#blog #journal #diary #online #history #WorldWideWeb #1990s #PalmPilot #AvantGo #push #data #cult #famous #memoir #PoetrySlam #touring #drugs #sex #adventures

So I heard out of the blue this week over at Mastodon (you know, that decentralized social network I'm crazy about these days) from one of my old fans from back in the '90s when this personal journal of mine had just started out, at the same time that I was making a living being a regularly touring performance artist through the “poetry slam” circuit. Few people know it anymore, but my journal has actually been around and active in one form or another now for an entire 25 years without any breaks, all the way back to almost the birth of the Web (which first went public in 1991; I first learned of it in 1995, then made the first version of my personal website in 1997, the journal started in '98). I got online originally to promote my slam pieces, the novel I had just completed, and my upcoming tour dates; but then I started doing tour diaries of the places I was visiting as a performer, which quickly expanded out into a regular confessional diary that I maintained whenever I would get back home to Chicago as well.

In fact, this was long before the startup known as Pyra Labs created the world's first “content management system” (or CMS), the backend software that automates the writing, editing, publishing and maintenance of something like a daily personal journal; they called it “keeping a web log,” whether that was a personal diary, a workout diary, a dream diary or what have you, which then got shortened by them into the term “blog,” which is where we get the word. So I was literally having to hand-create a new HTML file back then each time I wanted to post a new diary entry, then had to hand-add a link to it on the diary's main index page, and redo every page by hand again if I ever wanted to do something like change the upper main menu. That's admittedly a big part of why I had the early successes online that I did, simply because it was a pain in the ass and barely anyone else was doing it, which was compounded when I discovered an early service that had invented a clever way to “push” online content to offline Palm Pilots in the '90s whenever they would sync their calendars with the owner's desktop through a physical cable and a “hot sync,” and I started porting out a version of my journal that would work through that, unofficially becoming the first creative writer in history to provide an online blog of that type to mobile devices (by which I mean I think it's official that I'm the first, but I don't know how to go about actually proving that, so let's just call it “unofficial” since ultimately it doesn't really matter).

The numbers I had back then are laughable compared to the hits just an average teenager can get at TikTok on a random Tuesday — the biggest audience I ever had was maybe 30,000 to 40,000 people a day — but that was huge compared to my poetry friends whose fan bases back then were in the hundreds if not dozens. I was the first in my artistic community to start having groups of fans in far-flung international destinations (one of my first such groups in fact was in post-civil-war Ljubljana, Slovenia, where some art-school undergrad found me through his Palm Pilot and then slowly got dozens of his classmates hooked on the journal too), and I was the first person in our circle to regularly get national publicity, from being featured a few times in the hip “cyberpunk magazines” that were around and popular back then (one of the more flattering ones was in a mag literally called Artbyte), and the whole thing just really messily intertwined with my offline personal life as well, because I was staying a lot of times with readers while on the road, then sometimes doing drugs and having sex with these readers, then sometimes writing stories about the drugs and sex at my journal the next week, which then inspired more people to invite me to yet more drug and sex adventures.

What this recent Mastodon new friend reminded me of as well is that I was essentially discovering and documenting adulthood through my journal in real time back then too, which was a big reason people got kinda sometimes so insanely obsessed with it; I was operating with absolutely no filter back then, because that's how my buddy Henry Miller did it in Tropic of Cancer in 1934, and I was a young straight white male, so of course I wanted to do everything Henry Miller had done too, of course I did. I heard over and over in those years from people who were fans of the journal because I said a lot of things out loud that they had deeply felt inside of themselves too, but didn't have the courage or audience to be able to admit those things out loud the way I did; and I was glad for that reaction, because that was exactly what I was going for, an attempt to really grab life by the balls and live with as much gusto and brutal honesty as I could muster. I loved deeply and I fought deeply, and I made every single mistake a guy in his late twenties can make, just every single freaking one of them, and dutifully documented the entire experience, as well as either what I learned from it or what I permanently fucked up in my life because of it. And then I wrote performance poetry pieces about it, and took those out into the world and performed them at bars in the middle of the night while drunk and high, then would go home with someone new later that night and start the cycle all over again.

