If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. ~ Charlie Parker
This morning’s prompt at DS106 Daily Create was to come up with a generic container for something modern. I decided on a box of dead links.
And while I am at it, I am going to share what I did yesterday, with a prompt inspired by the legendary radio man Paul Harvey and his catch-phrase, but with a modern touch.
Peace (and connection),
Kevin
Billy Collins? Dogs? Poems? Watercolor artwork?
You had me at hello. Or maybe, woof.
Dog Show — a collection of short poems by Collins and beautiful artwork by Pamela Sztybel — is a quick trot of a collection that, as often is the case with Collins, seem light on the surface and then suddenly a line comes along that will just floor you. There’s even a cat poem in here.
Peace (take it for a walk already),
Kevin
Here is a link to six years of collaborative calendar creating by the CLMOOC community and beyond.
Peace (curating it),
Kevin
I am on a personal journey of sorts to explore independent websites via the Internet Phone Book project and report out on my explorations.
This morning, I typed 17 into the phone and landed on a site called “electrocute.”
First impressions? It’s got a fascinating design aesthetic with content around technology and design and textiles, and it looks like there are a lot of tutorials and small projects, including music-themed ones that caught my attention. This interactive Wind Chime generator is beautiful and soothing. I got lost in it for a bit of time.
I was trying to find an About Me page for Yafira (which I think is the name of the person behind the site) and stumbled upon a blog link and then found a manifesto entitled: Soft Computing, Soft Textiles, Soft Worlds. I see now that Yafira is a student at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.
They write: “But I don’t just think of soft computing as a technical construct. I think of it as something tactile. Something tender. I imagine a computer that feels like fabric. A phone that squishes. A wearable that folds with your body, that warms up gently when held. A soft object that stores not just data, but memory, comfort, feeling.”
Which brings me back to some inquiry we had done years ago in the CLMOOC community around LED and fabrics and coding, and the whole hacker/maker ethos we were trying to encourage in teachers, so they could bring that to the classroom. This electrocute site is a cool reminder that people like Yafira are still thinking in that direction and pushing boundaries.
And their most recent post is called Poetic Pattern Recognition. It’s a thoughtful at how technology can intersection with the very human act of writing poetry. Man, this also resonates with inquiry and explorations I have done over the years. Way to go, Yafira, whomever you are and wherever you are – keep up the curiosity.
We are not machines, but we speak their language in whispers and rhyme. – Yafira
I took that and used it as inspiration for a poem.
Peace (in the spaces between digital and analog),
Kevin
Peace (just before the bloom),
Kevin
I’ve written before about my song lyric sheets, and the mess they show of my mind in the midst of revision process. I took a pic of a brand new song I am composing and filtered it a bit. It’s neat (as a piece of art) but not neat (as a piece of writing).
Peace (and sound),
Kevin
I am doing a little catching up of poems from the last few days. The one above is from this morning’s one word prompt off Mastodon (creek).
This next one is from yesterday’s Daily Create, in which we were prompted to use found words of old documents for a “franken-poem” format.
And then I saw that John J had created a randomizer blackout poem generator just for the prompt (which I find pretty amazing) so of course I had to give it whirl.
And then yesterday’s one word prompt was “soup.”
Peace (with poems),
Kevin
Here is the subtitle for this project known as the Internet Phone Book: a directory for exploring the vast poetic web.
The Poetic Web is a phrase I have stumbled on now and then, and I can’t remember now when or where I stumbled on the Internet Phone Book project, but I sure am glad I did. It’s a physical book made for exploring hundreds (actually, 737) of websites that off the regular paths — no social media platforms, no giant corporations. Just regular people making websites as passion projects, and maybe even mostly for an audience of one (themselves). The Poetic Web, in my mind, indicates personality of websites in their quirky coding, wording, artwork and more.
A more formal definition: “The Poetic Web is a practice and process towards a place: a web that is more handmade, expressive, and intimate; where site-making is a political, personal, and poetic act. This is a growing collection of projects, tools, and teachings around it.” — via The Poetic Web (Chia Amisola)
I’ve begun exploring more of the sites found in the Internet Phone Book itself more thoroughly in the new year (I wrote about this in a post the other day). I’ve highlighted about 50 sites that I want to explore, and have done a little touring already of some others and found it quite fun to see what people are up to or have been up to. The sites inside the book were either sent in my website owners or recommended to the editors.
The collection of sites here is curated and edited by Kristoffer Tjalve and Elliott Cost, and both add essays about the Indie Web/ Poetic Web to the collection, along with a handful of other quite interesting essays that explore how our online homes represent who we are, as identify markers, and reminders of all the magical possibilities that still exist for us, if we can just break free from the silos that the huge corporations have built for us, to make money off our data and our privacy.
From the introduction: “The web is called the web because it is a network of hundreds, thousands, millions, billions of sites. To keep the web alive requires the active participation and care of people like you.” — Kristoffer Tjalve
Just look at some of the titles of the essays, and tell me you are not intrigued:
Disclosure: I am writing this review but the book is no longer available. It was an independent endeavor, and they raised money from readers like me before publishing the book, and it seems as if they were able to successfully fund the project and now the books are gone. Sorry. (On a positive note, though, the cover also says: Issue One, 2025 — indicating the project might have future iterations).
Peace (calling it up),
Kevin
I wish I had never seen the video but I did. And then I read about Renee Good this morning and saw this in reference to her Instagram bio: “poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado.”
Peace (please),
Kevin
It wasn’t that long ago that we celebrated the 5,000th post at the DS106 Daily Create and now we have a birthday of the launch of the first daily invitation to make art. The Daily Create launched on January 8, 2012, and has been running every day since. The prompt this morning was to create or remix art to invite others to join in the fun. Consider yourself warmly invited.
Peace (and making stuff),
Kevin