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Posts which are about how I create this blog. Technology, design choices, … mostly ‘what’ and ‘how’ posts.

Thank you I. Asimov

11 Days Ago

Over in my Open + Curious project, I’ve been working intentionally to improve my writing. For Open + Curious the more recent articles all begin with a clear posit (a statement which is made on the assumption that it will prove to be true) and then go on to explain why I believe that to be true; that’s their finished form. I was generally writing each piece, editing it to find and hone a single line of thinking, and then finishing up by crafting the leading posit. Yes, I know, “Craig discovers the essay.”

I’m reading I. Asimov and this advice leapt off the page:

What I do now is think up a problem and a resolution to that problem. I then begin the story, making it up as I go along, having all the excitement of finding out what will happen to the characters and how they will get out of their scrapes, but working steadily toward the known resolution so that I don’t get lost en route.

When asked for advice by beginners, I always stress that. Know your ending, I say, or the river of your story may finally sink into the desert sands and never reach the sea.

~ Isaac Asimov

slip:4a1193.

I’ve now written thousands of posts where I’ve led with a quotation from something. I’m forever writing some observation about what I’ve quoted, and then trying to pivot to what I actually want to say. Unfortunately, this style has begun to feel constraining.

Going forward, I’m going to see what happens if I think of what I’m quoting as giving me a direction. This piece starts with my thoughts about my writing for Open + Curious, and then looking “in the direction” of Asimov’s quoted contribution, beyond that I “see” this gibberish about my writing process. Sorry, maybe that’s all too meta? It’s noisy in my head.

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…and some housekeeping

17 Days Ago

Could you contribute a testimonial for 7 for Sunday? I’m always on the lookout for some, “This is better than sliced bread! ~ Craig C.” testimonials. If you’re open to being quoted, please hit reply and send me a testimonial. (They end up getting posted on the front of my site where the main signup is for 7 for Sunday.)

And please consider sharing 7 for Sunday with others. Forwarding the email you received works, but you can also just point people to https://constantine.name/7-for-sunday/.

Thanks for reading! I appreciate your time and attention, and I don’t take it for granted. :)

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Images?

January 11

My blog has an enormous amount of photography. There are over 2,000 images posted, and while many are simply me saving typing a thousand words, many of them are gorgeous. I’ve cherry-picked the best of them into a Featured Photography page.

…actually, since I’m me, I set up some code that creates pages of images arranged into gallery-carousels, and I have only to tag the images behind-the-scenes rather than manually edit them into the page. I digress.

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New York after Paris

December 11

The truth is that New York is in the throes of creation. With infinite travail it is taking on a body adequate to its needs, — a feat Paris long ago accomplished. The operation necessarily involves disagreeable surprises, and the immediate result, viewed in its entirety, is, it must be confessed, much more grotesque than impressive. An orchestral performance in which each and every performer played a different tune could hardly be less prepossessing.

~ Alvan F. Sanborn from, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1906/10/new-york-after-paris/306234/

Items from The Atlantic are appearing more often here on the ‘ol blog. My reading goes through epochs as I discover things that interest me and begin following them via RSS.

However, I landed on this article after a few clicks from another place, and that’s odd. Generally, the things I read do not contain links to other interesting-to-me things. That sounds backwards, perhaps? You see, if I find a place that has something interesting, I follow it in some form or another. So usually, any interesting links I find, point to things I already have seen—or if they’re very fresh, I’m already about to stumble upon shortly. I’m not sure that itself is interesting to report, but there it is.

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It’s even better than that

December 5

I’ve a few readers who really enjoy the Marcus Aurelius quotes in my collection. A few initial Aurelius quotations I collected through my general reading online, before I eventually read Meditations (English translations thereof, to be fair) and pulled a bunch more quotes myself.

I’ve just spent a few hours cleaning up my Aurelius quotes. Mostly this was adding the section number from Meditations to my blog posts. It’s now easy to find the original material. Note that Wikisource has several versions of Meditations available online. But at the risk of sounding snobbish, I really like Gregory Hays’s translation which will go out of copyright (maybe) in 2102. I digress.