Ultimately I gave up on trying to be a professional creative writer myself, opting a few years later to instead open a traditional small press so to publish the work of others; then after ten years of doing that, I gave up on trying to make a living publishing other people as well, and am now a freelance book editor for other people who are mostly self-publishing. So it's tempting to look back on those early years and think of them as a waste of my time now, since I'm no longer doing anything even remotely related to what I had been trying to accomplish back in those years. So it's nice to hear occasionally from someone like this new Mastodon friend, because it's a reminder that it did actually mean a lot to a lot of people's lives back then, and that if I'm not fated to be famous or even remembered widely as an early web pioneer (unlike that little hipster Jason Kottke who hasn't been around any longer than me and hasn't done anything different than me, but happened to have a bunch of millionaire nerd fans in San Francisco in the '90s which is why he's still so fondly remembered from those years and I'm not...but that's an angry rant for another time), at least I know I'll live forever in an odd and small little corner of cultural history, one of those secondary people in a community who only the serious hipsters of the next generation go to the trouble of learning about, not the Velvet Underground but the Jack Smith who inspired the Velvet Underground. And I'm pleased by that idea, and would consider myself a success if I was to occupy that kind of space when people think back in the future to the early online culture of the 1990s.

A couple of my old friends have been pushing me really hard to publish an entire full-length memoir of those years soon, now that I'm going through the 25th anniversary of all those events, and I have to confess that I've been giving it some thought. I look back at a lot of my behavior in those years with embarrassment just objectively, and then sometimes with vicarious embarrassment when looking at it through the modern lens of the #MeToo movement; and especially now in my fifties where my testosterone has dropped by so much, and Twenties Jason feels like such a different person than Fifties Jason, it's a lot easier for me to be critical of Twenties Jason and with clear eyes be able to look at him and understand all the damage he did to so many people who were around him in those years. So my memoir wouldn't just be a greatest-hits reprinting of the best of those slam pieces (I wrote and performed about 500 pieces altogether in those years), but a look back at what was happening in my life when I wrote one particular piece or another, and an examination here decades later of what went wrong and right, what I could've done better, what that event says about both those particular times and about young men in general, and other more critical looks at my “slam/blog years” than the kind of hagiography I would expect from a lot of other slam poets from back in the day, if they were to write a 25th-anniversary memoir now. (There was a lot of self-congratulating going on in that community back in those years, one of the many reasons I agree that it would be fascinating to take a look back at that old '90s work from a contemporary critical eye.)

So, you know, maybe! But there's just a lot of shit going on in my life right now, or I should say a lot of shit that I want to have going on and only a limited amount of time and energy to do them. My first-ever taxes as a full-time freelancer just got paid this weekend, then I promised myself I'd start getting heavily into health insurance stuff right after that (I need a new eye exam and glasses, a new hearing exam and hearing aids, new dentures, and help with my burgeoning arthritis, DID I MENTION THAT I'M IN MY FIFTIES), and this is not to mention trying to get my online presence built out again among the dozens of other open projects I have going on in my life right now. I actually still have all 25 years of this journal archived on various external hard drives in my apartment, and I'd love to have the time soon to get all of it back online in one consistent form at a website. So maybe I'll get all that done first, then think of writing my funny, bitter little memoir about my time as an online blogger and slam poet in the '90s. Or, you know, maybe I'll just get high and watch season 3 of Party Down again, because that just came out last month and it was freaking awesome. Ah, the glamorous life of the formerly cultishly loved now 54-year-old normal!

