It was my 21st birthday last week!
To celebrate, my boyfriend and I had lunch at Olive Garden. (Going there together has turned into some kind of inside joke by now, I think.)
It’s been, what, 4 years since the “6 years” post? Oh dear. Computers have been tormenting me for nearly over a decade now. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll be free of these shackles anytime soon. I was truly cursed from birth.
writing is hard
I’ve always wanted to write more articles for this blog, but it’s difficult when I’m constantly inclined to restrict my writing to lengthy technical deep dives that, in turn, necessitate fact-checking and detailed prose that borders on legalese. Writing more personal posts (like this one) might help mitigate the dread of every post feeling like a chore…
Part of that feeling comes from the frankly ridiculous amount of overengineering that goes into my personal website. This iteration is built on Astro, which has felt nice. I’ve been theoretically pining for a WYSIWYG editor to write and edit these posts, as copying image and video files around is a hassle, and I’d like to be able to blog from my phone, too; however, I do like being a control freak when it comes to this sort of thing, so that might not be the best. :P
I have several blog posts stashed away in yonder Git branches, likely never to see the light of day because I got too ambitious with them and got burnt out. Actually, I had a post in the works in which I not only explain how React works, but also elaborate on its underlying appeals and neat mechanisms that arise from its design. (It was actually just thinly-veiled propaganda, if I’m being honest.)
I implemented embedded code editors just for that post, complete with Babel support, real-time previews, and diagnostic reporting—the works! I also added support for those little badges that you can interleave with code, which involved numerous Markdown crimes. You’re able to hover over them to highlight a corresponding note:
You might notice how the above screenshots and screen recordings feature a site design completely distinct from what you’re looking at now. That’s because I have a habit of constantly overhauling the design of my personal website. Oh look, here’s one I forgot about:
There are even more designs, mockups, and revisions that I can and should make a gallery out of. “Oh well. We have warehouses FULL of the things…”
OK, onto the next topic before I start rambling again.
life is hard…
…but we persist. ADHD is still making everything rough as it always does. I remember thinking a long time ago, “all I need to do is get a software engineering job and all of my attention and focus problems would go away,” because I foolishly, foolishly concluded that monetizing my main hobby would essentially constitute me winning at life. Funny, that.
There could be several more paragraphs in this section but it might be best not to overshare. :v
new website 2 electric boogaloo
I’ve been spending a lot of time on this new website design in the last few weeks. I really like it, and I hope and pray that I’m free from ever having to redesign this website again.
I think my inspirations are pretty clear (especially on the landing page)—I wanted to replicate that Web 1.0 feel where websites actually brimmed with personality and character, linked to other interesting resources and websites, and housed within them gardens and forests of pages and content that the author was passionate about. I’ll take any excuse to yap nowadays.
I make heavy use of the Silk icon set by Mark James, which I first saw used by Garry’s Mod, an absolutely timeless game I grew up on.
skube
You might’ve noticed a spinnable 3D Skip Cube (AKA “skube”, coined by Spotlight) at the top of the page, featuring art drawn by Mikey. I should note that, in the following situations, a normal 2D avatar is shown instead:
- You have JavaScript disabled.
- You have “reduced data usage” enabled, and your web browser is telling me this.
- You have set a preference to prefer reduced motion.
- You have manually switched to 2D mode by right-clicking on the avatar (or on a touchscreen, performing a single tap).
This was surprisingly really buggy (and there remains more bugs for me to squash, as always). Physics updates were tied to frame rate until Julian and Aly helped me figure that out—big thanks!
I still define blog posts as having tags, but they currently don’t show up anywhere. I’ll work on that later, and I might start generating multiple RSS feeds for people who don’t care for this kind of post…
I think that’s all I wanted to say. It’s getting late now, so good night!