Following the tips in How to draw when you don't have time by Javi can draw!, I have been drawing trees. The video is 6.5 minutes long so it's easy to fit in. From the video:
Your main goal is to create a habit of drawing for drawing's sake.
I think my favourite simple tree is this one. I like the way it gives me a little bit of a feeling of leaves being in front or behind, and it looks like something I can get the hang of drawing quickly.
My favourite tree drawn from life is this one. I can think about where I was sitting when I drew it.
It's hard to pick my favourite from a tutorial or a reference photo. Maybe this one. I like the way it has light and dark.
One of the things I like about going through elementary education as a parent is thinking about my processes for making sense of things and how I can help A+ figure out her own way to do that. A+ is in grade 4, and she has a research project that's due in a few weeks. I helped her take notes on different websites using a stack of index cards. The next time she lets me help her with homework,1 I can show her how to sort those index cards into piles by topic. Then she can take each pile and figure out their sequence.
Index card sorting is the slightly-larger version of the way I used to help her with writing by letting her brainstorm a whole bunch of keywords in any order she wants. Ideas for a paragraph or a school essay fit on a page, but a longer report needs more space and tactile experience. I write keywords as she dictates them, we move things around to cluster similar ideas, and then she can pick whatever she wants to write about first (or jump into the middle) and thread her sentences through those words. Get the chunks down first, get them to be the right size for your brain, and then figure out the flow. Someday I'll show her mindmapping programs (or even maybe Org Mode!). For now, index cards and drawing programs help us focus on ideas without getting lost in interfaces. She's still far from making her own Zettelkasten. I don't even know if that'll suit her brain. But if I show her the ideas in miniature and shift some of my thinking to forms she can observe, maybe that'll give her some tools that work for where she is right now. Like the way physical math manipulatives make abstract numbers more real, I hope that that moving ideas around helps her think about thinking.
Cognitive load
This challenge of helping A+ figure out how to make sense of things and convert that understanding into a form her teacher can grade is similar to something I've been working on for many years. My mind finds it hard to settle on one topic. It likes to jump from one thing to another. I'm learning to accept that.
I like writing non-linearly.
I like connecting ideas.
To write something sensible, I sometimes need to summarize ideas enough so that I can fit them within my working memory.
(In one blog post?
On one page?
On their own index cards?)
Too much cognitive load means the ideas fall apart.
There's no getting around intrinsic cognitive load, but sometimes it's easier to look at smaller chunks.
I can get around extraneous cognitive load by rewriting or redrawing things to cut out the fluff, like the way business books are padded with lots of filler.
Managing my germane load–my working memory, the particular ways of encoding the knowledge into schemas in my head or in my notes that will work for my brain–is the work I get to focus on.
Figuring things out
I use blog posts, sketches, and hyperlinks to chunk thoughts into building blocks.
Then I need to figure out the order I want to discuss them in.
It's difficult to run a single coherent line through the ideas.
Sometimes I experiment with tangents in side notes or collapsible sections.
Sometimes I can't get the ideas all straightened out. Sketchnotes and maps sometimes help show the spatial relationship between ideas, when I can squish things down into two(ish) dimensions.2
Even if I had all the continuous quiet time I wanted, I'd still need these rough notes to get things out of my head and into a form I can look at. It's okay for them to not be coherent and polished. I figure out what I think by writing and drawing. This is the doing of it. Other people's essays also evolve out of notes that are gradually fleshed out. There's hope for it yet. Slosh enough mnemonic slurry around in various buckets, and something interesting might precipitate.
The idea of an atomic note is nice, but I'm not there yet. For now, I think I'm better off letting my mind explore these branches instead of pruning things down to a singular focus.
In my original post I joked that my blog is often full of nonsensical or meandering digressions.
This is because I have an odd sense of humour, but it’s also fun making connections between disparate things.
…
Digressions and tangents are one of the key ways that human writing is interesting.
I’ve gone down so many wonderful rabbitholes just by reading a digression note on a blog I first read because we had a common interest.
Maybe it's okay to leave these little signposts in case someone wants to take those forks in the path.
This reminded me of busybody, hunter, and dancer archetypes for curiosity.
Sometimes people are curious about lots of different things, like a bee visiting different flowers.
Sometimes people are focused on a particular topic and want to know as much as they can about it.
Sometimes the joy is in the leap from one topic to another, like when interesting blog posts are juxtaposed in my feed reader or my to-think-about list3.
