<html lang="en"><head>
	<style type="text/css">body {
	font-family: Avenir Next, Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;
	font-size : 16px;
	font-weight : normal;
	font-style : normal;
	color : #839496;
	line-height : 1.5em;
	text-align : left;
	background-color : #fdf6e3;
	width : 650px;
	min-width: 400px;
	min-height: 500px;
	margin: 10px auto 10px auto;
	padding: 10px;
	padding-bottom: 20px;
}

p.postdate{
	font-size : 12px;
	color : #b58900;
}

p.byline {
	font-size : 12px;
	text-align : center;
	padding-bottom : 20px;
	color : #b58900;
}

p.menu {
	font-size : 12px;
	text-align : center;
	padding-bottom : 20px;
}

p.copyright{
	font-size : 12px;
	color : #b58900;
}

p.caption {
	font-size : 12px;
	text-align : center;
	padding-bottom : 20px;
}

h1 {
	font-family: impact, monaco, Consolas, "Lucida Console", monospace;
	font-size : 24px;
	font-weight : normal;
	margin-top : 40px;
	color : #859900;
	padding-bottom : 10px;
}

h1.bannertext {
	font-family: impact, monaco, Consolas, "Lucida Console", monospace;
	font-size : 38px;
	font-weight : bold;
	color : #cb4b16;
	text-align : center;
	margin-top : 40px;
	padding-bottom : 5px;
}



h2 {
	font-size : 20px;
	color : #657b83;
}

h3 {
	font-size : 16px;
	color : #657b83;
	font-style : italic;
}

a {
	color : #268bd2;
	text-decoration: none;
}

a.bannerlink {
	color : #cb4b16;
	text-decoration: none;
}

a.h1link {
	color : #859900;
	text-decoration: none;
}


a:link {
	color : #268bd2;
	text-decoration: none;
}

a:visited {
	color : #2aa198;
	text-decoration: underline;
}


a:hover {
	color : #268bd2;
	text-decoration: underline;
}

hr	{
	border-color : #eee8d5;
	background-color : #eee8d5;
	color : #eee8d5;
}

img.centered {
	display : block;
	margin-left : auto;
	margin-right : auto;
}

img.inline {
	float : left;
	vertical-align : top;
	margin-top: 20px;
	margin-right : 15px;
	margin-bottom: 15px;
}

img.right-inline {
	float : right;
	vertical-align : top;
	margin-left : 15px;
	margin-top : 20px;
	margin-bottom : 15px;
}

div {
	overflow : auto;
	width : 100%:
}</style>
	<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
	<title>Ordinary Human Language</title>
</head>

<body>

<a href="https://ordinaryhumanlanguage.ca" ;class="bannerlink"><h1 class="bannertext">Ordinary Human Language</h1></a>

<p class="byline">by Brian Crane</p>

<p class="menu"> <a href="pages/books.html">Books</a> - <a href="pages/movies.html">Movies</a> - <a href="pages/tv.html">TV</a> - <a href="pages/tinderbox.html">Tinderbox</a> - <a href="pages/archive.html">Archive</a> - <a href="feed.rss">RSS</a> </p>



<h1>Figuring Out the Blog Thing</h1>


<div>

<p>Turns out that almost all my blogging energy is going to the blog I started with my brother. My mother is now recruited and posting. Now I have my sights set on my sisters. While things simmer there, things will lie dormant here. </p>

<p>Which is fine. The beauty of flat HTML is that there aren’t any platform updates to manage, etc etc. Things can mothball here with zero effort. I’ll be back alter. </p>

</div>

<p class="postdate"><a href="2024/07/Figuring-Out-the-Blog-Thing.html">Post Page</a> • Posted July 26, 2024</p>

<hr>


<h1>Mini-Doc on a French Pastel Maker</h1>


<div>

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Eu6po8_sPco?si=tRcZcjq-SC_qs6u2" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>

</div>

<p class="postdate"><a href="2024/05/Mini-Doc-on-a-French-Pastel-Maker.html">Post Page</a> • Posted May 21, 2024</p>

<hr>


<h1>Toronto Swan</h1>
<img src="https://ordinaryhumanlanguage.ca/images/2024-imgs/TorontoSwan.jpeg" width="650" class="centered" alt="A Swan, Swimming on Blue Water">


