Feel free to use or remix these stick figures under the Creative Commons Attribution License.

I had fun drawing stick figures based on Geoffrey Roberts' emotion wheel while waiting for A+. After she finished her class, she sat with me, suggesting some ways to improve the expressions and even adding her own flair.

We imagined another sketch showing cats expressing the different emotions. A+ already has a title for that sketch: "Feline feelings." It'll be a good challenge, figuring out how to draw cats clearly enough to show those emotions. Related: this sketch of bird stickers on r/Supernote.

Other variations: drawing other emotion wheels, like the Plutchik wheel or the Junto wheel. Some wheels vary emotional intensity, which will be a nice exercise.

A challenge: working on the outer ring of emotions. How do I distinguish "disillusioned" from "perplexed"? What about "free" from "joyful"?

I found my copy of Bikablo Emotions, and I'm looking forward to picking up more tips from it. I remember flipping through it for my post on sketchnotes: Building my visual vocabulary (2013). So many things to explore… =)

Dave Winer's looking for old school bloggers (also this) so that nudged me to think about how and why I blog.

(let* ((annotations '((2001 "university")
                      (2003 "graduated, teaching")
                      (2004 "internship in Japan")
                      (2005 "grad school")
                      (2007 "working at IBM")
                      (2008 "drawing")
                      (2012 "experiment with semi-retirement")
                      (2016 "A+ was born")
                      (2019 "EmacsConf, COVID-19")
                      (2022 "SuperNote A5X")
                      (2023 "even more EmacsConf automation")
                      (2024 "cargo bike")
                      (2025 "added iPad to the mix")))
       (json-array-type 'list)
       (json-object-type 'alist)
       (posts-by-year
        (mapcar
         (lambda (o) (cons (car o) (length (cdr o))))
         (seq-group-by
          (lambda (o) (substring (alist-get 'date o) 0 4))
          (json-read-file "~/proj/static-blog/_site/blog/all/index.json")))))
  (append
   '(("Year" "Posts" "Note") hline)
   (cl-loop
    for i from 2001 to 2025
    collect
    (list (format "[[https://sachachua.com/blog/%d][%d]]"
          i i)
          (alist-get (number-to-string i) posts-by-year nil nil #'string=)
          (or (car (alist-get i annotations)) "")))))

How long is a blog post? Some people write short posts with one clear thought. Others write longer essays.

I tend to start out writing a short post and then get distracted by all the rabbit-holes I want to go down. Drafting my thoughts on blogging leads to adding lots of blogs to my reader, writing some code that takes an OPML and makes a table of blogs and their most recent posts, fixing the org-html-themes setup for my Emacs configuration, breaking out this chunk as its own post, drawing a bunch of mindmaps, doing a braindump, tweaking my workflow for processing braindumps to use faster-whisper and whisper-ctranslate2 instead of WhisperX because of this issue, so that I can try the whisper-large-v3-turbo model, experimenting with workflows for reviewing the PDF on the iPad… Definitely lots of yak-shaving (wiktionary definition). I still want to write that post. I already have the sketch I want to include in it. It's like Chilli in the Bluey episode Sticky Gecko (script): "The door: It is right here. All we need to do is walk out of it: it's so easy!" The thought! It's right there! Just get to it, brain! But I wander because I wonder. I suppose that's all right.

It might be fun to play around with the sizes of things I share: shorter when my attention is fragmented or squirrely, longer when I can think about something over several days or years. Here are some ways to tinker with that.

Breaking thoughts down into smaller chunks so I can get them out the door:

• When I notice that something is a big blog post (like this reflection I've been working on about blogging), I can break out parts of it into their own blog posts and then replace that section with links.
• I can post interesting quotes and snippets to Mastodon and then round them up periodically or refer to them in blog posts. TODO: It might be good to have a shortcut for an accessible link to a toot using a speech bubble or similar icon.

