Heya folks just checking in for a second because it’s taking a leeeetle longer to get done what I want to before I start back up on regular video content, although I’m seriously hoping to have something new out for you before the end of the day today.
Glad I’m hitting the spot I am right now; this computer is about done for I’m afraid. It’s just not up to running modern versions of stuff like AfterEffects when you’re really pushing it. Got bluescreened last night, which…might be the second or time that’s ever happened on this computer? But generally things are getting super-duper slow as software continues evolving to take advantage of physical architecture that just plain didn’t exist when this computer was born. I think I’m going to have to prioritize funding for that over getting business paperwork in order for now, or there won’t be a business to file any paperwork on. The good news is, I know how to buy a computer 🙂 This one’s lasted a decade, which is pretty doggone decent for a computer.
That’s part of what’s taking so long, though, I’m spending a whoooole lot of time looking at a little circle cursor while I wait for some background thing to finish happening so the screen will refresh after I changed a text title, or having to restart the program every time I make a change because it won’t display the preview properly anymore due to sucking down 12 or 13G of the 16G available memory on this box…typical symptomology of a computer aging out of its useful production life and getting ready to retire into service as a low-load file server behind a new box, if you’re in IT.
Then you end up having to do more pre-rendering to compensate where on a modern box I could just link the live AFX files in Premiere and bounce back and forth between them easily for editing. Right now I’m doing it more old-school, rendering AFX files into videos then compiling those videos into an entire working presentation, which radically reduces production time in the current situation, but there’s also a big hit at the top in terms of building templates and reusables, which is what I’ve been doing the last couple of days for this specific thing that’s going to fulfill the intent of the “Morning Meeting” newsletter in that it will be:
mostly daily
short-ish (max 5 minutes +/- credits)
accompanied by video & podcast
There’s a ton of other information to talk about related to all this but it’s not quite here and now yet. Today? Hopefully, but tomorrow if not unless something seriously blows up.
So yeah. But don’t let me get you thinking I’m all down about it – I’m doing what I can with what I’ve got, just like I always have, and pretty quick here we’re gonna talk about how to radically improve what I’ve got, so I can radically improve what I’m doing 🙂
As always thanks for your patience and support. I know it looks chaotic, but things are going well. Just not as quickly as I would like…which won’t be helped if I stop every six hours and talk about what I’m doing instead of just doing it.
Hey there kids, after a bit of a mental health break I’m back and at it.
Me Stuff
I’ve changed the title of this newsletter to reflect the shift in focus away from me and more toward news and comment. Necessary URLs will be set up with redirects so old links continue working.
You can skip to the next header if you don’t care about internet drama.
I’m not going to go on about this too much because it just feeds the beast, but this is once again a pattern that I’ve been observing for a long time.
Close friends with whom I’ve discussed it over the years know that I’ve suspected the source for well over a decade, but they finally slipped and outed themselves beyond any reasonable doubt when trying to recruit yet another troll to do their dirty work last week.
This person’s behavior is rooted in whisper campaigns and back-room antics, ingratiating themselves to the clickbait crowd or not realizing they outed themselves many, many times over the years.
It includes calling my new roommate – within literal hours of my changing my address on my voter registration and domains, who I’ve mentioned previously has a terminal stage four cancer diagnosis so that’s totally on-brand for le stalker, they did the same to my parents’ last years – to harass them with similar lies, which was pointless.
It’s gross, sick, and obsessive. The person responsible has been involuntarily committed to psychiatric confinement in the past, and has tried repeatedly to con me into committing myself…often in response to some emotional distress I’m experiencing that they actually inflicted.
Going into the ugly details of that person is more attention than they deserve. Unfortunately I have a triggerable mental illness and they know it and they know my triggers because they’ve been trying to cuddle up to me for a quarter-century so it has to be spoken about a little.
The evidence is sufficient for me, but not likely to be enough to take to court and get a restraining order that wouldn’t do any good anyway.
Eventually they’ll crash and burn and end up back in the nice white room with the soft walls, the only reason they’re not there now is they’re predatory as hell and keep attaching themselves to insecure women with lots of money (this isn’t speculation; more than one of his partners has asked me to get him to stop in the past, as though that’s within my power). Their endgame for me is to leave me with nowhere else to turn so they can play hero, like a fire-fighter who sets the fires themselves so they can get the praise for putting them out.
The bottom line is this person has been trying to push me over the edge of suicide for about twenty-five years because they resent me talking them out of their own (and leaving them no honorable way to rationalize it), and every time it doesn’t work they escalate with a new low. In the end there’s no punishment worse for that person than having to wake up every day being who they are and knowing they’re too weak of character to ever be anything else.
So now, I’m still quite down and not feeling greatly motivated but I’m forcing myself to get back on the ol’ horse and keep riding now because if I let this keep me idle much longer it’s only going to further damage my work and reputation. Enough of the personal drama, let’s get on with it.
The (Actual, Very Late) Morning Message
Two stories I want to look at quickly today.
The first is the impeachment of Attorney General Ken Paxton in Texas, which is doing a great job of getting the “capitalist, let’s keep up appearances” fascists arguing with the “we’ve won so let’s stop pretending this is about anything but gaining power” fascists.
