Category: meta

One Hundred and Fifty Days In A Row

meta

Tonight I’ve reached 150 days in my daily posting streak. And, dagnabit, I don’t know what to write about. There’s still all of XOXO to process, for sure, but for some reason tonight I am not able to focus on that. I’m probably playing a D&D one-shot tomorrow, but if I write about that freely, there’s a chance I’ll spoil something for my players, who may or may not read my blog. Had an interesting interaction with my boss today but, yeah, also, there I’m not sure I want to expose that publically.

There’s the volatile political situation in my city, country, and the world. But wow do I feel ill-equipped to write about that coherently. I have my leftist views that color how I see the world, but I doubt I’d be able to pursuade anyone else one way or the other.

So what is left to write about? What is worthy of being the topic of my 150th post in a row? Damned if I know. And that’s part of the problem of my streak.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned this previously, probably even recently: I can sit down and bang out 500 words, no problem. It’s just typing practice. I can produce clean, grammatical, correctly-spelled sentences and paragraphs, and most of the time those sentences and paragraphs revolve around a single specific theme. But are they good? Is it worth posting those? That’s the part I am not one hundred percent certain of.

I’d rather only post the good stuff. To do that, I still need to write every day. So that’s going to be a thing going forward. I will still sit down to a blank screen and bang out about 500 words. And when those 500 words mean something, or describe something beautiful, or interesting, or meaningful, or personal, or informative, I will post it here. If it doesn’t, I will still have kept up my streak, I will still feel like I’m progressing as a writer by exploring the ins and outs of constructing themes, scenes, stories, characters, and dialogue. I will still have shown up, which is the most important thing.

I have set myself a very high bar by never focusing this blog on any one specific topic, theme, or niche (I cringe to use that word but I am not sure of another that doesn’t have the stench of marketing and still conveys the same idea.) And because of that, when I want to write a post, I need to pull a topic out of thin air, or have one already in mind. That’s a problem if I feel the pressure to post or lose my streak. As you can tell by the fact that this post is similar to several others I’ve posted over the past 150 days, I fall into a rut. I don’t want that to happen.

I can still use this space to inform, share, and reveal things about myself without it being at least 500 words on a specific topic. I can post that I’ve done my writing for the day. I can share links to cool things on the internet. I can call out heroes and villains in the world. I can share pictures or even videos. I will still post daily; it just won’t always be longish posts. And hopefully the act of finding and sharing those kinds of things will feed my creativity and give me new ideas for the wordy posts.

Thank you for reading and thank you for sticking around. Lunar Obverse lives on, and on, and on.

A story of three hands, sort of

meta

I’m three days away from hitting a streak of 150 days in a row posting at least 500 words here. It’s been a great run. Well, great for reminding me that I can, if I put my mind to it, build up a habit of writing and posting daily. I’m proud of showing up and keeping it going, even at times when I’ve been busy with other things. No reposts of material that has already appeared here, everything original and never-before published on the open web. So on the one hand, it’s been good for my writerly instincts, building that habit, that rhythm, of tapping out something on a regular cadence.

On the other hand, I am not proud of every single post. Without going back and doing a personal audit I couldn’t give specific examples but I know that there are some, maybe even many, that do not make me feel joy for sharing it beyond incrementing the number of consecutive posts. That is not a great feeling. Many published authors have given the piece of advice that writers should not share their first drafts. First drafts are meant to just be a foundation for expansion of the good bits, deletion of the bad bits, sharpening the text and prose, sculpting a better text.

On the third hand, some of those posts that start out with me saying “I have no idea what I want to write about,” turned into something cool. By just starting, I was able to pull out an idea or a feeling that was lurking inside, hiding away from my conscious brain, unlocked by the magic of showing up. The ideas flow and something coalesces. It’s raw, unfocused, but there’s something good there. It just needs another draft, or some editing, to be great.

When I’m posting every day, though, I don’t often have the time to do that editing. I’m writing, as I am now, with just a few hours until midnight, my mental cutoff for “today”. I click “Publish” as soon as I finish writing it, in the heat of creation. I have been taking the time to do some quick software-enabled grammar and edit checks, but it’s not the same as taking an hour or two to reflect on what I’ve written, consider the overall message and how I develop my narrative and argument (if the post supports it), and look at the post with an editor’s eye instead of a writer with a deadline.

