Woman with glasses and stars antenna reading a book

June.07 - Wed-Fri Log of Stuff That Happened (highlight was seeing Kevin James Thornton!)

Okay a quick intro because wow this got out of hand...(also, using View Source might be fun)

On Wednesday (2025.06.04) I put up this little site and announced it, got some fun and surprising attention about it, and then realized I had a ton of homework to get done. I'm not saying I was avoiding homework in order to play with my website or anything. But I knew I had to take a break from Mastodon for a few days, to both recover from social overwhelm and also get some paper writing done, so I thought I'd put my would-be Mastodon posts into this blog post.

And then, instead of a page of little observations or side notes, I actually started writing some stuff. I don't usually do this, I think I'm really out of the habit, but it felt good so I kept going. And now....it's a lot...

Which is to say, the post below is way longer than I expected! Not an apology, but a warning.

Here we go....

Wednesday: Unexpected pats were rewarding

I woke up on Wednesday and checked Mastodon, and my post about making this tiny little blog had nearly 300 Likes and 100+ Boosts, and I’d gotten 20 new followers. WHAT THE HECK?!?

I hadn’t put a hashtag in the post or anything, but it was public. Still, I had no idea it would get that much attention?!? I figure people on Mastodon are very techie and like very techie things, and so wouldn't be interested in my Volkswagen Bus of a website , unless it had some amazing CSS or something (which it does not).

The VW bus crack is actually probably accurate! Someone described my site as being like an old Geocities site, and I love that. Perhaps the response on Mastodon is mainly nostalgia. A lot of folks just seemed delighted by it, it was so sweet. A couple friends DMed me and said this inspired them to think about making their own simple site. So cool! This motivates me to write up my reasons for doing this, and a list of the tools I used.

I gave likes or thanks to all the comments, and then had to take a break for a few days to charge up my social battery. (Or, as I like to say, "regain mana" - the few years that I played World of Warcraft irrevocably installed the "mana" metaphor into my head .).

Links for today:

Kevin James Thornton

Three people leaning over a table, getting a selfie, in a dark comedy club. They're wearing masks and smiling, though you can't tell.
Jaime took this photo, but Kevin takes audience photos and you can just barely see me (I can't see Jaime or Greg). I thought we were the only three people masked in the whole place. But then as I walked to the bathroom, I saw a masked young woman at a back table, we nodded like we'd just recognized each other at some secret society meeting. And then, AND THEN, a woman at our table (they had us all squished together), she put her mask on about halfway through the set. It was a Vogmask like mine, and I'd like to hope that seeing us mask made her feel less alone, and so more confident in masking.

On Wednesday night we want to see Kevin James Thornton at a local comedy club with our friend Jaime (who just wrote a book!). I don't use Instagram anymore but I still check in on friends once in awhile, and I love Kevin's account.

He does a lot of comedy about growing up gay in a very religious household, and makes a ton of references to experiences in church youth groups - where I also spent a lot of time. I lost it tonight when he said, "Some of you will remember youth groups in the 90's? Do you remember the Aussie Scrunch Spray? The Drakaar Noir?" I immediately remembered what those smelled like, what a trip. I had such a hard time in my youth groups, but geez I was oblivious at the time to the closeted members. So much damage done by that culture.

He related this story of a friend from his youth group holding hands with his prom date, and how this was borderline scandalous because of the purity culture. "You were supposed to think about everyone you dated as a potential spouse," he said, "so you wouldn't hold hands with someone because that was like holding hands with another man's wife." Greg turned to look across the table at me to see if this had been true at my church, and I nodded. I can remember being told, as a 16-year-old in youth group (circa 1990), that whatever I did with a guy, I had to be aware that I'd have to explain that later, to my future husband, so don't do anything you think your future husband wouldn't want you to do.

Seriously. We were told this. It's as horrifying to write now as it was back then, hearing it directly from the youth pastor. Marriage is special and important, and also, your literal human body belongs to a man you haven't met yet, or maybe you'll be lucky enough to marry the 17-year-old guy sitting next to you in youth group who just burped the alphabet to resounding applause - either way, it's their feelings about your sexual experiences you should be considering as you move through adolescence, not your own.

I mean, joke's on them, I was so shy in high school that I never dated anyone. But Kevin made the point in his act of saying, gently, that a lot of these early lessons about sexuality stayed with us, shaming us even into adulthood. I might be a weird exception, I don't think it exactly stayed with me, to be honest. I was all tomboy, cutoffs and surf shirts, I had no game. It was hard to internalize a lot of that stuff because it just didn't seem to apply to dateless me - the weirdly protective nature of crushingly low teenage girl self-esteem (don't worry, I had other fun trauma to contend with).

