hello! this is the place to get news about whatever I feel is news/share-worthy currently. if you’re wondering what I’m doing, look no further. newer news will be added at the top. scroll for older news. you know how this works
ok soft launch has been delayed once again. German bureaucracy, etc.
I am gaining more and more enthusiasm for fromtheabysmal.net. fixed a bunch of stuff today and it feels so functional and clean now. even mobile layout is nice now.
kiryll said he’s jealous of my writing setup. this pleases me.
May 4
We’re doing it. We are soft-launching the store while it is at a point where I am tbh kinda mortified to let anyone outside of Kiryll and myself and my kid see it. We will set up payments and make sure products are sorted into the right catalogs and then we will do it.
Apr 30
trying to organize finishing up the TMW store so we can soft launch it. feels like everything still needs to be done, and by me. doing my best to prioritize and let LLMs handle what they reasonably can. feels sticky right now, like walking through slime. but I also can't wait to finally play around and change everything yet again, which must wait till this version has been public for at least a day, ugh
April 22
fromtheabysmal.net is now styled to my satisfaction (aka it’s got the ‘no makeup’ makeup look lol)
it also has RSS and post links. oops, did not think of that before. also, my autopublish pipeline is doing exactly what I need it to do (publish stuff for me) AND is now on github.
GITHUB FOR EVERYTHING FTW, btw. I now have four (4) repos and they are all for some kind of writing or archiving project.
the TMW blog, when it begins its existence, will be managed via github too. I have been the BIGGEST fan of this concept since I came across the posthog site and saw how it works, ugh so cool
see, I have this repressed desire to maintain a version history for basically everything I do so I can change and revert and iterate on stuff that’s somehow public without losing all accountability for it.
Also, using github for all my web projects means that everything I do is mine; no corps no interfaces no subscriptions ever only to write shit and put it on the internet; github is nothing but backup, in essence, AND can eventually, if I want, serve as a way to let others do the same
as my plans for “going public” (meaning: telling more people about all my current little projects other than Kiryll only) become more concrete, sadly I am observing my responses to my own work become more critical, narrow-minded, strategic. you know the type. non-carefree
I will need to meditate on this
gah shit is there truly no way for me to be a person on the internet? do I really have to trick myself (or, more likely, let myself get tricked) into being convinced nobody reads my words except me? despite needing to know it somehow serves people other than me? fuck
lalalalala, this is not for the mind to solve
April 14
got Claude Code to prompt me to write down news every couple days, adding what I wrote to this file, right here
plus, to add a sentence or two to a project description for estherpatrizia.com that isn’t finished yet
THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING
the use cases for this are endless
next, I want to experiment with having the prompts arrive at times I do not anticipate them, so I don’t start closing them compulsively at some point.
April 14
about 2 weeks ago, I realized I wouldn’t publish the pieces I write in the mornings, like, ever, if someone else doesn’t do it for me.
the flaw in the plan with kiryll publishing was first and foremost him not feeling entirely comfortable taking that decision (what to publish, what to flag as ‘needs work’) off my hands
i had claude code set up a system that runs every monday, wednesday and friday. it checks my drafts folder and looks for the post that is most publishable. it does the lightest copyedits possible (typos, obvious punctuation) and otherwise leaves it alone entirely. it sends me an email at 12 noon stating that this post will be published in 4 hours unless I reply VETO, which, if I do, snoozes publishing for one day AND sends kiryll an email (which I wish to avoid for many reasons) stating that I delayed publishing. if i do not reply, the post is published to fromtheabysmal.net
after one successfully published post, i’ve amended the pipeline to include the to-be-published text in the email, along with 1-3 pointed questions that might prompt me to do some light editing. if I then reply to the email with a new text, that one is published. if I do nothing, the original text is published.
unrelated: one thing I believe is true more and more for me is that no matter how much of a pain it can be to my mind, tracking what I do, whatever it is, in some way, be it just a photo, a sentence here, or a log in an app, is actually truly necessary for me to get anywhere with anything. having some kind of physical record of the thing I am committed to outside of my own body.
Liam is a commitment for obvious reasons, but also he simply exists and I am forced to respond to that existence day after day. and interestingly, the older he gets, the more pure pleasure I derive from his existence; the more it overrides any frustration or difficulty that arises as a consequence of being his mother.
lifting weights has been almost laughably easy to maintain as a habit for the last eight months (!!! the longest I’ve ever gone doing any kind of deliberate exercise with real regularity) perhaps not just because getting strong is fun, and the setup I have at home allows the habit to flourish, but because my app lets me check off what i’ve done each session and shows me the progression, reminds me of the next three workouts, with zero pressure to actually show up. which is precisely why it then happens, no matter what, barring injury or intense PMS.