During my cleanup, I realized that one of my quotes, “Death smiles at us all. All a man can do is smile back.” is not something Aurelius wrote. It’s something the character Marcus Aurelius said in the Movie Gladiator. But it really sounds like him; It’s a great line of dialog for a movie.

It turns out that there are two spots in Meditations which echo the often misattributed quote. In the middle of section 2.17 he writes, “[…] it accepts death in a cheerful spirit, as nothing but the dissolution of the elements from which each living thing is composed.” which is the sentiment without the cinema flourish. It also doesn’t make perfect sense when you pull it out from its context.

Eventually, you reach the final line of section 12.36 and find, “So make your exit with grace — the same grace shown to you.” That’s literally the final line he wrote as a meditation to himself. Can you imagine that being the last line you wrote to yourself? And thus my title.

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Exploring

November 21

It’s been six years since I started recording conversations for Movers Mindset. I’ve finally (after talking about it for years) gotten around to creating a Movers Mindset daily email of bite-sized things from all the 150+ podcast episodes. I have an enormous pile of episode summaries, quotes from the guests, their answers to the 3-word-questions, a few articles, choice bits from transcripts…

There’s a signup form over on Movers Mindset‘s web site.

Fun, inspiring, and educational, the daily email makes it easy to explore Movers Mindset. It also includes a notification about new episodes, which is handy if you don’t want to subscribe, but still want to know who’s on the show so you can grab just the episodes that interest you.

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Should I keep blogging?

September 23

This is not a passive-aggressive maneuver to get you to scroll to the bottom, read the footer and consider supporting my work. (It would mean a lot though if you did.)

This is a serious question which I ask myself at a frequency approaching every minute. All the benefits are not directly measurable.

Exposure — In order to ensure I have material to write posts, I have various processes and systems that force me to skim an insane amount of stuff pretty much every day. If you imagine skimming my weekly email in a second or two, that’s 7 items. I skim about 300 to 500 items every day. A small number each day catch my attention enough that I toss them on my read-later queue. There are 764 things on that queue at this instant. It takes me significant time to read them, but often just a few seconds to realize, “yeah this is going to be a blog post” (and then I go on reading to the end and then I write the post.) If I stopped blogging, would I still do all that work to be exposed to ideas?

Learning — Writing blog posts creates a third “imprint” in my mind. First a glance, then a read, and then thinking about it. Even if I sometimes abort the blog post mid-writing, it’s still three different repetitions. And I have software that feeds me my own blog posts (“what did I post 10 years ago, today?” etc.) so I am constantly re-reading everything on this site; that’s more repetitions as things drift into history.

Integration — If I write a blog post about it, I generally try to figure out its relationship to everything else. Adding blog tags is the most obvious bit of integration. But figuring out what to pull quote involves deciding what is salient to me. And deciding which part(s) I want to focus on, magnify, or disagree with requires further integration.

Writing — Thoughts swirl in my mind. Characters appear on my screen. There are several skills one can work on between those two sentences.

All of that goes into feeding my personal growth and priming my curiosity. Since good conversation is powered by genuine curiosity, all that stuff also enables my person mission.

Should I keep blogging? It doesn’t feel like stopping is realistically an option.

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1,000 quotes

September 4

Wow. Here’s the 1,000th quote added to my collection:

The world is like a ride at an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it, you think that it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly coloured, and it’s very loud and it’s fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time, and they begin to question – is this real, or is this just a ride? And other people have remembered, and they come back to us. They say ‘Hey! Don’t worry, don’t be afraid, ever, because, this is just a ride.’ And we… kill those people.

~ Bill Hicks

slip:4a1000.

I don’t “use” the numbers in simple 1, 2, 3, … order. Often I find several quotes from one person at the same time. I don’t want 20 quotes in a row from Leo Tolstoy in the daily quotes podcast. I space them out and end up with a smattering of numbers used out of order. So I keep a little list:

Each time I find a quote, I look to find the next number. When I used 999 for a proverb I thought, “I wonder what quote will be next?” And promptly forgot all about the milestone.

