Belarius

I still feel like I'm developing my practice. I'm using the "sync to local folder, upload to neocities w/ WEBDAV" pipeline, which is functional enough but definitely involves extra steps. I think it's just a price I'm going to need to pay in order to avoid the future opportunity costs of having to rebuild again. I considered GitHub Pages as one option, for example, since I'm already using that for my professional website, but I don't quite trust that the rug won't get pulled out from under me there in 5 years.

As far as Publii itself goes, the Markdown editor is almost like basic posting here, in that you can always just put raw inline HTML into things. That works well for Barleyposting, for example, since I only ever need to post one image (or very occasionally a few images) at a time. However, the image assets need to be organized in advance and linked to directly. For more complex features, such as lightboxed image galleries, the WYSIWYG interface is pretty powerful, but it's a little heavy-handed in the way it sanitizes changes made to the raw HTML. I feel confident that I can form new habits around its idiosyncrasies, but my habits from posting here are pretty ingrained at this point.

There's also the issue of modifying the theme itself, which I feel much less confident about, but at least the option exists to do so on a broad scale if I need to, so it all seems a lot more viable for posting purposes than building standalone sites.

As a final caveat, I did not have time to research all the alternatives, so Publii may not be the best road to Poster's Delight. It's what I struck upon that seemed like it would come together fast enough given the circumstances. Certainly there are folks here who would know better than me what the tradeoffs are for other alternatives.

I don't believe I've addressed this directly, but I think I've mentioned that it was quite a bit more challenging than I initially expected! My first clue that I was potential in for a bad time was during my very first month of dedicated midnight posts for the #scary tag when I tried to find a good piece by Beksiński using Google Image search and discovered, to my horror, that a ton of the results even then (almost a year ago) were AI-generated trash. I think his paintings were an early part of the gold rush because "too many fingers, and wrong" was a feature of his art rather than a bug.

I quickly determined that DuckDuckGo's image search had less AI trash, for whatever reason. It's still consistently better than Google Image search for quick & convenient use, both because the quality of the results seem a bit better (for art, anyway) and there's a "Wallpaper" size option that's a bit better than the "Large" option Google offers. So my first port of call when trying to get good candidates for a theme is to search there.

Regardless of the search engine, I would try a bunch of different synonyms that felt like they might be fruitful. I've founds that the quality of my results has improved when I include the term "museum" in the search in quotation marks, as well as a specific medium (painting, sculpture, mixed media) or style/movement (surrealism, expressionism, pre-Raphaelite).

From these initial searches, I will always find a few good candidates, but I'll also often surface (a) museums I've not considered that have whole collections I can search directly, (b) blogs/aggregators that post in in some genre or along some theme (these were especially crucial to unearthing some of the illustrations and pop art I included), and (c) artists whose style looks compelling but for whom I think I can probably find a more on-theme piece. It would also transpire that through these peregrinations, I would stumble onto pieces that would fit well into other themes, and I would file them accordingly. My rule was always to keep every artists different during any given month, but I don't mind repeating an artist several times across a year.

Relatedly, I kept an eye out for works being third-party-posted on cohost specifically, not as a way to find art to make my own post (no need to do so redundantly), but to find artists. In quite a few cases, I was able to use posts by, say, @the-museum or @funeralpyre (among others) as a jumping off point if an artist seemed compelling, then would track down a new work that wasn't already on cohost to add to my various theme backlogs.

Unfortunately, this forward-thinking strategy means I have at least some art for all the months we will never get back to again on this webbed site. The art posts are surprisingly time-consuming to write, because many of the works have quite tenuous provenance that makes correct citation difficult, and I've also taken writing captions/alt text very seriously in a way that forces me to really think about what each piece is doing or provoking in me. I genuinely don't think there's time left to compose all those posts that would have instead unfurled over the next 11 months, because this is also an unreasonably busy time of year for me at work. I may just do an art dump later in the month (without my usual rigorous practice) if there's time, just to get them out there, but I'm loathe to do so in a way that doesn't unambiguously and clearly credit the artists responsible.

