Here’s another rambling “here’s what I did today” post, lets see what comes out; but first a public service announcement. If you’ve tried to email me today using the tealart.com email address that I’ve used for years, I’ve had some problem with prompt delivery. This domain at gmail, seems pretty reliable, but I’m not sure about this. If you’re trying to get a hold of me and I’m not answering your email, I’m not ignoring you.

Today was a slow day in the yarn store. Swatch knitting transpired. I got to work with the Dream-in-Color “Smooshy” sock yarn, which is a great deal of fun. Another example of great/fun yarn that I’m not incredibly likely to ever knit. I like heavier socks generally and for stranded sweaters you really can’t beat the shetland.

I think the ticker is now at T-4 rows until the underarm point of this jacket that I’m working on. I’ve figured out how to set in the sleeves properly, I think, and I’ve worked through the shoulders enough times to feel, at least vaguely confident in myself, so I’m just going to go with it. Maybe this weekend if I have enough free time.

Not that free time is very rich supply around here. Or, to be fair, as my title seems to communicate, “free” time when I have a brain, in which to work is pretty slim around here.

I haven’t written anything longhand in the notebook in a long time, and I’m thinking that this is a problem, but I don’t quite know how to go about getting this in order.

Doing the knit-a-long for the sport sweater, is also something that I’m interested in working on, but I haven’t had a lot of time to get the infrastructure in place for that. I really want to “host it” using the new TealArt site, but that’s not done. I think, I’m just going to install a “fresh” version of Wordpress, because momentum is a powerful thing.

That’s where I am. Have a good evening folks, and if you see my brain somewhere, send please be a dear and send it back!

Onward and upward!

So, this is what I get for writing entries ahead of time. That was a TealArt practice that I need to let go of, I guess.

The last entry, which I posted just after midnight, was, stale before it even went live. I wrote it yesterday to describe my thoughts regarding the status of TealArt and tychoish, which as you can tell from the previous entry, I’ve felt for a while now, are at some sort of a crossroads. Something needed to change, and TealArt just wasn’t fun for me anymore, and wasn’t what I needed to be spending any time and energy on.

So so last night, I imported all my old archives from TealArt (chris' went to chris' new site) and basically everything is the way I want it.

There was a slight snafu that some of you are probably painfully aware of: I forgot to turn off my crossposting scripts so, most embarrassingly I sent out 300+ tweets in the span of about 10 minutes. The saddest thing is that I I couldn’t get it to stop for another ten (and I still had to revert to a backup and try it again anyway). Sorry for the confusion. Also, all of my tealart posts are now backlogged on live-journal, and will likely stay there henceforth. Some are probably double posted, but such is life, and I don’t really seem to care enough to go back and edit these things.

After all that, I did realize that, even though I’m really keen on keeping the archives online, I really don’t want anyone to actually read these posts.

As for TealArt, moving forward, I’ve found a new CMS that I think will be perfect for the small, mostly static site that I hope to turn TealArt into in the next few weeks. I have a couple of projects--station keeping, some knitting patterns, maybe a podcast, maybe a science fiction collection, and so forth--that I think would be perfect for TealArt, but I think the structure of a blog, is something that won’t really fit the kind of projects that I would hope to work on here. So this new CMS, is a good move, I think. I’m not trying to be coy about my plans, I mostly don’t have any yet.

Anyway, now that that’s out of the way, I think we’re ready to return to regularly scheduled programing around here.

Onward and Upward!

Since I spent some time last week upgrading and tweaking the tychoish.com design and back-end, I’ve been prone to thinking about my role/life as a blogger.

In late august and september, I did my little redesign of TealArt.com and put it on hiatus, because I liked what I was doing with tychoish, because it was becoming increasingly clear to me that I didn’t want to write that site alone particularly when I wasn’t getting any sort of return, whatsoever. I thought I’d give the site till the end of the year, on hold and then see how I felt.

I think I’m going to, at some point, merge the sites back together, at least in the back-end (I think there’d be a way, with some very creative mySQL foo to do that without having it be excruciatingly apparent to the viewing public.) Initially, I wanted to pull tychoish into tealart, but now I’m thinking that the other way might be cleaner, and better looking forward. That’s a technical project that I don’t think we need to get into here.

The reason I’m considering merging the archives is that a site like tychoish is really the only kind of site that I’m interested in running by myself, alone, from a writing perspective. If it isn’t a tychoish post, I should probably try and find ways to post it elsewhere. Also, while tychoish is still slowly climbing to get to the traffic that TealArt had/has, it’s close and the traffic is “higher quality” (longer times on the site, lower bounce rates, etc.) So that seems to be a good way to do that.