April 4
the TMW store is in that state where it is almost so real that I am becoming very afraid of touching it. What if it’s actually finished, and I can no longer justify not showing it to anyone?
thus, I am procrasti-working by finally setting something up on my estherpatrizia.com domain, the one I used to put on everything I did. during my walk yesterday, a certain taylor swift song came on, which reminded me of a nonsense book project I was working on for quite some time a couple years back while I was trying to put together a book design portfolio and establish myself as a book designer. it’s a damn shame that thing didn’t get anywhere past my documents folder. so the next thought was, what if I just put ALL my projects on my site, whether finished or not?
NOT A PORTFOLIO. an index.
while starting to build this today, the next thought arrived — where do I draw the line, what’s ok to list? the answer to that felt obvious: was I satisfied with the result? if yes: list.
the thought resulting from THAT, but ehh, a lot of that is just so small and unimportant. then, yes, and how do I explain the general smallness and unfinishedness of all my endeavors of the past couple years?
answer: 1. you don’t have to be a mastermind-level Creator of Things, full stop. 2. have a project titled “Liam” lol
April 1
I don’t want this site to be glitzy anymore lol
the current state of the TMW site is already feeling slightly stale to me. observing myself wanting to crumple it all up and stick it in the trash.
so, trying to get all its current necessary loose ends tied up so it can go live, even if only to a tiny group of friends. sadly, there’s still a lot to be done.
product descriptions don’t even strictly need to exist, but the products themselves need to exist in a sellable state, they require delivery time estimates, they need to be zugeordnet their respective markets. maybe a size guide page needs to exist, not sure about that.
about page needs to be finished. home page needs to be tweaked to match the fact that we currently do not have any tools live at all, yet. other than the ephemeris. the ephemeris needs a desktop icon, then it’s done.
March 5
I do wonder if this place is allowed to be something like a want-to do list as well as a things-that-have-happened-or-are-currently-happening list. If it can be a to-do list, I would like to note that I want this site to be a little glitzy after all.
I would also like to note that pouring into multiple but similar projects always was and is still the best way I know to keep momentum flowing over the course of months or even years. It’s only that my mind often convinces itself to stay focused on one project for too long, too often, which is my personal most direct path into burnout and apathy.
That said, I am trying to organize everything I’ve written over the past 1-2 years that I never could publish. It’s a lot and probably some of it needs to be left alone forever.
Also, maybe fromtheabysmal.net needs an intro line (or sth, like this site has) at the top?
March 4
I am committed to doing letters from the abysmal somewhere on a server, away from all social features there ever were. had claude write some html and javascript and fiddled with css a tiny bit. i will upload all new posts directly to the server, add a line to the .js so it will load the post... and that will be all. Am satisfied with this approach. It’s like the extremely minimal but elegant Wordpress blog I never had. No interfaces except Filezilla. I love it.
The goal is to publish pretty much EVERYTHING I write that isn’t a literal diary entry over there.
February 28
TMW is coming along well and I now consider myself an amazing copywriter. of course I have no idea what I am doing bc I am mainly just writing whatever silliness comes to mind wherever there is a section that requires words, but whatever. it’s been fun. also it makes Liam laugh so maybe that’s something.
not being able to do anything but write in iA in the mornings has been making me very creative around spending time doing... nothing. (bc obv there was a longform-writing streak and it has passed, but it will resume again at some point) I meditate, I work out, I walk when I can (right now I can’t bc my foot has been kaput from walking for too long in boots two weeks ago). Or I cook or I just sit. I think spending time doing “nothing” has been very important for.. everything.
fun store stocking whatever we have in... store at the moment
free HD resources
non-free (because time/cost/labor-intensive) HD resources
also, yurp, writing is now easy once again, thanks to having nothing else to do on my mac during the hours of 8am to noon during the week, thanks to 1focus and iawriter. obviously these companies have not paid me to mention them, but I have paid them and am very happy so far with my purchases
also I just noticed that when you enter your email in the subscribe thing on thematerialwhy.com and then confirm your email, doing so then lets you access the site (which is otherwise password protected) and poke around a bit and see that nothing at all is to be seen yet
what power I have just now bestowed upon whoever in the world may be reading this
January 26
kiryll will be my substack publisher, so I don’t need to interact with the interface for writing, at all. I will be a consumer on the weekends and nothing else. cannot describe what a relief this already is and we haven’t even done anything yet. the substack environment has twirled my writing brain into an ever-tightening knot over the last years and trying to untie it in the very environment it happened is not going to work. maybe it’s never going to be untied, but I can remove myself from the environment.
fiddling with domains and webspace and figuring out where to put what, and how
just purchased iA Writer (working on just doing the thing when I want it and not doing endless cost-benefit calculations in my head beforehand till I am “sure-sure” and also exhausted inside), which exports decent html and also pdfs, so wondering how to make use of this investment to make making and especially maintaining all these sites I like to have on the internet as simple and hassle-free (to my fussy head) as possible
for the book of appetite I have decided to forego styling the HTML completely. for this little project, though, I believe, I will do a little styling to make it easier to read