#writing #journal #blog #substack #newsletter #creativity #literary #literature #experiment #test #kindle #scribe #eink #device #handwriting #handwritten #pdf

Substack's been bugging me more and more recently about finally starting a paid newsletter; right now the only one I'm doing is a free one, where I talk about my adventures in freelance editing, which I don't charge for because the goal with it is not to make money but to publicize my freelancing services and generate new clients. But it's true that a number of creative writers are actually doing not too badly for themselves at Substack these days, just from publishing creative writing directly through the service and charging their subscribers a monthly fee; and it's also true that I've been feeling a bit more of a desire recently to get back into more confessional writing, like I used to do when I first started this journal in the 1990s, but have also been feeling hesitant because here in my fifties I simply don't know how much of a public audience I want anymore for that kind of intimate writing. Plus, I have to confess, even though I subscribe to half a dozen of my friends' Substacks devoted to creative writing, I almost never make it all the way through any of the issues before throwing it away, because they're arriving in the same way all information in my life arrives — in my email, on my phone or laptop, when I'm on the go or trying to rush through new messages, and my brain simply doesn't have the time or inclination under those circumstances to stop and really focus in on a kind of writing that's dense, slow and complex.

At the same time, though, I recently acquired Amazon's brand-new Kindle Scribe, the company's first-ever e-ink writing device, which of course also doubles as just a regular Kindle, and in this case finally has a ten-inch screen, more the size of a traditional hardback or trade paperback book. These kinds of devices have been available in the US for several years now, and I've been badly wanting to play with them; but so far they've all been from companies like ReMarkable who have marketed their devices straight to upper-middle-class designers and people like that, and therefore have been charging $700 for theirs, and there ain't no fucking way I'm paying $700 just for a toy I may or may not like. But after returning my old Kindle for a rebate, I was able to buy a Scribe for only $260 (and that was brand-new; I bet they'll be all the way down to $200 by the time next Christmas rolls around); and given that it doubles as just my Kindle, a device I use for hours and hours every single day, I figured this was just low enough a price to justify trying out, especially because I'm strongly interested as well in seeing what it's like to read ebooks on a full ten-inch screen.

So, that leaves the question — what to actually do with this new “digital handwriting” ability? I don't want to do any of the things on it that I'm currently doing with my paper Moleskines, such as my daily time management, small notes, my gratitude journal and things like that, because a paper notebook is the perfect form of archival material for that kind of stuff while a glitchy PDF most certainly isn't. So why not finally try this creative-writing blog for Substack I've been thinking of, but do it entirely handwritten and distribute it as a PDF? The glitchy, ephemeral nature of it is actually a bonus in that situation, because like I said, I don't know exactly how to feel right now about starting to talk again online about more personal, confessional things, so I kind of like the idea of doing it in a way that requires a little more dedication than usual, so that it discourages quick scans and kneejerk reactions. This is part of the problem with typed text online, that we've made it so easy to port out into a whole variety of situations and contexts — you can publish it as an email, reprint it as a web page, take an excerpt from it for social media, tell your phone to read it out loud like an audiobook, and on and on. I've been feeling kind of iffy about starting to talk about personal issues again in a way that would be so easy to copy, paste and distribute out of context; so while it would still be possible to distribute out of context with a small excerpt from a handwritten PDF journal, it would be a much bigger pain, so it would prevent any of the casuals from making their latest two-second outrage porn entry for their Facebook feed.

(And speaking of which, I've found myself thinking a lot these days about the mainstream social media companies' turns recently towards nearly 100% garbage and misinformation, and how they seem to only exist anymore to make money off outrage, which has had me thinking about the sci-fi conceit that I think I read in Margaret Atwood's “MaddAddam” trilogy, how in the future the public internet has become such all-consuming garbage that people must now buy paid subscriptions to services just to know which public statements are actual facts anymore. [That's the “Maddaddam” trilogy, right? If it's something else, please drop me a line and let me know!] That feels a lot to me right now how the current state of places like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are, just these destinations where you get nothing anymore but 100% blaring, screaming trash, 24 hours a day.)

I really kind of like that people would have to jump through a few hoops to read my confessional journal in this way; the writing's too small to read on a phone screen, and the vertical pages make it awkward for a laptop, so you would need to essentially load it to your tablet or fellow Kindle Scribe to be able to read it from start to finish. Then in the other direction, I also really kind of like that jumping through these extra hoops means that you'll only be reading the journal in the same context you might read a book (at a cafe, in bed, etc.), and thus encourage a slow and thoughtful reading of it, your brain now having switched gears into “book-reading mode” instead of “blaze through my emails as quickly as possible mode.” Really the only question I have is that, even while knowing that my reader numbers would be deliberately lower than otherwise, would I get enough readers to even make it worth my time in the first place?

