Hi, my name is Darby, and this is my blog. Again. But, like, my other one. No, not that one. This one.

Ahem.

Long story short? Long story short.

For a good long while now I've run Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks, a book blog, in various formats, at varying levels of (in)frequency; for a bit less long of a while I've also run Naming Things is Hard, a tech blog, at a fairly consistent level of (in)frequency; and over the last couple years I've been active over on Micro.blog, which I've intended to use as a general life blog, which has mostly lately turned out to be posts about how I run for fun, and some other stuff.

For various reasons I've decided to drop my hosted blog at Micro.blog and now I'm replacing it with this blog, which I'm starting from scratch, because I'm too lazy to import all my content from the hosted Micro.blog, and because sometimes a fresh start is nice, right? Right. I'm still on Micro.blog and this blog will get vacuumed up and shared over there, in case you're one of the extremely cool and special people who actually follow me there, and if you're interested in replying to or commenting on posts, Micro.blog might be the easiest way to do that right now. But also this is not actually a Micro.blog, and I don't want it to be, I want it to be something else, though I'm honestly not sure what I want it to really be, yet.

And actually, and anyways, this is all happening at a time when I'm not even particularly certain why I'm doing a blog, let alone this blog, anymore; it's an open-ended and ultimately profoundly uninteresting question and maybe I'm hoping doing the blog will help me answer it. If nothing else it gives me a place to close the loop on posting about my current round of running training, as I climb my way up over the peak weeks of my current training cycle, on my way toward running my first full marathon, which is like five weeks away now, I think, oh god, oh my god, it's happening, be cool, relax, be cool. So there's that. So you have that to look forward to.

In the meantime the dust is still settling and I'm still realizing what functionality and such blogs actually need and I'm working on getting all that working, so if the RSS feed, like, breaks into your house and steals the cream cheese out of your fridge or something, please accept my apologies, and a bagel.

Whatever else happens here (will I, too, like Taylor Swift, break my legendary silence and endorse a presidential candidate, one who is an actual human being and not a walking stuffed sack of lies and decay? stay tuned!) there will absolutely still be running content on this blog. Because being a runner is nothing else if not being a person who talks about being a runner.

To wit: while I've been a bit quiet about it, after being burned by injuries a few times now, I can say I've spent the last three months or so training for my first full marathon, and I'm feeling reasonably increasing levels of confidence that I'm going to make it to race day. Race day being October 20. The race being the Columbus Marathon.

This has been a while coming. I do want to dump some more detail on the plan I've been following and what my race day goals look like and the precise ways in which training through the Cleveland summer has felt like a crazy-person thing to do. But for now I'm just going to say that I'm right around the peak block of training; according to the training plan I've been following, I've got a 19 mile run coming up this weekend, followed two weeks later by that 20 mile run. Unbelievably, my "highest total mileage" week is actually already behind me, when I hit 36 miles the week of my 18 mile run; not that this week's 34 miles is all that far off, but.

My training mood has progressed from "ugh, no, why, ugh, gross" earlier this summer to a much quieter state of "hey, whoa, this is happening, huh" today. I'll admit to having some fairly vivid fantasies about the week after the race—about how I'm going to sleep all the way in until I need to help get the kids to school, how I'm absolutely going to have a weeknight beer or three any time I like. (And oh, I will like.) But so far I've managed to not let the fantasy get in the way of continuing to get up at ungodly hours of the day that the me of twenty, ten, five, maybe even three or two years ago would have violently scoffed at.

And so now that I'm really officially calling my shot, here, if I go out tomorrow morning to run, and a small meteorite lands in front of me, and I sprain a finger or something dodging around it, and then I go to the doctor and the doctor is like, "Wow, this is a fatal finger sprain, you have four weeks to live"? Then I'll know the universe really needs me to quit this side-quest for once and for all.

Current musical obsession: VIVA HINDS by Hinds.

Every now and then a new music Friday comes along that brings with it more music than I could possibly listen to in a single day. And it looks like today is one of those days...

I like Album Whale; it's a fun site. This is the list where I've been adding new albums that have grabbed my attention, however briefly or obsessively, at least in part so I can remember what I've actually liked and what I'm actually interested in going back to again.

Just for fun, I'm working on back-filling it, back to the beginning of time, creating a sort of music-listening autobiography in reverse. (This is a fool's quest.)

Added a method for sharing links (and optional commentary on those links) to this blog as a special category all to itself. Because I felt like it. Those'll get rounded up here.

I also (I think) have those posts going out on the feed, basically like regular posts, though I think I need to figure out how to get the words "link post" into the feed title output for those. I think I want that? We'll see. Or not.

Well today’s 19 mile run got cut a couple miles short by a bee sting. Ouch. Right on the front of my right ankle. Not ideal. I guess if I had to pick between the 19 and 20 mile runs, this would have been the one I’d have preferred to get stung on, but…

Started the day with a bee sting, ended the day with buying a brand new car. And a burrito.

I’ve only watched two films from this collection so far—Deep Red and All the Colors of the Dark—but I’m hoping to catch as many of them as I can before the collection closes up.

Cool music podcast, extremely nerdy deep dives into band discographies and histories, that sort of thing. I've been working through the second season, the 90s grunge/alternative season. In almost certainly related news, I've been giving Pearl Jam's later stuff another try, after falling off the wagon a long-ass time ago, and? The new album, Dark Matter? It's pretty damn good. I'm into it.

It was very hard to get out of bed this morning. But I did. And then I ran five miles. Please clap.

I thought about trying to "make up" the missing miles from Saturday's bee sting incident, even though I know I know I know it doesn't work that way, but in the end I stuck to the planned five. I've got eight to do tomorrow, no sense in actively trying to break my body just yet this week.

