Do you remember fashion plates?
I never had them, and I don’t remember who did, but I remember somebody had them when I was a kid. (Cousins maybe?) They popped into my head recently as a certain gremlin muse was Frankenstein-ing another batch of ideas together. I had the thought that cutting parts out of multiple story ideas and sticking them together to make something else reminded me of fashion plates—mix and match the different outfit pieces and patterns to make something similar but different.
Anyway, Basil is a putz.
Also it’s snowing.
We’re in the middle of a week-long blizzard situation that has people invoking the Halloween Blizzard of 1991. We’re not getting that much, but it’s super windy, causing sizable snowdrifts that certainly make it look like we just got three feet of snow.
Last week we had a day where it rained steady all day long (IN FEBRUARY! IN MINNESOTA!) and that helped melt some of the heaping mountains of snow we have sitting around here, but it also highlighted that the sewer drain at the end of our patch of street was completely blocked by one of those mountains and we were developing quite the lake over a thick layer of ice that was destined to do a whole lot of damage. So the HOA called out the snow removal company to fix the problem they helped cause. They sent out a Bobcat to break down the snowbank, which mostly got dumped in the neighbor’s yard (or down the hill toward the parking lot of the apartments next door), and it took a good two hours to get through it all. Bob and I spent a chunk of that time standing at our bedroom window watching the action, because who doesn’t like to watch a tiny Bobcat massacring a giant snowbank? And now they’re just going to fill it back up again with this current batch.
I opened a text file with plans to create a very basic webpage and found myself staring at the blinking cursor realizing I have lost so much of the web design knowledge I used to have piled up in my brain. So many things that I once barely had to think about are just gone. Part of that is just lack of web design in my daily activities, but also WordPress has spoiled me in not having to create pages from scratch. Everything I look up for basic formatting is prefaced with NOBODY USES THAT ANYMORE, LOSER, but doesn’t really explain why and I just don’t have the mental capacity to sift through a few hundred AI-generated websites with incoherent articles in order to find the one site still written by an actual human with two brain cells to rub together. If I hadn’t failed out of [online] college, I’d have a BA in web design and based on the internet claims of EVERYTHING YOU’RE TRYING TO DO IS WRONG, I wonder how much of what I would have learned would still be useful more than a decade later.
Nowadays I know I could take specific online classes from various sources to learn exactly what I’m trying to do, but I know at this juncture I’d be wasting my money because my brain wouldn’t be able to keep up. (Which is the same reason I failed at college too. But at least that led to the ADHD diagnosis?) So instead I stare blankly at a text file trying to remember how to create a style sheet and link it in an HTML document. If that’s even a thing anymore. The internet says I’m an idiot for even thinking about it. There’s some forum site I inevitably end up on during every search where no matter the question, there are multiple replies to the effect of That’s so stupid, why would you even do that? mixed in with the most convoluted block of code that puts the source code of Nestcape Composer pages to shame.
My brain is suddenly flailing down a nostalgia trail remembering that program. Woof.
Composer would put an obscene amount of unnecessary HMTL tags into a document that made it an absolute nightmare to decipher the source code. BUT—that was how I inevitably taught myself basic HTML way back in my early days on ye olde internet. I dug through the source of pages I had created in Composer and recreated them without all of the unholy bloat. I did the same kind of thing in teaching myself CSS when style sheets became the standard. I should dig up some of my old web page files and start rifling around to see if I can’t figure out what it is I’m trying to do without having to consult the steaming pile that is Google search results.
Anyroad.
I started writing this last night, walked away from it several times, changed my mind what I wanted to write about, cut out several paragraphs more than once, and finally reached the fuckit stage wherein I read it one last time and click publish.
Also, Snow Update:
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My Own Soul’s Warning The Killers |