🥃 Booze, blogs, video 🤚

Hey! Thanks for reading! Just a reminder that I wrote this some years ago, and may have much more complicated feelings about this topic than I did when I wrote it. Happy to elaborate, feel free to reach out to me! 😄

🎵 The song for this post is Nadie Baila Como Tú/El Noa Noa (Medley), by Pandora. 🎵

"For relaxing time, make it a Santori time." From a company headshot photo shoot in 2015.

I mentioned in my "year in review" post that I'd done the last 4-5 months of 2019 abstaining from drinks.

Stopping alcohol has been less grounded in anything concrete, to be honest. I sincerely love being tipsy or drunk as much as the next person, but I suspected I might like how it felt to remove the up/down cycles of drinking, even casually. [...] I wanted to see how things like mood, attention, and sleep regulation (all pretty critical for my continued happiness) changed if my liver and brain weren't getting gummed up as often.

That's… a lot harder during quarantine. I haven't kept it up for a meaningful amount of time.

Also from that blog post:

It dawned on me a few times last year that, without trying, I had a drink or a two at least 2-4 times a week. In the context of other drug use (yes, alcohol is a drug), it seemed excessive.

And, well, it happened again. I looked at the last 5ish days and realized I'd gotten a little passed buzzed each night. I woke up feeling like shit, but in the context of a crumbling society, with panic in and outside the house, incompetent leaders, and a complete lack of agency, when the time came to "unplug and enjoy the night" it felt pretty good to shut my brain up for a bit and feel happy in the simple way getting drunk can do for you.

I don't love it, but I'm also not kicking myself about it: we're in uncharted waters, it was just a few days, and the biggest loser was my sleep cycle. I'm don't think I'm in troubling territory. But looking at that pattern (moreover, feeling the continued desire to get drunk again even after those nights) scared me enough at the prospect of growing a dependence that I'm motivated to stop again. But in the spirit of sharing how we're all dealing with this, let it be a data point. These are not the Normal Times. I'll be sipping, idk, tea? during virtual happy hours.

I'll make cultural exceptions.

Bloggin'

In this Brave New World of RSS-ing, I've been reading a lot of small-time people like me with blogs and (I'm assuming) very little readership. It's fantastic! It reads like people! Writing about things they like and care about!

Kev Quirk wrote a somewhat polarizing post arguing for blogs having full posts on their RSS feeds. I happen to agree (you can read a lot of other opinions on the lobste.rs thread), but this got me thinking of other blog features that are to my liking, and sometimes missing.

• Have a way to contact you! I saw one person I wanted to reach out to, and their "Get in Touch" in the About page linked their Twitter account and Instagram feed. I can't use this! Please, post an email address, or host comments somehow. I recognize that comments are a pain the ass for the static sites that are popular with this crowd, but I wanted to chat with the person in question and it was a flat dead-end.

• Have an RSS feed! The man, the myth, the legend Robert Mustacchi blogged again recently. His output, when you can find it, is always fantastic, (here's a piece on hardware LEDs talking to the OS). It looks like he's using Asciidoctor (a beautifully laid-out article) and I suspect the "blog" is a site generated from an Asciidoctor document. It means there's no RSS feed, which means I have to hope I hear about his posts when I cheat and log into Twitter every now and then.

Oddly, these omissions are mostly a function of home-baking your own solutions, which I do and actively encourage. And I'm delighted anyone is hosting words on the Internet, don't let me or anyone else police you! Lastly, if you have suggestions for this site and its usability (Dark Mode? Typographically?) please let me know 😄

(looking for people to follow? a lot of lobsters shared their personal sites, found a bunch of friendly feeds here. I also shared a ton of blogs/feeds a few years ago)

Remote events, lectures

This post on how a professor runs their lectures to allow for interaction was interesting to me. "Virtual happy hours" where we look at Zoom's panel view and hold a drink is popular, but I'm enjoying all the new ways we're adapting to the remote life.

One detail:

it allows me to know whom to address, because students register with their university credentials and appear in the chat with their full names.

This, of course, is a win and a loss, because then you lose the opportunity for viewers to troll you the way StarCraft fans did to Artosis in the early GOM days:

My Lord we really loved those Grack memes didn't we.

I hosted a Jackbox.tv games night; these do super well on Zoom or Twitch if you can get the AV + volumes levels right. If you ever want to play, reach out 😄