Some Updates

About the new format

I thought it would be neat to treat my website a little more like a blog. Each page would be a "post". On the back end, I'd have a folder for each year, month-folders within the year-folders, and the pages themselves would have the day as the file name. I may or may not add a specific title to the end. The point is, each page has a fixed link that makes some kind of objective sense.

I also want to have collection pages, similar to those in a bullet journal. These would serve as tags/categorization, and be a replacement for the javascript I don't want to deal with.

Originally, I was thinking that I'd make a whole new format for these pages, but I think they should be in whatever format I feel like using at the time. I'm not going to reinvent the wheel unless I feel like it, and I worked hard on cave.css, which works perfectly fine as a general-purpose template.

An unexpected new obsession

My current Big Project is reading War and Peace. I don't know if I'll finish it, but I'm genuinely enjoying it and all I'm learning about its history so far.

It's been one of those moments where a hyperfixation completely sweeps you off your feet, because it's like, wait, I've never liked this kind of thing before. I'm not much of a reader. I'm not usually a fan of the "classics," or of any history that happened before like 1850 at the earliest. But for some reason, Tolstoy and War and Peace are so fascinating to me at the moment that a book over a thousand pages long seems like a doable thing.

Did you know Tolstoy didn't even think of War and Peace as a novel?¹ And yet, I feel like that's all I ever heard of it as. It's supposed to be the novel, right? What made us think about it like that, and why didn't Tolstoy think of it like that? So far, I haven't gotten to anything that seems all that strange to me, other than the large chunks of French,² but I also wonder if it's one of those situations where something that was avant-garde at the time became conventional later. Not sure yet.

I actually got myself into this because my friend took me to see a local production of Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 for the first time recently. I was completely starstruck, and I proceeded to listen to pretty much only that soundtrack for over a month. Much of that was "Dust and Ashes" and "The Opera" on repeat. I don't think I ever would have touched War and Peace if Dave Malloy hadn't already made me fall in love with a lot of the main characters. If you've never listened to Great Comet, take this nudge. Please.

Also, have this meme.

(ok, you can't see it well with the dithering, but trust me, Pierre is wearing glasses)