Taming my tangents and ideas: I'm sometimes envious of blogs with neat side notes, but really, I should just accept that the tangents that my mind wants to go on can take paragraphs and are more suited to, say, collapsible details or a different blog post. Something I can experiment with: instead of gallivanting off on that tangent (soo hard to resist when there's an idea for an Emacs tweak!), I can add a TODO and leave it for my future self. Maybe even two TODOs: one inline, where it makes sense in the text; and one in my Org Mode, with a link to the blog post so that I can go back and update it when (if!) I get around to it. Who knows, maybe someone might comment with something that already exists.

Saving scraps: It's easier to cut out half-fleshed-out ideas if I tell myself I'm just saving them somewhere. Right now I capture/refile them to a scraps heading, but there's probably a better way to handle this. Maybe I can post some thoughts to Mastodon and then save the toot URL. Maybe I can experiment with using Denote to manage private notes.

Connecting thoughts and building them up:

• I tend to write in small chunks. (TODO: I could probably do some kind of word-count analysis, might be neat.) Sketchnotes and hyperlinks might help me chunk thoughts so I can think about bigger things. I can link to paragraphs and text fragments, so I can connect thoughts with other parts of thoughts instead of trying to get the granularity right the first time around. The shortcuts I made for linking to blog posts and searching the Web or my notes are starting to help.
• I sporadically work on topic maps or indices. Maybe I'll gradually flesh them out into a digital garden / personal wiki.
• Sometimes I don't remember the exact words I used. Probabilistic search or vector search might help here, too. I don't need an AI-generated summary, I just want a list of related posts.
• I can figure out how to add backlinks to my blog, or simplify the workflow for adding links to previous posts. Maybe something based on this guide for 11ty or binyamin/eleventy-plugin-backlinks. I might need to write something custom anyway so that I can ignore the links coming from monthly/weekly review posts.

Connecting to other people's thoughts: For the purposes of conversation, it'll probably be good to let people know if I write something about their blog post. Doesn't happen automatically. Pingbacks and referrer logs got too swamped by spam a long time ago, so I don't think anyone really uses them. Idea: It might be neat to have something that quickly lists all the external links in a post, and maybe a way to save the e-mail addresses or Mastodon handles for people after I look them up so that I can make that even smoother, and some kind of quick template. I can send email and toot from within Emacs, so that's totally doable… (No, I am not going to write it right now, I'm going to add it to my to-do list.)

(Also, there's another thought here about books and The Great Conversation, and blogs and smaller-scale conversations, and William Thurston and mathematicians and understanding, and cafes…)

Hmm. I think that getting my brain to make smaller chunks and get them out the door will be a good thing to focus on. Synthesizing can come later.

Related:

• Old-school blogger

See discussion on Mastodon

Nudged by Dave Winer's post about old-school bloggers and my now-nicely-synchronizing setup of NetNewsWire (iOS) and FreshRSS (web), I gave Claude AI this prompt to list bloggers (with the addition of "Please include URLs and short bios.") and had fun going through the list it produced. A number of people were no longer blogging (unreachable sites or inactive blogs), but I found a few that I wanted to add to my feed reader.

Here is my people.opml at the moment (slightly redacted, as I read my husband's blog as well). This list has some non-old-school bloggers as well and some sketchnoters, but that's fine. It's a very tiny slice of the awesomeness of the Internet out there, definitely not exhaustive, just a start. I've been adding more by trawling through indieblog.page and the occasional interesting post on news.ycombinator.com.

It makes sense to make an HTML version to make it easier for people to explore, like those old-fashioned blog rolls. Ooh, maybe some kind of table like indieblog.page, listing a recent item from each blog. (I am totally not surprised about my tendency to self-nerd-snipe with some kind of Emacs thing.) This uses my-opml-table and my-rss-get-entries, which I have just added to my Emacs configuration.