So in that spirit, I do sincerely hope you'll take a moment to download and try out this first sample issue, then drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com to let me know what you thought, or tag me on Mastodon at @jasonpettus@mastodon.cloud (web version). I'm also at the moment leaving commenting ability on at that PDF over at my Google Drive account, so you can leave your thoughts there for now, but I'll shut that ability down if it gets filled with spam and the like. Particularly please let me know if my handwriting is even legible enough to read, which is a big unknown for me at this point. I'll continue doing my “normal” journal here at Write.as, where I just talk about the small daily stuff going on in my life these days; but if people react well to this idea, I plan on starting this up at Substack just for people who want a hardcore extra dose of Jason's inner brain once a week, probably in a way so the text-only PDF is free, but the “bonus edition” with embedded photos (like today's) would be $1 a month. Looking forward to seeing what you think!

#writeas #blogging #cms #framework #decision #opensource #free #anonymous #journal #journaling #mastodon #federation #socialnetwork #fediverse #FEDIVERSE!!! #markdown #GratuitousGenerationXReference #52weekphotographychallenge #2019photographychallenge #52week #photography #challenge #week1 #dramatic #shadow

Ha ho, my gents and laddies! Greetings from the newest member of THE FEDIVERSE!!! The newest thing on the internet to predict itself to be the next big hot thing on the internet! Will it convert? Well...

This all started because I got motivated to finally get off my ass this year and move my personal journal off Medium.com, where it's been since 2015, after Medium moved to a paid-access business model and suddenly tons of people wouldn't have access to my blog unless paying money. Over New Year's, the online publication Tedium published an article challenging its readers to move off social media and into owning their own intellectual property by running their own blog or publication-style newsletter/podcast, and recommended the minimalist publishing platform Write.as as a great destination; and that finally got me up and going as far as moving my personal journal off of Medium and onto https://write.as/jasonpettus. Or, not off Medium, but no longer exclusively on it; one of the nice things about Write.as is that it taps into Medium's public API and will repost your blog entries there if you ask it to.

Where I'm composing my essays, though, is now over at Write.as, and it's merely sending a copy over to Medium. No third party is dictating who can and can't see it at Write.as, and it has a public RSS feed too. I actually kind of like composing essays there in Markdown a little more than the WYSIWIG dashboard at Medium — it's faster and cleaner for someone like me, who isn't a great coder but a good enough one that Markdown comes easily. But one of the biggest new benefits, I'm coming to discover, is that Write.as is broadcasting my feed in a way so that a Mastodon-built server, any of them, can add me as either a “friend” in a social network or a “feed to follow” in a news reader. In other words, it's not one central social network like Twitter or Facebook, but a bunch of social networks that all run off the same shared free public API, so that any member at any of them can follow or friend any other member at any other of them, just like being able to directly dial any other phone on the planet just by knowing its number. It's a federation of different, competing social networks, just with one communications protocol to Rule Them All. It's a... FEEEDIIVEEERSSSE! [echo] [echo]

And I'm like, okay, sure, I believe in supporting your hippie vision, I do. But I also lived through the birth and death of THE BLOGOSPHERE!!! twenty years ago. I was on Geocities and then I was on LiveJournal, then was on TypePad and then MovableType, then Blogger and then Blogspot, then was on a gay porn server space being provided to me for free by one of my fans, and eventually all of them failed me in one way or another, so forgive me if I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool believer just quite yet. Still, it's an admirable system, and really the next generation of how the social web online is going to work. Ironically, the technology for it's been around for awhile, but it's just now with the big major social networks having ethical meltdowns that it's suddenly become a hot thing that a bunch of people are interested in at once. It'd be a beautiful way of opening up Twitter-like benefits (the immediacy, the rapid scope) but without anyone ever again having to worry about the random whims and badly enforced censorship of any one large corporation like Twitter; you simply all share a core code base for exchanging information with each other, just how like how 100 percent of email clients now share a core protocol for communicating.