Today I bounced on my take-me-to-a-random-post link (see About this site) and landed on a very old post from 2013. It was a very large block of text, much longer than what I usually quote. I trimmed it down to what’s show above and copied it into my collection. I looked up the number and …surprise! 1,000.

In case you’ve not noticed the new bit of copy in the footer: You can get a daily quote by email from my Little Box of Quotes.

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Thoughts on Conversation

August 7

A few weeks ago I finally got around to starting a dedicated newsletter for my thoughts on conversation over on called Open + Curious. This new, weekly newsletter is free to subscribers through Substack—you can read it on the web or via email.

Over on Substack I’m publishing more polished work. I’m sharing what I’ve learned and hopefully engaging in discussion.

The blog here at constantine.name remains the same; same posts, same quotes, same same. Here on the blog things are messy as I’m working with garage door up. There’s a lot of discovery and reflection happening here. If you’ve not been to the actual blog web site in a while, you may want to swing by my Projects Page to see what I’m up to.

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Weekly email redesign

May 1, 2022

I’d like to do a bit of meta-discussion to start this week’s email. (If you’re reading this on the web site, these posts are assembled into a weekly email. This post sits atop this week’s assemblage.)

I reworked the stuff at the top to ensure that each email has a little more “what the heck is this?” context. I’ve moved the “hey could’ya?” contribute stuff down to the very bottom, (and added a non-subscription, any amount you like option.) I’m imagining that keeps it from being in the way, but is still noticeable—if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you’re probably finding at least some value in the email.

I’d be happy to hear any thoughts you have about these changes: Is the please-support-my-work stuff too out-of-sight now? Does the stuff at the top make sense? After reading these emails, is there anything you’ve wanted to do—anything at all—that you didn’t know how to do?

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Thhhhpbt

April 16, 2022

Burnout research shows that cynicism is an easy way out when we don’t have the mental resources to cope. It’s no surprise that cynicism is a core attribute of the burnout equation: during a time of ongoing stress it’s much easier to be pessimistic than it is to mobilize and make a difference.

~ Chris Bailey from, https://alifeofproductivity.com/remember-burnout-and-cynicism-go-hand-in-hand/

That short blog post is about news-from-the-Internet and the pandemic, but it’s perfectly applicable to any source of chronic stress. For me, the chronic stress is entirely self-inflicted and the cautions remain the same.

I’ve gotten relief from myself over the years through journaling and blogging. Journalling gives me some perspective. (But it is difficult to do it well, since it can degenerate into subjectivity, navel gazing, or whining.) Blogging gives me the chance to regularly work with the garage door up; showing my work by exposing my thinking. Even if mostly no one calls me on anything, knowing that people are looking calls me to a higher quality of thinking.

Yesterday and today I’ve been thinking about taking another look at cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). A couple years ago I made a pass at understanding it—specifically wondering if one could “do it” to oneself. (Yes.) I’ve dusted off a small volume for a re-read to see what I can tune in my existing self-care routines, and hopefully find some new ones to settle into for a while.

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Commentary: On

January 23, 2022

When I started adding quotes to this blog I put a lot of thought into how they were presented. In particular, I decided not to unpack my thoughts about the quote. And more recently I’ve pointed that out, saying that I wanted you to have the chance to stumble over the quote without my muddying your first impresions.

In hindsight, that doesn’t make any sense. Sometimes the quotes appear right adjacent to something else I’ve written, or next to other quotes… and at the very least you’re finding it in the context of my blog (or email.) Worse, I often find I have something I’d like to say about the quote, and I’ve simply let that stuff pass unwritten.

So there are about 700 quotes published here already. I’m going to republish them adding…

gotcha! No, I’m not. I just wanted to point out that you’re going to start seeing quotes paired with my reflections… and boy howdy that kinda looks like the rest of the stuff I do here already, like quote something someone wrote . . . so yeah Craig, what really is/was the difference.