<div>

<p>My grandfather had a goose on his farm when I was a very young kid. He called it Grey Gander. That goose chased me anytime I came near it, wings spread wide as it ran, enormous and terrifying. To this day, I look at a goose and see nothing but a mean-spirited beast, eager to bite the back of my arms with its hard, nubby beak as I flee.</p>
<p>This swan has that look, the beady eye of a biter. But it’s also beautiful, and as long as it keeps its distance, I’m happy to admit it.</p>

</div>

<p class="postdate"><a href="2024/05/Toronto-Swan.html">Post Page</a> • Posted May 10, 2024</p>

<hr>


<h1>Last Shows of the 2023–2024 Season</h1>
<img src="https://ordinaryhumanlanguage.ca/images/2024-imgs/COCDonPasquale.jpg" width="650" class="" alt="-Show Poster">


<div>

<p>The Beav and I are back from Toronto where we watched the last two shows of the Canadian Opera Company’s season: Donizetti’s <i>Don Pasquale</i>, which we know and have seen elsewhere, and Cherubini’s <i>Medea</i>, which was completely new to us. Both were great. <i>Don Pasquale</i> was inventive (but faithful) in a way that made good sense of what is, at root, a silly story. <i>Medea</i> was simply magnificent, a top-notch production of beautiful music that takes its source seriously but also makes something new from it.</p>
<p>Together, these were the best shows of the season with February’s <i>Fidelio</i> the runner up. We already have tickets for next season in hand, so this was a great way to finish off the year. </p>
<img src="https://ordinaryhumanlanguage.ca/images/2024-imgs/COCMedea.png" width="650" class="centered" alt="-Show Poster">


</div>

<p class="postdate"><a href="2024/05/Last-Shows-of-the-2023-2024-Season.html">Post Page</a> • Posted May 6, 2024</p>

<hr>


<h1>Things Are Proceeding as Unplanned</h1>


<div>

<p>In order to focus on writing new things here at OHL, I explicitly planned NOT to restore media and links to posts from the previous run. And so, in a ridiculous but oh so typical turn of events, restoring media and links to old posts is <i>precisely</i> what I am currently doing. </p>
<p>What? Why? </p>
<p>The short version: I decided it was better to set this file up to handle video now rather than waiting to do it later. The current file structure is simple and limited to fundamentals. Completing it by including video would give me a fixed, working base that I can archive and then fall back to if later additions or experiments become too baroque. </p>
<p>But once I had these last media pieces in place, I wanted to try them out. So I went back and began restoring videos to some of my old posts. One thing led to another, and soon I was restoring some links, and depending on where they led to, maybe some images. This fiddling is on-going. </p>
<p>To be clear, I don’t <i>plan</i> to restore everything (lolololololol), but for now, these old posts are where the action is.</p>

</div>

<p class="postdate"><a href="2024/04/Things-Are-Proceeding-as-Unplanned.html">Post Page</a> • Posted April 26, 2024</p>

<hr>


<h1>What I Forgot I Learned about Blogging</h1>


<div>

<p>As I was putting this blog back together, I was also <a href="2024/03/Back-on-TBX-yet-Again.html">starting</a> a shared blog with my brother. In the days since I’ve been back from France, a lot of my blogging time has been devoted to getting that other project up and running. It’s going well, we have the start of some momentum, and that’s exciting.</p>
<p>Working on getting that project going has been a reminder of how much I had to learn over the early years of starting this blog. My brother’s one of the sharpest people I know, and he picks things up near instantaneously, but even the fastest marathoner in the world has to run 26 miles to finish a race. That’s what the other blog is like: fun and going fast, but there are so many miles to cover. </p>
<p>Importantly, those miles aren’t fundamentally about tech. They’re about writing: mostly about sorting out what to speak about and finding a way to do it publicly. I really do think there’s something universal in the challenge: surely everyone with any self-awareness at all faces it, no? But how it manifests for each individual seems extremely personal. We each work out our answers to “What to say?” and “How?” on our own and that demands time and reflection. If there’s a shortcut, I haven’t found it.</p>
<p>I also wonder if it isn’t a bit harder to figure all this out with someone else helping. I mean, surely it’s easier in the sense that someone’s there to help and offer encouragement and advice. But also, is that really helpful? I mean, you’re not them! And worse, you’re there watching them fumbling around and ultimately standing in for the very same public that’s the problem in the first place. Maybe putting a familiar face on that public helps—I surely hope it does—but sometimes I wonder if I’m more help than hinderance… </p>
<p>(Does it go without saying that the entire previous paragraph reads to me like questioning the possibility of teaching composition? And that that in turn is a bit like, What have I done with my life?)</p>
<p>Overthinking about what helps and what doesn’t aside, the other blog is fun. Blogging with my brother is fun. I’m excited by it, I love it, and it’s where a big chunk of my blogging time has gone post-France.</p>