(defun my-opml-table (xml)
  (sort
   (mapcar
    (lambda (o)
      (let ((latest (car (condition-case nil (my-rss-get-entries (dom-attr o 'xmlUrl))
                           (error nil)))))
        (list
         (if latest
             (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d" (plist-get latest :date))
           "")
         (org-link-make-string
          (or (dom-attr o 'htmlUrl)
              (dom-attr o 'xmlUrl))
          (replace-regexp-in-string " *|" "" (dom-attr o 'text)))
         (if latest
             (org-link-make-string
              (plist-get latest :url)
              (or (plist-get latest :title) "(untitled)"))
           ""))))
    (dom-search
     xml
     (lambda (o)
       (and
        (eq (dom-tag o) 'outline)
        (dom-attr o 'xmlUrl)
        (dom-attr o 'text)))))
   :key #'car
   :reverse t))

(defun my-rss-get-entries (url)
  "Return a list of the form ((:title ... :url ... :date ...) ...)."
  (with-current-buffer (url-retrieve-synchronously url)
    (set-buffer-multibyte t)
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (when (re-search-forward "<\\?xml\\|<rss" nil t)
      (goto-char (match-beginning 0))
      (sort
       (let* ((feed (xml-parse-region (point) (point-max)))
              (is-rss (> (length (xml-get-children (car feed) 'entry)) 0)))
         (if is-rss
             (mapcar
              (lambda (entry)
                (list
                 :url
                 (or
                  (xml-get-attribute
                   (car
                    (or
                     (seq-filter (lambda (x) (string= (xml-get-attribute x 'rel) "alternate"))
                                 (xml-get-children entry 'link))
                     (xml-get-children entry 'link)))
                   'href)
                  (dom-text (dom-by-tag entry 'guid)))
                 :title
                 (elt (car (xml-get-children entry 'title)) 2)
                 :date
                 (date-to-time (elt (car (xml-get-children entry 'updated)) 2))))
              (xml-get-children (car feed) 'entry))
           (mapcar (lambda (entry)
                     (list
                      :url
                      (or (caddr (car (xml-get-children entry 'link)))
                          (dom-text (dom-by-tag entry 'guid)))
                      :title
                      (caddr (car (xml-get-children entry 'title)))
                      :date
                      (date-to-time (elt (car (xml-get-children entry 'pubDate)) 2))))
                   (xml-get-children (car (xml-get-children (car feed) 'channel)) 'item))))
       :key (lambda (o) (plist-get o :date))
       :lessp #'time-less-p
       :reverse t))))

(my-opml-table (xml-parse-file "~/Downloads/people.opml"))

I'm rebuilding my feed list from scratch. I want to read more. I read the aggregated feeds at planet.emacslife.com every week as part of preparing Emacs News. Maybe I'll go over the list of blogs I aggregate there, widen it to include all posts instead of just Emacs-specific ones, and see what resonates. Emacs people tend to be interesting. Here is an incomplete list based on people who've posted in the past two years or so, based on this work-in-progress planetemacslife-expanded.opml. (I haven't tweaked all the URLs yet. I stopped at around 2023 and made the rest of the elements xoutline instead of outline so that my code would skip them.)

(my-opml-table (xml-parse-file "~/Downloads/planetemacslife-expanded.opml"))

Making this table was fun. It's nice to see a lot of people also writing and learning out loud. This reminded me a little of EmacsConf - 2020 - talks - Sharing blogs (and more) with org-webring. TODO: Could be fun to have a blogroll page again.

I notice I tend to like:

• posts about adapting technology to personal interests, more than posts about the industry or generalizations
• detailed posts about things I'm currently interested in (Emacs, personal knowledge management, some Javascript), more than detailed tech posts about things I've decided not to get into at the moment
• "I" posts more than "You" posts: personal reflections rather than didactic advice
• curiosity, fun, experimentation

Looking forward to discovering more!

Related:

• Old-school blogger

See discussion on Mastodon

After our first informal field trip to the Art Gallery of Ontario, I got my own 13" iPad Air so that I can play with digital painting beside A+. Using the same apps might make it easier for her to pick up ideas from me and for me to pick up ideas from her. We mostly draw in Procreate, and I'm starting to get the hang of its brushes and features.