To be clear, Paxton’s behavior being illegal and unethical isn’t what’s driving this. What’s driving it is the risk that allowing him to get away with it anymore will tend to tip off the marks and people will start looking more closely at how the GOP does business. As a sidebar it helps get lefties cheerleading part of the GOP and attempts to create a narrative that the whole party isn’t completely off the rails into full blown fascism, which of course is not true.
Keep your eye on this situation and watch for one GOP faction to try leveraging it as a redemption tour, “see, we’re not all bad!” They are.
The other story is the launching and subsequent detection of a massive new fascist disinformation/propaganda campaign designed to troll people susceptible to such things into outing themselves and following fascist agitprop pages.
Particularly insidious about this run is that the majority of it is couched in appeals to nostalgia and military worship in the US, including active duty personnel and their families. Pages with names like like “I Love US Military” interspersed with “cute animals” and “hey old people who aren’t real good with computer literacy, don’t you long for the good old days?” bait to reel people in, then they start seeding fascist messaging to see who drops, knowing what whoever’s left is a prime target for their work. Probably the most important story I’ve ever written, and probably going to be ignored until some lone-wolf stochastic terror attack leads back to one of them.
Sorry it’s a little short and boring today, but there it is. We’ll see you in the actual morning tomorrow, hopefully!
Hello Patrons and supporters and welcome to another edition of the JH AfterParty, exclusively available to you for one week before being released to the general public!
Finally started seeing some balance to the unremitting upswing I’ve been on for the last couple of months. Last Thursday was pretty much a no-go for the day, just sat down and everything I picked up to work on my brain just went “mbleh” and refused to chug. So I gave it the day off and Friday was better, weekend okay, yesterday afternoon kinda meh, but still nothing like the major crashes I’ve experienced in less stable, more chaotic living situations in the last few years. Obviously that’s not to say that my depression is the fault of my living situation, but rather that those situations made it more difficult for me to manage. I’m not feeling any impending sense of a giant crash or anything, just learning to manage myself better generally so it’s not always full throttle or dead stop. That’s part of the reason I’m opening up new sections of the site, too – helps me feel less guilty for doing anything that doesn’t potentially generate income if I can use it to generate a little income.
Got some stuff done over the weekend as well – the Substack newsletter of course, and a new Medium article about media disinformation, plus other bits of content and the new “Morning Me” newsletter. I’ve started that off being just a “hey it’s morning time here’s me” thing, but I’m now starting to morph it into more of a “here’s a news item or two and a few of my thoughts about it to get your day rolling with your brain engaged” groove, as I’m getting the routine tightened down and everything in place to make it a true production process much as I’ve done with this newsletter over the last four weeks.
I know it’s tedious to watch sometimes, but hopefully at least a few people are actually interested in how I do all this and my thoughts in process. All of this back-end and infrastructure and template work is designed to make production smooth and efficient, so I don’t find myself suddenly overwhelmed trying to produce six newsletters, five video episodes, five podcast episodes, plus actual content every week.
Oh, yeah. As of yesterday I’ve started doing the “Morning Me” as a video and podcast series in addition to the “print” version. That’ll be an ongoing thing. I’m considering doing the same with this but haven’t had time to look properly in to doing it with the supporter preview functionality protected – again, an issue that seems pretty petty and meaningless in this context but will be far easier to solve now than later down the road when it’s standing in the way of “real” content going out. But as of yesterday you can get your “Morning Me” as a video cast on my YouTube channel and as an audio podcast through any of the links on my site – it’ll still show up as “In My Room” in some players, for now – I will have to create an entire new infrastructure to properly handle podcasting again but this’ll get it out of the gate for now. There’s also be a download link on each newsletter so you can just snag the MP3 and listen to it however you want.
I laughed way too hard at this:
saw this poor guys truck at the store with an unsolved math problem on it
It’s an irrational function because it still runs on fossil fuels.
That project management software (ProjeQtOr) that I mentioned last week has been working out really well, easily the best free solution I’ve ever found in terms of working the way I work and helping me stay organized and on task, plus I’m losing fewer ideas because when I have one I can just open a ticket and then it’s there and eventually I’ll remember it and get back to it. That’s part of what’s empowering these multi-part series I’m doing like the gaming history and national debt pieces – I can plan them better and it gives me time to think of things like NOT writing them all as a single enormous article because hardly anyone reads those anymore. Haven’t had time to look into a “public” facing reporting tool for supporters yet, but it’s on the agenda.
Contributions are unfortunately way down, but that’s to be expected with no multimedia work going out. I’ve got a couple of pitch videos sketched out and some other stuff that’ll help that. Just reminds me how grateful I am to those of you who have been and/or are pitching in on the support; even though I’m in a much better place, I’m still way behind where I need to be to get this whole thing set up properly – right now I’m not even keeping up with my few basic bills, to say nothing of trying to help out the friend who’s putting me up and adding a ton of empowerment to all of this by doing so, and there’s a laundry list of expenses from gear to food to business licensing and taxes that needs handled.