So we'll see whether it catches on or not; but for now, you can add this blog to any account at any Mastodon server anywhere with @jasonpettus@write.as . And, sigh, yes, I suppose I will sign up for an account myself at some Mastodon server somewhere just to see if the hype is earned. Now fetch me my Mondo 2000 and a cyberpunk movie on videotape, my Nine-Inch-Nails-listening Generation-X Blogosphere Comrade!

Here's the image I chose as the best at the end of week #1 of my new 52 Week Photography Challenge of 2019, the theme this week being “dramatic shadows.” Four other finalists from a nighttime shoot are below. As always, check out more at my Instagram or Flickr accounts. They were all taken in the Buena Park neighborhood of Chicago where I live. Next week, some thoughts on joining Spotify last week for the first time ever, and the windowless room full of nerd slaves they must undoubtedly have somewhere in order to make their recommendation algorithms work so well. Talk with you then again.

Receive an email every Friday with the latest announcements of new blog entries, new photos at Flickr and Instagram, new book and movie reviews at Goodreads and Letterboxd, new rare books at eBay, new handmade notebooks at Etsy, and the most interesting Twitter news links of the week, by signing up at bit.ly/ILoveYouRobot.

Greetings, users! Like most other Twitter members, I’ve been seeing an alarming amount of tweets this week from all my friends about what a shitty 2018 it was for them, and how they can’t wait for it to be over and how they’re desperately hoping 2019 will be better. Unlike them, though, 2018 actually went pretty well for me, so I thought I’d get a journal entry up here on a quiet New Year’s Eve and review why, as well as look at my plans for building on these successes in 2019.

The main reason, of course, is that for the first time in 15 years, I actually generated revenue in my life during every single month of 2018; and that’s because, for the first time since attending a coding bootcamp three years ago, I finally gave up on the idea of trying to get a full-time job in the tech industry, and decided instead to try to make a living for the first time as a full-time freelancer. The simple fact is that, although I learned a lot of lessons about myself and about soft skills by attending DevBootcamp* in 2015, trying to get a job because of it turned out to be kind of an unmitigated disaster, for a variety of interrelated reasons — partly I was discriminated against for being in my late forties while apply for entry-level positions; partly I was old enough that I could see all the red flags at the various companies that did interview me; partly I was ethically disgusted with most of the positions I had even the tiniest chance of getting; partly those various positions started drying up a couple years after my bootcamp experience, as more and more tech companies started realizing that hiring bootcamp graduates was turning out to cause more trouble than help.

[*It’s also worth noting that DevBootcamp is now out of business, one of the half-dozen such organizations that bit the dust during The Great Coding Bootcamp Purge of 2018. It was kind of an open secret within these bootcamps, in fact, that the clock was already ticking as far as your window to get anything useful out of the experience; although the official line was that “There Will Be Endless Coding Jobs In Our Glorious STEM Future For Everyone!,” it was clear even in 2015 that the industry was soon going to reach a point of unsustainable critical mass, and this was even before the bloom fell off the rose of tech companies actually hiring bootcamp graduates, and realizing that most of them weren’t getting nearly the kind of education they needed to be decent ongoing employees.]

At first I decided to combat this by switching my job search to front-end developer positions, instead of the full-stack positions that DevBootcamp prepared its graduates for, since I’m already a veteran of graphic design, HTML and CSS; but it turns out that you can’t get a front-end dev job unless you’re competent at modern front-end Javascript webapp frameworks like React, Angular, Ember, VUE and others, which I’m not. Then after starting to meet people in the tech industry that were doing this, I decided to switch my focus again now to product management, since I already had self-taught experience in my life at helping creatives and tech people communicate with each other, the main thing that people in that position do; but unlike coding positions, no one wants to hire product managers based on them having a bit of self-taught experience, which meant I was going to have to go back to school yet all over again if I wanted any chance of getting even an entry-level position. And I had already spent $12,000 to attend DevBootcamp, so wasn’t thrilled by the idea of spending yet another $12,000 with still no guarantee of a job.

