TheIdOfAlan

And when you get damned in the popular opinion, It's just another damn of the damns you're not giving

The most important thing about a band isn't its music, but its name, right? right? 😆

I haven't gotten over the part of my history that pressures me to apologize for putting out my work in spaces I don't own. I'm doing a lot of it here. It feels like I'm taking up a lot of space because, you know, I am. I think it's helpful right now. Adding content grist to the mill that produces community because I like the vibe here and want to see this place grow.

I'm pretty sure if it gets old, y'all will tell me to shut the fuck up. Just want to say there will be no hard feeling.

Anyway, here's a self-portrait I took in college during the days of film 😁

I'm making my own Markdown/MDX replacement. Just added an "about" attribute to my blockquotes today. Pretty happy with the way things are shaping up.

the intro to this one always give me a little lift

I'm not sure how to make it happen. It would be hard to monetize and goes against siloed content, but wow would the world be a better place if we controlled out data

Hey there - I'm Alan and this is my intro

. First, I'm on Mastodon and we should totally follow each other there https://hachyderm.io/deck/@TheIdOfAlan

. This is gonna be long because, like Pascal said, I don't have time to write something shorter

. Please take everything I say with the picture of a person who's pretty energetic and genuinely excited about whatever it is they are saying. (I'm very rarely severe in my tone)

. Bullet points are my friend. It takes me a very long time to edit full on prose If I didn't do bullet points I'd rarely get anything out. So, let's run with that here

. The ability to randomize these points would be awesome. Ordering things make them feel like the order matters and it doesn't really here. Maybe skim around and read them randomly to simulate the experience?

. Photography used to be my thing, but I haven't taken a shot in a long time. Still love the idea of it and will probably get back to it at some point

. One day I'm going to get back to my Million Portrait Project (http://millionportraitproject.com/ - sorry for the "http without an s" link, but that site is old. Fixing that is on the list)

. Music is huge to me. Headphones are on most of the time. (I can totally recommend open-back ones if you haven't tried them before, I got a very enjoyable pair of phillips for like $100)

. Doing projects and new stuff gives me the happy brain juice

. "Tuneify" is my current project. It's an attempt to make a better robot DJ. A notoriously hard problem. I don't expect to do anything surprising with it. I just want to see what happens if I implement the ideas in my head and learn more about how all that stuff works

. Learning is my jam, btw

. Tuneify will be here: https://www.alanwsmith.com/tuneify/ - but it's far from even being a workable prototype. (It just loads your top songs into an IndexedDB when you log in. Unless I've broken it between the time I posted this and the time you see it which is likely given the dev process)

. Instead of listing about a bunch of projects I should just link to my links page https://links.alanwsmith.com which has a several of them

. Though, if you like The Shining, I'm really proud of: https://jacktorrance.blog

. On yeah, my main site is: https://www.alanwsmith.com - there's like 1,800 completely unorganized posts on there. Still working on how I want to deal with that

. Part of dealing with it is that I wrote my own file format: https://www.alanwsmith.com/neopolitan/ and a static site generator to go with it. I'm tired of jumping frameworks, so my goal is to use this for the next 20 years

. Feels like I should mention I have bipolar 1, but I don't really think about that very often. (I'm super lucky that my meds let me be functional)

. For 22 years, I worked at the PGA TOUR. I got burned out in general and after recovering from two years of major bipolar depression. Currently no gig. Still trying to figure out how I'm going to fit into the world

Saw the post on Mastodon that linked over here and decided to give it a shot. I just wrote up this piece which feels like maybe it would fit.