The way that happens is with your support and that of other folks like you who are committed to doing what you can to help nudge the battleship Humanity a quarter-degree or so in a more sane and sustainable direction. Please do keep your eyes peeled for an upcoming short video that will be framed specifically as a tool for those of you who have been supportive to reach out with and help add to that so we can get out of “hanging on” mode and get on with climbing upward, I should have that by the end of the week. We’ve been on a slow build. My end has picked up considerably in the last month and will continue to do so. Now it’s just a question of getting it out there so people can see it.
And as I’m writing this I’m having dozens of notions of things I need to do fly through my head, so let me wrap it up and get back to work!
How about a wall of text with no headings this week?
Hey everyone and welcome to another JH AfterParty, I am of course your sartorially exquisite and finely honed host John Henry, let’s take a look at what’s up inside my world this week!
The ongoing high-octane energy period continues. I have to admit this is kind of shaky ground for me, because this definitely isn’t an artifact of my mental illness (which it often is when I’m “up” like this – it’s called “manic depression” for a reason). I’ve been steady and strong for weeks now, and there’s no end in sight. My mind is sharper, my productivity is through the roof, and I’m literally hitting personal, internal goals that I’ve been picking at for twenty years or more.
The implementation of ProjeQtOr project management software on a subdomain of JHUS is a great example of this. I’ve literally been playing with project management software trying to find something that would work for me and the way I do things AND not cost an arm and a leg or require an MCS for thirty years.
Like Microsoft Project is pretty perfect – would be a better solution than this in fact – but it costs hundreds of dollars a year to maintain and unlike Adobe Creative Cloud (which also costs hundreds of dollars a year to maintain) it doesn’t produce an easily tangible result for the “customer,” which in my case is you in spite of my long-standing loathing for the idea that I am a “product” or the things I do are “commodities” or “services” to be “consumed.”
Regardless of my own self-serving philosophizing, in the end people are giving me money because I do certain things, and that amounts to a customer service relationship. This isn’t a new idea to me, it’s just one I’ve always been loathe to speak out loud because it feels like I’m turning myself into a new gadget from Ron Popeil. I don’t like thinking and talking in corporate-speak and MBA terminology. I know the language, in fact I’m pretty fluent in it beyond not keeping up with the lastest stupid buzzwords for someone’s half-assed attempt at actually doing the things some of us have been doing and telling everyone else you should be for centuries.
Watch the whole progression of the “Six Sigma” thing for an example. It doesn’t really mean anything at all other than “I’ve got a decent enough handle on how to do things that I can pass a little test and get a certificate that will make all the HR drones think I’m smart.” It’s just a big fancy bunch of marketable nonsense that comes down to “maximize production efficiency whenever possible.”
Cultivate the ability – and make it a habit! – to avoid rushing, to the greatest extent you possibly can. When you’re rushing, you’re not thinking.
– jh
Much like “common core math,” in the end it represents an attempt by someone who doesn’t “get it” to communicate “it” to other people who “don’t get it,” while entirely locking out everyone who does “get it” from the conversation because the person who appears to “get it” gets paid so we’re back to the manifest individual tumors of the cancers of competition and capitalism.
Common core math is an attempt to teach neurotypical people how geniuses math, predicated on the notion that if you do it like a genius, you’ll get genius results. It, and nearly every such endeavor, overlooks the part about you have to be a genius to understand how it works, and most of us aren’t geniuses.
Six Sigma and pretty much every other trendy corporate buzzword is the same thing; it’s how someone figured out a way to package a good idea so people who are consistently averse to good ideas will accept it. Problem is in order to do that, half the time you have to compromise the idea until it’s no longer good.
This circles back to my problem with project management and self management and software. I’ve seen it in plenty of other places, too, it’s not just me – you can get so caught up in the metastructure of what you’re doing that you forget to actually do the thing you set out to do.
For instance about twenty-five years ago when I first started building websites, I started putting together a little section of my Geocities page for gaming…and then ended up in the weeds creating all the structure for the content until I got bored with it and never created the content. Now here I am a quarter-century later finally following through on it.
I’m not talking about things that just don’t pan out like the Musk For A Minute project – that was a good solid swing and an unfortunate miss and that happens in life, it’s not even a “failure,” just didn’t go where I hoped it would. I’m talking about things where you start off thinking you’re going to arrange your music collection and end up building a database where you can keep notes, track lists, ID3 or other metainfo, and write an article for every single one of your 60K+ MP3s…and then when the database is done you do about twelve entries and find something else that attracts your attention and your energy and suddenly a good idea is abandoned and three years later you go “ohshit, I was gonna….rawr.”
Meanwhile you’ve forgotten all about actually organizing your music collection.
That is the kind of bad habit I’m breaking in myself right now, and for some reason it’s important to me to express how it really is the same problem as the compromise problem above (and the other one below). You get so wrapped up in trying to find ways to make the truth palatable to people who are violently opposed to hearing it (or in some extreme cases straight out incapable of processing it), you forget that the job is “tell the truth,” not “make it comfortable,” and pretty soon you’re not telling the truth at all anymore. You get so wrapped up in trying to find ways to make the process more efficient that you forget it has to actually be a working process and at some point you need to engage in it.
See e.g. the entire “critical race theory” argument, whereby cowardly bigots insist that because the truth of how horrible white people in the US have been to people of color historically is not comfortable to white people, that truth should not be spoken at all.