My blog now includes posts that are not as strong, as focused, as beautiful as they could be, because I didn’t give them time and attention and polish. There are other posts that probably are just typing exercises and shouldn’t be posted at all; these don’t even have a kernel that could be expanded and enhanced, it’s just a ramble without direction. Good for my typing speed and building a habit but little else.

I want to be better. I want every post here to be something I’m proud to publish, proud to share. What I’m saying is that I am shifting my goals. Instead of posting every day, my plan is to keep on writing every day. I need to keep that habit going because the intentionality of writing daily means it becomes more difficult to stop.

But I am not going to post everything I write. I think I will still make it a goal to post something here, but on the days when my writing isn’t a sparkling diamond from the first draft, what I’ll post is a link, or some inspiration, or maybe some pictures. I’ll mention how many words I wrote that day, perhaps, maybe comment on what I’m working on. My friend Tracy has challenged me to try to quantify how often I post, or come up with some measurable metric for it. Tracy, I will try to come up with a way to measure it but for now, I’m just going to say, I will only post the things I’m proud to share, whatever that may be. It’s an internal measurement of worth and I don’t know how to quantify that. Not yet.

I still have to hit 150 days in a row, though, before I’ll allow my goal to change. And I have several ideas for posts to reach that goal, don’t you worry. I’m still going, and this blog isn’t going anywhere. Blogging is back and I’m here to stay. Thank you for joining me.

Organic Search Traffic

meta

Other than my home page and my About Me page the most popular posts since I re-started the blog are this post about modding Fallout 3, a recent post about my best friend’s birthday, and a post about baseball that includes the phrase “Sugar Titts” (with two T’s at the end). What does this say about my blogging, or my audience? Fuck if I know.

The plug-in I use to track my stats is the underrated but great Koko Analytics, a lightweight but fully functional view and visitor counter that doesn’t sell the info it collects to anyone, as near as I can tell. But since I only installed it in April of this year, there’s, like, 20+ years of the life of this blog that aren’t tracked. And before April, I didn’t do a lot to try to make this blog friendly to the big analytics and SEO sites. I just did things my own way, posting whatever the Hell I wanted, and didn’t worry about keywords, or dead links, or catchy titles, or sticking to a niche. None of it.

But even with my terrible track record of marketing, Google has indexed my blog, because they index everything. So if I dig in to Google Search Console and Google Analytics, I can find what Google finds are the most clicked on posts on the domain bamoon dot com, a.k.a. Lunar Obverse, the home of the bright side of the Moon, me, Brian Moon. Brace yourself!

Now again, Google Analytics data only goes back a few months, because that’s when I started taking the visibility of my site seriously. According to Google, I’ve had 449 visitors, and of those, 7 of them are returning visitors. I don’t know who you are, you seven amazing people, but I love you. Thank you for coming back.

Of the around 500 people who visit here, the vast majority of them come here directly, not being referred by anything. This is to be expected. I don’t really know how to advertise this site or otherwise promote it. I do put links in my Instgram story sometimes, or post on Mastodon, but that’s about it. I don’t have an advertising strategy, thank all the gods, the dead and the new gods alike.

Here are some of the organic search terms that have led people to my posts:

“fallout 3 stewie tweaks” and “anniversary patcher fallout 3” which clearly lands them on my page about modding. I really half-assed that post. I should take another run at it, make it a real How To.

“Sundered pass map TLD” and “the long dark sundered pass” which is another game-related post about The Long Dark, one of my top 5 all time games. So that’s fun. Hey, a theme is emerging.

“ai shitpost” which is a topic I could probably write more about but which topic has pulled a couple of good rants out of me lately.

“appendictis symptoms” Look, I’m not a doctor and I don’t play one anywhere. Definitely don’t take medical advice from an untrained person with anxiety about their phyiscal health.

And lastly, coming in at number 8, “astroglide verge” which, wow, I have no idea. I just tried that search term in an incognito window and my blog is not anywhere in the first 7 pages of results. No shade for anyone who uses the product, but it’s not something I have ever used, written about, or even considered. I do hope you find what you’re looking for, it just ain’t here, sorry.

