Stumax.com

🎬 The Shape of Water (2017)

A fairy tale for grown ups. A beautiful film with a lovely story and fine performances all around. Michael Shannon is especially good as the antagonist.

Rated 8/10

This article reminds me of what it was like to follow the Tampa Bay Lightning in the early days. For years, every time you went to a game, it seemed that there were more opposing team jerseys than home jerseys. But then the team started winning. stmx.info/2F4fd0l 🏒

Got ‘em! Two season ticket deposits for an NHL expansion team in Seattle: acquired. Now all we need is an actual team.

Pff… Details.

Here’s @andybywire getting the troops ready for World IA Day Seattle. We are expecting 100+ IAs in a short while. I think we’re ready. #WIADseattle

I have missed Last Week Tonight sooooo much!

How do I know I’m not a bot?

Oh, man… I squeaked into the division playoffs of my fantasy hockey league. Had a weak draft, and haven’t really been able to stay on top of my team the way I’d like, but I managed to stay in the top 6. At least I won’t get relegated this year.

Picked up a couple of Pacific Northwest essentials tonight: snowshoes and hiking boots. Gotta get out and enjoy the snow while it lasts.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my personal publishing empire. I’m really liking micro.blog. I like the community, I like the philosophy behind it, and I like the quality of conversations that happen on the service.

One thing that drew me to micro.blog was the idea that I would own my own content. However, there’s a bit of friction involved in posting to micro.blog through my own site that I’d like to eliminate.

Here’s how I’m currently set up:

1. Post to my WordPress blogs on stumax.com (for personal stuff) or turninggrille.com (for IA stuff). Make sure to select the Micro Posts category.
2. Those posts automatically cross-post to micro.blog
3. Those micro.blog posts automatically cross-post to Twitter

Here are the problems: In Step One, it’s not that easy to post to a WordPress blog, especially on a mobile device. I want to just tap out a quick post, but I have to set the category and post type, which adds a bit of friction. And if I include an image, there are additional steps to make sure that posts properly (and it doesn’t always work on the first go.) MarsEdit does make this easier, but there’s still more overhead than I’d like.

And, according to Johnathan Lyman on the micro.blog Slack, my character set is incompatible with emojis. It should be utf8mb4 instead of utf8. And check out this lovely set of instructions on how to convert your database to a different character set. No thank you.

Cross-posting to micro.blog works pretty seamlessly, as does cross-posting to Twitter. My problem is I don’t always want to cross-post to Twitter.

So, I really have to think before I post about all the places where what I write is going to show up and what it’s going to look like in each place. And this overhead — although it’s not massive — is enough to make me abandon some posts entirely because I just don’t have the capacity at that moment to think through all the consequences.

Maybe that’s a good thing. The world certainly doesn’t need all my ephemeral thoughts. But part of the benefit of micro.blog should be that it becomes easier to blog, and therefore I would blog more regularly.

How do I solve this? I could reverse the flow: switch to a hosted micro.blog and start all my posts there, and then have it flow into my personal WP blog for posterity. It feels like this would lower the friction significantly, but it would also further fracture my online presence. I’d also have to pick one blog for the posts to flow into. But I’ve been debating consolidating the two blogs anyway. I’m not sure it was the right choice to begin with.

Sigh. First world problems, right? I’m still noodling on this, but I’m strongly considering switching to a hosted micro.blog at stumax.info. That would make my publishing flow look like this:

1. All posts start on micro.blog
2. Automatically cross-post to my WordPress blog via this WP plugin (and abandon the idea of keeping two separate blogs for all my content)
3. Automatically cross-post to Twitter if I choose to (using the new selective cross-post feature in the micro.blog iOS app)

This feels better. But am I missing something? In the m.b Slack, Mark Hughes pointed out that there’s some overhead with this approach if you want to set categories, tags, or post type for the posts you’re bringing in to your WP blog. Which, yeah… I want to have that stuff.

Stuff to think about. More to come…

Tonight when we placed our order at our usual Friday night Thai restaurant, we were told they were out of spring rolls. When we got home, what did we find in our bag? Spring rolls! That’s the kind of lie I can totally endorse.

Oh, yeah. Come to papa.

“A group led by billionaire David Bonderman and Hollywood producer Jerry Bruckheimer on Tuesday filed an application for an NHL expansion team to play at a revamped KeyArena.”

#NHLtoSeattle

? Every time this song comes up in my queue, I just have to stop and listen. So beautiful.

Mariachi Cobre: Estrellita

I’m sure there’s another German word for when you’re using a service and the free plan is super useful but the paid plans are too expensive for your little volunteer group and there’s no middle ground where you could give them some money but not hundreds of dollars a year.

I’m sure there’s a German word for the feeling you get when you’re on the free Slack plan and there’s a great conversation and the messages are flying by and all you can think about is what important information you’re pushing out of view because you’re over 10,000 messages.

I’m lucky to work from home most Fridays. The only downside is that my home office is filled with very relaxed co-workers who make it hard to stay motivated. (And one of them insists on taking the good office chair!)

I’ve really been enjoying reading my micro.blog timeline since I joined up months ago. It’s a high-signal, low-noise environment, with a lot of quality contributors.

But the way I’ve been writing for my micro.blog stream over the past couple of weeks hasn’t sat right with me. I’ve been writing for an audience on Twitter, not for micro.blog. Which is weird, because normally I couldn’t care less about Twitter. But because I’ve been working on this conference, I’ve been using the motivation to promote the conference on Twitter to drive my motivation to post more here (and hopefully get my 30 day pin).

But the stuff I’ve posted is really marketing. It doesn’t sound like anything that’s of interest to the community here. It wouldn’t be interesting to me. And the tone isn’t personal, so it feels out of place.

So, I apologize.

I’ve been really wondering what I should write on micro.blog. Heck, l have a hard time figuring out generally what my personal publishing approach should be. I keep two different blogs for my personal interests (stumax.com) and my professional interests (turninggrille.com). Whether that’s the smartest thing in the world is a question for another day.

Currently, both blogs are set up to cross-post to micro.blog, and my micro.blog is set up to cross-post to Twitter. In the spirit of owning my own content, this feels right: all content starts on my own blog.

But in practice, writing stuff on my own blog that’s intended to promote something to a Twitter audience doesn’t seem necessary, especially when micro.blog then becomes just an intermediary for the content.

So, I think what I’m going to do from now on is only post promotional content directly on Twitter. Which means I’ll have to come up with something more interesting to say on micro.blog if I want my 30 day pin. Which feels better all around. In fact, I think I’m going to take a skip day tomorrow and start the clock over again on my 30 days. If I’m going to do this, I want to do it the right way.

No one has complained or anything, and I’m sure no one really cares about this but me. But I do care. So… there it is.

The Disaster Artist (2017)

Franco is fantastic as Tommy Wiseau, and the story and relationships are well drawn.

Rating: 7/10

Ultimate Team Modes in 2018: What We Want More and Less Of

I play a lot of NHL18 in Ultimate Team mode and found myself agreeing with nearly all of this, especially about contracts. Managing player contracts in HUT is pointless… unless the point is to keep me from having fun.

I think I’m sold on SaneBox. I’m a week into my trial period and really appreciate how quiet and focused my inbox feels. I’d love to slowly undo the tons of rules I’ve been managing in Gmail and let the robots handle it all for me.

Downsizing (2017)

This movie won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but it sure was mine. A subtle and skillfully crafted movie that’s both thought-provoking and delightful.

Rating: 8/10