Weeknotes 33 - Toad frog, Indie web, Super Hot Zombies

This week I popped up the Stiperstones hills to try and get a good sunset photo. The hot sunny weather was about to break into hot stormy weather instead, which often makes for a good transition. Alas, it was not to be, no groovy sunset or storms. It was dark on the way back down when I bumped into this lovely creature...

...my camera was also out of battery, so I had to take this with my phone. I like to think the frog was posing for the camera as it stayed perfectly still and chill. Although, I suspect, terrified of the torchlight that suddenly appeared and not wanting to get eaten was a possibility. I'm hoping the moths I attracted while taking the photo made up for it.

Fun fact, all toads are frogs (but not all frogs are toads). Saying "is it a toad or a frog?" is like saying "is it a magpie or a bird?" What we're looking at here is a frog, who is also a toad.

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In Indie Web style I checked my logs and saw that Matt had made a blog post (Personal software vs factory-produced software) linking to my (Weeknotes 032 - Making all the things) post from the other week and that Ton Zijlstra, in turn, had read Matt's post and written his own: Personal Software.

Blogs, linking to each other, how exciting.

I also read about old skool link directories (and even WebRings) in a couple of places (which I've now forgotten), gasp, which is fun because I've been thinking about that too, about making a directory of other pen plotter artists. More about that, but not much more, in the artist update at the bottom of the post.

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The end of the week was a bit weird, to be honest, and I'm still, and guess I have been for many years deconstructing it, and working out what to do with it.

The very short of it is, that when I was working at my desk in the office in San Francisco, someone walked up behind me and quite innocently put their hands on my shoulders, and internally I fucking freaked out. And I still have trauma about it now. I can pinpoint it as the very moment that absolutly broke San Francisco for me. But it seemed like such a trivial non-event that I couldn't reconcile it with how I felt.

Of course, at the time, I didn't know I was on the spectrum with Aspergers. For years after I told myself things like "I guess I'm not a very good cultural fit for San Franciso", that with hindsight it translates to "The office didn't have a good policy for accomodating neurodiverse people." And if it did maybe I could have worked without fearing that someone was going to fucking touch me, I can still feel the fingers on my shoulders now, and it makes my body want to crawl out of my skin.

So yeah, a fair bit to unpack there. I'll write more about it when the time is right.

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This is a movie I'd like to see: like A Quiet Place and Bird Box, but with zombies mixed with SuperHot, so they only walk around when you move. When someone moves, they move, when no-one moves they stay still.

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Artist update.

• 49 new followers this week.
• Requests to buy a pen plot: 2
• Pen plots sold: 0, because I'm still a bit scared of the post office.

Because I keep the Instagram tracker going, and that's watching for the #penplotter hashtag, I get to see a lot of pen plotter artists. And because I'm thinking about setting up my own online shop vs Etsy vs Shopify, etc. I often go and look to see what those other artists are doing.

Which has me itching to make a directory of pen plotter artists, with links to their Instagram, homepage and shop if they have any. 'Cause I think that if I discovered pen plotter art, wanted to see more of it, and maybe even buy some, having a directory to go to discover them would be handy.

And now I can't stop thinking about building it, so I guess it's a thing that's going to happen. The first step is to register a domain name, and then in my experience, you're allowed to not do anything else with it for a couple of years.

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