Why is the burden on me to prove that I’m not a robot instead of on the server to prove I am? This is a vain question if you reflect on the adversarial nature of internet spam, but I am asking anyway. Here’s a fun game: Prove you are a human.

• Phone (Android): Long press the hyphen button
• Desktop (Linux): Compose key sequence ---
• Work computer (Windows):
  • If in Word or Office: Type two hyphens and let it autocorrect
  • If Markdown: Use the HTML character entity —
  • Otherwise: ⊞ Win + . character chooser, or just Google “em dash” and copy/paste

Manuel Moreale, a tireless indie web advocate, recently had me as a guest on his People and Blogs series (local mirror). Welcome to anyone visiting this site via Manu’s feed! Take a look around and let me know what you think.

I was super excited to be interviewed by Manu, as many of his writings have sharpened my thinking around why I prefer blogging, email, and group chats to brand-name social media:

• On personal websites and social web
• Staying small

Manu has compiled a lot of useful information for people trying to pivot from social media, such as his list of blogging platforms. If you are one of the friends I’ve been trying to talk into creating a personal site, definitely check out Manu’s list.

Here is a local mirror of my interview on Manuel Moreale’s People and Blogs series.

Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Sure. I grew up in Seattle, went to college in Los Angeles, then lived in South Korea for four years, first as an English teacher in Naju, then as a grad student at Seoul National University. In 2022, I moved to the Washington, DC area for my current job as a numerical analyst at a government consulting firm.

I joke that I have “reinvented myself” several times, because I double-majored in jazz piano and Korean language in undergrad, then considered becoming a schoolteacher, then grew interested in math and programming and did my master’s in industrial engineering. But there’s continuity through these chapters. At work, I build numerical modeling tools (picture something like Universal Paperclips) for clients who are sometimes skeptical of analyzing their data quantitatively. That’s because they’ve been disappointed by past attempts that failed to account for the right variables, or that offered too much technical flourish with too little explanation. So, in my role, equally important to getting the math right is my ability to tell a convincing story about why I modeled the problem a certain way. That’s where I draw on my teaching background, the performance skills I learned in music school, and my ability to translate specialized concepts into accessible terms.

Sorry—I devolved into my job interview spiel. My blog is Illusion Slopes. I post book reviews, notes on programming and game theory, and observations about Korean language and culture. I hope there’s something for everyone, but you might have to scroll a bit.

What’s the story behind your blog?

In music school, we often discussed the importance of building an artistic brand and having authority over what comes up when someone Googles your name. So, when I started my blog in 2015, it was with the vague hope that bolstering my online presence would help me find piano students, sell sheet music of my compositions, and maybe get my book reviews in front of an editor. It was a very careerist project—and not very successful by that yardstick! Still, I held onto the idea of the blog as digital resume for some time. When I was an English teacher, I blogged about language teaching; in grad school, I blogged about my academic research into college admissions markets.

Now that I have a stable job, I feel less pressure to professionalize my blog’s content. Instead, my goal is simply to keep writing, even at the risk of publishing an imperfect or overplayed take. Lately, I’ve been trying to post silly ideas and low-stakes opinions to practice writing in a different voice. The most enduring lesson I took from music school is the growth mindset (I memorialized it with my Crocs), which says that in order to improve at anything, you must find the edge of your comfort zone and take targeted risks. Before I die, I would like to get better at writing of all forms, and Illusion Slopes is one way I practice.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Well, I have two piles of notes: a Syncthing folder full of Markdown files, and a stack of handwritten pages torn from legal pads. I try to record all of my ideas, even the terrible ones, as soon as they arrive. Like Taylor Troesh says (aside: it is very cool to be on the same P&B as him), you have to make yourself a magnet for all ideas if you want to attract the good ones.

Every month or so, I shuffle through my piles of notes and try to turn a few into (for lack of a better term) finished products. A finished product can be a blog post, but honestly, it’s more often an email or a long message to a group chat, especially if the content is personal or an inside joke. (I like what Steven Garrity said about blogging in his company’s Slack chat—very relatable.)

In my blog’s queue, I also maintain a slush pile of kind-of-finished posts scheduled for various dates in 2050. If I can’t salvage any ideas from the notes but have fallen behind on posting, I pull something forward from the slush pile. Technically, these posts are already readable through GitHub, but I assume anyone who goes to the effort to find them there will recognize them as drafts and adjust their expectations accordingly.