So out of desperation more than anything else, I decided back in January to sign up for some of these third-party freelancing websites, like Upwork.com and Freelancer.com, just to see if I could pick up some quick easy work doing my old pre-bootcamp jobs like personal assistant, copy-editing, proofreading, data entry, document layout and the like. And that’s when I discovered something interesting that I would’ve never guessed — that the eclectic set of random skills I’ve happened to pick up over the years because of my own personal interests (graphic design, website development, manuscript editing, marketing, mailing lists, managing people, high-level strategy, ebook creation, podcast production, etc etc) just happens to be the perfect combination of skills to bring to full-time entrepreneurs who are usually hiring half a dozen different people to fulfill these roles in their lives.

I’ve had a policy for many years not to mention online the people and companies I work for (people who get pissed off at me online tend to retaliate by trying to get me fired from my jobs, and I don’t need the headache anymore); but basically the kinds of people I’ve been picking up this year as ongoing freelance clients are what are typically called “thought leaders,” with Malcolm Gladwell probably being the most famous example — people who write bestselling books about the intersection of business and intellectualism, then use the books’ popularity to speak at events like TED and SXSW, then use the popularity of the events to get paid gigs consulting for C-level executives at Fortune 500 companies, then use those consulting connections to interview famous CEOs for their next bestselling book, thus starting the cycle over again once very couple of years. Despite all the successes, these people are essentially just doing what I’ve been doing over the years, going it solo and working from home and with no office peers to fall back on when it comes to things like maintaining their newsletter subscription lists, their personal websites, their booking calendar, their Google Adwords, their podcast, their blog, etc; and I’ve been finding a lot of surprise success at getting hired by such people to basically do all those things for them, a job category I would’ve never realized even existed if I hadn’t stumbled ass-backwards into it this year.

I also decided this year to up my game over at my rare-book dealership at eBay, with more success than I was expecting. I’ve been collecting rare books since 2011, mostly as a personal hobby, and over the years have had maybe 20 to 40 of my books for sale online at any time; but this year I’ve been making a concentrated effort to get all of them finally photographed and listed, a daunting prospect since it takes around three hours to do each and every listing (that is, to do it correctly, with a dozen high-dozen photos and deep research on the book’s history, significance and previous sales records). As of today, though, I finally have almost 200 of my 300 books now listed; and more importantly, sales for 2018 is going to top just about $2,000 by the end of the year, about twice as much as the thousand bucks I was aiming for. For someone like me who lives off just $25,000 a year, that’s a significant amount of money, and way more interesting than $2,000 worth of secretarial work, a positive experience I’m hoping to build off of in 2019.

And what else? Well, it was a good year for spending a significant amount of quality time with my friend Carrie’s twin sons, including one of them coming and living at my place full-time for two and a half weeks, which was a much better and more fun experience than I was expecting, despite the sudden preponderance of way more Kanye West in my life than I ever wanted to have. This is important to me right now, because the boys were 15 this year, which means there’s only a few years left before they’re off to college and will never live full-time in Chicago as kids again. That makes me want to spend as much time with them as I can these days, which directly clashes with most teens’ wishes to spend as little time around the adults in their lives as humanly fucking possible; so I’m glad that I got to have the experiences I had, learning about the videogames now in their teenage lives and the friends now in their teenage lives and the music now in their teenage lives, without having to pull any teeth to get the information.

