50 reached

dated Sunday 12 January 2025

I turned 50 in December. Here's something I wrote to mark the occasion with people from a range of moments of my life gathered in a room and I could address them, I was honored:

About twenty years ago I largely gave up online for personal relationships
I feel rewarded for that
These days I am not inclined to be too public
not while I'm hovering over this nest
I'm taking care of myself in here
deep cleansing old wounds

at a young age losing my dad by his own hand opened me to possibility
people have deadly invisible struggles and
people have such a wide range of things they can do each day

it might have cracked me open
helped prepare me for a wide range of folks
made me hungry for life and mentors and friends and lovers
I sought out people,
I seek out people
thank you all for connecting with me.

now I'm a dad - woah - double dad
sometimes I feel I am now re-parenting myself
It’s deeply soothing to give my kids focus and companionship I believe I wanted
While acknowledging here tonight that I am uniquely scarring them
fortunately I am not parenting myself exactly, I’m parenting two individuals, my teachers - Gracias a la vida

So I’m profoundly grateful for this parenting opportunity, to have the chance to stick around and pay attention for a while.

thank you to my life partner
In 272 days it will be our 10 year wedding anniversary
I am so glad I met you when I was ready
And you are so much fun. Let’s keep hanging out.

I hope you all will come together with me to pleasure her in the hours and decades to come.

So, meditating on my next 50:
Hopefully I’m in my second half, as my brother suggested, not my last quarter.
What am I missing? What unfulfilled yearning within?
I would like to be a better whistler
I want to practice more hacky sack
I want to share the truth about the potential for velcro on pants to transform your computer work
if I have enough years I’ll probably do more personal mediated storytelling
Maybe I’ll update my internet father story with exciting new developments

But meanwhile I’m procrastinating on all of that by
Preparing hot breakfast
planning camping trips
Improving PTA communications infrastructure
Encouraging my partner to have time to herself

The song of family friends and bud work I am lustily singing
To be connected
To be less alone
To serve and amuse

Thank you folks for keeping me alive

specific texture

dated Sunday 25 February 2024

What can I say about the specific texture of this moment? Little without identifying too many intimate details of my familiars. I want to be a friend and lover and familiar. Maybe after you die I would write about you, but then that could potentially impale your dear ones. Who gets the spike? No one I would hope too soon really.

the bread was too old

dated Monday 29 January 2024

I saved old bread, I thought, a few crusty rumps of some old delicious loaves. Some were olive bread. Most dated from all over 2023. the casserole was at first wonderful, savory, the texture of the custardary bread was scrumdelicious.
then a back of the mouth taste after a few bites. like old oiil. The children with their more powerful senses refused after one bite. I was depressed. That and a long-delayed work project had me feeling like I wasn't successful following through to create. My eldest consoled me numerous times.

human petting zoo

dated Tuesday 23 January 2024

How to celebrate the 30th anniversary of a personal web site? I considered this morning as I fashioned a three-legged stool over my morning ritual oracular vapors.

I thought it would be good to have a petting zoo here. Basically, I thought, I'll declare links.net a virtual single human petting zoo mostly in text. I've already set myself up as an exhibit, so I don't have to do very much to decorate.

A good chunk of people will at least peek at a petting zoo. What animals did they bring to this situation which doesn't otherwise have animals in it? And some still-large subset of people will charge in to a petting zoo, sidling up alongside any living thing to begin inter-species speed dating.

So I can put myself at the center of this Justin's Links petting zoo. Look, my virtual skin - doesn't it look smooth and hairless? That's because most of the photos on this site are from my callow days. Now I'm a 49 year old skinbag, who had a basal cell carcinoma removed from his right cheek.

Aren't you curious to touch me, to see what I feel like? How do you interact here? Rub your finger on my links, feel inside the folds and orifices you can reach.

It occurred to me to host a petting zoo for the 30th anniversary of the first visitors to this page probably because these days, I generally feel relieved when I encounter a petting zoo. It means two smaller humans I roam with will be excited, engaged, delighted by the chance to rub their dirty hands across a range of allergens, experiencing small animals who have made some kind of peace being handled by huge strangers.