The downside of my approach—gradually laundering notes into blog posts—is that it doesn’t provide a mechanism for following up on old posts with new information. For example, I recently wrote about the then-impending Korean presidential impeachment, but I never wrote an update when Yoon Suk Yeol was actually impeached (and more). I’m a bit embarrassed by the lack of continuity. But at the same time, part of the zen of non-professional blogging has got to be to release yourself from the obligation to always have a take.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

Not really. Sometimes I write on my phone, other times on the computer, other times longhand. I think I do my best writing when I revisit the same piece in different surroundings. For example, if I write the first draft on my phone in the subway, I’ll do the second draft on a notepad at home.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I started out on Blogger, which I had used once for a school project. Then I migrated to a static site in 2022. I chose Jekyll because GitHub sets it all up for you, meaning you can start with their opinionated configuration, then pivot to self-hosting if your needs become more specialized. In my case, I still host the site using GitHub Pages, but now I use a custom build script so I can run the latest versions of Ruby and Jekyll. The one unconventional thing I do is install the Ruby stack in a conda environment instead of using rbenv or a Docker container.

I bought my domain on Google Domains in 2018 or so and was automatically migrated to Squarespace after the sale. One of these days, I want to try migrating my domain to another registrar, mainly just to practice doing so without breaking my 301 redirects, email, and so on.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

You know, despite all the drama with Matt Mullenweg lately, I sometimes wish I’d gone with WordPress. Most of my friends are not programmers, so when they ask me about creating a personal site (welcome to the ’sphere, Longtime), I can’t recommend my setup, which requires you to know and love Git, Markdown syntax, YAML, SSH keys, etc. I usually refer people to WordPress.com instead, because at least WordPress is free, open source, and can’t trap them in a walled garden. But I wish I were making the recommendation from a place of greater firsthand experience.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?

With free hosting from GitHub Pages, my only direct cost is 12 USD/year for the domain name. Every few months, I pay a penny to rent a VPS, set up my site’s build pipeline, configure Apache, and test it all out. It’s that practice mentality again—I want to know I have options if I ever decide to move away from GitHub Pages.

I don’t object to others monetizing their blogs. However, when it comes to my personal consumption habits, I seem very reluctant to pay for anything on a subscription basis. My only media subscription is to the print edition of my favorite literary magazine. I think my revealed preference is for blogs that are wide open but double as a storefront for the author’s print books or CDs, sort of like Cory Doctorow’s site.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

So, one corner where old-school blogs are still going strong is in the community around foreign exchange programs like the (US government) Critical Language Scholarship, Fulbright, and Peace Corps programs. Participants in these programs often find, as I did, that living overseas for an extended period produces a kind of character growth that is difficult to fit into the tidy post formats of traditional social media. My friends Bethany and Paula have kept their blogs going for years since returning to the US, and both sites are awesome rabbit holes of personal reflection and useful information about how these exchange programs work. Fulbright Korea itself also has an official WordPress blog called Infusion run by current grantees.

Further recommendations: Anh’s homepage is one of my favorite personal blogs. I don’t know the author, but the design and content work together to project a very vivid sense of her personality. And she is an exceptional artist; check these out.

Shellsharks is also design inspo. I appreciate the Style Guide that shows all the CSS styles in one place. This site is super ambitious—really three or four blog-type things layered over each other—but totally sticks the landing.

Idealistic Future is a small trove of insights and anecdotes about the role of storytelling in the modern workplace.

I’ve followed Futility Closet since I learned how to work the internet.

I love Airplane on a Treadmill, specifically for this opening line:

I created this blog specifically to make this post. It may be the only post I ever write, but since human ignorance is seemingly unbounded, perhaps it won’t be.

(He wrote three more posts.)

I am not a parent, but I’ve always enjoyed the Free Range Kids blog, which challenges the decades-long trend of helicopter parenting in favor of letting kids make mistakes and grow.

The Chicago Manual of Style blog and Q&A are entertaining if you are into such things.

But as for who to interview next: I want to hear from Herb Childress. He is a retired academic who has written vividly about trying and failing to land a tenure-track job. He might offer interesting thoughts on carving out a space (including on his blog) for his writing and academic identity despite rejection from traditional institutions.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

First, track 1 from Gregory Porter’s Water album, which is where I got my blog’s name.

Second, Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, which my friend got me into. I keep coming back to this collection of essays, especially the one about unearthing a DVD of her appearance on a reality TV show a decade after it aired. Big thoughts about constructing the self through the perception of others.

Third, whatever the hell is going on with fluxus.org.

Using a tip from Travis Hathaway, here is a shell one-liner to check if a Conda environment is up to date:

conda update --all --dry-run --json | jq -e '.success and (.actions | length) == 0'

It exits (-e) with 0 if the environment is already updated and 1 if updates are available.

I use this in CI so that I get an email if my environment.yml file is holding any packages back.

Because this command actually executes the dependency solver, it won’t report the environment as out of date unless a package both has an available update and can be updated while satisfying all the other dependencies’ version constraints.