All three of those examples of broken thinking are rooted around the same fundamental (and dysfunctional) thought pattern, and you can probably tell by my rambling I’m having a little trouble nailing down precise verbiage for it. I know it’s not just a me thing, because there are those examples above. I just can’t find a common, readily understood phrase to describe it that does the concept proper service. I think the closest I ever came was something I said once that got memed and I’ve long since lost track of: People will happily pay $10 for a sideshow just to prove they didn’t get taken in by the $5 circus.
Point is I’m in a really amazing place in my life right now, things are happening like crazy and moving ahead in big ways. All that stuff I was “gonna” over the years, I’m finally doing, and it feels really wonderful. (Okay, not all…but a lot more than I ever have at once before.)
I wouldn’t be here without all of your help, and I wouldn’t be able to contemplate moving forward without knowing you all are here, and I appreciate you far more individually and constantly than you probably think…especially because interpersonal communication and followups like sending “thank you” notes when someone chucks me fifty bucks on PayPal tend to be first and foremost among those things that get lost in the dust when I’ve got other stuff happening.
That’s part of the whole reason I’m doing this newsletter; to find SOME way to show folks that I’m thinking of you and that I never forget “who I’m working for,” without stepping over a big bright line I have where I think it’s pretty gross to lock information that everybody really needs behind a paywall so only people who can afford it, get it. That’s kind of one of the big problems I’m trying to solve, right – the whole inequity of access to critical needs, systems, and information. I can hardly be a credible agent of change in that regard if I refuse to risk letting go of the tactic myself because I’m afraid I won’t be able to eat or pay rent. Someone’s got to take that risk, and I happen to be pretty well geared to minimize the impact of it in a lot of ways that most people aren’t, so here I am.
Anyway…I was going to say “I digress” but this entire newsletter is supposed to be a digression of sorts so I won’t. I will say that I’ve got a lot of great new content up at the site, much more coming, some really fantastic things happening in terms of my mental health and overall state of being, and I’m now in my groove and doing what I came here to do.
And I’m all outta bubblegum 😉
See y’all next week, please don’t forget those engagements! Some of y’all have been hearing me talk about “when I get to this point, it’s gonna be time to get serious about all of this for folks in the liking and sharing and commenting and subscribing and telling others department” for a decade or more.
Well, now I’m at this point. It’s time. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
Talk soon and don’t forget to subscribe to the Substack! (There’s a form in the sidebar if you’re reading this at JohnHenry.US. It’s below the content on vertical screens.) That’s the one way you know for sure you’re aware of everything I publish and create, and that’s the best way to know what you like and prefer to share and engage with 🙂
OH! I almost forgot I’m doing an irregular-but-daily-ish new thing called “The Morning Me,” you should check that out (I’ll get a node page up for it soon) and also know ahead of time that there’s probably going to be something similar about the rest of the world coming along Real Soon Nowâ„¢. And yes, rich media is on the horizon.
Good morning, me and good morning you, I am of course your painfully photogenic host John Henry and this is the “Morning Me!”
A few new things going on today. First, when I’m finished writing this I’m going to record it as video and audio and it will be published on my multimedia channels and social media in multiple formats, including showing up in audio as a new edition of my old “In My Room” podcast (for now).
For right now I’m doing this as no-frills as it gets, just me and a mic and camera reading my morning newsletter. You may get the idea there’s more to all of this than I’ve gone into detail about and you’re right: essentially the MM newsletter is me building and testing the infrastructure to build all this up properly into what it was supposed to be in the first place, way back when. I want to be sure I can get a daily morning thing out in three formats regularly without that itself becoming the full-time thing.
I know that these kinds of personal musings and “what’s up” content aren’t any big moneymaker or traffic attraction, and they’re not intended to be. There are three levels to “why” I’m doing this kind of content.
The first, I’ve already said: this is where I work with new ideas and refine them and see how they are able to spin out as production, if I need to make adjustments before I’m committing myself to “the public” as an information source on a regular schedule, that kind of thing.
So for today’s Morning Me what’ll happen is I’m going to finish writing this, then set up and record it on webcam real quick. I’ll probably go “naked” today with maybe just a url bug onscreen for the sake of getting this out while it’s still morning anywhere in the western hemisphere, then spend some time today in Premiere working up both traditional lower third graphics I can reuse specifically for this show and some kind of vertical framework so I can put a thirty-second pointer up for each show as well.
Again you can probably see what I’m doing here – like a stand up comedian running new material unannounced in a small club or a band throwing a private party to debut songs. The second reason I’m babbling on so much about myself and the work I’m doing here right now is that it’s as close to zero effort source material as it gets. I don’t have to read the news or do any research to write these morning newsletters, I just write them. Harder than it sounds sometimes, but generally less time consuming than trying to do “real” news and information content. This allows me to focus on creating the infrastructure and meta-content necessary to ensure the actual content gets the best possible treatment I can give it.
The third level is transparency and disclosure and making sure I’m communicating with you folks properly. Everything I do is crowdfunded, and I feel like that gives me some obligation to keep in touch with you about what I’m doing and how I’m doing it.
All of this in service of being able to create better content and get it out to you faster, with broader distribution scope and therefore more positive impact in the world.
