Jump To The Front And Back
It has just come to my attention that it's 2023. I signed up for Livejournal in 2003, which means this will be my 20th anniversary (although, like most of you, I haven't really used it much in the past 10 years). To commemorate this, however (and I love nothing more than commemorating), I'm going to try to update once a month in 2023. Please join me if you feel so inclined, and if you somehow miraculously actually see this post.
In May 2003, Livejournal was my first attempt to join what we now know as "social media". Catherynne M. Valente has written a brilliant piece explaining the history of social media, the demise of Livejournal (as well as Myspace, Friendster, Tumblr, Twitter, etc), and where we go from here. I highly, highly recommend that you read the entire thing, but here are some excerpts:
( Read more...Collapse )This being the January update, I should probably share some resolutions and projects for the upcoming year.
- My main resolution for 2023 is to continue electrifying our house to cut down on fossil fuel usage. In 2022 we replaced our old gas furnace with an electric heat pump. This year we hope to replace our gas stove with an induction range. Bill McKibben has written extensively and convincingly about this topic. In the SF Bay Area, BayRen offers a $750 rebate. My dream stove is this one, but I'll probably have to settle for something a little more affordable like this.
- Music projects for 2023: The Corner Laughers have recorded a song for a Kinks tribute album coming out on Futureman Records later this year. The Kinks have been my all-time favorite band for the past 25 years, so I hope we did OK. I played bass on a couple of Andy Z singles which will be out in March, to commemorate World Wildlife Day. And
goldenmoonbear and I will be in Michigan in June to play some acoustic shows. More about that as it gets nearer the date. - Octavia is currently working on a class presentation about Ring-Tailed Lemurs, and practicing some show tunes to sing at the prologue to her school's Spring musical (which surprisingly takes place in early February). She's enjoying having her Michigan grandparents here for an extended visit and her favorite game is "9-year-old Grandma Judy", in which she time travels to the 1950s to meet 9-year-old Grandma Judy. They go to a one-room country school, visit the cottage at the lake, drink root beer floats, and all kinds of other old-timey hijinks.
- The big news at work is our upcoming colloquium with movie star physicist Kip Thorne. He's going to be speaking about the film Interstellar, which he worked on as science advisor and executive producer. (I watched it last night and he definitely has some explaining to do.)
- Lastly, and this is so geeky and insular that it could not possibly interest anyone outside of me, but I'm putting it here anyway so I can have it as a reference. Since the mid-90s I've kept paper lists of all albums listened to for the first time, movies seen, books read, etc. I switched to digital lists sometime in the mid-2000s, but I never really copied the old lists over or had a unified database. Long story short, I did a big data entry project (still ongoing) at the beginning of the year, and now I do.