What I did internalize was that evangelical youth pastors are creepy af, which, accurate. Now though, as an adult, I can say yes, I've had a lot of friends, both straight and queer, who have talked about the mental toxic sludge those old messages left behind. Some were definitely more hurt than others, but all of them wish they'd never encountered it. Religion can do so much damage. I'm so glad we got out of there. I'm so glad Kevin did, too. Happy Pride, everyone. 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

On Thursday, I did homework and realized my definition of demisexual was wrong

I'd gotten a bit behind, and spent most of my day catching up. This took me well into the night, which isn't great for my sleep but is stellar for my output. Sitting in the literal dark, in bed, body doubling with the moon; it's the best way to study. I got three assignments done, including two papers. Outfreakingstanding.

Also sliding this tidbit in here - conversation with trans friend about sexualities and preferences and all that - apparently I'm demisexual? I had no idea! I thought demi was "the same as ace", because someone literally said those exact words to me years ago, and I, being a new soul who tends to believe everything she's told, just went with it.

I looked it up and yeah, it sure sounds like me (my husband was like, "that's so obviously you", and then my kid said that too, so...?), but I want to find some demis to chat with to be sure that what I'm seeing is accurate. If you're demi and are open to chatting about such things, lemme know!

Other outfreakingstanding Thursday events:

I found these two beauties in the garden:

Two pink flowers, outside, viewed from above.

My dad got to see Eagle come in to roost:

Photo by Richard Butler, a.k.a my dad

What a gorgeous boat. She's a training ship for Coast Guard officers. She's visiting for a few days for the Portland Rose Festival. I wish I could come visit! I really wish I could watch her go under the Steel Bridge.

In case anyone dare look at those three masts and think they're spindly things, and this is not that impressive, can I just say, those are steel masts, and also, this is what Eagle looks like when under sail:

Thanks to Petty Officer Third Class Matthew Thieme for this lovely public domain photo.

If that doesn't make your heart skip a beat, well then.....you.......probably don't like boats as much as I do.

Curious what all the sails do and why it's rigged like that? This site has way more going on than I'd like, but the actual sail-related content is good. (Speaking as a fan, not an expert.)

Cal seems to be doing some "Cat on Hat" live show:

His box is RIGHT THERE. It's literally right there. But he's laying on my hat. He doesn't even fit, and he knows it. He's embarrassed, obviously, as anyone would be. But the last thing you're going to get a cat to do is admit their most recent idea was a bad one. So he's trying to make it work, or at least, look like it could be working, very soon. When I started taking the photo, he even began purring.

The second I left the room, he jumped down.

On Friday, I did still more homework

It was not very exciting, except for the fact that I did so much of it (staying off Mastodon is helpful, uh oh!). And the sun was out, it was gorgeous all day, so I just focused on the writing and ignored the news. This was a good choice.

At the end of the day, I made lentil soup and listened to political historian Heather Cox Richardson give her thoughts on recent events (her YouTube video). This is always a good idea. If you're going to dive in, she's such a great place to start.

Today is Saturday

And already I have enough stuff for a whole post so I'll write that up for a separate entry! :)

Thoughts on blogging this way...

Okay, this post is done! So long, but done! So now in order to publish it, I have to rev up and get ready to try and ADJUST MY RSS feed, so the folks who subscribed actually see a notification of this new post. I hope I can do this right a second time!

Maybe you wanna try this?

It's been really fun to take a little break and just write about my days here, in this file. This could be a nice solution for folks who wish they blogged more but are also trying not to spend so much of their time on their computers. Instead of constantly posting updates to social media (nothing wrong with this, but just if you're looking for ways to go longer between phone checks), you can make notes in something like Ulysses, which syncs across devices, and then put them together into one big summary post at the end of the week .

It's so easy....

After that, all you have to do is copy and paste that into your favorite HTML text editor, successfully recall the keyboard shortcut for adding paragraph tags around each paragraph so it doesn't take you half an hour, put your photos into the right folders and then make links to those, remembering that / goes to the root and ../ just goes one layer back even though that seems totally counter-intuitive, also remembering that one app exports your photos as .jpg and another exports them as .jpeg so be sure to check which one it is or else the image will break, and then test it on your internal server app to make sure it doesn't look weird, and then make a link to it from the main blog, and then remember to go into the rss.xml and copy and paste the last entry, adjusting the date and time, also remember to check the weekday is right since fully four people told you about the broken date in the first post (which was lovely, thank you debuggers!), and then upload all that to the Neocities site, and then test that it's working, and then open up Mastodon and make a post about it just in case you're wrong and your RSS IS actually broken, and now you need one of your long suffering software-writing friends to look it over.