As of this moment I’ve got nearly an hour in just writing this and figuring out what I was going to say – deleted a LOT of content for the sake of keeping it short – so I’m gonna let both of us get out of here, just want to say on the way out how much I appreciate you taking the time and supporting my work with your engagement and contributions. It’s a slow build but we’re on the ramp and rolling now, and things are looking very, very positive. Thank you all for being part of that, stay tuned right here and watch how it all plays out, and don’t forget to stay engaged, and of course if you’re able and willing you can help support the whole thing multiple ways including PayPal, Patreon, and more, you can find out more about all that at http://passionate-cyan-owl.192-250-227-172.cpanel.site/money! For now this is JH and the Morning Me saying see you tomorrow, same bat-time, same bat-channel!
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.
Good morning folks and welcome to the show, let’s see what’s rattling around in the ol’ brainpan today…
Got a ton of new stuff kicked out yesterday, lot of backend work on this new project management tool. I’m super excited about that, I’ve been trying for years to find just the right PM tool for me and the way I work, and this one seems to be doing the job. I’ve got some playing around to do with it yet, but I think it’s going to be a powerful help for my work and my personal life as well.
I haven’t yet figured out how, but I’m going to make the reporting tool viewable for supporters and add it to the “perk” list, since I figure details like that are in the package of stuff that pretty much nobody’s going to be interested in except supporters.
Fact is the tool is for me, first and foremost, to help me stay organized and stop losing good ideas to the ongoing rush of trying to keep up with my own brain. Sharing it and showing everyone else is just a lucky artifact of its abilities that allows me some transparency while also not getting stuck in a loop of writing a twenty-minute Facebook status every time I have a thought I need to chew on or a little bit of happy fluff I want to share. Like this:
Health insurance companies should be outlawed and if you work for one you should make them fire you and start collecting unemployment. There’s no reason for health insurance, at least in the way we have it, to exist in a nation that respects its people.
– John Henry
I don’t want to get too deep into this today because I’ve got the JH AfterParty newsletter to get released. As I’ve mentioned previously I’m trying to get in the habit of having that ready to drop for the advance edition by 9am on Tuesdays, and then the public release of the previous weeks’ edition at noon (all times Eastern). This week because I just started this “Morning Me” thing and didn’t want to skip it on the second day, I went ahead and decided to let the AfterParty be a little late because I didn’t finish it last night like I should’ve. In the future, if there’s a conflict the AfterParty will take precedence and the MM will get skipped.
I should note here also that while I loosely intend to try to get one of these out daily, I’m not committing to it. My personal goal is to try to hold the line at no fewer than four “Morning Me” posts per week.
I noticed last night that my FB login app for the comment system is not working properly, which leads me to suspect the rest of the social logins aren’t working either. I’ll probably have to take half a day or a day in the next few to hack that out and see what the problem is.
Sidebar: if y’all notice something broken, tell me. Please. Thanks.
I really can’t be effusive enough about my current state of mind. I’m pretty sure I’ve never “had it together” at the level I do right now, in terms of how I’m approaching and accomplishing my work. I know there’s a lot of noise and confusion right now because I’m doing a lot of things in many different directions, but it should get more steady and stable and predictable around here steadily and quickly.
On that note, I’m giving a few days to make sure I haven’t overwhelmed myself but I’m probably going to try to work up a second daily (or sorta-daily) issue newsletter, like this one but about news, events, etc. that are catching my eye or potentially going to work up into a bigger piece. A bit like a short version of the excellent Heather Cox Richardson newsletter (man, I can get 120wpm freehand when I’m really cranking it out, she must be using a voice parser or have a couple of people typing for her or something, I seriously have no idea how she creates such long, comprehensive newsletters every day….and I’m the guy most people are like TOO MANY WORDS SLOW DOWN WITH ALL THE WORDS ITS TOO MUCH! I’ll try to get a link to her substack in an upcoming MM.
And with that I’m going to get on with my day. First priority is getting this JH AfterParty newsletter written, and then I’m back into content creation wherever I pick up, probably will get to work on the second part of that series about the national debt.
I’m probably going to stop distributing the MM to my “other” FB pages like Antifa, Progressive American, and Custode. This newsletter is really just about me for my people, my way of staying in touch as my work pulls me ever farther from the levels of social media engagement I’m used to. As such, I think cranking it out to those pages would be more annoying than interesting to their readers.
Please don’t forget my existence is predicated on your support so please remember to lean hard on those like and share buttons. We’re past the point in history where worrying about being “spammy” is even on the radar. Flood the net with JH as best you can – plenty of content to do it with right here! – and JH is gonna keep working on making sure you’ve got plenty of material to work with.
Love y’all, don’t forget to pitch in few if you can at the money page. (Sustained support is critical! Far better to have forty supporters sending me five bucks a month than have one person send me $250 one time. Check out the options for weekly and monthly support via PayPal and Patreon at that link.) There’ll be a lot more coming on that, too, but that conversation is better held at the AfterParty. Have a happy upbeat song to get your day off to a great start! You can always count on George Harrison for a smile…
As part of this whole process I’m going through of finally nailing myself down into good work habits and maximum productivity, I’m facing the not-entirely-pleasant reality that writing social media updates about what I’ve got going on is a fairly important part of my thinking process; it’s where I work out ideas and often will find flaws and gaps in my own thinking or planning as I’m writing.
