September 2021 State of Catastrophe
Hey everyone! Jon here with a new State of Catastrophe. If you’re new, or haven’t read one of these in the past, that just means that today’s kind of a “site/technical update” post, rather than one about like, specific foods or anything. So you’re not going to learn many historical details today, I’m just updating people on some stuff that we’re working on “behind the scenes”, as it were. If that’s not something you’re interested in, we’ll be back Monday with a normal post.
That Summertime Madness
Yes, I know that’s not actually the song lyric, Lana Del Ray stans. I assure you, I only understand like 1/3rd of the lyrics, I got the song title.
Anywho…man, was that a trip, huh? As I was VERY vocal about through July and most of August, this past summer was a mess for me. But, weirdly, I’m feeling pretty good on where I’m ending up. It’s by no means perfect, but like, the reason this is coming out Friday instead of Thursday is that Nate and I had to pop over to Bremerton to pick up the Excursion, which was finally out of the shop. So I once again have transportation I control. And Nate taking over Monday’s post, along with getting my evenings back, really makes me feel ready to start tackling some new ideas/content, and pushing some stuff that I’ve been letting slide until now.
Now, I’ve said this kind of thing before, so I do want to put a qualifier on it that this could just be like, a brief manic episode, where I stuff my head full of fanciful dreams before crashing back down (editor’s note: An idea not helped by the fact that a series of Thursday night conflicts and Friday interruptions means this is coming out almost on Saturday), but right now, here’s the stuff I’m looking at getting into:
Being more social. Over the summer, I got into a podcast called “How To Citizen”, that talked a LOT about the importance of building community, of interacting with groups, and sharing ideas, and that kind of fed into an idea of how much I’ve been neglecting the site’s social media presence. This is a problem I’ve tried to motivate myself to address, buying eBooks in the past about it, but those efforts crumbled under my distaste for reading books digitally. (which is a very weird problem, since I am VERY willing to binge plenty of kinds of digital text, there’s just specifically something about the eBook format that frustrates me). So I recently dropped a bit of dough to get myself a Skillshare subscription, and I’m starting to watch videos on there to deepen that skillset. So if you’re following us on Twitter or Instagram, you’ll likely see those start being more…you know, ALIVE.
A Whole mess of dishes. Potentially too many, in fact, as I just realized it’s like, 3 AM Friday morning, and I was supposed to start cooking one Thursday evening. (One of the recipes has a “chill overnight” step.) At the moment, there’s a kind of half-theme hammered out for the next couple weeks that may or may not survive, depending on my family’s interest/opposition. Like, I wrote up 25 potential dishes to make, to cut down to 4-8. I’ve set up to go on a (not too extreme) ingredient run in Seattle this weekend, and if everything works out, I might have a month’s worth of recipes done in the next week couple weeks. (that is a pretty big IF, though.)
A little more technique/craft. Not a LOT more, since one of our goals is to keep these things intelligible and accessible to standard cooks (beyond like, having to Google a certain word or phrase every now and again) , but stuff like “buy a ring light for my phone, so my white balance is more consistent” or “learn to frame shots better”. One of the things I’m trying to do with the Skillshare idea is get a little better education in shot composition, food styling, etc. And also hopefully figuring out some stuff like “why do the anchor links not always work”, and “why is the Archive gone sometimes?”.
And…man, I thought I had more to talk about, but I guess most of it is actually less site-related, and more “day-to-day life”. Like, I gotta go buy new shoes, because mine are blown out on both sides, and I’d love to finally sort out my bed/room situation.
So thanks, everyone, for supporting the site, and see you Monday, when we make GIMBAP, with a new family addition, and some self-motivated assistance. If you’ve got anything you’d like to see us work on, hit me up in the comments, on FB, or wherever you like.