Udio sued

meta, Tech

As a follow-up to my post about generative AI music, Udio is being sued by the major labels, along with the similar site Suno. Because of course they are.

The issues involved are interesting. I generally think AI should not be trained on human artist’s work without the prior consent of the artists. But my understanding (and I am not a lawyer) is that if the labels win this case, it would not increase the protections for artists, it would increase profits for the labels. So the suits are not automatically a positive for me.

Reconstructing the timeline

meta, Tech

I thought a fun follow-up to my post about running out of gas on a road trip would be documenting what I had to do to figure out what happened when.

Also: because of my digital archive and research, I updated some of the locations in the original post to reflect that. Thanks for your patience.

Swiss-cheese memories

When I wrote the first draft I just guessed the details based on my memory of events. Since they were 22 years old, those memories were not accurate. What I remembered was: taking pictures of the sunrise, then giving up driving for a nap while Caleb drove, then some time later, in the daylight, waking up to the car running at maximum speed and getting a picture.

Just at sunrise, three white guys stand in the middle of a freeway. Left, tall, dark hair, glasses, in polo shirt and jeans, is Jake. Middle, shorter, red hair, wearing a green and white sweater and jeans, is Caleb. Right, older, balding, unshaven, glasses, in black Hawaiian shirt and jeans, is Brian (the author). Behind them is a farm set at the base of tall lightly forested mountains. The picture is faded from being overexposed due to the early lack of light.
Left to right: Jake, Caleb, Brian (me, the author)

After wrapping that up, we pulled into the closest town. According to the map, the closest town to the Idaho-Montana border was Superior, and I vaguely remembered a diner there.

I do remember Jake saying we should fill up the tank as we drove into (a) town and assumed it was the same one we had breakfast in. According to my memory, the next major event was, of course, running out of gas, and Jake going off with the old couple in the RV. I had no idea where we were when that happened; we were just “somewhere in Montana”

Those were the events, in roughly the order they happened, but my first draft had them all happening before noon on 20 July 2002, in western Montana. That’s not right!

Start with what I know to be true

For a starting point, I knew that we pulled over to take pictures of the pre-dawn mountains, and a simple Google search showed that sunrise in Montana on 20 July was at 5:46 AM. Roughly that placed us on the map, give or take.

Blurry, taken before sunrise. The sky is dark blue but covered in feathery pink and cream and dark gray clouds; the middle ground is rolling hills, nearly black from being backlit by the sky's glow; the foreground is a highway curving away and to the left, very low contrast. On the highway you can just make out the red taillights of a car driving away.
Sunrise on the Idaho-Montana border.

I had pictures from that trip. Digital pictures that were saved in my Photos library and therefore available right on my iPhone. Those photos followed me, from my old iBook back in 2002 down through the years and many laptops and phones, to my current iPhone 13 Mini. Gotta admit that’s kind of cool!

The camera was an Olympus Camedia C-220, Zoom (yes that was its name). It did not have location or time data capability; consumer electronics did not have that feature back then. I added location data later, in iPhoto on my Mac when Apple added that feature, and I tagged them by date taken, but beyond that the only information was in the pictures themselves.

Searching old albums (digitally)

I quickly found the speedometer picture we took while speeding, and the gas gauge picture showing the empty tank. I had to include those in the post. But comparing the pictures to my memory showed a contradiction: did we really burn through 3/4 of a tank in just a couple of hours? Seems unlikely.

Back to my photo library, where a search for “Montana” revealed a picture of the speeding ticket! OCR on my phone is a miracle when it works. This was a huge score. So much good info preserved there, including the time the ticket was written: 10:25 AM. This told me that we had continued for at least five hours after sunrise. That means we were a minimum of 400 miles east (assuming 90-100 MPH sustained) of the Idaho-Montana border on I-90, which puts that speeding stop about 50 miles west of Billings.

Triangulating from there

View of a desolate highway surrounded by low mountains. A red Subaru sedan is parked on the shoulder, trunk and passenger door open. A white man in a black shirt and shorts is getting luggage out of the trunk. On the ground next to him is a red gas can. At the right edge of the image is a green exit sign but all that can be read is E 5.
Stranded in Montana… but where?