Obviously there are two flaws involved there: the first is that it doesn’t have to be done on social media and the second is that it’s content and ought to be treated that way. Ergo, more blog posts like this one and I hope you dig it. I’ll probably end up playing with some kind of official cute daily title thing or whatever (I did, see below), but taking this time to focus on exactly what my goals are for the day and how I intend to achieve them is important to making each day I have left as productive – on my own terms and for my own purposes – as they can possibly be. That’ll be the last meta comment on that whole thing, at least for now, let’s commence with the thoughts that actually prompted this like 90 minutes ago and then yeah.
A screenshot of the ProjeQtOr ticket for this blog post.
So I have this tool called “ProjeQtOr” running on a subdomain now, and it seems to be just what I needed (an earlier promising candidate turned out to be a false start). Good, solid project management, works great for a one-person show but still easily scalable and scopable to include stuff like some CRM and collaboration on projects. I’ve got it running on a subdomain right now (https://projects.johnhenry.us – you can go peek if you want but all you’ll see is a login screen).
I still need to spend some time learning the reporting tools to get everything I want out of it, including opening it up for public view as a supporter perk and using it to help generate work reports for inclusion in the Saturday Substack, which is where this whole side-track with the project/task management stuff started (again – I’ve taken many runs at this, but I’m finally in an environment where I have a hope of making it stick). Once I do that I’ll figure out a way to make it visible to users with access and tell them how to access it.
From my POV it’s a necessary sanity tool to keep everything I’m doing in order and stop forgetting and leaving off on things – there are probably three dozen unfinished articles on my blog! – but also the public-facing functionality that I may be able to put to use is significant and constitutes a legitimate value add for folks who are supporting my work to be able to see more closely what exactly they’re supporting and how it’s getting done.
Other than that…let’s see, I’ve got this blog post, the piece about the national debt, continuing to learn and develop with this new tool while simultaneously using it for its intended purpose which is to help me keep track of what I’m doing, when, and for how long. I did force myself to take a few hours off last night and got some new Fallout 4 screenshots…I think I’ve talked enough for here and now. I really appreciate everyone’s patience during this exciting and energetic period of major growth and development on my end; I’m doing my best to stay visible so you know I’m working and not just off screwing around somewhere.
(NTS: Maybe get into a habit of a “morning me” blog post and then something else that’s a sort of “morning news review” where folks can just get a peek at what I’ve been seeing in the news and what I think of it, small-dose stuff some of which will likely end up developing into more substantial content in time…and oh hey, half an hour later I’ve created a new project node with two levels, a new project for a new newsletter titled “morning me” that I’ll do kinda daily, and turned this into the first issue…but I have other work to do and I’ve already got a couple of hours in this plus a couple more undocumented fiddling with infrastructure and yeah. I’ll go more into what I’m thinking for this in the next edition, for now I gotta run, see you soon!)
Hi everyone and welcome to the first official edition of the JH AfterParty newsletter! This will be my “supporter-Patron perk” content, or at least part of it: Patrons and people who support or have supported my work financially get to read this when it’s released, and everyone else will be able to see it in a week.
Lots of exciting stuff to talk about here, so let’s get right to it!
First, as should be obvious if you’re reading this on my site, I’ve implemented a proper authentication system on JohnHenry.US now, so that supporters who contribute via methods other than Patreon will be able to get their (admittedly nominal, at present anyway) “perks” as supporters.
Right now this comes primarily in the form of posts/newsletters/content just like this one.
The habit I’m striving for with this is “every Tuesday.” So every Tuesday (ostensibly!) I’m going to write a sort of “backstage diary” type of post where things are more casual, less go-go-go and bullet pointed, and more this is what I’ve been thinking about and doing lately.
Also a place for some of my more personal musings and ramblings, for instance I think this would be the right place to tell the whole story of this old friend who deus ex machina’d out of nowhere and gave me exactly the things I was missing to turn everything around – basically the time and space to work that I’ve been promised multiple times in the past and always ended up getting “not so much” and conditions and hurry up and hey when you gonna get a job.
All that sort of personal rambly stuff that has often taken place on my Facebook page will be shifting in to these newsletters, too – I figure most of the folks who would care to read stuff like that are already supporters anyway 🙂
(Sidebar: if you are a past supporter but have never had an account here, get with me via the contact form and we’ll get you set up properly.)
Now that I have the proper infrastructure in place, my weekly casual newsletters that I’ve been referring to as my “patron previews” and will now be known as “JH AfterParty” (see below) will also be posted here under the same “conditions” – they’re only visible to logged in users who have supported my work somehow for the first week after publication, then they’re public-access. Folks who just create accounts so they can access the forums are in a different group and will have the same access as the general public; the posts will be available to them a week after they’re available to supporters, both here and on Patreon.
I do plan to continue duplicating the work at both JHUS and Patreon, though; there are people who are Patrons first and JH fans second, and I want to make sure they’re getting their due. Plus it helps the whole *shudder* marketing situation on that platform, by way of the same folks.
Oh crap, I’m a rock star.
