The Agrinautica

   I'm sure you've heard of this site Medium but just to lay the foundation here, it seems to be a currently flourishing site for blogging but contrary to livejournal people address themselves to the public at large rather than treating it like a private journal. I've made occasional posts there without getting any traction, and have exactly three "followers" who are all friends of mine I'm sure. Anyway so I had an idea that might fly with the SEO gods, which is after this last trip to the east end of the state I've now been relatively close to all four corners of the state and most places worth visiting in between; so I was thinking I'd post a series on Medium that is like a travel guide to Victoria, told sort of in the manner of a travelog but as if one were marathoning through all the sights in as quick succession as a tourist on a tourism marathon might rather than the over-the-course-of-seven-years I did it.

   So I wrote my first introductory post to the planned series, which lays out the itinerary. And plan on writing the first part, about Melbourne, forthwith. So I went to review the livejournal entries I've made bout Melbourne and.. here's the funny thing -- there are none. Yes there's lots of passing references to having had to go to Melbourne for one reason or another, but two or three times I've spent a weekend of longer in the city and have never written about it. Considering how thoroughly I cover all my travels, this is kind of an astounding omission, and I think this is really indicative of just how banal I personally find cities to be.

   Ironically, I'll be in Melbourne next weekend (working at a beekeeping booth at a garden show). But alas, too late, I'm impatient to move this project forward before that. I suppose I'll use next weekend as an opportunity to double check / more thoroughly investigate the observations I'll now have to dredge from memory, and then update the post accordingly.

   In other news, I can't figure out how to align=justify text on Medium (I know typesetters consider it barbarity but I have yet to hear a convincing argument against it from them), and worse still, it flat out won't allow me to put two spaces after a period. What blasphemy! (though I just noticed livejournal just quietly humors me by allowing me to put them but only displays one. Ah well _I_ know I did what was Right) AND Medium insists on line breaks between every paragraph which always annoys me. I'll damn well skip a line between paragraphs if I want to! Which you'll no doubt note that I've done here but I don't do when the paragraphs are closely related. -- or more critically I want to put a subheading above some paragraphs but it looks godawful having a skipped line, subheading, another skipped line, actual content paragraph. Perhaps I'm too grumpy and set in my ways for a different site ;)


Unrelated photo from the last time the sun shone here, last Sunday

Edit: okay my Melbourne post is up.

Edit 2: I've also perused the posts on medium with the travel tag now and it appears there's a fair few people posting travelogs. But they mostly fall into one of two different categories, either: (A) "I went here, then I went here, then I did this" boring summaries; or (B) attempts at writing a "travel guide" in which they've just posted a bunch of generic information about the place that anyone could have gotten off five minutes of google, and/or such inane fluff that it's completely indistinguishable from something written by chat AI. Obviously I'm deeply deeply biased about my own writing but I like to think neither my usual travel blogging or the post I made for Medium today is as execrable as these two styles.