It's been nice doing moments from daily life again. It's been a while since I got to play with colour this easily.

A+ and I are both interested in piano, singing, and drawing, so we're experimenting with the Simply family subscription (CAD 46.49+tax/month). A+ likes to draw in the evening as a way of postponing bedtime. I could probably find lots of free drawing tutorials like the ones that Simply Draw has, but it's nice that it's already set up with the video in a corner and it pauses at the appropriate steps, so A+ can independently do it. She's starting to see shapes and shade a bit better now, although she doesn't yet have the patience to blend things slowly. I'm developing that patience, yay me. I wish I could zoom in on the reference image, though.

Here are some drawings I made following the Simply Draw tutorials.

One of the things I like about digital drawing and painting is that I can sneak up on blending by using different opacity settings and colours instead of either accurately controlling the pressure in my hand or switching between pencil and eraser. I also love the way I can use layers to build up an image gradually, how I can erase or undo, and how I can just use whatever colour I want without having to hunt for the right colour pencils or put things away afterwards. I haven't really played around with drawing with art supplies, although the watercolour tutorials that cross my feed seem fascinating. Maybe someday.

There's a glimmer here of how this might become a relaxing thing to do, different from untangling a thought or condensing a book into a sketchnote. I'm slowly getting to the point where, when I notice I'm starting to get anxious or when I'm tempted to nag A+ about procrastination, I can tell myself that I'm going on an art/music break instead and that usually keeps me busy enough until the urge passes. I think this might be useful for our sanity, especially if A+ picks up the idea too. When I'm on a music break, she often gets inspired to kick me off the piano and do her own music lessons, so that's a win. Art is something we can do side by side, and I can always make a drawing more elaborate since A+ likes to stay at roughly the same stage as I am.

I remember enjoying art enough as a kid to have fun at a summer camp where we did things like sand art and papier mache. I think I worked on an illustration of a sparrow that made it into a book of poetry or something like that. By the time we got to drafting classes in high school, I was feeling a bit more meh about art. I got back into art again with the Colors app on the Nintendo DS and then ended up getting into drawing and sketchnoting. I'd like to play around more with colour, and maybe I'll do more doodles and more drawing just because. I like drawing nature, and I'd like to get better at drawing characters too. I'll put the sketches on my blog and in my online sketches, and it'll fun to see how I grow over time.

A+'s class is working through a variety of assignments while reading through The Wild Robot. They've done chapter 1-11 so far. One of the assignments is to visualize things from the book, like sketching 6 things Roz has seen in nature so far. I figured I'd practise drawing too.

References:

• blue flower by NiklasErnst
• goose by Open Clipart-Vectors
• sparrow by artellliii72
• beaver by Clker-Free Vector Images
• squirrel by JonPauling
• sheepdog by marybettiniblank
• chipmunk by CoastalSandpiper

A+ thought that Roz encountered a beaver, but I think she might have mixed it up with the otters. It was fun to draw a beaver anyway. I'm getting the hang of blocking out the shapes with a highlighter and then going over it with the pen.

The sheepdog wasn't from the story. It's from another reflection that I've been noodling on about how A+'s teacher often tries to herd 17 kids to be on the same literal page during virtual class. It's a hard job.

As for A+ and art, she still gets very frustrated. "I can't do it!" she wails. But she's starting to be able to say things like "I see there's a circle here." I think it might be helpful for me to borrow a bunch of drawing books that emphasize sketching on top of basic shapes, instead of those drawing videos that just tell you the lines and curves to draw. Maybe Ed Emberley's drawing books. It might also be interesting to look through some digital art tutorials and tips, like this thread on the Procreate forum (oooh, monsters with eyes). Getting even more tempted to get an iPad for myself so that we can learn side by side. I've tried drawing on Android tablets/phablets before and Medibang Paint was pretty nice, but one of my goals is making it easier to bounce ideas and discoveries off each other.

Could be fun.