</div>

<p class="postdate"><a href="2024/04/What-I-Forgot-I-Learned-about-Blogging.html">Post Page</a> • Posted April 25, 2024</p>

<hr>


<h1>The Old Familiar "Hi and bye"</h1>
<img src="https://ordinaryhumanlanguage.ca/images/2024-imgs/Pontdugard.jpeg" width="650" class="centered" alt="Pont du Gard, France">
<p class="caption">The Roman Aquaduct, Pont du Gard, France</p>

<div>

<p>A week after announcing a return to this site, I left for two weeks of vacation in France. There was no blogging going on from the far side of the pond, and so things have been pretty dead here. </p>
<p>That should change soon enough. I’m back and working on some stuff behind the scenes.</p>

</div>

<p class="postdate"><a href="2024/04/The-Old-Familiar-Hi-and-bye.html">Post Page</a> • Posted April 20, 2024</p>

<hr>


<h1>A New Start</h1>
<img src="https://ordinaryhumanlanguage.ca/images/2024-imgs/NewStartBanner.jpeg" width="650" class="centered" alt="Streaming colors in waves">


<div>

<p>For the past few months I’ve been experimenting with various blog options, trying to figure out what I miss from blogging, what I’d like to have back and how best (and where best) to do it. The few previous posts are traces of some of what’s been going on behind the scenes on other domains to mark that work.</p>

<h2>Beginnings &amp; Retreat</h2>
<p>I began posting to Ordinary Human Language in <a href="2011.html">summer 2011</a>. After an uncertain start, I wrote extensively for five or six years, but then for a variety of reasons, I began to slow down and pull back. In part, I was overwhelmed by technical problems that were more than I could handle with what I knew at the time. I had also slowly become wary of public writing and had begun posting less often, less widely and less honestly. Why this happened is complicated. Then in late 2019 <a href="2019/05/Hackers-Suck.html">when my site was hacked</a>, I took down my Wordpress installation and replaced it with a much reduced and simplified flat-file site. I updated it sporadically but never found my footing. A year later when the pandemic finally began to weigh me down and online was becoming everything, I stopped posting completely, using blog time to go outside and to walk or bike or run.</p>

<h2>Exploring</h2>
<p>During that time I was still “blogging” in a sense, only I was doing it privately rather than publicly. I was experimenting, trying to understand why I wrote up my reactions to books and movies and all the rest. I wasn’t sure what they were for and wasn’t sure what made a blog the place I enjoyed keeping them.</p>
<p>Some things were obvious. It mattered that blog posts were discreet entries, and that over time, they hung together and emerged as a bigger whole. It mattered that entries floated away and disappeared as they aged and as my attention shifted, but that they remained present and could jump back into view with only the click of a link. It mattered that the entries had images selected in the moment they were written and that when I saw them years later they’d remind me of the moment (and of me) when I chose them. The best offline equivalent I found for my blog was <a href="https://www.thebrain.com" title="TheBrain: The Ultimate Digital Memory">The Brain</a>, and I blogged daily for myself from 2019 through 2023 in that software.</p>
<p>Ultimately though, I realized that the public aspect of blogging, however difficult I found it, was important to me. It’s such a small thing in principle, given how few people will ever read what I post. Yet, regardless of whether anyone’s reading, I began to realize that turning my voice away from myself and toward the world changes how I write and think. There’s a tension between, on the one hand, a drive to bring a written comment to a finished public form, and on the other, the freedom of speaking into a wide open space where no one is listening (even if I’m haunted by the myth of Melampus and the reeds). That tension confused me in the past, but oddly enough, I think I’ve come to enjoy it. </p>

