Long time listeners will know this site has had a long-running relationship to the “lorem ipsum” dummy text. Originally, it was for practical reasons: Outside of PageMaker, it was hard to find digital-friendly copies of the filler text (a.k.a., Greeked text).

So when I saw this post from Six Colors [sic], I knew I had to watch it. The video, by Rabbit Hole, was truly informative (and quite enjoyable) so I wanted to share it here, too:

Today feels like the first day of summer in Toronto even though it’s not quite here.

The city is getting ready for FIFA, Do West Fest is on, local music champions playing in front of City Hall, while the weather is warmer and nicer than it deserves to be.

But I decided to take some time apart from all of that to join an two-day conversation about creativity in the now times.

In between the conversations, I sanded an old butcher block and listened to the wind chimes as breezes brushed against the leaves.

It’s wanted — what I needed — for this time, in between days.

There’s a reoccurring reminder in my Things app that’s been there running for years:

Review cognitive bias

All it has is a link to this image:

The reminder goes off every 14 weeks (to keep it slightly out of sync with monthly and quarterly rhythms), and is designed to exploit a range biases to work in favour of me keeping them front of mind in my own work.

This little habit has helped me be more mindful of what can trip me up while designing (and just living, too…).

Now I’ve found something to help me be more conscious of how to actively avoid them int the first place: Jon Yablonski’s Cognitive Bias Index. His web-based tool supplements the list with a brief description, along with some tips on how to avoid the bias. There’s also a useful list of tools/frameworks to counteract many of the biases.

Should become a nice supplement to my bias-busting routine.

For those who remember flipping to the back pages of the Sports section, this is a little hit of nostalgia for you to enjoy: boxscore

The email newsletter, from Jeff Blankenburg, lovingly recreates the information dense baseball scorecards (printed in 5.5 point type) that tells the story of every game played the night before. The design of this version is a reminder of how meticulous the typography of these agate pages were and how effective the layouts still are.

West End Phoenix

A day from now the first new Star Wars movie in nearly seven years is being released, and in my universe, there’s barely a ripple.

Compare to even the noise made around each of the last trilogy’s film releases, this is an odd silence. No doubt it’s happening out there, but the noise isn’t reaching me, arguably a key target market. Maybe that explains why, because they know I am already going to see it, regardless.

But my suspicion is that’s not the reason.

The silence I experience is because mass media is gone, having been replaced by a constellation of social media accounts shouting opinions to attract attention. Ironically, that amplified outrage is very reason why I don’t participate any more more (although you can find me as @saila on most of the original networks and their offshoots, and I’m using @crsaila to sit on a few others).

For the first time in my life, I am realizing, I am no longer present in the media landscape.

There’s more to this, but I can’t seem to get the words for it today, so I’ll end with this: A story I commenting on a “controversy” that in my ignorance of it, reminded me, too, of why I avoid this new media landscape and sit in silence.

Released a stripped back version of the CMS built with Claude and used to generate this little site.¹ Called “chaseframe” (as in…), the CMS generates static HTML files from ejs templates, using Node.js to parse the Markdown files in my Obsidian vault. ²

As my GutHub skills are…unpolished…I accidentally released a non-sanitized version of the CMS initially and pushed out my custom design elements and other site-specific details. I think I corrected things by making that first repository private and renaming it, and then creating a new, public “chaseframe” repository. Moments like this remind me how long it’s been since I’ve worked primarily in code editors. (You literally carbon date them to my fluency with a version control system more advanced than .bak.)

Probably won’t update the repository often, but it all depends on what I end doing on this site.

We’ll see.

Footnotes

1. See also. ↩

2. Which at some point I should write more about, because Obsidian has become my core tool in almost every digital thing I do. ↩

Wary of making these LCKY posts:

• Too introverted.
• Too extroverted.

With that contradiction stated, an update on this site, about this site: Some posts will now be pushed to my Mastodon (and maybe one day, Bluesky) account. Those post that are shared will — if anyone reacts to them — show a little bit about how people are responding to them (this takes a spark of inspiration from Matthew Haughey’s own blog updates).

Again, this site is mainly for me to share out some of my own random thoughts, so I don’t want to build into it any subtle nudges encouraging me to chase social media fame.

However, because my home on the web here truly is so innocuous, I also know a reaction to something I posted is a signal from someone I’ll learn something new from. Ignoring that would mean ignoring the very thing that attracted me to the web to begin with.

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(Somewhat ironically, this post is not being posted to the socials.)