Connecting one sentence to another is the job of the transition words that A+ learns about in class: first, then, finally.
My connections tend to be along the lines of "Similarly…." It's easy for me to connect the ideas that feel the same.
"But" is an interesting transition word I want to use more. It surprises. I wonder where I can practise noticing when two ideas contrast, especially when two seemingly-contradictory things can be true,4 or when there's a general idea but a specific exception. It's not just about looking for an opposite, but thinking more critically about things and seeing the gaps. To practise this, though, I have to be comfortable with writing more for myself than for readers who might not be able to follow the uncertain not-quite-trails I meander down. I'm in good company. Jerry's Brain is quite the knowledgebase, but it might be hard for anyone to use if they're not Jerry. It's better to start, even when the beginning is awkward and I know I'll still need to slog through the plateau of mediocrity.
An example
Henrik Karlsson's recent preview of a paywalled post on agentic fragments had this:
Where I saw a sweater, she saw a thread temporarily shaped as one—it could just as well be a scarf, a pair of socks, a hat, or six gloves. She saw more degrees of freedom than I did, and acted on it.
… which branched off myriad thoughts: MacGyver, my dad's Swiss Army Knife, Henrik's essay on agency? The fun of building things in Emacs, the things I love about free/libre/open source software, the master builder scenes in The LEGO Movie? The way my sister unravels her health challenges and turns them into poignant reflections? Sewing and re-making things, Jacob Lund Fisker's book Early Retirement Extreme, and the skills I want to get better at?5 (Even though I'm starting to have more time for myself, I don't find myself using that time for practising sewing or picking up woodworking again. If anything, at the moment, I'm probably focused on getting by with less stuff instead of more.) Maybe this will eventually be multiple posts, like the way I responded to the IndieWeb Carnival theme of "Take Two" with three posts.6 Maybe I need to lightly sketch out my thoughts with drawings and words until I figure out what I want to say, like moving index cards around on the floor.
Into the unknown
Figure 1: Connecting the dots
I wonder what better could look like. There's that meme of connecting the dots, when someone is trying to show a complex theory in an incoherent way. When connections are too lightly supported or too overwhelming in number, it only makes sense to me and not to other people. (Maybe not even to my future self.) A good connection, on the other hand, might lead to "Hmm, I hadn't thought of it that way," or maybe the insights you can get by extending a metaphor. Like when you start to fill in a visual framework and it guides you to think about things you might have missed. Mashing up ideas can reveal different aspects of them: similarities, differences, gaps.
There's something here, I think. A digression doesn't have to be to something I know. A connection can be to an amorphous question I haven't fleshed out. If I mash ideas together with enough energy, what particles come out of the collision? If I connect the ideas that feel similar, can I begin to sense the lacunae, the questions I may want to ask?
Here are more signposts to things I'm still figuring out: not so much "Here there be dragons," but pointers to territory I've yet to explore.
I'm backing off from homework assistance right now so that I can help her develop autonomy and I don't overwhelm A+ with fretting. Perhaps this index card technique will come in handy for her science project, or perhaps it will wait until her brain is ready.
Building on Visual vocabulary practice - ABCs, I
decided to make a regular grid that I could then
automatically split up into individual images. I
used Emacs's svg.el to generate the grid. I
started with 4 rows of 7 boxes to match the
alphabet example, but I realized that using 5 rows
of 7 boxes each would let me reuse the grid for a
monthly calendar. I numbered the boxes to make it
easier to double-check if the lists line up, but I
can write over the numbers for things like dates
since the background won't be exported.
I used convert icon-grid.svg icon-grid.png to
make it from the SVG produced by the following
code.
Code for producing the template
(require'svg)
(defvarmy-dot-grid-boxes-params'(:num-rows 5
:num-cols 7
:dot-size 3
:line-width 3
:dot-spacing 60
:grid-color"#a6d2ff":row-size 6
:col-size 6
:text-size 50
:margin-top 2))
(cl-defunmy-dot-grid-boxes-template (&key (num-rows 5)
(num-cols 7)
(dot-size 3)
(line-width 3)
(dot-spacing 60)
(grid-color "#a6d2ff")
(row-size 6)
(col-size 6)
(text-size 50)
(margin-top 2))
"Prepare an SVG with a dot grid within a table with solid gridlines.Each dot is a solid circle of DOT-SIZE filled with GRID-COLOR spaced DOT-SPACING apart.The gridlines are also GRID-COLOR. They should divide the image into ROWS and COLUMNS, which are ROW-SIZE * DOT-SPACING and COL-SIZE * DOT-SPACING apart.The table has a top margin with the dot grid, and this is MARGIN-TOP * DOT-SPACING tall.All dots are centered on their x, y coordinates.The rest of the image's background is white."