(You don't actually have to clap, by the way.)

In "you couldn't script something so on the nose" news, Saturday? The day I bought a brand new car? (And got stung by a bee during a run?) it didn't actually end with a burrito. It ended around 4 am when I woke from a dead sleep to the sound of a machine doing something machines are not supposed to do.

Doing it rather loudly.

And rudely.

At first I thought it was our one window A/C unit, so I turned that off, except the noise kept happening, and so then I unplugged the unit completely, thinking it was taking a while to cycle down, but the noise kept coming, and I thought, wow, it's weird there's so much power still cycling through this now completely unplugged unit, I hope I'm not supposed to know how to disable a secret battery inside it right now while it is threatening to explode. (It was 4 am. It was an exhausting day.)

Eventually I realized the sound really was coming from outside the house so I tromped outside to see what I could see and quickly realized it wasn't the window A/C unit but our main A/C that was putting on an industrial rock concert for the neighborhood. Whoops. So, uh, that's what I need to turn off, huh.

Took a while to get back to sleep after that.

Took a peek at the unit the next day, thinking ha ha I'm not going to see anything because it's probably something in the motor or something, but, oh, oh no, it was one of the fan/intake blades that had sheared halfway across its width, which new flap was what was then scraping/banging away at the inside of the housing.

So cool. So fun. So looking forward to spending money I had just given away earlier that day.

The best part of a work-from-home day is the snacks.

I'll give you just one more handful of pretzels if you can guess what the worst part of a work-from-home day is.

Do I have a problem with these? Only in the sense that sometimes my kids eat most of them before I get to and then I get sad.

Wait, no, it’s not the cones I have a problem with, it’s my kids. Dang.

I've been doing my mid-week eight milers on Tuesdays, mostly, lately, but I swapped it back a day this week in favor of my weekly "oh, god, I'm supposed to be doing this more than once a week?" strength training session, so I could at least sleep a skitch extra on Tuesday; I was tired. Which was all fine and good until that 5 am alarm started going off today. (It's not so much about trying not to be tired at this point, but trying to at least spread out and vary the levels of tired across each week.)

It all worked out. For as heavy as my legs felt at the start of today's run I eventually did loosen up enough to enjoy at least the back half well enough. And those cooler temperatures continue to fail to disappoint.

When I head to the suburban shopping center and I walk through the parking garage and I see truck after truck after truck whose front grilles tower over my kids' heads I feel an intuitive revulsion I can never quite shake. We don't belong here, I think. And: Owning vehicles this large must feel so sad.

Anyways, the data doesn't lie; these giants are both selfish and deadly.

I hate Mozilla's turn toward AI. I don't believe that "trustworthy AI" is a thing; you can't trust or not trust AI, you can only trust or not trust the institutions pushing AI upon us, and right now, I don't trust any institution pushing AI upon us, because I believe AI is almost uniformly bad and wrong and terrible and did I make it clear I think it's bad?

Anyways, I'm a big fan of Firefox and MDN, and Mozilla does some good stuff and stands for some good stuff, at least in theory, but I still don't trust them with AI one bit. So it's frustrating that the context the article supplies here is that the organization itself desperately needs money from another source, a source other than one of the other obscenely and overwhelmingly untrustworthy giants in the room.

Bought one of these a while back. Love it. Have yet to find the right place to hang it. (Probably partly out of fear that I'm not punk enough to display it.)

On the one hand, I don't want to get my hopes up too much, but on the other hand, this new The Cure album that's apparently coming out in November? I'm almost certain it's going to be literally the best thing ever.

I've been rewatching Twin Peaks in preparation for the Blank Check episodes coming out soon. I'm about halfway through the original run. Safe to say: the show holds up.

[ Ed. note: possible spoilers below for Twin Peaks. ]

It's funny, actually, because I think the show is hitting me even harder this time through than it did the first time I watched it all, ten, twelve years ago? Whenever that was? I'm trying to parse out why.

I should say it's not just Twin Peaks because I also just re-watched Eraserhead for the first time in ages and that definitely hit me really hard this time through; that one makes sense, to me, because I first watched it before I had kids, and now I do have kids, and, well, yeah, the movie makes both way more sense and feels so much stronger once you have an idea or two about how that goes.

Twin Peaks, though, I'm not sure I have quite so easy an answer. Partially I think my basic sense of literacy when it comes to film has improved over the years, and I have a better idea of why things work and what makes things interesting. Partially I think just knowing the general broad stroke of the show (I've forgotten huge swaths of it, but, like, now I know who killed Laura Palmer, obviously, and I know that Diane is actually Laura Dern!) allows me to focus on it in a different way, to take details and plot lines on their own terms, giving the more grounded portions of the show more room to breathe, more weight unto themselves. Like, Audrey's whole story up to this point is just devastating, when you look at it as a piece of honest human drama apart from the "weirder" elements of the show. And then like, just last night, I watched episode 7 of season 2—one of the big David Lynch directed episode, one of the most "this aired on network freakin television" episodes of the show—and as "it was happening again" was, ah, happening, it was, fascinatingly, Bobby's reacting, and reaction, to me, of everyone at the Roadhouse, that really stuck out this time; he's a more interesting character than I remember him being.

I know how the season dips a bit as it goes on before it picks back up at the end, but the reality is at this point I'm halfway through the original run of the show and there's far more really superior Twin Peaks than less-than-perfect Twin Peaks. It's making for a good re-watch; it's a compelling place to spend time again. Rolling straight into The Return is going to be fascinating, because I watched that as it came out each week and haven't managed to make it back to it yet, and there's story beats and images from season one and two I really want to hold onto as I go back to season three that I'm pretty sure get reference in ways I didn't realize they were being my first time through.