#hexagonal awareness project

[hexeosis]

hexeosis AMA

r/hexagons will be hosting its first official AMA next Thursday, June 15, featuring me, hexeosis. come on over next Thursday and ask me anything and i will attempt to answer in an intelligible way :D 

[hexagonalawarenessproject]

Important Hexagonal Announcement

tl;dr: I'm going to start posting less crap.

Friends, Romans, &c.:

In this first full week of HEXAGONAL AWARENESS MONTH, I have come to a momentous conclusion regarding the future of this blog, one that I feel compelled to share with you forthwith, though it won't reach its full implementation until some weeks hence:

Essentially, I have I come to the—in retrospect fairly obvious—conclusion that I simply cannot afford to continue spending upwards of an hour a day battling the increasingly-inadequate Tumblr UI in an attempt to keep this blog at its current and historical rate of throughput. When I first started the HAP blog, I anticipated being able to reblog maybe, if I was lucky, a few pictures of hexagons a day. After a few days of queuing up my extant collection of favorited posts at the time, and what other hexagonal material I could find here and there incidentally, I realized I had like, I don't know, a hundred or so posts queued, and was comfortably able to push them out at like a dozen a day without risk of depletion. Soon enough I realized that I could easily continue at this rate indefinitely. Indeed, I quickly ramped up to near twenty posts a day, where I have more or less remained, despite occasional fluctuations to burn off excess inventory. In the first months and years, I took a fairly proactive approach to finding material, scouring the archives of interesting tumblrs, going on aimless tag searches for unexpected material, etc. Eventually, due to time constraints, etc., this worked its way down to my present system, where the vast majority of my posts come from a dozen or so tags, with the rest coming from my fairly limited selection of followed blogs, and archive searches of new followers. Anyway, point is, being some massive fire hose of like 20+ hexagon-related posts a day wasn't really my original goal, it was just sort of an accident of history justified by the unexpected depth of material early on—an accident that become increasingly easy to justify over the years when I realized I could maintain this level of throughput. But, in the immortal words of Jeff Goldblum, I was so preoccupied with whether I could, I never stopped to ask whether I should. At least not at first. And even if, indeed, I should—if reblogging this much material is ultimately of some value in itself that would not be attained from a more modest and discriminating selection (and I certainly wouldn't have continued for this long if I didn't think this arguably the case)—it remained undecided as to whether it was worth the sheer amount of time I was sinking into it.

The fundamental miscalculation I made in all of this—and it is one I have repeated on other social media platforms in recent years—was operating from the assumption that at some point Tumblr would stop sucking, and that they would present me with a fast, efficient user interface that I could use to expand and refine my hexagonal queries, and complete my daily work in this respect in a more modest amount of time—rather than, say, having their developers hard at work adjusting the color on the navigation icons for like the twentieth time or what have you. This, sadly, has never happened. I promised myself I would not turn this into a Tumblr-bashing post, and I won't, but a particular source of my ongoing frustration has been the "new" post form. It is slow, it sometimes hangs inexplicably for upwards of ten seconds at a time, and it is in no way an improvement over the old one. The use of a modal overlay is particularly needless and resource-consuming. I have to scroll up and down to the top and the bottom of the page to adjust all the pertinent fields (i.e., change the blog, and change to queue rather than post). I have to make sure my cursor isn't in the content field while I am doing this, lest I only scroll that. The autocomplete on the tag field is constantly interrupted by my misplaced cursor, as it seems to interpret a passive cursor crossing the boundary of the active autocomplete field as an indication that I am finished typing my partially-typed tag name. It inexplicably raises a confirmation dialog if I attempt to leave the page. And so forth.

I could go on. But the central problem I have had of late is that Tumblr is just slow as balls, both in its baseline speed (particularly with the needless client-side logic being imposed by such unnecessary frivolities as the aforementioned modal overlay post form, etc.), and in its occasional phases of being, like, really quite unworkably slow. Tumblr has always been slow, in both of these respects, but the effects have of late been increasingly amplified by seemingly buggy and unresponsive ajax requests, etc. I finally I suppose reached my breaking point with this yesterday, when I had two different incidents in the morning and the evening, which I won't go into in any great detail, but which turned what should've been maybe half an hour or so of daily Tumblr work into easily over an hour and a half. But this was not an isolated incident. It's been like this more and more, and again, even when Tumblr isn't being particularly conspicuously slow, the slowness of just having to sit through slow-loading forms, and dealing with the aforementioned problems with the post form in particular, etc., would be enough to make me seriously question whether this whole operation is now worth the amount of time I am sinking into it.

Having now considered this question, I have, of course, come to the conclusion that no, it is not. The upshot of which is that I have simply decided to stop doing the daily work of maintain a 16+ post per day throughput, over and above my usual dashboard sweep and occasional meandering tag or archive search. As a result, though I have no intention of abandoning this blog altogether, its volume will decline significantly several weeks hence, down to perhaps as few as a few posts per week, though perhaps also an order of magnitude or so more than that. I intend to continue reblogging worthy hexagonal material as I run across it certainly, but will no longer be trying to meet some arbitrary quota, or maintaining constant and comprehensive vigilance over particular tag searches. As a consequence, of course, this will mean fewer crap posts and fewer like, you know, situations where there's like a series of five different photographs of the same painting, taken at slightly different angles, all of which I reblog over like a several day period, etc. Nor will I continue to reblog every remotely hexagonal post from the sort of geometric artists who post largely identical animated GIFs with slight variations in colors, etc. I will go back to, again, browsing Tumblr recreationally and at my own pace, reblogging material here and there as I see fit, when I find it genuinely worthy of such endorsement. In short, I will become like many of the other hexagon-themed tumblrs, most of which are far more sporadic and selective than I have been.

My intention is to continue the current pacing such that I exhaust my present supply of bookmarks (which as of this writing are several dozen posts above the 301 post queue limit, which I had maxed out as of last night) sometime after the end of the month, thus ensuring us all a continued supply of traditional material until the close of Hexagonal Awareness Month. At that time I will post another message to this effect, reconfirming the change of format for anyone who missed it the first time or what have you, and providing what further details I can vis-a-vis the anticipated character and volume of the material going forward. I may also do a slower drawdown, to maybe a dozen posts per day or less, which could keep my current stock running through most of April I imagine, though I'll play it by ear. I also hope in the future to finally be able to start more seriously addressing the backlog of feedback I have sitting in my ask queue, the neglect for which I have hitherto shown is, as I have said before, inexcusable on my part. Other changes in format and content are possible as well, which I will keep you informed of as they may develop.

I reserve the right, of course, to revert to the present format or something like it in the future, particularly if the utility of Tumblr's UI is significantly improved at some point hence. However, given Tumblr's historical lack of concern for the obvious deficiencies in their platform, in addition to the well-known torpescence of their present parent company, I do not, of course, hold out much real hope of this. A more likely course is that I will eventually establish a classic-HAP-style blog on my own site somewhere, free of the constraints of this ridiculous platform entirely, and leave this blog in its reduced form as a residual native presence on Tumblr.

One way or another I urge you all to continue following this blog after the change in format—at least until it becomes clear whether or not it is going to suck. If nothing else it will hopefully be less of a strain on your dash, and what material we do put out will be of slightly more direct relevance to our mutual concerns vis-a-vis the ongoing raising of hexagonal awareness.

In closing, I wish you all the very best of Hexagonal Awareness Months, and express my sincere hope that the spirit of this sacred month sustains and illuminates your awareness of hexagons throughout the rest of the year and beyond.

[superjezmeralda]

Hexagonal Swiss fridge magnets.