And other than these things, you can generally say that 2018 was a good year simply because of maintaining the status quo in many respects of my life, which always counts as a positive merely from not slipping into a worser position. I didn’t get any fatter this year, for example, although I also didn’t really get any thinner (still hovering between 185 and 190 pounds, when the goal for years has been 175); I still got in my Fitbit step count and bicycling goals most days, although I didn’t come close to my weightlifting or swimming goals; I meditated a few days per week, although not the seven days a week I would like to achieve in a perfect world; I generally ate healthily, but not as healthily as I could; I got to travel a bit, but not as much as I wanted; I maintained an even keel with my elderly parents, and finally convinced them to take their first Uber ride as a hopeful first step towards the day soon when they’ll no longer be able to drive, although I failed at convincing them to let my brother and me make their home more elderly-friendly. And perhaps most importantly, I maintained another year of strong filters and bans on all my online destinations so that I didn’t receive a single bit of news about Donald Trump and his latest crazy antics, which I suspect is the number-one reason why so many of my friends at Twitter keep proclaiming that 2018 Was The Worst, Just The Fucking Worst. All these things count as positive experiences merely because I deliberately worked on them, regardless of how successful they were.

So what’s on tap for 2019? Well, as always, instead of New Year’s resolutions, I actually created an entire year-long three-page detailed plan for myself, so let me just run down it right now and share the highlights with you…

—A one-year pause on all web development. For years now I’ve been paying $115 every single month in order to have a series of Wordpress builds through the hosting service WPEngine, but then haven’t built out any of the actual sites; so I’ve decided this year to get rid of the account and put all my development plans into deep freeze for the time being, especially since I no longer plan on using these as portfolio pieces in trying to get a full-time dev job. That’s why, for example, my personal journal is still appearing here at Medium.com, when I promised in my last update that it’d be switched over to a dedicated Wordpress site by now. (Obviously if you're seeing this, you know that I've recently started trying the federation-friendly minimalist blogging platform Write.as; but more on this in another post soon.) Also, hardcore fans will notice that the website for my old arts center, the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography, is now entirely offline, since I hadn’t updated it in years and it was essentially serving as an extremely expensive parking space for the 25 or so books that CCLaP still has for sale up at Amazon.

—New revenue opportunities. Inspired by my successes at “piecemeal revenue” in 2018, I’ve decided to push and expand in this direction even more in 2019. Specifically, I’ve decided to invent a new type of handmade bullet journal to sell at my Etsy store; although there’s a growing amount of mass-made notebooks for this suddenly hotter and hotter form of organizational system (which has gotten a big boost in recent months because of the inventor finally publishing his first full-length book on the subject), I’ve noticed that there are almost no cool crafty handmade versions, which I’m hoping will bring some new notice and new sales over at my Etsy store.

And I’m re-opening my personal chef service from my early thirties, “The Slacker Chef!” This was a little experiment I was convinced to try during one of my periods of unemployment when younger, basically cooking for other people’s dinner parties; the money was fantastic, but my heart wasn’t into it at the time because I wasn’t into all the work of going out and hunting up new clients every day. But now that I am in the habit of trawling for new clients every day, I’ve decided to revisit this idea for the first time in twenty years, and see if it can’t generate another couple thousands of dollars in revenue just like my rare books are doing. The more things I can do in my life that will make a thousand or two or three a year, the less I have to worry about freelancing in order to pay all my bills.

And speaking of which, I’m also going to try doing my first-ever physical live events as a rare book seller in 2019; specifically, I’ve decided to get a tax ID and join the Midwestern Antiquarian Booksellers Association, so that I can get a table at this coming year’s Chicago Book and Paper Fair and the Printers Row Lit Fest. I don’t have the slightest idea how much money events like these might bring in; but just to throw out a random number, if I could make a thousand dollars at each of these, that would effectively double my money next year from rare-book sales, from $2,000 to $4,000. That would be exciting, because collecting and selling rare books is easily the most fun thing I do for money these days, and I’d like to be doing a lot more of it if I could.

—New third-party tools to put it all together. Specifically, I’m signing up for a Shopify.com account in 2019, as a central place for selling everything I just mentioned; and I’ve already set up a weekly newsletter called “I Love You Robot” for disseminating new announcements regarding it all, since my activities are going to be spread out across so many different online and physical destinations next year. You can sign up for the newsletter right now at bit.ly/ILoveYouRobot, which on top of everything else will include the most fascinating 10 or 15 news items I linked to at Twitter that week. (It will also announce new journal entries here at my blog, if you’re not a person who uses RSS.)