(let* ((width (* num-cols col-size dot-spacing))
(height (* dot-spacing (+ margin-top (* num-rows row-size))))
(margin-top-height (* margin-top dot-spacing))
(svg (svg-create width height)))
(dotimes (row (+ (* num-rows row-size) margin-top))
(dotimes (col (1+ (* num-cols col-size)))
(let ((x (* col dot-spacing))
(y (* row dot-spacing)))
(svg-circle svg x y dot-size
:fill-color grid-color
:stroke-width 0))))
(when (> text-size 0)
(dotimes (i (* num-rows num-cols))
(let ((x (* (% i num-cols) col-size dot-spacing))
(y (+ margin-top-height (* (/ i num-cols) row-size dot-spacing))))
(svg-text svg
(number-to-string (1+ i))
:x x :y (+ y text-size)
:fill-color grid-color
:font-size text-size
:stroke-width 0))))
(dotimes (col (1+ num-cols))
(let ((x (* col col-size dot-spacing)))
(svg-line svg x margin-top-height x height
:stroke-color grid-color
:stroke-width line-width)))
(dotimes (row (1+ num-rows))
(let ((y (+ margin-top-height (* row row-size dot-spacing))))
(svg-line svg 0 y width y
:stroke-color grid-color
:stroke-width line-width)))
svg))
With that function defined, I can make a template with:
I used that template to draw a bunch of little doodles. The Noteful app I use on my iPad makes it easy to import a template and then export my drawings without including the template.
(If this blog post is out of date, you can check the Dot-grid box templates section in my config for my current code.)
Once I imported the template into Noteful, it was
easy to draw using fragments of time. 35 boxes are
a lot, but each icon was just a few minutes of
drawing, and I enjoyed seeing the progress.
me
A+
pizza
mom and kid
flower
witch hat
pencil
chopsticks
rice bowl
peach
pillow
desk fan
folding fan
pumpkin
jack o' lantern
ghost
taxes
broomstick
bubbles
candy
bow
bao
bowl
strawberry
tomato
cherries
cake slice
cake
mug
teacup
tempest in a teapot
skull
poison
cauldron
tree
baseball cap
propeller beanie
top hat
magic
magic wand
cape
playing card
hanging towel
folded towels
soap dispenser
bar soap
picnic table
picnic basket
bread
croissant
donut
donut
sandwich
soup bowl
rice and eggs
oatmeal
From "How to Draw Cute Doodles and Illustrations" - Kamo
2025-09-29-05
enjoyment
crying
happy or asleep
making a mistake
sleepy
yum or cheeky
cheerful or excited
smiling
confusion
anger
unsettled
discomfort
front view
rear view
side view
sitting on a chair
teacher
baby
kids (1-3)
kids (4-5)
walking
running
jumping
raising a hand
sitting on the floor
swinging
singing
drawing
sunny
rain
cloudy
windy
stormy
snow
moon and stars
Splitting up the drawings into individual components
Because I kept all my doodles within the
template's boxes, it was easy to split up the
images into individual files. First, I needed the
text for all the labels. Sometimes I typed this in
manually, and sometimes I used Google Cloud Vision
to extract the text (editing it a little bit to
put it in the right order and fix misrecognized
text). Then I used Emacs Lisp to read the labels
from the text file, calculate the coordinates, and
use ImageMagick to extract that portion of the
image into a file. I used filenames based on the
label of the individual icon and the ID of the
image it came from.
I really liked being able to write code to extract
and name images all in one go. If you don't want
to dive into Emacs Lisp, though, you can slice up
a large image into small ones using ImageMagick.
I had worked on a similar visual vocabulary
project in 2013, but I had made it as a shared
notebook in Evernote. That's gone now, and I can't
remember if I backed it up or where I would've
saved a backup to. Ah well, no harm in starting
again, with files under my control.
Looking up images
Now that I'd broken down the images into labelled
components, I wanted to be able to quickly look up
icons from a web browser; my own version of The
Noun Project. First, I exported the label information
into a JSON.
