Hello, hello!
I'm hannotek, a poet and essay writer, and I am super pumped to have found the_stacker_muse territory.
I am relatively new to Bitcoin. I started researching it in late 2024, and the past year has been a wonderfully chaotic whirlwind. I've still got a lot to learn, and I'm slowly moving towards full adoption.
I am also enthralled with nostr. I feel like I missed the boat on all the other centralized platforms like X, WordPress, and Instagram. I never really paid any attention to social media until about eight years ago, and I felt like I was posting into the void. But nostr, this feels like a new start for me, and I'm quickly moving my writing here.
I am a retired soldier turned poet. I started poetry after my first deployment because it helped me better understand my experiences. I found great peace while writing, so it has become my profession. I have one completed manuscript of poems that I'm currently submitting to presses for publication; and I'm nearly done with another manuscript. I'm also looking for the nostr equivalent of KDP so I can publish ebooks on nostr, but I don't think that has been invented yet.
Over the next month or two, I will publish here the poems I've already published on my WordPress website, a migration of sorts. After that, I plan to start making videos and live streams of poetry readings, along with discussions about poetry in general. I don't have a radio personality, but I do like to talk, so that may be fun. I also write essays, usually investigative work that summarizes declassified government documents. It's slow and tedious work, but it's gratifying. On that note, is there anything on nostr that can convert TIFF images of archival documents into searchable and editable ones?
In any case, I wanted to introduce myself to this group of writers and say that I look forward to reading your works.
These are my thoughts from this morning, as I sat on the frozen back deck and watched the sun rise:
some people are like grass in the winter.
they no longer reach for the sun,
they no longer grow,
no longer strive to be more than they are.
they go through the motions
of just being a lawn,
isolated and frozen
even when children giggle and play
on their icy cacoons.
they go unnoticed, forgotten
until the world tilts just a little
closer to life.
Looking forward to reading more of your poetry. Also your summaries sound quite interesting.
I'm living where the lawn is not frozen, but the grass is just as dead cause my kids have trampled it. Wish it would freeze.
Thanks so much for reading. I'm excited for the summaries, but I'm anxious since I've never done streaming anything. I'll work it out though.
Ha! My grass struggles even when it's not winter thanks to the kids and the pets. Thanks for welcoming me.
I appreciate the introduction. Nice to have you around. And cool poem!
Interesting.
Thanks! I've been looking for a group of writers and poets on nostr. I'm happy to be here.
You could do a version 2 as things seems going to the right way.
You're right. I could make new versions of each poem as I migrate them to nostr. I actually believe that poems are never done being written until the poet dies.
When I first started writing poetry, I sought out other poets, and one of my mentors told me that before. He said that a poem written in my 20s, will be different than the same poem I write in my 30s. And as the poet revises each poem to reflect the changes within the poet, this process is ongoing and only ends when the poet is no longer around to make the changes.
greetings fellow!
Happy to make it to your debut post and give you a proper Welcome!
Your poem is interesting. I suppose people will take away different things from it n feel either melancholic or hopeful — based on their emotional state when reading it
Test
Your lines about grass in the winter speak to a quiet endurance and an underlying potential that waits for its moment to awaken. That image is powerful because it reminds us that stillness is not the end but a phase in a cycle. People lose momentum for many reasons yet there is often a season ahead where they can begin again. You seem to be seeking those seasons in both art and technology and that is an inspiring thing to witness. In terms of your archival work there are open source OCR tools that might serve you well. While they are not native to nostr yet they can bridge the gap until such solutions exist. What you are doing is more than migrating content it is cultivating a space where words memory and innovation meet.
Thanks for reading and responding to my poem! You are indeed correct, winter seems to me a slowing of time, a stillness in our lives. The visual for the poem was my dog, slowly moving around the frozen yard, crunching with every deliberate step in the stillness of twilight before the sun peaked. I watched him move around in this manner as I sat drinking coffee and waiting for the big orange ball to arrive.
I have researched some OCR tech, much of it is costly. I did figure out once how to transition a TIFF to PDF using a Google Drive to Google Docs method, but the output was so bad it was of no use. For any given project, I download the archive files, all of them being images and not documents, and then I make my way through each one, page by page, with the goal of determining what happened and why the documents were classified to begin with. It's a lot of fun for me, but it is very tedious work and it takes a long time to discover the story behind the document.
Thanks again for the interaction.