Meanwhile, we’re going back to 7 “posts” within each weekly email. If you’ve been here a while (and if not– Hey, welcome new friend!) you know I’ve been trying to work through the “frontlog” of scheduled quotes. I’ve gotten ahead… or should I say, less ahead? …or closer to being behind?? Anyway, the scheduled queue is down to about 90 days into the future. So back to a post a day. (Because, after all, you can also just subscribe to the RSS feed— all Mailchimp does is check that feed, once a week, and email it to you. ;)

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2022’s touch-phrase shall be…

January 2, 2022

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: I hope these emails aren’t piling up in your inbox. I know of at least one reader who really enjoys them. They enjoy them so much, they keep saving them for a better time to read them, and they now have a pile. That’s not what I meant to do to you; I’m so sorry!

Back on 3/3/2021, I changed this blog from going out as a daily email, to be a weekly email. One of the reasons was that I didn’t want my email piling up in your inbox. I don’t mean “waaaaaaaaa, you’re not reading!” I mean that I don’t want to be making your life worse. It doesn’t actually affect me whether you read in a timely fashion, read later, or not at all. But puh-LEASE think about this:

If you enjoy these emails so much, don’t you deserve to have a specific time that you can look forward to? Your favorite reading nook, a cup of tea (or rum or whatever)… you know: Make a little ritual out of it. If that ritual turns out to make your life better, then you can always remove my silly missives and slot in something actually worth reading. I digress.

Choose wisely.

Those of you who are regular readers will be aware that I’ve been thinkering on the touch-phrase for 2022. Coming out of the fourth turn, it looked briefly as if, Urgency?! might pull ahead in the final stretch to win by a, “U”. But it wasn’t to be; Choose Wisely was hard at it the whole way down the back stretch and simply had too demanding a lead for Urgency?! to overcome. And why did this turn into a horse race metaphor? They do sound like the name of race horses though. Choose Wisely takes up the mantel from a long lineage of winners: “No.” “Simplify” “Hell Yes! or no.” and “Festina Lente” (which is not an assessment of pasta’s done-ness) to name a few.

Hopefully—lest my life have no meaning—I’ve made you laugh, or think twice, in the past year. Seriously though, please consider hitting one of those supporter links at the tippy top. Every dollar really does matter and move me towards making a living doing things I enjoy.

In other news, I’ve hit the “Drop cap” button on that paragraph back there a ways. Why? No reason. Just always wanted to use it, just to see what it looks like in the emails.

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Water pump

December 11, 2021

Have you ever worked a hand-operated water pump? I mean the outdoor, permanently installed ones for pulling up drinking water. There’s a lot of varability to them, but generally there’s a bit of pumping before there’s any fruit to the labor. In my mind, there’s also a particular sound that goes with the initial machinations.

Sometimes, when I want to create a blog post from nothing, I hear that sound. You start on that pump. Then you’d hear the sound change, you’d feel the water make the action of the pump more leaden as the amount of effort changed.

But still, no water yet. You’d lean into it a bit more. Some sounds of water now. A gurgling rising in pitch which you instinctively know means the space for air is dwindling rapidly. And at a hard to predict moment . . .

You get a blog post about water pumps when you were expecting drinking water.

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Random please

December 8, 2021

I’m a process process process person. The second time I have to do something, I’m trying to figure out how to either never have to do that again, or how to automate it. (And failing those two, it goes into my admin day.) But being process oriented also means I like to build tools to enable doing things that weren’t previously possible.

Recently, I installed a little bit of code on my site that will bounce one to a random post. This means I can now have a link, which takes me to a random quote. I collect all the quotes because I want to read them. A big portion of the enjoyment comes from their discovery. So any time I can mange to re-discover a quote, by stumbling over it some how, that’s a bonus. So now, each morning, I bounce myself to a re-discovery…

https://constantine.name/?redirect_to=random&tag=quotes

Which is great to bookmark— Except, if you click that, you land on a quote; and making a bookmark is then of that specific quote. Instead you have to manually create a new bookmark—so that’s your homework for today, go figure out how to do that in your fave web browser. In that new bookmark, you can copy-and-paste that URL as the address for the bookmark. Then, any time you go to that bookmark, my web site will bounce you to a random quote.