Code for processing a sketch and updating the index
My curves are shaky. I'm mostly learning to ignore
that and draw anyway. Good thing redoing them is
a matter of a two-finger tap with my left
hand, and then I can redraw until it feels mostly
right. I try up to three times before I say, fine,
let's just go with that.
I often draw with my iPad balanced on my lap,
so there's an inherent wobbliness to it. I think
this is a reasonable trade-off. Then I can keep
drawing cross-legged in the shade at the
playground instead of sitting at the table in the
sun. The shakiness is still there when I draw on a
solid table, though. I have a Paperlike screen
protector, which I like more than the slippery
feel of the bare iPad screen. That helps a little.
It's possible to cover it up and pretend to
confidence that I can't draw with. I could smooth
out the shakiness of my curves by switching to
Procreate, which has more stylus sensitivity
settings than Noteful does. A+ loves the way
Procreate converts her curves to arcs. She moves
the endpoints around to where she wanted to put
them. I'm tempted to do the same, but I see her
sometimes get frustrated when she tries to draw
without that feature, and I want to show her the
possibilities that come with embracing
imperfection. It's okay for these sketches to be a
little shaky. These are small and quick.
They don't have to be polished.
The Internet says to draw faster and with a looser
grip, and that lots of practice will build fine
motor skills. I'm not sure I'll get that much
smoother. I think of my mom and her Parkinson's
tremors, and I know that time doesn't necessarily
bring improvement. But it's better to keep trying
than to shy away from it. Maybe as I relax more
into having my own time, working on my own things
and moving past getting things done, I'll give
myself more time for drawing exercise, like
filling pages with just lines and circles.
Reflections on sources
I had fun coming up with words and drawing them. I
could start with whatever was in front of me and
go from there. I used my phone to look up the
occasional reference image, like the heart.
Sometimes A+ suggested things to draw. Sometimes
she even took over.
The books were handy when I didn't feel like
thinking much. I could just reproduce the
already-simplified drawings. I often felt like I
still wanted to tweak things a bit more to make
them feel like my own, though, which was a useful
way to figure out more about what I like.
Instead of mimicking other people's sketches, I
can mine my sketchnotes and pull out the concepts
I tend to think about a lot. If I've drawn them in
Noteful, I can even copy them from their original
sketches, resize them, and make the lines a
consistent thickness. If I've drawn them
elsewhere, it's easy enough to redraw.
Building a visual library is a great way to learn how to actually draw things.
I'm curious about using this 30-minute drawing exercise to start paying attention to a few things, and maybe using the shrimp method if there's something I really want to nail down.
Visual mnemonic links might be a way to explore the connections between things as I wander around ideas (even though this video is way more advanced than I am).
Next steps
I think I'll keep drawing these visual vocabulary
practice sketches, focusing more on my own ways of
drawing. It's fun. I have 324 icons at the moment.
I wonder what the collection will be like when I
have a thousand terms in it.
On the Emacs side, it might be
interesting to quickly add a related doodle to the
margin of a blog post, or to look up or copy a
personal reference image as I untangle my thoughts
in a sketch. I'm tempted to write some Emacs Lisp
that searches for these terms in my draft blog
posts and adds a little hint whenever it finds a
match. Another small piece of code might identify
recurring nouns and verbs in recent posts and
suggest those if I haven't drawn them yet. Could be fun.
When A+ saw what I was doing, she asked me to swap
out my meeting icon from "people around a table"
to her online meetings at virtual school. She even
added details: "This is the kid with the Minecraft
background, this is the kid with big
headphones…" I enjoyed watching her in this
state of playful focus. I wonder what else I can
draw that she might have fun taking over.
"Meeting" is my favourite one in this set, but
since that's mostly A+'s, my next favourite is
"freeze." Canada gets even colder than -20C, but
for me, -20C is definitely stay inside weather.
I've also been enjoying Kamo's books, like How to
Draw Cute Doodles and Illustrations. Her style
reminds me of the Illustration School series by Sachiko
Umoto, which I also liked. I think I tend towards
simple and approachable rather than realistic or
technically impressive. Learning how to draw
concrete things might help me get better at
drawing abstract things. It's fun to slow down and
pay attention to more details, too. Turns out I'd
been drawing guitar holes in the wrong place all
this time. Now I know!
