wooly mammoth's mighty absence

2022 june

Thu, 14 Jul 2022 11:56:18 -0600

Kept the usual list of stuff but ultimately an eh month I don't feel like writing up.

you know that makes me crazy

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 14:16:52 -0600

A recent exchange I witnessed about a suspension at the Washington Post got me thinking about the absurd way a lotta people talk to and about abuse survivors.

2022, may

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 22:30:40 -0600

Articles, games, music, podcasts from May, 2022.

2022, apr

Tue, 03 May 2022 21:25:07 -0600

Articles, games, music, podcasts from April, 2022.

2022, mar

Sun, 03 Apr 2022 00:16:34 -0600

March's list has articles, games, music, and... more?

2022, feb

Tue, 01 Mar 2022 23:06:50 -0700

February's list has music, articles, podcasts, and games.

video game art

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 23:02:36 -0600

Several opinions about game design are offered by various people in a recent piece in The New Yorker profiling famous video game guy Sid Meier. The article is worth the read even if you have never played one of Meier's games, but many of the opinions in it are things I believe the exact opposite of. The perspective it offers is cohesive and consistent, which is not always the case with games writing and having all of these ideas in one place makes them easier to dissect. Also, I love Civilization, so I am appreciative of the fact that a guy of Meier's age and with his interest in niche strategy games, a genre that often attracts some of the most annoying people ever, is not offering up much worse thoughts here.

annoying guy music

Mon, 10 May 2021 22:41:23 -0600

li p img { margin: .8rem 0; }

There's Taking Up Space, and then there's being a band called Viagra Boys.

goods, 2020

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 23:27:05 -0700

Things I saw, listened to, read, or otherwise happened to me in 2020. Well, the things I liked.

How to See Through Fog: A Project

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 21:56:05 -0600

https://www.absentmammoth.org began in a much different form all the way back in January. Getting it to where it is today took dozens of hours and occupied most of my free time for several months. Making this website gave me something positive to focus on and has been a sick learning experience. I pushed myself more while working on it than I have with anything else in ages.

self-Deprecation

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 22:52:30 -0600

This is a post about self-deprecation. This is me thinking through thoughts. It is a 'web log.'

Yo La Tengo - Painful

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 22:27:00 -0600

This is something I wrote on an old website as part of a series on favorite records. It's several years old now. Have some mid-late 2000s style music blogging. It's killing me not to edit any of it, but... it's a time capsule. From the vault.

Similar to Lungfish, Yo La Tengo is a band with a huge and flawless discography. They've released well over a dozen LPs and probably a bazillion other things over their decades long career in music. They are a band unafraid to experiment with different styles of music and even how they perform live.

Like with Lungfish, I don't know what the consensus "best" Yo La Tengo record is. This series isn't about the "best," right, but the albums that mean the most to me. That instantly makes Yo La Tengo's Painful the go-to choice here. Painful is one of their more consistent -- in overall sound -- records. Others, like I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One, explore a lot of different styles of music in one place. Painful is consistent and lets you slip into its world completely. You, as a listener, are allowed to spend 49 minutes in a very predictable, in a good way, atmosphere.

site changes & updates

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 22:11:00 -0600

I have made additions and adjustments to the site in a few places. Why?! Well,

How to See Through Fog: Persona 5 Royal

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 23:16:00 -0600

Listen up, inmate! (Consider this sentence a major spoiler warning, if you care about that kind of stuff.)

Persona 5 Royal is the best Japanese roleplaying game that isn’t Tactics Ogre. Recently released as an expanded take on the now few years’ old Persona 5, Royal furthers the story of a gang of outcast Japanese teens, each wronged in a different way by an adult or society. While ultimately a criticism of Japan, from the Lost Decade to Fukushima to today’s right-wing Abe government, the specifics of what it is condemning — corruption, selfishness, complicity, cruelty, sexism, and mindless obedience — are… well, baby, they’re universal.

How to See Through Fog: Hollywood Handbook

Sun, 26 Apr 2020 00:30:00 -0600

Thanks. This helped.

Things aren't so hot these days, and there are lots of reasons to be anxious, mad, and depressed. I could enumerate them here, but anyone reading this already knows what's up. Instead, I'd like to do a little series on things that have been helping me See Through Fog.

First up: Hollywood Handbook, a podcast.

additional thanks to

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 20:01:24 -0700

Hank Ewbank, for the cute lil shadow puppet mammoth display picture, as well as for showing me...
Matthew Butterick's practicaltypography.com¹
Though I have rewritten the css from scratch, Jamie Tanna's Hugo theme was source of the original theme. Dissecting his site is how I learned almost everything I have used to write the actual css/html of Absent Mammoth. I still look at his newer site's code to better understand how Hugo works. It's great
⌃ click "Inspect Element"
The Hugo docs (for the most part)
Countless search results that led to various, occasionally contradictory, guides and examples that sometimes found their way into this site. Thank you, random guys on StackExchange and Medium. Some of you were helpful. Others of you could learn from some of you
IndieWeb.org, which contains a significant amount of helpful information re: building your own website. (It's also how I found jvt.me in the first place!)
The Wired article How the Web Became Unreadable, which explains a misunderstanding surrounding contrast; the shift away from high contrast sites has caused developers to use harder to read font colors (e.g. grays in place of solid black²) instead of dampening the harshness of bright white backgrounds³
Markdown
Github (problematic)
RSCSS
The Boris album art below. I had played around with different purples and softer blacks until I saw it and all was clear to me. I didn't think I could get away with my <a> purple being quite that dark and also keep it from blending in with the default font color, but I did use a color picker and then fiddle with the hsl a bit to get it light enough. The art is by Mami Saitou

This site is exactly the kind of thing that I love -- clear, opinionated, and it explains the underlying theory and reasoning behind what he is advocating. While (because?) I am an absolute amateur, or less than, it helps me to have a resource like this to turn to. Even if it's completely wrong, it is at least complete! Worth the $9. ↩︎

/now

Mon, 24 Feb 2020 20:13:24 -0700

february 28th, 2022:

i've rewritten the css/html of the site so that it is now, i think, all mine! i've put this off for ages, having started it early last year and then put it on hold for several months. but it's now new from the ground up, using grid for the layout and with some changes to how the html partials for the site are setup. besides some minor aesthetic tweaks, it doesn't look hugely different on the outside. my plan next is to add some tufte-style sidenotes for posts and maybe something on the right side of the screen for larger monitors given that there is a lot of whitespace now that the site is left-justified.