—The #JPCHI25 Project. Next year will be my 25th anniversary of moving to Chicago! To celebrate, I recently put together a list of 100 “core things” that everyone should do in Chicago at least once before they die, a mix between a bunch of touristy things I haven’t done in decades (go to the top of the Sears Tower; eat at the Billy Goat; ride the Navy Pier ferris wheel; attend the Chicago Blues Festival), semi-touristy stuff that even locals tend to enjoy doing regularly (attend late-night shows at the Green Mill and Buddy Guy’s; eat at the Walnut Room; walk the entirety of the Art Institute; watch a Cubs game from a next-door rooftop bar), a shopping list of various famous but semi-obscure locations to visit (the Driehaus Museum; the Lincoln Square pedestrian mall; Garfield Park Conservatory; the Robie House; Nelson Algren Fountain), and a bunch of weirdo unique things that are fun to say you’ve done at least once (visit the last Chicago street still paved with wood bricks; stop by the Obama Kissing Rock in Hyde Park; attend the turtle races at Big Joe’s; bowl at the vintage hand-set Southport Lanes; see a movie at Facets; have a Malort at Old Town Ale House). I’ll be taking copious pictures at each destination, and tagging them all at Twitter, Instagram and Flickr with #JPCHI25, so I hope you’ll get to follow along all year. And speaking of which…

—My first-ever 52 Week Photography Challenge. For those who don’t know, I received my first-ever DSLR camera as an early Christmas present this year, my first high-end camera since I was a photography major in college thirty years ago; so I plan on throwing myself heavily into this new hobby in 2019, including participating in my first-ever 52 Week Photography Challenge. There will be much more about this at Instagram and Flickr throughout the next year, so I encourage you to follow along at those places for it all.

—New wellness goals. I’ve decided to try a year of tai chi instead of yoga in 2019, which I’m looking forward to; I’m planning on buying my first electric bicycle, which will hopefully let me bike more often and for longer distances now that I’ll be turning 50; I’m going to take my first class in American Sign Language, which it’s just time for now that my hearing is continuing to get worse and worse each other; and perhaps most significantly, I’m getting a driver’s license again for the first time since 1989, almost exclusively so that I can drive around in my parents’ suburban-scrawl community during my increasingly frequent trips down there, but also so that I’ll have access to a car-share program in Chicago, for the rare times I need a car here like the book fairs I’ll be participating in. As always, more on all these things here in this journal as 2019 continues.

—And a new computing system in my life, both in equipment and attitude. Another thing that’s happened recently is that my ten-year-old Macintosh desktop finally died, which is sad but actually lasted longer than I was expecting it to. Even low-end Macs are now just so ridiculously fucking expensive that I’ve decided to try something brand-new for 2019 instead, which is to switch full-time to Linux and start moving more and more of my computing life to cloud services. That will involve buying one of those Windows laptops with a touchscreen monitor that can be flipped backwards to “convert” it to a tablet; erasing Windows and installing Ubuntu; buying a 4K television during Amazon Prime Day next summer to serve as a new home monitor; installing open-source versions of my usual Adobe Creative Suite software, the main thing I’m currently missing by using my cheap little Chromebook right now instead of my broken Mac; buying an external solid state hard drive as a central portable location for all my daily files; and moving my workflow for documents more and more to my Google Drive, and for music to Spotify instead of downloaded MP3s and iTunes. (I actually did this part last week, and am really blown away already by how amazing Spotify’s recommendation service works; this will likely be the subject of my new journal entry here.) Will this finally let me wean myself off the increasingly sour teats of Apple, Microsoft and Adobe? Well, it won’t fucking hurt!

So that’s pretty much it for now; although I should mention that another part of this plan is to start updating this journal a lot more often, now that I’m not sitting around endlessly waiting for a Wordpress conversion that will never come, so I hope you’ll have a chance to come by on a regular basis during 2019 for more. As always, I can be reached at ilikejason@gmail.com, and would love to hear from you about advice or invitations regarding any of these projects. Here’s hoping 2019 will be a chance to build on the successes I had this year, and that your own goes better than apparently the shitty 2018 most of you had!

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