<h2>The New Run</h2>
<p>Given how much the act of blogging preoccupied me, I was surprised to find that it has been been the basic technical choices about platform that have given me the most problems as I’ve come back online. WordPress is the obvious easy answer to the question, “How should I blog?,” and over the past weeks, I’ve flopped from using it to not using it to using it to not until I’ve lost count of the loops I’ve made. Two factors ultimately made WordPress nonviable. First, I am bound to WordPress for a different project, and don’t feel like using it twice. Second, I refuse to commit what I write to an online tool I can barely run and can’t fix when (not if) things go wrong. I did that from 2011 to 2020. It went badly. </p>
<p>So if I was going to blog, I decided I needed to find a way to blog through <a href="http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/" title="Tinderbox: The Tool For Notes">Eastgate’s Tinderbox</a>. Luckily, I wasn’t starting from scratch: I already had my two earlier attempts to work from. The first was my monstrously complex experiment from 2017. In that file, with extensive help from people on the Eastgate forum, I’d done the work of creating a simulacrum of my WordPress site with all the menus, sidebars, categories, tags, etc. It worked, it was marvelous, and a day or two after I posted it, I retreated to WordPress, <a href="2017/07/The-New-Site--un-bilan.html">overwhelmed by the technical load of maintaining it</a>. The second was the exceedingly simple file I’d constructed as an archive for the original site after being hacked. It was a single column, a simple menu for some categories, but it boasted css for both a light and a dark solarized theme. </p>
<p>I wanted to land somewhere between these two extremes. I wanted the images, stable links, and organized page navigation of the first site, but in a package that was, as much as possible, as simple as the archive site I’d built. It’s taken some work, but what you are reading now is the compromise I’ve arrived at for the moment. I’m happy with it, and although some things may change a bit as I test everything out and work through kinks, I hope that I’ve built a base that is stable enough to work with for the foreseeable future. Stay tuned.</p>
<p>___</p>

<p>So, a long post, but I thought it was worth marking the new start with a few words of context. Thanks for reading.</p>

</div>

<p class="postdate"><a href="2024/03/A-New-Start.html">Post Page</a> • Posted March 21, 2024</p>

<hr>


<h1>A Note on Past Posts</h1>


<div>

<h2>Broken Links</h2>
<p>If you’ve arrived here by following a (broken) link, you should be able to find the post you are looking for by using the menu above and scanning the available post titles. “Permalinks” will bring you to a post-page with a stable link that you can save or share. For now there are no images in posts from the original run of the blog, and the links to non-page resources will likely be broken. I don’t have any plans to go back and restore them for now. Apologies. </p>
<p>That said, for the major posts listed on the <a href="pages/tinderbox.html">Tinderbox page</a>, I do have some of the old screenshots and videos. Most are out of date at this point, but if I have time, I may restore them because they are the posts that have been of most interest to others.</p>

</div>

<p class="postdate"><a href="2024/03/A-Note-on-Past-Posts.html">Post Page</a> • Posted March 20, 2024</p>

<hr>


<h1>Back on TBX yet Again</h1>
<img src="https://ordinaryhumanlanguage.ca/images/2024-imgs/Wile E Coyote—Cooking.jpg" width="650" class="centered" alt="Wile E Coyote in a half apron stirring a pot over an open flame.">


<div>

<p>The new WordPress blog that I hope will be something I keep with my brother (and others) is up and running. I’m happy with it even if it’s close to out-of-the box in design right now. It works though. Skinning can come later.</p>
<p>With that site up and running I don’t need a second WordPress site, so I’m thinking that this blog (i.e. the temp blog on another domain) becomes a place where I can run a site for TBX, just for the fun of it and to see if I can. </p>
<p>…or maybe this (non-OHL) url yet again functions as a launch pad for something else. I’m thinking that maybe it’s the place where I sort out the post structure I need to restart (and recuperate) a working blog at OHL again. Maybe. </p>
<p>… it would just mean moving those posts into a duplicate of this file, updating the templates using the info in the current OHL archive, and then … I see it … it could work. </p>
<p>hmmmm…</p>

</div>

<p class="postdate"><a href="2024/03/Back-on-TBX-yet-Again.html">Post Page</a> • Posted March 14, 2024</p>

<hr>




<p class="copyright"><a href="https://ordinaryhumanlanguage.ca">Return to Top of Page</a> • ©2011– . Site created using <a href="https://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/index.html">Eastgate's Tinderbox</a>.</p>





</body></html>