Bloglook and Blogname

The other day I was reading a post by photographer Hannah Yoon, and thinking that Substack's design looks rather sophisticated and nice – whitespace, serif font, occasionally (in this case) broken up with an understated photograph. And I found myself wondering if I should give this blog another makeover to make it look more like Substack, or perhaps even start a new blog on Substack. (A parallel blog I mean; I wouldn't abandon this one.)

The new blog, if I were to start one, would be about photography. In 2020 I started writing regularly for a couple of photography websites, whereupon I decided I would reserve this blog mostly for non-photography topics. But I've recently been wondering if, rather than writing for other photography blogs, I should just start my own. Just an idle thought; I most likely won't act on it. In any case, changing this blog's design to make it more Substack-like was still an option.

Then I saw this tweet asking what people miss about the "good old days" of the web, to which @jeesun replied:

i miss blogs with a unique look. it seems like everyone uses substack nowadays.

I think I'll keep my old design for now :)

What I would like to change is how it looks on mobile devices. But that involves messing with the CSS template and implementing responsive design, which I currently don't (perhaps never will) have the energy for.

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In hindsight, I would have liked to have chosen a blog name and URL that don't have my own name – but that ship has sailed.

Last year I wrote that one of the blog names I considered was The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I think Planting Cabbages would have been a good name too. It's from a quote by Michel de Montaigne:

Let death find me planting my cabbages, indifferent to death, and still more to my unfinished garden.

Planting Cabbages is my username on WeChat, which I use to communicate with some of my Chinese friends. One time they asked me why I picked this name, and I told them about the Montaigne quote. They found it very interesting, and on the taxi ride home, we ended up having a long discussion about it. One of them also speaks French, so she looked up the original quote and proposed various possible translations. Another mentioned a Chinese philosopher who said something similar.

They later told me that the discussion continued after they dropped me off. The taxi-driver was silent throughout, but right at the end, as they were getting off, he asked, "But why cabbages?"