I mean I’m not going to stop using the tealart.com domain, probably ever, and I can think of a lot of cool projects that might be fun to run under the TealArt banner (knit alongs, station keeping season 2, a podcast type thing, and so forth), but I don’t think that I need a blog for that. I mean I’m still a ways off on this, but I think this is the direction that I’m headed in.

Thanks for listening.

Cheers!

1. Use the Tor Onion Router and/or public computers. 2. Use Pornomode.¹ 3. Understand the communities and functions of websites you’re using. 4. Develop an extensive knowledge of Boolean logic for google searching. 5. On the internet, no one knows your a dog: If you must give out personal details while stalking, lie as much as you can.

So this entry is likely going to get me in trouble. Warning made.

Background: There’s a thread that’s now 100+ postings long on the queer group on Ravelry that debates the very old news website queer by choice. At the beginning of the thread I participated on the side of choice because: promoting agency is a good thing, because a insinuating that sexuality is a choice means that it becomes harder to deal with it as a pathology, because it lets queer be a flexible/mobile category that’s more inclusive. I’ve mostly ignored it.

More recently there’s been some coalescence in the thread that basically amounts to “you can choose your politics, but you can’t choose who you really are, dude.”

Which of course misunderstands the argument completely, and leaves us with, what amounts to a sort of strategic constructivism? Is that what we’d even call it? It’s pretty weird, at any rate.

I’m trying to not get too into this stuff, as it is, in a sense “work stuff” so I don’t want to bore with the details, but, there’s a notion of “strategic essentialism,” in contemporary queer studies/identity, particularly around trans identities, mostly because its important to draw a line somewhere and throw up your hands in front of sophists and say “it might not be perfect, but lets just say that there’s something essential about gender, so we can proceed with a political action, or our lives.” I propose that what we’re seeing in this thread (and I suspect that this thread is not a particular anomaly,) is the opposite of this some how.

The problem is that the debate, in such circumstances degenerates into sophistry, which I never really like. Also, in the final analysis, I think it’s important to have some sort of understanding of a false consciousness, that we’re all enraptured by, when it comes to gender; so the dozens of people saying “Nah, I didn’t choose, you hippie,” are particularly infuriating. And I know how difficult it is to invoke false consciousness, but still people.

Anyway, rant over, for now.

Onward and Upward!

Good Monday to you all!

The period of time between thanksgiving and the second week of January are designed to be a haze of sorts. Between the holiday morass that seems to have enveloped America, the traditional end of semester crunch, and my process of applying to graduate school, which is on going, it’s all ends up being a blur.

My goal for today is to make some headway on a paper that I think is due wednesday (it’s easy; a rant, that I’ve been working on for a while) and of course, write my statement of purpose for graduate school applications which needs to be good, so that I can send it out to a professor. It’s an important piece, and I think it’s good that this statement is so important, at the same time it’s a hard document to write, and there are a lot of things that I have to balance: Interested and invested without looking jaded or to set in my ways, and I have to be excited by my prospective advisors research and still look like an individual, and so forth. Thankfully, my discipline isn’t known for it’s fine and delicate rhetoric, so that’s good, but it’s tough.

So in that spirit, I’m going to post a couple of little doodling that I came about over the last few days as I tried to think about getting a statement t a statement together. Nothing good, yet, but cool ideas, and half decent blog posts.

Seems like a good day to post them. So, enjoy!

Onward and Upward!

Last year, when I was applying to graduate school, I spent a lot of energy looking for scholars who did work on the basic (as in basic science) phenomena that I’m interested in rather than scholars who did work in queer studies, and well, I’m applying for graduate school again, so I’ll let you decide how well that worked out.

Actually, there are a lot of reasons why I’m not in graduate school right now, some of which I think, with hindsight, I’d be able to fix, others were pretty unavoidable. But in any case, one of the things that added to my failure to get into graduate school was the fact that I was perpetually trying to convince prospective professors that it really did all fit together perfectly in the end.

As a result of this, and my desire to appear less scattered this time around I’ve been thinking about my project in terms of the very specific academic goals and less in terms of the cool things that make this subject personally interesting. The end result: I come off as really boring and stilted. Joy.

I had a conversation a bit ago with a professor who was really interested in queer studies (as, it turns out, many of the people I’m interested in studying with this time around) and it caught me off guard to think that there was someone out there who saw this as the most interesting thing about me, not the least. I mean it’s pretty obvious, it just felt good.

Sometimes, in desperation, I’ve thought about switching to another field, because of the way that I’m so distant from my own, but sometimes I realize that even if I’m a little discontented, this is the stuff that I’m best at and when it “fits,” it really does fit.

Anyway.

Onward and Upward!

1. Flax
2. Virgin Acrylic
3. Corn Husks
4. Dryer lint
5. Steel Wool