So here it is, the beginning of November. A lot of work in /lexicon and /lifebox, and at the moment it’s not clear what the blog is doing, beyond helping me remember where I’ve put stuff. I may return to thinking of it as a way to keep like-minded others (whoever they might be) updated with my doings and discoveries and curiosities, but I have no idea if there’s anybody out there …
Lots of activity in the last couple of months, unrecorded in the blog. A lot of my daily link-farming is captured via my August 2025 page (Collecting the Portentous and the Exemplary)
Lately I’ve been thinking about Legacy and the where and why and how of collecting, curating, displaying. Today I looked through the homepage links (oook.info) and made a page of links to pages found/rediscovered that trace some of the ways I’ve used html to track my own thinking… some from W&L years, some from the last 20 years, and even one dating back to 1971. The page needs reorganization (perhaps chronological, maybe topical) and …explication, and it hints at further delvings into my past, so it’s just a start.
About 3 weeks ago I got a request from Stephanie Aude, the Local History and Genealogy librarian at the Andover Public Library, to use a map I had drawn (in 1976) of the world around me when I was 10-11-12 (1953-1956) and lived in Shawsheen, a village that is part of Andover. In short order I volunteered to talk to the genealogy resources group at the Library, and the Event took place on April 10th… and was a grand success from my point of view. http://oook.info/etc/Andover.html has the materials I prepared for the presentation (along with links to various other bits I had gathered and shown and talked about). To my great surprise and pleasure one of the participants (Alice Mooney, as she then was) was a classmate from the Grade 6 class picture. Small world, as they say.
Along the way I revisited material Broot and I had gathered for a project we did on our own families in 2001, and was pleased with its eloquence.
As seems to have become routine, I’ve set up pages to gather links to revisit from April incoming, YouTube videos of particular salience, and videos specific to the current contretemps with Canada. And now I’ll get back to work on the Lexicon project.
March 2025 links begun, and March 2025 YouTube videos too.
This mode of curation/gatheration seems to be working pretty well.
I’ve started to build oook.info/lexicon/ to contain the project that I’ve been gathering material for at oook.info/etc/lexicon.html. I expect it will summarize a sprawling domain of explorations, just right for a winter month.
and
harvest of links for February 2025
and
beginnings of the Lexicon Project (a workspace/logfile for a current enthusiasm)
and
January 2025 links updated
January 2025 AI links collected (extracted from January 2025 links)
YouTube saved (2023-) updated
I intend to continue this sort of monitoring of the multiple streams of Incoming, insh’allah,
I’m working on the year’s-end curation for 2024, with the intention to enhance retrievability for documents I’ve collected and created in several media and various form factors.
By laying these things out for inspection via web pages, I can derive some better understanding of where I’ve been in the last year, and perhaps develop a map of the landscape of rabbit holes I’ve visited. And maybe even construct a sense of What It All Means, and whither next to wander…
Parking these links in the blog will remind me where I’ve squirreled them away. I mean to update them as they are refined: weeded, sorted, commented… Here’s the current corps de ballet:
…which seems to be an effective means to keep track of links I grabbed and imagined I’d get back to sometime.
…where we find the personal inner resources to stay balanced,
to avoid unhealthy anger and depression,
and remain engaged in the world…
My response to the problem yesterday was to write Advice du jour and send it to a few like-minded others. Today, part of my answer is to MAKE stuff, to bring things into being… which is what the last blog post was all about. So here’s something from today:
Positively jovial, jovially positive. But this one might better reflect the sensations of doomscrollers:
And one wants to collect Zeitgeisty images as they flitter by…