Next, comparing the odometer in both of the pictures referenced above, we put 295 miles on the rental between the two pictures. So, where did we run out of gas? I found another image from that day in 2002 of me, standing next to the trunk, with a gas can on the ground (Caleb or Jake had taken the picture; probably Caleb). On the right edge of the frame is an exit sign: Exit 5something.

The exits on I-90 in Montana are numbered low to high, west to east, and I knew our gas stop was closer to the eastern border than the western. Looking at a list of exits for that highway, I found only one viable candidate: Exit 544, for Wyola, MT. I looked it up in Google and used Street View and confirmed: that was absolutely the same place. I even clicked down to the bottom of the off-ramp and saw the sign I clearly remembered: No services.

No Services

Wyola is less than 100 miles by car from Billings, and the maximum range on that Subaru Legacy was more than 300. Where did we last fill up the tank? It couldn’t have been Billings. We must have stopped somewhere else west of Billings for lunch or something else. Where were we when Jake reminded us to fill up while driving in? 320 miles west of Wyola is Butte, and it’s hard to imagine three guys on a road trip not stopping in a city called Butte. Right? That’s where we had our lunch.

Finally, to satisfy my curiosity, I looked at restaurants in Butte to see if I recognized one. I found an Annie’s Cafe, which very much feels like the kind of place we would choose, but the user-submitted pictures do not ring a bell for me. Change is inevitable in two decades, yeah?

PostScript: Full Chronological Order

All events listed occurred on 20 July 2002

  • 5:30 AM – We pull over just past the Idaho-Montana border, near Sohon, MT, and take pictures of ourselves and the sky before sunrise.
  • 9:00 AM – We stop in Butte, MT (hehe, butt) for breakfast and gas.
  • 10:00 AM – Approximate time we pegged the speedometer at over 120 MPH indicated, west of Billings, MT.
  • 10:25 AM – Montana State Trooper pulls us over and cites us for “Exceed(ing) the posted speed limit by (more than) 25 MPH” @ 92.5 MPH. Fine paid: US$40.00, cash
  • 11:30 AM – Approximate time we arrived in Billings. Jake reminded us to fill up the tank. We did not.
  • 11:30 AM – 12:30 PM – lunch break in Billings. Establishment unknown.
  • 1:30 PM – Approximate time we ran out of gas, at Exit 544, near “No Services” Wyola, MT.

By the way

meta

By the way, with my previous post, I’ve also added a new category to the blog: Cars.

I’ll go back through and see if I can find any other posts for that category. For now, as of this post, there’s only one example.

Maps and Territories

DnD, meta

I’m in “prep new D&D campaign material” mode because I’ve got a game in two weeks. I’ve been prodding my players about what they plan on doing so I can be ready with material for them. Honestly I just need an encounter or two plus some lore and rumor drops to get them started, I don’t need much.

But I am also prepping maps for locations they might visit. I’m working on a map of the big city in my campaign, Kopno’domas. It’s going to be my Viriconium, my Waterdeep, my Lankhmar. The greatest city in the world. A big sprawling urban setting filled with shining palaces, grungy back allies, and buccolic pastures, decadent and squalid in roughly equal measure, spanning a lively river and nestled up against a small mountain range. This city has lived in my head for almost 15 years and I’m excited to put it on the table for the players to see. It’s not real if it’s just notes; only what happens at the table counts.

If that sounds like I’m overprepping, let me expand on that a bit. Sure, mapping out a location on the possibility of characters going there might take a lot of time. But in this case I am working off of those aforementioned 15 years of dreaming, which means 15 years of sketches, notes, revisions, and additions. A pile of neighborhood names, perusing the google results for “how many people per building in Medieval Europe.” Notes about noble houses, their goals and schemes. Random tables about urban encounters and “what building is that?” Me writing flash fiction set there. It’s largely just me taking those notes, picking the ideas I like, and crafting a cool map in Inkarnate.

(Side note: I’m taking notes on this map while I make it; I plan on turning those notes in to a nice long “How to map a city in Inkarnate” post down the road.)

Just Start, Over and Over

I’ve spent, however, most of today creating new maps in Inkarnate, fiddling around with settings, not liking it, deleting it and starting over. I don’t know why I am having such a mental block about this? I kept quibbling about the various different versions I’ve sketched out of this fictional place and how they don’t all match. Can I make them match? Should I honor the earlier versions, or just wing it and make up something new? Can I reconcile the versions, or can I retcon the earlier ones with some kind of obfuscation?

