Moon Tiger

This is my personal blog, which began as an archive of posts I published in 2023 on phils-web-site.net. I'm using that space for a more public-facing project now, and needed a place for my personal musings. You are here.

This site was built very quickly with eleventy, a barebones static site generator that I was trying to get some practice with, and then rebuilt even more quickly with Astro, a less barebones static site generator that I like much better.

Most Recent Post:

A Panoply of Web Sites

I should probably post here more often than once per solstice, but the problem I am grappling with is that I simply have too many web sites.

Last year, I began thinking about my online presence more critically, and began dividing my content between Sun Phil and Moon Phil. Sun Phil was for the Google search results for my name, and for cheerful tech topics that would help with my employability. Moon Phil was for everything else, from journaling to unprofessional rants to matters of spirituality and mysticism that I do not wish to bleed into my public persona. This was a turning point in my digital self-conception and led to a lot of thoughts being published that would have otherwise withered on the vine. I also deleted my twitter account, which rules even more in hindsight.

But why stop there? Inspired by my newfound occupation as a web site maker, I resurrected phil’s web site as a tribute to the Wild Web of yore: an aesthetically and navigationally jarring labyrinth that serves as a repository for any and all unhinged thought and opinion that wishes to escape my mind. The “Dumb Shit” section reorders itself on every site build, taking users through what I hope one day to be an endless rabbithole of insane raving. I got the basic building blocks set up early, then forgot about it once my ADHD got bored.

Since the Tiger Pajamas project has gotten more fully off the ground, I have yet another outlet for tech writing, and the more specific domain of web sites has given me a useful focusing element. I haven’t written as much as I’d like on our company blog, but I like what’s come out so far.

My band has a new web site, with some more fun design stuff coming, and I have another blank canvas to paint with all sorts of useful things: show calendar, exclusive demos, maybe some fun music-based interactivity.

I’m also in the very early stages of what I hope to one day be a family site, for me, wife, and eventually kid to publish to a small and exclusive audience, further enabling us to wean off of Facebook and Instagram and possibly serve as a model for a future Tiger Pajamas product.

As I grew beyond the sun/moon dynamic, it was only natural to look to the planets. Phil’s Web Site is a fitting receptacle for my Mercury Posts, and it received an enthusiastic new audience, as well as participation in an honest-to-god webring, right as Mercury stationed in Sagittarius. The family site would be Venus, tigerpajamas.com, like the tiger itself, is of Mars, and Jupiter rules my musical collaborations. If I can think of a Saturn project then I’ll be oh no oh shit oh fuck

horcrux.

I just did horcrux.

Having split my soul into seven parts, I am now functionally immortal, but at what cost to my humanity. I guess more to the point, that’s a lot of upkeep! Engineering blogs famously suffer from the problem that their owner can spend far more time building the thing than writing in it, and now I have a large handful of Astro repositories that can be constantly tweaked, and at a time when I’m having a hard time remembering what I’m supposed to be doing at any given point, I run the risk of overwhelm.

I’ll take the tradeoff, though. Lately I’ve been feeling a deep listlessness, a deficiency of whatever resource I was accruing when practicing qigong regularly. Every day is a logistical challenge combined with an endurance contest, with emotional bombs going off every few days or so, and in my absolutely fried state, making small progress on anything is tough, let alone putting in the regular, sustained effort needed to build something large. But here’s the thing about web sites: they’re just there. If I get the rare confluence of strong lunar pull to introspect and the chunk of time necessary to do it, Moon Tiger is there. The site sure isn’t judging me for taking so long to come back. And without it, I’d miss out on the opportunity to get my thoughts out. And with these new projects online, there’s easy channels for expression that wouldn’t otherwise have had any.

So yeah more web sites. I’m sure that I will want to do some consolidation one day, but it’s working for now. With the planet thing, I could even adapt astro dice to suggest which site to work on at a given time, and what sort of work to do. As I contemplate my seventh web site, this idea is actually getting me excited.