Daily Create: A FrankenPoem

Blackout FrankenPoem

The prompt for this morning’s Daily Create builds on a prompt previously for a Frankenstein Poem (a poem of disparate parts) in which J build a tool for creating Blackout Poems from the text of some old text. In my case, I got a passage from Paradise Lost to work with. The tool also generates an image for overlay (or backlay) if you want, which is a nice touch.

Peace (hidden inside the text),
Kevin

Internet Phone Book Explorations: Joodaloop

I type the number 23 into the Internet Phone Book pad and find myself at Joodaloop. It the site of a website designer, yes, but also a curious mind. The name of the owner is Judah (as far as I can tell, which makes sense, given the cool name of the site). I say Joodaloop out loud to myself a few times as I begin wandering about, because it has a fun musical flow to it.

Joodaloop. Try it.

In one part of his extensive website, Judah writes what seems to be a mission statement that connects nicely to the ethos of the indie web that brought me here in the first place through the Internet Phone Project:

I want to make beautiful websites. I want to make messy websites. I want to make websites that feel like a cozy attic. I want to make elegant websites. I want to make painstakingly hand-crafted websites. I want to make unreasonably intricate websites. – Judah (via Joodaloop)

There’s a real voice on these pages that I appreciate, and I followed some of the links forward. I found myself curious about the Hypertext As Literature page (it’s a curated collection of article and linked resource sites and not a collection of hypertextual pieces, as I first thought). I wander a bit inside the Map Of My Internet, feeling a bit like a silent intruder on the crumb trail of someone else walking through the woods. But it a curious adventure to see how others curate their online experiences, and a map is something I rarely can resist. The naming of category clusters on the map is intriguing.

Some of the other areas of Joodaloop are technical but quirky, but I also notice that Judah is a drummer, so once again: musician meets musician. (My dad is a drummer, by the way, but I am a saxophonist, guitarist, songwriter). I appreciated some of the linked resources, including this search engine for museums — Museo.

All in all, I enjoyed my time at Joodaloop. And my time there will end with the dog looking at me funny as I say out loud one last time: Joodaloop.

In case you are wondering what I am doing here, this is one of what will be a series of short explorations of indie websites found in the Internet Phone Book project. My aim is to stumble upon things outside of the larger realm of the Internet, and maybe shout out some spaces, too.

Peace (on the edge of the map),
Kevin

Daily Create: Haiku To A Book Of Days

SongBook Of Days

I am slow-reading This Year: 365 Songs Annotated (A Book Of Days) by John Darnielle (of Mountain Goats fame) in which he annotates and explains and tells stories of patches of lyrics to songs, one per day of the calendar year (an old format). Today’s DS106 Daily Create prompt asked us to write a haiku for our favorite book. Darnielle’s book is not necessarily my favorite (I am still near the start of the year in his book) but I am enjoying it, as a reader and a songwriter myself.

Peace (day by day by day),
Kevin

Podcast Listen: The Fediverse Experiment

The hosts of Hard Fork and Search Engine podcasts have been experimenting over many months with setting up their own social network on the Fediverse, and they talk about it here.

They write: “Our present version of the internet is arguably the worst it’s ever been. Which means – any shot at changing things, even an unlikely one – is worth trying out.”

I have been on Mastodon for quite some time but I never jumped to another Instance other than the main one — Social — so I am always curious about how other people are not just navigating around the Fediverse, but also setting up social home spaces. I appreciate that no one company or evil CEO owns the Fediverse, and that I have the ability to pack up and move to another hosting system (an “Instance”) and all my data comes with me, and that platforms like Mastodon rather seamlessly connect with other Fediverse concepts/platforms.

Peace (you can own),
Kevin