I've had this ask in my inbox for over a month, and was weighing the best time to respond. My plan had been to write something thoughtful on the nature of grief after some time had passed so the topic wouldn't be too intense for the poster in question. Now, I hope I have not waited too long, and that the anonymous asker will see this reply in the days that remain. In this period of intense emotion for the site, I feel as though I can risk posting this without a content warning, in the hopes it improves the chance of that kind person seeing that their ask was answered.

Within a few months of when I started posting daily pictures of Barley at @barleydog, I became intensely aware that what I was building was, in a sense, a biography that would meaningfully outlast her. Dogs, after all, simply don't live all that long, relative to the humans scale of experience, and making a daily practice of documenting Barley as she is soon became a long and growing letter that I have been writing to my future self. I have tried, in writing about her (and the thoughts and experiences I have had thanks to time spent with her) to capture who she was in a way that both conveys her to those who will never meet her, and to those of us in the future who can no longer do so. I worry for her, and about her, in ways I know she cannot do for herself, and I do what I can (within the constraints of what daily living allows) to ensure she enjoys the time she has left.

So it was deeply touching, disarmingly so, to learn that my musings had helped someone who is going through what I have known, deep down, I will go through myself one day, and sooner than I think. This vulnerable ask affirms (as have the many kind comments that others of you have made over a year+ of posting) the value of what I can't help but feel sometimes is the silly self-indulgence of pushing my pet into the timelines of others.

With this final Era of Posting coming to an end for cohost, I want to say so much. I am both grieving, as well as dreading that different kind of grief that will come after. For now, the lesson I take from this moment, from Barley's ability to be a salve, by her presence and through my documentation, is that we cannot know the good we do for those around us by being sincere and thoughtful and present when they need us. Share what you treasure with the world, love what you love and who you love, in good faith and with a generosity of spirit, and you will lighten life's burden for hundreds of good, dear people that you will never meet.

For my part, I am hard at work rebuilding the scaffolding of Barley's biographical monument elsewhere. If following her adventures and my idle musings has been something you look forward to checking in on every day, or maybe just once in a while, check back in with @barleydog in the coming days. I'll post a link you can bookmark and an RSS feed you can subscribe to very soon.

And please, give each of your pets a kiss on the head (literal or figurative, as appropriate) on behalf of Barley and me as well.

Just one more theme to reveal! I've also had a good time with this. Trying to find and curate art by theme has (a) been quite a bit trickier than I had originally anticipated and (b) has resulted in my discovering so many artists and distinctive works that I simply would not have stumbled upon otherwise. As someone who values the work done by creative people, this has been good for my soul. I would actually recommend trying this to anyone who is feeling stuck in an artistic rut: Choose some theme and try to find 30 pieces from 30 different artists, published throughout history and across multiple mediums, that aren't already super famous. You'll definitely discover artists you're not already familiar with, and will probably end up developing whole new strategies for finding art in general. I certainly have! It's also a nice problem because there's functionally infinite amounts of art out there, so it's just a matter of figuring out how to find it. It's never an impossible task, even if the theme is more off-beat.

I'm glad you've been enjoying it! One thing that this whole exercise has taught me is that it's impossible to know which posts will trigger a chain reaction of sharing, and which will garner mere severals before going quiet. I figure any one of these works could be someone's favorite, so I'm going to keep mixing things up. Fortunately, folks seem to be discovering the older posts via the tags, if my notifications are to be believed, so here's hoping that new users can enjoy those older posts as well! Should be interesting to start revisiting pre-existing themes once we enter the spooky season!

I'll also take this occasion to give a shout out to cohost's non-North-American users. My self-imposed rule that I must post each new work no earlier than midnight was originally motivated by complaints I saw last year that not enough was going on in their timelines while most of North America sleeps.