I’m not sure if anybody even realized I haven’t been posting lately but this is the longest hiatus we’ve ever had on this blog thus far. It was my normal practice to post pre-scheduled posts only every other week when on fellowships but now I totally went off the (WordPress) grid and I wanted to reconnect with you all.
(And also, Easter greetings – if that’s something you care about!)
As you might have imagined, I’m quite busy at the moment. I have some typesetting going on (my god, I’m not sure I will ever agree again to typeset a book that I’m also responsible for as an editor, it’s a crazy amount of work!), then I should finish my PhD thesis, I’m on a fellowship where I should finish a translation before heading off to the next fellowship which I hope I can actually get to because it’s in the US. So yeah, busy times.
Although I have to say, LaTeX is a comfort to me in stressful times. I like to focus on the nitty-gritty of code and zone out of the world. It’s relaxing to me and provides a change from everyday life. While I used to make useless CV templates (like this one) to relax, now I’m typesetting the proceedings of this conference which thankfully happened in Vienna at the end of February 2020, right before the Covid crazy went down.
On the down side of things, I also have been having back issues for a while now, meaning I should reduce screen time, or rather: cut out all unnecessary screen time. Of course, there really isn’t all that much to be cut out because the thesis still needs to get written. Oh well. But since the pain is really bad on-off (last Thursday I woke up with such a constricted rib cage that it took me quite a while to even be able to breathe more or less normaly, so that was new), I really need to try and reduce whatever possible. Even though I had never before put blogging on the “optional list” because I wanted to remain consistent (at least with posting every other week), now it has happened and you haven’t heard from me in more than a month. I just had to look that up and honestly, it felt like longer to me, so maybe it’s not even all that bad 😉
Anyway, I’m hoping to be rid of some of my responsibilites at latest towards the end of May. That’s still some time to go but it’s also not an unlimited amount of time. And I can assure you, I’m really motivated to get back into blogging and finally supply some more in-depth LaTeX content – when I have the engery to do so again.
You can follow some of what I’m doing using the #100DaysofDH challenge hashtag on Twitter – where I’m trying to post but honestly, I started regretting this invasion of my privacy already after the first three days 😀 But hey, I invented this challenge, so I can’t really back out now. Still, I didn’t realize at the time how uncomfortable it would make me to post something to Twitter daily… Especially as I had gotten into an actually quite enjoyable Twitter fast. But well. Duty calls and now I have to finish this challenge 😉
I will also post a little piece on apprenticeship in learning LaTeX soon. This is a topic which had never occured to me before I started some sort of apprenticeship myself (more news later) – but it’s a really important one and I want to do it justice.
I’m hoping you’re alright!
Best,
the Ninja
LaTeX Ninja'ing and the Digital Humanities 