ℹ️ about bcj

Hi, I'm bcj. Welcome to my page on my site on my computer in my house. I started this site because it was an excuse to have friends over and because you should follow through on your goofy ideas.

Photography

I've been taking photos for a bit over a decade now. I started by taking pictures with my phone while out on runs, but eventually got my own standalone camera. Ever since then, it's been a slow process of learning more about taking photos. Last year I committed to taking and sharing at least one good photo a day. It was incredibly fulfilling—I don't think I've ever learned more about a subject in such a lasting way—but I can't imagine making that kind of commitment again. After a bit of a break, I'm back at it and having more fun than ever.

Movies

Growing up, both my dad and one of my best friends were really into movies. I ended up watching them a lot without even realizing it was one of my big interests.

I don't tend to watch a lot of movies on my own (outside of October when I watch too many spooky movies), but I do have a fair number of movie nights with friends. beocijies actually spawned out of an ever-expanding static site generator project that I made to help make organizing online movie nights easier.

What are some of my favourite movies? Good question. My favourite movie is probably The Long Goodbye. Some of my other favourites are The Conversation, Face/Off, Pontypool, Night & the City, Sleuth, The Thing, and Videodrome.

As of writing this, the last movie I saw that blew me away was probably Voyage to Cythera.

Spelunky 2

After putting a number of hours into the remake and then the sequel, I started speedrunning this a couple years ago. I am firmly okay at it. This is to say, I am in the top half of people who have submitted speedruns for it but am not in the same league as the people at the top of the leaderboard.

Music

I mostly listen to post rock and jazz but I'd like to believe I have at least somewhat varied tastes. My favourite album is TNT by Tortoise. This is probably not a surprise given the two kinds of music I mentioned.

I played the trombone in high school but sadly never realized I should form/join a ska band. We all make mistakes. Every so often I try to learn music again but it hasn't really stuck. I'm staring at the keyboard propped against my wall unplayed in about a year as I type this. One day.

Reading

I've been a voracious reader for my whole life. I used to read a few books a week—but that's dropped to a few a month now that I mostly work from home. If you come set up a beocijies page, you'll probably notice that I have a lot of books.

Some of my favourite authors are Italo Calvino, Ursula le Guin, Georges Perec, Ann Leckie, Meriam Toews, Kurt Vonnegut, and Banana Yoshimoto. The book I've read the most is An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris. It is also my favourite.

Running

I've been a runner for years and have even run a few marathons but thanks to a string of injuries over the last year or two, this has been a somewhat lapsed hobby. Watch this space I guess

Friends

I'm in favour of them generally. They're fun to hang out with. Part of the reason I made beojicies was to have an excuse to invite friends over even though I don't especially like entertaining.

Programming

I get paid to do this for a living. Sometimes I decide to do it for fun. Last year I wrote myself a photo sorting tool that worked the way I wanted a photo sorting tool to work. It currently lives in the no man's land of being functional enough to do most of what I want but not nearly nice enough to recommend to others. One day.

This page is a lot style-heavier (and gimmickier) than most things I make but overdesigning things feels like the right aesthetic for beocijies and I want a page with all the CSS stuff I know just in case I need to help someone else out with their site.

🅱️ blog

Newest Post

today, I updated beocijies for the first time in almost a year (or like a year and a half?). Sorry little website. I forgot about you. Or at least have been busy with other stuff. What's happened since I last posted. The company I worked for laid everyone off. I got a new job. I took an impossible number of photos. I made a 'mobile' beocijies site (wow, wild that I never blogged about that here). I let some websites lapse. I made a new site for projects. I released the first in what was going to be a monthly zine but turned into a leap-yearly zine instead. Probably some other stuff. Hope you've been well.

Archive (Oldest to Newest)

today my friend beanboy came over to set up his beocijies website. He doesn't have a lot of webdev experience either but he had a strong idea of what he wanted to do and together I think we muddled through it pretty well and made something nice. :)

We also watched the tv miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's The Langoliers. I hadn't read the novella before so half way through he made me pause it and guess what I thought was actually happening. Truly, there was no way I was going to guess exactly where it was going but I think I did pretty well all things considered. It was fun, even if that series does drag out about half an hour too long.

today, I met m4rk88 and beanboy for coffee and then they both came over to create/update their respective beocijies sites. Beocijies now has three (3!) whole users. It's pretty much bigger than twitter (but it's not for sale!). We also saw Gem while heading over so maybe user four coming soon.

bean(ish) update: I forgot that I was going to pick up coffee beans. Oops.

today, I'm updating my page by myself. I'm trying to only edit my page when others come over to edit theirs but I wanted to test some scripts I wrote that make setting up new users nicer and I wanted to update the main page to include additional instructions.

today, is the start of park week, so I worked from a park this afternoon. After I finished up with work, I spent some time designing my new beocijies page (don't worry, even though I designed it on another computer, I am retyping all this manually). Now that beocijies is launched, I thought it would probably be a good idea to have a bit more of a real page for myself.

today, I updated my live-update script to tweet whenever people are updating their beocijies. To test it out, I decided to update my page to make it a bit more screen-reader friendly. For now, that just meant using some aria parameters everywhere I use emoji. I thought the biggest offender was going to be 🅱️ and ℹ️ would be decently meaningful but "blood type b" is at least short to read and Apple's VoiceOver utility absolutely mangles the information symbol. If you have any advice on how to the :hover stuff in the cheat sheet, please let me know. I made it work more correctly with touch screens but I have no idea what a screen-reader-equivelent action might be.

Thanks to m4rk88 for both suggesting some accessibility improvements and some more-general formatting fixes.

today, beanboy came over for the second installment in our new project where we're watching everything (that is still possible to find) James Hong was ever in. For the next little while, these are movies where he shows up uncredited for a few seconds at best but it won't be long before we actually get to see him act.

Beanboy also brought over his dad's old film camera because we wanted to work out if it still worked. It looks like it's not quite ready for a test roll so we're saving that for another day. I did get a nice photo with (but not using) my hand-me-down film camera so be on the lookout for that (on Instagram I guess?).

today, beanboy, edwub2166, and I hung out at the Forks. After, the three of us came back to my place so Edwub could pick a bunch of things he lent me to fix a flooded basement, so he could set up his beocijies page, and so that beanboy and I could continue our James Hong Project. It was fun, even if the movie wasn't.

today, beanboy, and I hung out. We met up in a park and took photos using film cameras that belonged to our dads (we have different dads [and different cameras]). After, he came over to eat some food (don't believe his lies, I had wonton soup, not noodles) and watch the worst movie we've ever watched together. Instead of paying attention to the movie we both got distracted learning about various film technologies/techniques (for both pictures and movies). It was fun in spite of the terrible John Wayne movie playing in the background.

⛓ links

My websites and where else to find me on the web

bcj Pics

This is my photography site. You should check it out

One Gros Online

This is my site where I host projects. One day it will have 144 things.

@bcj

I'm on cohost. Follow me there