What I’ve been up to (outside of my work):
I used to spend a lot of time listening, finding, and buying new music. I don’t nearly listen to as much as I used to; my priorities in my free time have changed. Tracking down or knowing that there’s a great song or album to be found just doesn’t give me as much excitement it once had.
However, these songs were my favorite ones to listen to in 2017 and will remind me of that year for the rest of my life (alphabetical order):
Broken Social Scene - Halfway Home
Broken Social Scene - Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl
Dday One - Contact
Dirty Projectors - Little Bubble
Dolly Spartans - I Hear the Dead
Doves - Rise
Gomez - Options
Noname - Diddy Bop (feat. Raury & Cam O’bi)
Orbital - Belfast
pronoun - a million other things
Sammus - 1080p
Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime
The Go-Betweens - Love Goes On!
The War On Drugs - Pain
Ultimate Painting - Song for Brian Jones
Some of the favorite albums that I listened to for the first time in 2018: AndyFellaz - BeatBop Street; Kendrick Lamar - DAMN; The Go-Betweens - 16 Lovers Lane; broken social scene - you forgot it in people.
I’ve been stewing on the rest of this post for almost a year now. Deleting portions. I’ve scrapped multiple versions of it.
2017 had been the most successful year for me, professionally. Personally, it’s been one of the hardest, battling anxiety and to a lesser extent, depression. I know I’m pretty fortunate; my struggles are a lot less burdensome than others and I have a lot of privilege.
Articulating my thoughts into sustained, multiple paragraphs in a coherent fashion that is also grammatically correct and well-polished for general audiences is relatively difficult for me.
I’ve been spending less time on twitter and trying to spend the time that I’ve devoted to that on reading books or actually reading articles that I’ve saved (liked/favorited) on twitter. I made a conscious effort to go through my twitter likes a couple weeks ago: I had 4200; now down to ~3,500 (~3,200 now). Found some articles worth reading and it was a nice window in my internet consumption over the years. It also reminded me how much link rot is prevalent.
Reminded me that I spend less time in the open source geospatial community because my full-time job in general web development nowadays (primarily wordpress and CSS language/CMS-wise; making sure that cpl.org is functional). In my experience, the opensource geo community was generally quite welcoming to new people, respectable in their behaviors at conferences and online, would work together, would sometimes prioritize (and corporate users would fund) developing documentation.
Reading these saved tweets also reminded that many of my peers, especially those I professionally admire, had unfinished projects and blog posts.
There’s a lot more to write, especially my experiences with open data and civic technology in the past couple years.