So run your rough hands over me. I can take some heavy petting. But no pokey fingers please. Nothing in the eyes or mouth. Not without consent.

TBH it's the images

dated Saturday 20 January 2024

I would update this thing with text strings all the live long. But images, I haven't figured out how I can best get photos from my January 2024 phone situation into my server and embedded in these here texteses. It's a recurring issue over the last few decades of publishing on the web. Text is cheap. Images are a pain. I'm indulging myself with more and more small text entries, now that I have my software setup to publish. It's the photos though, that would make people feel more touched and stimulated by my affairs. I'm older now and I'm working to spare fewer shits. But I too enjoy the photos, so I'm working on it.

These blog posts are now written in AirTable, the HTML is created by formulas from the AirTable data, and then I paste the results onto links.net via BBEdit and SFTP. So photos will be slid in somewhere there, as soon as I find an appropriate lubricant.

Did figure out how to see the images in my collection of mobile phone commentary cartoons from 2004. But those are old. How about these whiskers???

Library usage stats

dated Friday 19 January 2024

I manage most of the library requests for four people, including one four year old and one seven year old. We can bike past a public library branch on our way to school - mad convenient. If my kids mention a topic, I open my phone and put a few books on hold about it. I use my phone to request any book I read about online. If it's too new, go back and re-read "best of children's literature 2022" and see if those books are now available from the library, otherwise interlibrary loan.

I get a few books for myself now and then - mostly cookbooks. But the vast bulk is children's books. I did some number-crunching on our family library use. Here's our stats, not including inter-library loans.

2023: 427 loans
2022: 385 loans

We are loving our library. We have given to the Friends of the Berkeley Public Library and we match those donations giving to the Friends of the Richmond Public Library and Friends of the Oakland Public Library. Plus we lived in Fort Bragg California during the pandemic and we donate to their Friends of the Fort Bragg Public Library.

oversharing Dean's List

dated Friday 19 January 2024

In 2014 I marked 20 years on this site by starting production on a documentary: overshare: the links.net story. Mercifully only about 40 minutes. And also mercifully I finished in 2015 and didn't have to answer for broader political and social implications of social media. So overshare: the links.net story is what I used to tell people when they asked about my personal web site. Then I got older and internet security protocols and internet server setups evolved: while I still felt relatively confident about my life choices, my documentary web site subdomain was insecure. So over many months I finally motivated myself to make a relatively simple change to bring that old moving picture into view again.

For most sustained historical self-reflection, I'm gifted assistance from another: an internetizen known as Michael Dean. He sent me an email in October 2023. He had written a 7,917 word essay about my work and he had started his own daily online log. I felt an immediate welling up of overwhelm. I wrote back roughly as follows:

Thank you Michael. I’m moved by your efforts. I haven’t yet read your essay; I’m a bit shy at the moment about it. My life has changed so substantially recently I feel more distant from the self of publishing because I haven’t made time to make my online presence more authentic to now. A challenging task when I have two live children and I get more emotional succor from our interactions than I feel I would receive from posting for strangers. Plus the range of possible outcomes has become so wide online I feel un-calm when I consider an active online public life.

Cleaning the place up for the 30th birthday /bin/bash got me psychologically ready to look at myself again. It took me about four months to read Michael Dean's link: "The First Online Writer: Lessons from Justin Hall on rendering your unfiltered consciousness into hypertext".

That was about thirty minutes agin. I'm flattered and squirming. It's my life told through maybe two rounds of telephone, totally not hip to the new shit. New shit has come to light Man. But I am too curtailed to bring the truth as a date to this internet party right now. I eloped with reality.

Michael Dean has taken my source material and his 2023 context to re-render me. He has done some serious sifting and analysis of my wordpiles herein. And the papers I've soiled elsewhere. I appreciated greatly his approach: he's steadily encouraging people to find their own self expression, to experiment. The conclusion of his piece has some provocative tips to possibly sustain a life of virtual nudity; public or semi-public personal self-exposure. His dedication to sustained public notation seems to go well with

And he provides this amusing graph:

I'm writing this at the time I've read it. I suspect I will have more feelings about being the object of this scholarship. I'm grateful to Michael for showing me what a personal commitment to daily weblogging and personal hypertext thinking can look like today.