It took me ONE HOUR to add a new blog post to my site. That’s too much time. I wrote a list of steps. Almost thirty. I need other options. The hosted kind. Bearblog is my favorite option so far. It gives me a discount for being in a developing country (very kind!). It has custom CSS and RSS feed. I want the paid plan to add a custom domain.
It’s been a while since I wrote one of these. At the time of writing, I’ve posted the first part of my Sci. Comm. Internship post-mortem and finished editing the second part today. I thought I had to submit my internship portfolio last week but it seems I got the date wrong. I’m working towards writing the postmortem and submit it as part of my portfolio. Apart from that, I have to update my internship journal and get it signed by my supervisor before submitting it.
I think I keep conflating hobbies versus careers. I have a personal website. I have a blog. I want to talk about science with others.
Where am I going with this? Some about being paid for doing a thing. A job. Hobbies. Joy. Capitalism. Labor. Wages. Fulfillment.
Maybe this is an artificial dichotomy that I counjured up but I don’t have much evidence to consider work ‘fun.’ There are different expectations when someone/something else depends on. It’s not that I don’t have experience with those expectations and I trust myself with being able to be professional. I don’t really understand my thoughts.
As my internship turns to an end and my commencement trip rears close and with that another chapter of my life begins, I’ve begun to think about the difficulty in meeting other scientists and science communicators. I’ve had an easier time in the IndieWeb space where alternative forms of communication are the norms. Forums, online meetings, the Fediverse, and others. However, perhaps because I haven’t given enough time to the task, finding spaces by and for scientists and science communicators has been a struggle.
Wow, I drafted part two! Crazy! Seems there’s going to be a part three.
This project is so silly. WIll anyone be interested in this? There’s so little mentions of science. But to do this I had to understand the science. I should emphasize more on the science…
Scheduled a post sharing my first blog post about my internship on Mastodon. Frigging nervous!
Added a /contact page to my website! Also took the chance to create a new email account as a side task. Having read further, I’m kind of regretting it so I’ll make another one some other time. In addition, I sent an application to Fediring and it got approved today! I also updated my info on the a11y webring. Pretty satisfied with my work! 😁
I just recalled a tip to curve procrastination. If the task seems daunting, divide it into several tasks.
As to how this relates to writing, it could be said that I finished the first part of the blog.
Yes yes, this project spans a whole month. I should divide it into different posts.
I wonder what’s the word count of that post 🤔. Didn’t even check.
I finished my internship portfolio! Woke up real worried about it because tomorrow is the deadline. But when I looked at it, most of the pieces were already done. I just had to put all the pieces together. Add all the work samples, double check the alt-text, and add the whole full draft to the larger portfolio. I hope it's okay to have uploaded the whole site. I thought they would accept links so I was going to submit the link to the portfolio in the same Canvas LMS but they were just accepting files.
Time to rereading what I wrote last week for my internship. Let’s do this!!!🎉
Finally downloaded LibreOffice! Bye bye Microslop Office!😆
Using Microsoft Word during my internship while reading about current chaos in the tech industry and how Word keeps hounding me to upload my file to the cloud (probably to feed it’s LLM) just made me want to have nothing to do with it.
It’s gonna be a slow change but I’m excited to learn more about LibreOffice as a piece of software and as a project. It has an account on the Fediverse!!!
When it RAINS it POURS! 🌊
Also forgot to mention that I deleted my blog in bearblog.dev. I moved it to my website!
It doesn’t have a feed yet. It’s in the works though! Once I find how to make it using Eleventy scratches head.
With the internship’s trials and tribulations, I have forgotten to mention that I’m working on a crochet commission! My grandmother’s dance teacher wants me to make her a shawl similar to the one I gave my grandmother last year. Grandma used it during one of their presentations and it seems the teacher became fascinated with it. I bought the yarn last week and I’ve been making steady progress. Choosing the initial design was lightning fast (add link) but as usual, I got stumped with the final touches.
I just finished rereading and doing some light editing to yesterday’s posts. The power of writing is truly boundless. I feel like a stream whose water was liberated from blockage. I feel peaceful. The words are flowing and they are kind. I did some thinking about my internship as well. I realized that I was forcing myself to write something that didn’t spark joy. It was clear when I found a topic that truly did, a post-mortem of sorts about how I did a website refresh of the Living Agroecology Lab.
Accomplishments One of my first accomplishments in this internship is refreshing a website that wasn’t my own. I condensed the site’s header and footer, redesigned the News and People sections, and did slight touch-ups to the rest of the pages. To image heavy-pages, I identified the lack of alt-text and encouraged my supervisor to describe context-heavy pictures by explaining the importance of accessibility. Challenges One of my biggest challenges during this internship has been overcoming writer’s block.
The skills I developed during this internship experience include communication, time management, and independence. Communication with my supervisor and co-workers depended entirely through email and video calls. To my supervisor, I sent weekly reports, sharing what I had done, future plans, and questions. Because I tend to either bulldoze through tasks or ruminate on the details, remembering to take a step back, reflect, and move forward was an experience I’m thankful for.
All that writing about the Fediverse made me a bit nostalgic about Sharkey, another microblogging software like Mastodon. The UI is to die for and it has so many more options compared to Mastodon. It was also really easy to get started. Alas, what I truly need right now is a blog. I don’t want to worry about inundating my followers timeline with long posts like today’s (unless the signed up for that).
It’s really funny in a not funny way that to build connections on social media the users also have to suffer all the shit that people throw into it. My biggest gripe of mainstream Mastodon is the same as other corporate social social. No sense of community, no boundaries. People who don’t add content warnings to upsetting non-illegal content (ex. complaints), people who don’t tag political toots. I got so tired of sanitizing my Mastodon feed that I felt I had to be on my toes every time I scrolled through my feed.