I suspect it’s my perfectionist nature. If I can’t make the perfect map for this imaginary city no one cares about but me, then why even bother? Don’t answer that, it’s a rhetorical question. I know the answer already.

Having an imperfect thing is better than not having a thing at all. And my players won’t be judging the map on their ideal version of this city they’ve never thought about before; they’re just going to be happy to be in this city, stomping around and getting in to Good Trouble.

Navigating the Territory

Always a lesson for me when I stop to examine what I’m doing. This time the lesson is: give yourself the permission to be imperfect. Relax your standards and just start. Get something down, mess around with it, and put it into play. none of the notes are the game. None of the rules and books are the game. Even the character sheets aren’t the game. The game is what happens when we all sit at the table, talk to each other, bounce off each others’ ideas, and see how the dice are rolling tonight.

Kopno’domas started in my imagination but it won’t be a real place until me and the players have adventures in it. My maps, my notes, are just a guidepost, pointing in the direction of the gameplay. The map is not the territory.

We, the players, are both map and territory.

Call for response: similar blogs

meta

Hey all! I think I want to start reading other blogs again. Way back when Google Reader was a thing (RIP in peace, Google Reader) I had a list of blogs and news sites that I would go through daily. A lot of them were leftist political blogs, some were technology blogs, but there were also blogs like mine: blogs written by a single author, with no specific central focus on a topic. Blogs of essays, thoughts, sharing interesting headlines, commentary on other news articles. That kind of thing.

I stopped getting my news and opinions that way when Twitter became a thing, but now that Twitter is owned by a lunatic right-wing hoarder (RIP in peace, Twitter), I don’t do that anymore. I replaced Twitter with Imgur, Mastodon, and TikTok but they don’t really fill the gap of medium- to long-form writing.

The only other major example that’s still current of a site like mine is John Scalzi’s Whatever, although with him being a published and accomplished author, there is somewhat of a focus on sci-fi, publishing, and media. Still a great read.

If you’re reading this post, could you drop into the comments, or find me on Mastodon, and share other blogs like this you know about and enjoy?

Likewise, if you’re here, could you share what aspects of my blog you enjoy the most? Are there topics I cover that you would love to see more of? Favorite specific posts?

Thank you so much! You reading these words is absolutely the highest compliment I could get.

And now I’ll pay the Cat Tax! Image from Pixabay; artist credit is arttoart97

Photograph of a gray cat with orange eyes standing in the middle of an asphalt road. The cat is looking up and moving forward. In the background the sky is overcast and gray and the grass and hills are brown and orange indicating autumn.

Strategy process exercise task job

General, meta

I was complaining to my bestie Tracy that I had no idea what I should write about tonight. I’m writing this early because I have a D&D game later, in about an hour and a half. So to make sure I post something, I opened up my text editor and stared at the screen and realized that a) my mind was blank, and b) if I want to write topical posts for a wide variety of audiences, I need to be able to come up with good post ideas, lots of them, quickly.

The downside to having a blog that is just “whatever in the Hell I want to post about” is that I have so many options that it’s like having no options at all. If this were a sports blog, I could just write something about any of the many many many sports games that happened today, or the general news, or follow-up on previous topics. If this was a gaming blog, I could piggy-back off the narrow focus to come up with something to write about. While I am working on a more specific blog (coming soon) this place does not have that restriction. So, sometimes, I sit down and flounder.

Which led me to the idea: write about how to come up with blog post ideas. Easy-peasy! If nothing else I can rant about not feeling creative lately, but if I do a little research, I might come up with a strategy, a process, one that works for me.

Because I’ve been on this new blogging kick, the Algorithm has taken notice and has started to feed me Content about blogging, writing, and freelancing. Earlier today it surfaced a video from a creator about making money using Google News, which got me to click and watch. Turns out, the idea was “find today’s top story on a topic you know about, paste the contents into a Large Language Model (LLM) “paraphraser” (and those should be double-heavy-extra scare quotes, because, really) and then sell that paraphrased article to some other content mill. That’s not something I would do.

