Morning Me, May 17 2023

It is the morning and I am me so let’s get rolling on the Morning Me! A little late today – I got started find but then a friend (actually a friend’s kid, although given they’re in their 20’s “kid” isn’t really the right word) stopped by needing a little ear and advice so I broke off this and talked with them for a couple of hours. Time well spent, but not outwardly productive for my purposes here.

Work continues apace and I’m happy with it. Finally having a project management tool that does what I need it to do has been a real game-changer. We’re still in the stage where it’s eating up as much time as its saving while I learn all the things it can do and how to use it for my explicit purposes, but it’s definitely doing the job.

I think I’m about done with the “building” part of things for the most part at JHUS now. There’s still a lot of content and nodes and sections to be added, but the key thing for me the last week or so has been building a process that facilitates easy and efficient content creation and other work. There’s a million years of other work that needs doing too, but one thing at a time. Right now I feel like I have things in place such that you’ll start seeing a shift back toward content rather than infrastructure in the next week or so.

The AfterParty newsletters went out yesterday, this week’s for supporters and last week’s for everyone else. I am not anticipating a lot of output today, as I have a number of offline tasks that need attending from basic human needs to rearranging my room, and I anticipate that will absorb most of my truly useful energy for the day, plus it’ll probably have me tied up for at least four or five hours.

I’ve still got at least one and probably two more segments of the “National Debt” section to kick out; if I get any writing time in today and there are published results, it’ll probably end up being part 2 of that. Plus I’ve still got several dozen screenshots to go through from Fallout and will likely build a bunch of sub-set pages for that, but a lot of that work isn’t at all time-sensitive so I’m not rushed about it. Still, I do want to get that content built up because it’s already drawing traffic organically via search and that’s a good sign that the work’s worth doing and people are interested in it.

Whole lot of stuff bouncing around in the ol’ brain this morning, but what’s going to really happen is I’m going to finish this quick post, account for the time on it, and then disconnect and get on this room; I told my roommate that if she got home and I wasn’t on it she had my permission to climb my ass about it, and she’s due home in like three hours.

Right now I’m broadly and roughly thinking that my next “project” will be getting another daily-ish post like this happening that deals with everything else in the world that isn’t me – a quick news take, probably closer to SNL’s “Weekend Update” or the news coverage segments Jon Stewart used to often open his shows with. “Here’s a thing that happened, here’s 1-4 quick sentences deconstructing it and baking it down and telling you what it really means, probably with a smart-ass twist at the end.”

One that’s rolling, my current plan is to take that and this and add video and audio versions with each drop. Not sure how far I’ll take that, but we’ll see. I feel like there’s definitely part of my audience who fall into that space of folks who like to have that quick little morning shot and then a little dose of afternoon news and comment.

It dawns on me that I’m basically setting myself up like a modern Paul Harvey, that was his gimmick right? He had the “News & Comment” segments that would run like 3-5 minutes on your local radio station during their news break, and then “The Rest Of The Story” which would be an essay and you’re probably all familiar with it especially if you’re over forty. Funny story: he basically started his career at WKZO radio, which was also WKZO-TV when I was growing up. WKZO radio is still around, WKZO-TV is now WWMT. They’re local, the “KZO” obviously stands for “Kalamazoo.” Just a funny-quirky-synchronicity that crossed my mind as I was describing how I currently see things unfolding over the next few months. As always, Card Subject To Change.

Anyway, beyond that is where we start looking at getting back to regularly creating video and audio content, getting back to podcasting and maybe doing an hour-long livestream every week. I’m trying to stay super mindful about committing to more work than I can realistically accomplish, that’s another long-standing habit of mine (my aunts used to say my eyes are bigger than my stomach; that was about the amount of food I’d eat at the holiday table but the principle persists – it’s not “biting off more than I can chew” so much as “swallowing more than I can digest,” if that’s not a bit too grossly gastrointestinal.

I may have said this yesterday and forgotten I said it, but today I plan to follow through: this is the last day I’ll be distributing the “Morning Me” outside of my “me” platforms – the JH page at FB, my twitter, etc. – and leaving Custode, WeAntiFascists, and Progressive American out of it. The point of MM is to be a little chunk of me for my readers and whatever relevance it has to those pages will be, at best, secondary if it exists at all. That’s not to say I’m dumping those pages, just trying to be a little more mindful that everything I do doesn’t have to be seen everywhere I do things.

And it’s almost not even morning anymore so let me get the heck out of here and I’ll talk with y’all later.