Part of this comes from an unfortunate reality I’m facing: I’m going to have to stop being quite so accessible. The scope and volume of noise arrayed against me is just deranges, with obsessed twits crossing over into people who have jacked me around and got caught and cut off crossing over into plain old psychos crossing over into all those various forces of capitalism and grift that have plagued my online presence for so long now.
It’s sad, but a lot of that over the years has taken the form of bad-faith “friends” and people playing on my various buttons to get close so they could use me or ingratiate themselves – and this is a problem that goes all the way back to my childhood, mind you, because of who and what I am – and it’s come to the point where I just don’t trust any private communication from people I don’t know anymore (or from a lot of people I do).
Consequently I’m sort of shutting off most of the DM capabilities on my social media or heavily restricting it to a closely vetted list of friends when I can. I will instead have a contact form at JohnHenry.US (actually do now); if you’ve got something to say but you’re so worried about it being a problem for you that you’re afraid of leaving footprints behind with your message (like the network information that’s routinely collected by every website you visit), I don’t care to hear from you anyway to be honest.
The hardest part of this is how many people who started out as readers have become friends over the years, and by no means am I shutting those people out en masse or going all Greta Garbo on everyone. I hope to continue developing new friendships and relationships from an expanding readership/fan base over time. But leaving myself wide open just invites too many bad actors to waste too much of my time and energy, and yours, so I’m closing some things off and “funneling” others, which also helps me manage my time more efficiently and effectively in terms of organization.
I anticipate that, over time, the forum at JHUS will grow to supplant the greater part of the “community” aspect of my social media platforms, and from that perspective unfortunately I’m going to start looking a whole lot more like the standard-issue in terms of presentation. Hopefully I’m picking up the things that work without the things that don’t or that I feel fundamentally compromise the work when I start worrying more about advertising and marketing than about creating quality original content.
As I was writing this I decided to name this newsletter the “JH AfterParty.” The afterparty is where friends of the band hang out after the show, and everyone else hears about it a week later, so the whole thing ties nicely thematically. Especially since I plan to run it on Tuesday afternoons and that’s usually about when I’d be waking up from an afterparty from a really solid Saturday night gig back in the day 😉
Keeping up & wrapping up
I don’t want to duplicate work so in terms of raw, “this is what I did here’s the links and what it was all about” stuff please please PLEASE do get subscribed to my weekly Substack digest. (There’s also a signup form in the sidebar of JohnHenry.US). Every Saturday I publish a digest of the prior week’s work that includes links to new content and ongoing discussion of non-content work as well. That’s the very best way for anyone, regardless of whether or how they’re supporting my work, to keep up with what I’m doing. Please don’t forget to share those links around and all that other stuff; more than anything else, engagement is absolute king, and now that it finally seems like I’m firmly headed in the right direction it’s more important than ever.
As I’m writing this message I’m bouncing back and forth between other tasks, including other content work plus putting together tomorrow’s newsletter. Let’s talk quickly about what you should expect to see upcoming, and I’ll get out of your hair.
Ain’t no party like a JH AfterParty cuz a WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!? Photo by Thiago Miranda on Pexels.com
I’ve just about finished adding/changing/tuning up the back end of JohnHenry.US. I have a column 95% finished for WeAntiFascists.Com, but I want to go through the same process with that site before I publish (some of that is also already done). Then I’ll do it again with Custode.Org, in preparation to get a whole bunch of things rolling there that I’m not prepared to discuss in any greater detail than “a whole bunch of things.”
As part of the whole membership thing I was discussing at the top of the newsletter, I’ve also gone through and rearranged/simplified the user groups and permissions on the site. As of right now either you’re a “supporter” or a “subscriber.” Subscriber is the default group you’re in when you register with the site, and allows for things like posting to the forum. “Supporter” is the group you’re in if you contribute financial support; that’s the group that will see this newsletter when it’s published rather than a week later.
Those of you who are already registered supporters right now are also part of the Legacy user group, which is mostly just for my own internal record-keeping mostly to ensure I’m staying in touch with you about any sorts of new offers or perks or whatever become available to supporters going forward, which those folks should by rights qualify for retroactively as most of them are among the group of people who has been keeping me and my work alive the last few years.
These changes may make some things funky on your end that I can’t see from here. If so, let me know via the contact form. Note that if you’re logged in you have access to a higher-priority contact form, which you’ll find in the site navigation menu (It’s under “Forums & Account”)! You can also contact me directly through DM at Patreon if you’re a Patron.
Fun fact: what’s actually going to happen is I’m creating this post twice. Once that will post now and is visible only to subscribers, and the other that will post in a week and be visible to everyone. This replicates the functionality of Patreon without having to get too crazy. Plus then if I get a little chaotic or whatever and “forget” to shut off the original, it’ll still be in place and ultimately I’ll just add a 301 redirect to the non-paywalled version of the article so all the traffic goes to that one, and then this actual post goes byebye.
I’m gonna wrap it up and get out of here, get this posted, and see what else I can get done before I try to wrap up and have a bit of a weekend.
Hey kids, let’s write a blog post about ratholes and tangents!
I wanted to take a second and tell you a little “behind the scenes” story of how sometimes even when you’re firing on all cylinders, you end up taking a detour…
Front page of this site
So if you’ve been paying attention here the last couple of weeks you know I’ve been doing a lot of work across the board, but mostly here at JohnHenry.US. I’ve got a couple of huge new articles up, a handful of smaller ones, and entire new sections of the site.