I keep most of my notes in text files. This is great for searching, but the sameness of the typography makes things blur together.
I have to read a lot to remember what things felt like, and I still feel so much is missing. Some people can evoke lush word-pictures. I'm not there yet.
Lately I've been giving myself more time to draw, to colour, to doodle.
"Today: A+ kept giving me hugs as we walked home from the supermarket."
Even my simple sketches give me a surprisingly good sense of what I felt, what I cared about.
Comics are very expressive. I wonder how they do that.
How do they draw something so specific and yet so resonant?
I take a tangled thought, coax a bit of it into a drawing, and see where that takes me.
"A drawing is simply a line going for a walk." - Paul Klee
Sometimes I do an audio braindump to feel my way around it or to capture lots of details. That gives me a wall of text. Too much, and at the same time, not enough.
I might try to make an outline and expand it, but I often lose steam.
I like organizing and fleshing out the sketch. Drawing it is fun.
Then I can write the text. I often add lots of details and links. Sometimes I feel lost in the weeds. The sketch becomes my map.
I want to finish writing so that you can see my sketch!
(and so it makes sense to you and my future self)
Sometimes I just keep playing with the drawing until something interesting emerges.
I've been drawing more lately. It's slow, but more
fun. I like looking at my sketches from years ago.
I think I will like these ones years from now.
I feel like drawings do a good job of reminding me
what I feel about a topic, why I want to write
about it, and what the overall shape of the topic
is, which is important so that I don't run out of
steam a couple thousand words into a post.
The drawing also encourages me to finish the
post so that I can put it out there.
I find when I look back over these notes that the memories really come flooding back in really high detail because then, I spent a little more time documenting when I [relive it].
Practical skill building and application of sketchnoting and visual thinking (Troy Schubert). I think the section on "Deeper Thinking: Cliché to Metaphor" might be good for expanding my visual vocabulary, and figure 31 (Polarity Management – Results of Self-Facilitation) reminds me of how I like to use sketches to explore my thoughts.
There's a conversation 1 about whether blogging
is lonely
and I wanted to reflect on that
from the perspective of 24ish years
of sharing notes on my
idiosyncratic interests.
Blog conversations remind me
of the Great Conversation
between book authors2
sometimes with centuries
in between. In contrast, blogs.
are quick, open, convivial.
When it comes to developing ideas,
I like public writing more than
the ephemeral cacophany of
in-person conversations,
social media @replies
or private e-mails.
My notes are often for my present understanding
and sometimes for my future selves.
If they resonate with others: bonus!
I think this might be a useful way to think about it.
Write out of self-interest.
Leave the door open for serendipity
Then it's not about
"No one's liking or commenting"
or even
"Why can't I find other people like me"
It's more like:
I'll keep exploring and taking notes, because it's fun.
Maybe I'll bump into others and swap notes someday. Who knows?
There's a conversation about feeling lonely while
blogging that echoes through the years. Here's a
recent instance: Do blogs need to be so lonely? -
The History of the Web; I also liked The silent
applause | Robert Birming and Blogs don’t need to
be so lonely – Manu. Me, I mostly write for
myself, and I don't feel particularly lonely doing
so. It's a pleasant surprise whenever I hear from
someone, but it's not my main goal. I'm content to
plod along, trying to untangle my thoughts and
leave some breadcrumbs for my future self. This
has been very handy not only for technical posts,
but also for things like being able to remember
what it was like to be a twenty-something. Writing
into the quiet without expecting a reply is like
enjoying a comfortably silent beach and
occasionally being delighted when you discover
someone else's message in a bottle.
Blog conversations are so much faster than book
conversations. We don't have to pass through
publishing gatekeepers, we don't have to wait
years… just ideas bouncing back and forth.
Marvelous.
Commenting is easier than writing from scratch, so
it would be nice to give people that space to
share their follow-on thoughts more easily, but
it's becoming more of a hassle as parts of the Web
become more hostile. (Thanks, spammers and
advertising cookie-trackers.) I turned off
comments on my blog back in March as Disqus had
gotten overbearing with ads and tracking. I didn't
feel like figuring out another commenting service
or self-hosting my own. I don't miss wading
through all the spam. I do miss the ease of public
comments and the tips people shared, mostly
because it was convenient to see and share those
replies in one place. Still, there's space for
commentary. Some people comment via Mastodon or
their own blogs. Once in a blue moon, a post will
strike enough of a chord to get shared via Reddit
or something like that. And there's always e-mail.
