dick tracy’s electric casting outfit

Latest Dick Tracy acquisition: this early-mid 1930s Allied Casting Set, gently (as gently as one can get, I suppose, with a Depression-era home foundry; very fond of the scorch ring around the center) used and possessed not only of most of its original pieces - including three castings of Tracy, Chief Brandon, and Junior - but of its original box (which was the biggest draw for me: this thing is in excellent shape for being a year or two shy of being a nonagenarian).

Doubt I'll be firing it up anytime soon, but I'm feeling all Mandalorian armorer at the moment. This is the way.

blog is

While I'm reticent to commit upon this space the cardinal sin of blogging – that sin being to blog about blogging (or, perhaps, it's to call writing about blogging the cardinal sin of blogging IDK) – I've become concerned (fairly or un-) over the last several weeks that in the whatever-it-becomes internet era we're entering that there will be – as with all of the internet eras prior – an urge to standardize and impose rules upon the blog or, rather, the blog form: to be considered a blog an internet presence must have x, y; it must have a title; it must contain this / that, yadda yadda yadda – and I thought it might be useful, if only for myself (the only person for whom this space is generally useful in the first place), to commit to the digital ether what I consider the blog form to be at this very moment, weds/20230322 between 1000 and 1036.

A blog is whatever the fuck the person creating it wants it to be, an ever-unfurling, living, breathing snapshot of its creator in the moment of publication: it is defined not in what you post but rather in that you post (it can also be defined by your periods of silence – these, too, are a snapshot of you), a whole, a totality revealed only in frequency and existence and even then a form remaining at its purest and most unfiltered open to endless permutation and variation, an amorphous nebula that thrives on iteration and change: a captionless picture IS a blog post; a link devoid of commentary IS a blog post; a rambling 3000-word diatribe IS a blog post; a thoroughly-composed 60,000 word novella about your cat's telepathic powers IS a blog post; a sentence to follow up on a 3000 word diatribe IS a blog post; a single word IS a blog post: it is the synthesis and collision of these dashed-off or deeply thought proofs of existence that constitute the single greatest vehicle of internet-connected individual expression available to us: it can be as human as we are – but only if we let it.

boogie board return

After a few years away – it was a 2018 post by Aral Balkan that initially turned me on to it – I started using my Boogie Board Blackboard writing tablet instead of legal pads this morning: I've lost the penchant for the over-romanticization of handwriting and paper and turned more towards writing in Obsidian / Drafts so I don't need the paper to write, only to think, and the Boogie helps me do that (and prevents me from killing too many trees in the name of my inane and mostly illegible jottings). Pen / stylus nearly same weight as my beloved Lamy Studio fountain pen so there's little lost in translation; also nice that my inveterate southpawness doesn't result in (as much) smearing as it does with dry erase boards and ink.

Current workflow: determine the specific point – the more specific I am, the more useful it is – that I'm working from, then spew thoughts and notions all across the "boogie-page" (nice to use my right fingernails to circle stuff as I go about scrawling with my left), scan for something worthwhile (though I do tend to do that as I go, a habit picked up from living with my shitty handwriting because it's hard for me to read what I wrote five minutes later), type that up, hit the delete button on the Board, and start again.

One complaint: a bit hard to see in my low-light Paintshop cavern, especially when my left hand covers much of the light. Moving lamp to right side helped considerably - though I wish I could write in white on the black screen as I do in the computer on Obsidian. Still, a useful tool – glad to be back with it.