As I write this there’s still some flash that needs to be trimmed all over, but this is about the rathole so ignore that part and check out this page real quick. Just peek and scan, there’s not much there in the way of words.
The front of this site should be that “Home” page, but this theme won’t let that happen. Why? Don’t know, and hacking through the internals to track it down would take weeks. Harumph.
Guess I have to try a new theme. I’ve got all kinds of new branching internal content set up and planned and executing (like this) that’s designed around this theme with the same basic setup of hero banner on top, pages and posts below, and sidebar, so we’ll try to stick to something close to this layout…and nothing works.
I noticed this problem late Wednesday night.
I tried almost forty themes on this site yesterday, and the ones that would properly render the “right” home page, ended up having other major content formatting issues that made them unusable or would have forced me to redesign the entire site again.
There’s probably a fairly easy solution to this, but nothing jumped out at me in the theme code, and all the available Google solutions are dead ends. I even gave some serious thought into using WordPress’ new “Site Builder” feature, which is rather deeper than simply theming, but again this would be a huge rathole that would take me weeks to crawl out of and bring my forward momentum to a dead stop. (Note to self: make time for that rathole once you’re back in production.)
I’ve been trying to improve a lot of things about myself over these last few weeks that I’ve been quiet, for me, since I moved out of the motel. On one hand, I’m not in a crisis which demands that I just keep paddling as fast as I can and hope I hit land before I sink, so I can take the time to find the right solution. On the other hand, I know I’m prone to getting lost in these ratholes and tangents,
What the front page of this site is supposed to look like.
So I gave it one day. I mean, it’s the entire site design, right, so it’s okay to take a minute and see what you can do to make it exactly the “right” way you want it. But again: let’s not lose momentum or get into tangents of tangents of tangents, or all this stuff you’ve started doing is going to get lost.
Turns out: no good solution! I spent a day fiddling with different themes trying to make it work, and consistently the themes that fit reasonably well into the aesthetic and UI I had in place, will not render that home page as the root page of the site no matter what I do to it.
So the home page of the site is just gonna have to be vaguely mis-matched from the rest of it from now on. Hardly anyone visits home pages anymore anyway. Plus I can rig it a little bit by taking the time to properly set up my site’s page structure, using the “right” page as the root of the site tree, and then the breadcrumbs should use that as home and get SOME traffic pointed there.
So today it’s back to the tangent I was on…getting the gaming section of the site set up and a bit of content in it, then setting in to a production groove for a minute with new content coming in there and in other areas of my work…and at that point I can start thinking of doing the same things with music, film, books, TV/streaming, IT geek stuff, and all of the other things that interest me.
I figure it’ll be a year – and probably at least one more site redesign – before I’ve got this site in the condition I want it to be. The good news about that is it’s all one-time work that I frankly should have done twenty years ago anyway. Not only is it all scalable and amounts to a bunch of plug-and-play content boxes, the same techniques and some of the scripting I’ve written and so forth can also be used on Custode and WeAntiFascists, and it will be.
The same is true for some of the less major tangents I’ve been on this last week and a half or so – changing my SEO tool from Yoast to RankMath, adding and changing all kinds of back-end tools and plugins for the site (talked about some of this in last week’s Substack – make sure you’re signed up, all you gotta do is punch your e-mail address in the sidebar form on my site or go to my SubStack home page and punch it in there – always free!), most of which will also be implemented on my other sites. (The WAF site is set up a little differently with less metric/traffic monitoring and no advertising implemented whatsoever…so that’s like six different tools that aren’t used over there, or are used in substantially different ways.)
Shot of the “Gaming” section – you can see it’s still rough, but the aesthetic-thematic consistency should be obvious.
The first edition of the JH AfterParty newsletter goes public in a couple of hours, be sure to keep your eyes out for that please and thanks. Let me get back on the game section and get that wrapped up (mostly design elements and I want to get a few more Fallout 4 screenies posted, plus get the Cities:Skylines section started), then I’ll start picking up on the half-dozen articles I’ve got almost finished for other platforms (all my sites plus Medium, plus I need to get my Substack newsletter written so it’s ready to roll in the morning).
Finally just a quick personal note: yes, I recognize that from “out there” it looks like I’m kind of up my own butt right now, but that’s what happens when you’re a one-person conglomerate. I’d love to have some folks working for me to handle like 85% of this so I could just focus on writing, but that’s life in the big city. I’m sure there’ll be no shortage of social justice issues to discuss – and I have been even in the middle of all of this – so please don’t be concerned that I’ve decided to stop doing what I do and just focus on “light” stuff like gaming and music. I have a rich, full intellectual and artistic life, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of it in my public work. I’m starting to get some of that stuff out there now, because it’s interesting and – as I’ve mentioned before – I frankly have much less ethical quandry related to monetizing that stuff as opposed to public interest work that ought to be free. Ironically this will end up resulting in the other stuff generating the income necessary to do the social and public interest stuff well.
That’s it for me for now. I’m not going to set a schedule on “My Actual Blog,” but am trying to make sure I hit it at least once in every calendar period.
