welcome to remblanc.com

first status of 2025! new year, new me, new time to reflect on the old me.

2024 was okay for me. i think i spent too much time being bogged down by things that already happened to me and being worried about the uncertainties that ultimately did not happen to me. i think 2025 might be the year where the things do start getting tougher for me, but at at least this time around i do have an idea of what those things might be, and have more-or-less reasonable expectations for actually dealing with them, so i think i’ll probably turn out okay overall.

2024 had plenty of failures and plenty of successes for me. i want to go over the failures first.

my 2024 failures

my resolutions for 2024 ultimately did not come to fruition. what i wanted at the start of last year the most is to get a job somewhere in IT [that’s what i got a degree in], and to learn japanese, and none of these things actually panned out.

i am typically not a fan of giving people off-the-cuff advice, but i highly suggest whoever reads this to never ever make “getting a job” your new year’s resolution. trust me, even if you follow through with this, it won’t get you the job you actually want, and the further you go into the year not getting a job, the more demotivating it becomes. moreover, it is probably not the kind of wish one would want to have unless they are in utterly dire circumstances, and putting something you need instead of something you want is just a bad way of approaching the concept.

i also had my appetite for tech seriously soured by much of the tech-related stuff this year. i have a really poor view of the field as it stands now, especially with it being so full of grift on the public side [i dread whatever will happen after the AI bubble inevitably pops] and highly saturated with people who were attracted into this environment not by the prospect of actually being a tech person, but by the idea that they are going to be filthy rich after finishing a python tutorial. i simply do not see myself in much of the field at this point, except perhaps webdev, which, while exhibiting some of the worst aspects of the aforementioned issues, at least provides some kind of a creative outlet for me to both engineer things and express myself the way i want.

lastly, i don’t think i realized my writing ambitions as much as i thought i would. i don’t think i was motivated enough to actually carry through with those. or maybe i was just tired, idk.

my 2024 successes

well, for one, you’re reading this on what i consider a major step forward for myself.

remblanc as the idea was largely spontaneous to me. it was quite a lofty ambition for me, and it still is. i am still intrigued by the vague idea of its being, and i am more interested than ever in making it take shape. while currently i don’t see that shape clearly, i am excited by the possibilities and the thematic threads of it that i am currently developing in the background. i’d like to tell y’all about it, but i vowed to myself to not do so until i have anything concrete, so the only promise i will make is that you will know about it when it is actually done.

remblanc was a much needed creative reset for me that caused me to think what defined me as a person and as a craftsperson. it reignited some of my remaining passion for tech and made me very interested in webdev, it made me take more shots at writing, even if i lost plenty of momentum i had at the start of the year, and i’m thinking a lot more about creative fields than before.

speaking of creative fields, starting approximately two weeks ago, i started drawing! per my policy, i’m not gonna talk about it til i got things to show, but i’m having a lot of fun figuring things out and getting my brain rewired in the process. if you ever considered hopping onto this, either as a hobby, or professionally, i can confidently say that it’s something that is highly attainable, provided dedication, determination, knowledge, and a hint of taste.

conclusion

idk these seem obligatory when i add sections to the status. feels like i am missing something if i don’t include these, even if i don’t really have anything else to say and i don’t wanna fluff things up. suffice to say, if this was my attempt at working in copywriting, i’d be fired immediately.

happy new year everyone!!!!1

[7/100]

as a seasoned user of twitter, i feel like i spent far too much time, energy, and braincells on participating in online shitfights. the online shitfights pretty much always end up the same way: you find a take that is so extremely annoying and uneducated that you cannot help but give in to the urge to respond, and then you pour hours of your precious life arguing with whoever the fuck sees fit to defend the honor of the person who made that shitass take. you stand your ground, you defend your points, but you fail to persuade the person cos they’re dead set on defending the shitass take. then the arguments turn into a blur, the conversation devolves into hurling piles of nondescript shit onto each other, and nobody comes out of it happy.

twitter as a platform at this point is so godawful that i feel there’s no point in even trying to participate there no matter what, as the professional ragebaiters now rule on that platform. bluesky, however, is a different story, bc most people who ran off to there generally sincerely believe in the shitass opinions they spout. i thought i was above that and tried to avoid participating, but then i saw ppl saying some dumb shit about a video game that clearly had no idea what they were even talking about, and now i spent what feels like a whole day arguing about it online with someone.

i have two conclusions coming away from this.

one, online discourse is hell of a drug, and once you come onto it, getting off is a real utter challenge. never start discourse if you don’t want to waste your nerves away.

two, twitter is fucking back, babyyyyyyyyyyy, and it’s not a single bit better than it used to be back in late 2010s. i fucking love the internet, and boy i fucking love bluesky.

[6/100]

i lost the buckshot tournament the way i entered it: by completely whiffing it in the first leg without even practicing beforehand and losing all three rounds in the bo3 match. in hindsight i could’ve done a couple of things to increase my chances of winning, but i wasn’t courageous enough to pull it off, so i just ate the blow.

wack.

[5/100]

thanks to an htmhell article i saw on 32bit cafe forums, i found a way to crudely [re]implement the dark mode on my website. since i am already using a css preprocessor [it’s lightningcss on my end], i can just use a light-dark function and have it do all the dirty work for me, so this should hopefully work in older browsers that don’t support the function just yet. build tools yay!

it’s not quite how it used to be, but i might make it more authentic to the original dark css this site had, as i still have the old style sheet on hand. looks pretty nice regardless, and it surely is the partial return to form for the dark mode camp, i guess.

[4/100]

i got sick so i am not exactly able to think clearly enough to post things i am more interested in posting right now. i did not make the number go up yesterday, largely because of me being a bit too focused on other things. had a good evening walk, and then realized i still had a buckshot qualifier to attend. and then the next day, woke up with leaky nose, and zero energy to do things. wack.

good news is, i actually scored really well, and will now participate in a tournament. odds are kind of stacked against me, especially as we are pitted in a 1v1 ladder with planned 16 competitors, but winning money with no buy-in and no repercussions for losing still make going through this a deal too attractive to pass up on.

in other news, i’ve been learning to draw for a week now. i don’t have much to show yet, but my curiosity is entertained enough to take the challenge to 30 days [and possibly even farther]. maybe i’ll even post a drawing one day, but i won’t guarantee anything. i want that time for myself.

[3/100]