I was introduced to the DigitalRev TV YouTube channel this morning via The Sunday Edition of The Newsprint (an excellent site that you should be reading, by the way).
I've only watched a few of their videos, but they seem to be great fun. They don't even try to take themselves seriously. Much like me.
It's a miserable, rainy, slushy day here in Central New Jersey, and two videos in particular brightened up my morning a bit. They're very Not Safe for Work.
I first met Carl Holscher in a chat room for Bronies. After some back and forth, we decided to meet up for drinks and really hit it off. One thing led to another and now I find myself a prisoner in his basement.
No, wait, that's something else. Let's start again.
Carl Holscher runs a little site called Origin Stories where he asks folks about the history of their names, both online and off. For some crazy reason he decided to interview me. He must not have taken his meds that day. Regardless, it's an honor to be included in the company of such notables as Patrick Rhone and Casey Liss.
When presenting their summary of books read, some people would make you slog through an entire paragraph for each book nitpicking and analyzing every detail they did and didn't like and offering suggestions about why you should or shouldn't read it. You'll find none of that superfluity here, dear reader. Unlike those writers I value your time. I assure you it has nothing to do with being too lazy to write that much. Nothing at all.
Instead, I give you a simple affiliate-link-filled list. Enjoy.
Notebooks 1935–1942, Albert Camus
Writers and Their Notebooks, Diana M. Raab (ed.)
Albert Camus: Elements of a Life, Robert Zaretsky
Blackbirds, Chuck Wendig
Creating Short Fiction, Damon Knight
Unnatural Creatures, Neil Gaiman (ed.)
Mockingbird, Chuck Wendig
Daily Rituals, Mason Currey
Paterson, William Carlos Williams
The Art of Haiku, Stephen Addiss
The Poetry of Zen, Sam Hamill
The Essential Dōgen, Kazuaki Tanahashi & Peter Levitt (eds.)
The Training of a Zen Buddhist Monk, D.T. Suzuki
Mountain Tasting, Santoka Taneda (John Stevens, trans.)
Zen and Japanese Culture, D.T. Suzuki
Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, Leonard Koren
Japanese Death Poems, Yoel Hoffmann (ed.)
The Book of Chuang Tzu, Martin Palmer & Elizabeth Breuilly (trans.)
The Spring of My Life, Kobayashi Issa (Sam Hamill, trans.)
Bashō and the Dao, Peipei Qiu
Beowulf, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrūn, J.R.R. Tolkien
The Fall of Arthur, J.R.R. Tolkien
Mythmakers and Lawbreakers, Margaret Killjoy
The Year 1000, Robert Lacey & Danny Danziger
Philology, James Turner
Pound as Wuz, James Laughlin
Ezra Pound: The Solitary Volcano, John Tytell
Personæ, Ezra Pound
The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, William Carlos Williams
T.S. Eliot: A Short Biography, John Worthen
The Iliad, Homer (Bernard Knox, ed. & Robert Fagles, trans.)
The Odyssey, Homer (Bernard Knox, ed. & Robert Fagles, trans.)
Waking Up, Sam Harris
On the Shortness of Life, Seneca (C.D.N. Costa, trans.)
The Art of Just Sitting, John Daido Loori
The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Joshu, James Green (trans.)
Notebooks 1942–1951, Albert Camus
Essays and Lectures, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Journals 1889–1913, André Gide
Historia Discordia, Adam Gorightly
The Greek Music Drama, Friedrich Nietzsche (Paul Bishop, trans.)
The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche (Walter Kaufmann, trans.)
Cosmic Trigger: The Final Secret of the Illuminati, Robert Anton Wilson
Just a quick post for Journal Day to show you mine:
As I've mentioned, it's a Paper for Fountain Pens Tomoe River blank book with cream paper. I started journaling on October 30, 2013, stopped on January 16, 2014 and picked it back up again on July 15, 2014. Since July I've been pretty regular (must be all that paper fiber).
I've used all kinds of pen and ink combinations to write in it, but currently I'm using:
Wednesday Wanderings is a thing I'm going to try where I throw some links out there for your distraction and enjoyment. It may not be every Wednesday, there may not always be a theme, but I hope it's always interesting.
This week: stunning photograpy.
Thomas Huang. I want to crawl inside his photos and live there.
Patrick Ng. He of Scription fame and phenomenal photography.
Kevin Kelly. Make sure to check out Japan's Nakasendo Walk.
Yosemite National Park. This has been on my list of places to visit ever since I first saw Ansel Adams' shots of Half Dome and El Capitan as a kid.
This seems like an appropriate place to start. I plan on writing more detailed posts about some of these, so I'll just give the highlights below. Headphones, cables, and other such doodads not shown/included.
In the interest of full disclosure, some of the links below are Amazon affiliate links. I only used them in cases where the item was not available elsewhere.
Carrying three different notebook-type things with me every day seems a bit exceessive, but none of them are overly large so it's not a huge burden. Still it could probably be simplified. One thing I've considered is using a Midori refill in the journal capacity once I fill the Paper for Fountain Pens book. I'm not even halfway through it so I think I have plenty of time to work that out.
Hi, my name is Tony and I have a problem. This is not the first website I've started. It's not even the second. I've had some kind of online presence since my freshman year of college in 1997.
The last two sites were "tech blogs". I wrote and posted various Mac and Unix scripts that I had come up with and thought other people might find useful. The process of figuring out all of those little puzzles was fun. The problem is that I constantly had to be thinking about problems to solve if I wanted to "keep the content fresh". It became a burden and totally sucked the enjoyment out of it. I'm also not really a programmer so I was limited to the things I could manage to hack together.
On top of that, I've found my interest in fiddling with technology waning. Once upon a time I was the guy who would eagerly watch every Apple announcement with a gleam of excitement in his eye and then immediately buy whatever the new thing was. Maybe I'm getting old (or maturing, as they say), but I don't have that desire anymore. I still watch the Apple events, but I'm in no rush to head over to store.apple.com and place an order.
In short, I feel like I no longer have much, if anything, to contribute to The Tech Sphere.
So what am I doing here?
As my interest in technology has decreased, I've found my interest in analog tools has increased. Or rather, has been rekindled. I've always been a pen and paper kind of guy, even at the height of my digital obsession. But just like the world doesn't really need Yet Another Tech Blog, I'm not entirely convinced it needs Yet Another Pen Blog either. Other people are doing a great job with that already.
I'm going to try a slightly different approach. I like to jot things down. It could be a great quote I've come across or some random idea that pops into my head (like starting another new website, for example). As such, I'm on a quest for the perfect method and tools with which to do that. My hope is that this site will document that journey. There might be reviews and other Pen Bloggy type things along the way, but they'll probably be more the exception than the rule. I may even write about some digital tools too. I don't want to limit myself the way I have in the past.
Thanks for reading. [insert cheesy join-me-on-this-journey statement here.]