Joseph Conrad on Sailors

I recently re-read The Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad (the last time was in high school, for English class). I was pleasantly surprised by how short it was (~90 pages) and delighted by the prose: so much of the “modern” texts I read are either soulless corporate speak, that say very little, particularly about the things that actually matter, or flowery advertising speak, that serves more to misdirect and hide, or bland and flat, by writers who are exposed to very little soulful writing (or is this a description of my fears of own writing??). It’s hard to tease apart how much is a result of being written in over a century ago in 1899, how much is the writer displaying his craft, and how much of the structure is borrowed from Conrad’s native Polish.

•  ~2 min to read •  read more  


They Shall Not Grow Old, As We Grow Old

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

•  ~4 min to read •  read more  



minchin.jrnl v7 “Phoenix” released

Today, I do something that I should have done 5 years ago, and something that I’ve been putting off for the last 2 years1: I’m releasing a personal fork of jrnl2! I’ve given this release the codename Phoenix, after the mythical bird of rebirth, that springs forth renewed from the ashes of the past.

•  ~15 min to read •  read more  


Winter is coming... the butter in the kitchen cupboards in no longer soft!

•   permalink


AutoLoader Plugin 1.2.1 for Pelican Released

This release of Autoloader is to fix a crashing bug when no plugins in the minchin.​pelican.​readers namespace are loaded.

I also updated a number of other plugins to blacklist v1.2.0 to avoid these crashes.

•  ~1 min to read •  read more  





Microblogging 1.1.0 for Pelican Released

Microblogging is a plugin for Pelican, a static site generator written in Python.

Microblogging is a plugin to allow you to have “micro” (or “µ” or small) posts, similarly (at least outwardly) to Twitter, Mastodon, or Threads.

•  ~5 min to read •  read more