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Lunacy?

November 3, 2021

But there’s a message all of our readers should appreciate: Blog posts are not enough to generate the deep fluency you need to truly understand or get better at something. We offer a starting point, not an end point.

~ Shane Parrish from, https://fs.blog/2017/02/on-shallowness/

First off, I totally read that as, “to generate the deep lunacy …” which is probably closer to the truth than I’d like to admit for my own blog if one tries to just read it. Second, this is so meta. I’m writing a blog post about a blog post that is referring to the other posts on that same blog.

I’ve said this sort of thing before, but it bears repeating: On this blog, I’m showing my process of reflection. I would get the exact same benefit if I did all this writing, and pressed delete instead of publish. (With the notable exception that I do also use my blog as an archive to re-find things.) But I make no claim that simply reading this blog will do anything for you. “Look! Here are my footprints, stumbles, side tracks and snow angels in the woods.” Maybe you can see some art, or some fun, or whatever. But the whole point of having it out there for you to read is to encourage you to do your own reflection.

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Little Box of Quotes

October 12, 2021

Daily email

If you simply love quotes, you can get a daily, random quote by email from my Little Box of Quotes.

All the quotes

Craig Constantine

You can jump to a random quote. That link targets a new window in case you want to bang on it a few times. ;)

All the quotes are here on my web site, tagged Quotes. If you want to page through them. (But following the tags on a particular quote might be more interesting?)

Finally, there is a small collection of posts about the quotes and how I collect them, tagged Little Box of Quotes.

Podcast

The quotes are also published as bite-sized podcasts. Search for Little Box of Quotes wherever you normally listen. You can also play them in your web browser directly from Simplecast.

Patterns where there are none

September 27, 2021

Last week, one of your fellow readers hit reply—replies come directly to my personal email box—and shared some thoughts about connections and interesting juxtapositions in the week’s email. After I pointed out that the patterns they commented on, were simply a byproduct of how I write and how the email is assembled automatically, they rightly observed, “Lol, humans finding patterns where they don’t exist. A timeless classic.” I completely agree, and our power of pattern-finding is an awesome tool.

I was reading, and found a new-to-me Einstein quote. (You’ll find it soon, some time in February.) When I capture a quote from someone already in my collection, I have to check; There are ~800 quotes these days and sometimes I “find” one I’ve forgotten. (Surprisingly though, I can usually tell on sight if it’s in the collection already.) This led me to a search for “einstein” here on the blog. (There’s also a tag for Albert Einstein, but the search nets more posts including those I failed to tag.) I found a quote already on the blog—but not the new one that prompted it all—that was so old, it wasn’t in my collection. I fixed that, leading to a very old blog post, with a very high slipbox address, 4a784: Part of a Whole. And also 4a789: Do You Have a Question? Those were posted in 2013.

They’re about curiosity and broadening our sphere of compassion. Which sounds a lot like my just-barely-one-year-old vision and mission.

My vision is a world where everyone can flourish. My mission is creating better conversations that spread understanding and compasion.

So, as a human here finding connections, that’s a breadcrumb from 8 years ago hinting at the path I took to today. Awesome.

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House keeping

September 17, 2021

A shout-out to Alice who joins us this week. Welcome! :)

The front of my blog includes a random selection of testimonial quotes from readers of this email. It would be helpful if you’d hit reply and write something I could add to those testimonials.

Also, I’ve made a small addition to also show the tags for each of these items. After 10 years and 3,000+ posts, all my tagging along the way has proved well worth the time. If you’re curious, I have two pages for tags; One is an insane “all the tags” page, (there are 1,326 unique tags on my blog,) and the other is a more useful page of “tags with 10+ posts.The latter runs to about 100 tags and is an insightful glimpse into the sorts of things which interest me.

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