I like blog carnivals: someone proposes a theme,
people can choose to write about it, and the host
links to all those posts for easier discovery.
There's one for IndieWeb and there's one for
Emacs. It's fun seeing all these different takes
on the same topic.
I wish it was easier for more people to share what
they've been figuring out. I don't think the
technology is the limiting factor. My mom used to
keep a blog on Blogger, and she also wrote some
posts in the self-hosted Wordpress I'd set up for
her before. My sister writes long stories on
Facebook and Instagram so that she can untangle
her thoughts and capture the memories. Never mind
that Facebook is a walled garden that's hard to
follow outside its algorithmic feed; at least
she's writing. I think it's more that the process
of sitting down and turning your thoughts into
words takes time and energy. That's the hard part,
but that's also what's worthwhile. You can't skip
it by using a large language model.
Is writing lonely? I wish more people had the
space to sit with their thoughts and figure them
out, and I wish they were easier to find. I'll
settle for reaching across time and space: to my
future self, for sure, and maybe to others whom I
may or may not interact with. Send enough bottles
out to sea, comb the beach often enough, and I'll
find plenty of people who like to take that quiet,
thoughtful approach to life (even as we gently
poke fun at ourselves for possibly overthinking
things). Fortunately, if they blog, it's easy to
keep in touch lightly: not limited by anyone's
energy or interest at a particular point in time,
but just open to serendipity.
: A few more thoughts I want to connect to this one:
I came across Twilight Journal via r/stoicism today, so I wanted to link to that too. Messages in bottles.
And another thought about the night sky and how it's filled with stars, even though there are unimaginable spaces between them… (Not that I've seen a clear night sky lately, but I have one clear memory of it as a child that stays with me.)
In February, I started adding emojis to my monthly summaries. I added emojis to the lines for the text versions of my monthly sketches, then used a little bit of Emacs Lisp to convert that into HTML code with the text as a tooltip. I wondered what it might be like to represent a lot of days very densely. Would the constrained vocabulary of emojis be enough to give me a sense of the time, combined with the ability to hover over the emojis to see the keywords I wrote for that day?
Not bad. I can see the campfire and s'mores days (🔥), the time we were sick (🌡️), the shift from skating and sledding to biking and swimming, the days when I focused on sewing. In contrast, here are the monthly calendar sketches:
Hmm. I'm primarily interested in episodic memory retrieval and pattern recognition. The emoji summaries might be better at showing repetition because of the constrained vocabulary and the density is neat, but they're not quite expressive enough to resonate with me. I don't like hovering to see the tooltip, but by itself, the emoji doesn't usually have enough information to trigger my memory (either on its own or as part of the episodic context). Emojis and text also open up the possibility of an "on this day" slice, but I can get that with the plain text or by adding an on-this-day.rss to my web-based journal viewer with maybe some kind of private feed in our local network.
The sketches are more fun to flip through, especially now that I'm adding more colour to them. I can show repetition through background colour or icons in my monthly sketches. If I click on these images in my blog post or in my public sketchbook (ex: monthly sketches) using either my laptop or my tablet, I can page through them quickly, like the idea of rapid serial visual presentation 1. (This is great! Now I'm tempted to figure out how to disable all animations for BiggerPicture for just that bit of extra speed, which I think is a matter of tinkering with mediaTransition…) I wonder what it would take to have an automatic "on this day" slice for my monthly calendar sketches. Maybe if I was stricter about using a template so that I can automatically extract boxes from it, or maybe if I can use recognized numbers to figure out the layout… Definitely a someday thing, but could be an interesting challenge.
Do I want to do these emoji summaries long-term? Someone summarized 5 years of diary entries as emojis, and of course there's an app to do this too. Even on a larger scale, though, I think I might just get a few "huh, how about that" moments out of it rather than "wow, that's amazing." I think that if I continue with my daily sketches, that's probably more fun for me to make and review, and it still contains enough information to allow me to map the days to emojis later on if I want to. I can probably discontinue this emoji experiment. I'm glad I explored it, though.
In case you're curious about the Emacs Lisp code for extracting the emoji summaries, here's the function. It looks for the top-level blog post, scans for lines matching "dayNum. (emoji) text summary of day", and then turns that into the appropriate span, including links if there are any.
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