I mean, maybe, if my blog were about summarizing news for people, I might take a look at the top headlines and rewrite it myself, but I would absolutely not use an LLM for that. The video creator (whom I will not link because don’t want to encourage that behavior) did say to re-read what you get back from the summarizer, because that’s why they advised finding a topic you know about… still.

But the basic idea of scanning today’s headlines is a good one for finding out what everyone is talking about, I suppose. That would be great if this were a “recent news” kind of blog, instead of a “spontaneous unedited opinions of Some Random Guy on the Internet” kind of blog.

I have been using Google Analytics and Google Search Console on my recent blog-push, and it’s hilarious to me what kinds of search terms lead people here. A big one is “chicken butt shirt” for example, because way way way back in the day I posted about a cool and funny button I bought off the internet. “Guess what?” “Chicken butt” is a phrase I and my bestie use frequently. But, like, can I turn that in to a blog post? Could I get 1000-1500 words out of that? No, I don’t think I could.

What else does Google say people like about the blog? Well, another top search term is “Bettie Bondage” which, in this site’s case, leads to a movie review I posted a long time about about a biopic of Bettie Page. Again, I’m grateful for the traffic but if I used that as a basis for future content this might become an NSFW blog.

Not that there’s anything wrong with those. Just not really what I’m aiming for here. I’d start a new blog for that kind of content (note to self: look into starting a new blog for that kind of content. I hear it’s a sure money-maker.)

Not sure where that leaves me. Let’s stick a pin in this. Maybe I’ll do some actual research and write up a “how to keep your blog swimming in content” article.

I’ll add that to the Ideas File.

All of the above

Daily Story Project, meta, Tech

This blog has been up and in existence in some form or another for over 20 years. Over that time it’s run on several different platforms: first on Blogger, then on a bespoke CMS written by a friend, hosted on that friend’s server, and finally, when that friend moved away, hosted on a Mac mini I plugged in whereever I could, then, eventually, imported into WordPress and migrated from whatever hosting service sucks less and costs the least amount (currently Bluehost.)

When I started this whole thing, it was just a place for me to dump my random thoughts on whatever I wanted to talk about. I never designed this place for consistency and I never had an eye to making money from it, be it by getting sponsors or affiliates, putting ads up, or soliciting for digital downloads and media (although there was a desperate period in my life when I did try putting ads here, which failed because of the low low traffic.)

While I love everyone who comes here to read anything I say, there aren’t enough of you to make it worth it to Google for monetization. Don’t get me wrong on this. At the highest traffic levels for this space, I was getting about 200 hits per day, and I was posting nearly daily. To me, having 200 people care about my work is amazing and humbling! If I were standing in front of a crowd of 200 people who cared about the words I write, I would be beyond happy. But those numbers are peanuts to the internet, even for the time (this was a decade ago), and especially now.

But I do kinda care about reaching a larger audience, and one of the technical problems that I would need to fix, according to Google, is broken links. And with all the years of posting, holy shit are there a shit-ton of broken links, some of which I have no way to fix beyond deleting them or noting them as broken in the present day. I have spent hours going back through old posts checking links and fixing the ones I can, but let me tell you, manually doing that for (including this post) 2590 published posts over 21 years is a lot of work.

There’s another category of broken links, though. For a while, my post permalinks used the scheme of bamoon.com/year/month/day/post-title.php. I think there are perhaps 50-100 of those, from a previous WordPress configuration. Eventually I switched to bamoon.com/post-title/ Because these follow a regular pattern, I know that I could probably use a script to go through the posts and the database and update them all. But I am not a strong coder. I also know that one can use a feature of Apache and add lines to the .htaccess file to re-write the requests one-by-one as users request them. But, again, that means regex and scripting, not my strong suit.

Here comes ChatGPT, though. It’s not good at so many things, like making sure people have only four fingers and one thumb on each of two hands, but people (like Molly White) say it’s brilliant at scripts and coding. So I asked it for help. It gave me solutions for both cases. Great! I have a staging site I can test these on, so it won’t break the main site. But… one last question, ChatGPT: which solution is better?

And I feel like it punted. It said both are good, and I should implement both. The database fix is more permanent; the .htaccess rewrite is immediate and invisible to the reader.

Looks like ChatGPT is an Option D (all of the above) kind of bot.