status archive

i hate to be a bearer of bad news, but ryujinx, the second prominent switch emulator prior to the first one, yuzu, getting clapped by nintendo, got clapped by nintendo

i guess the emulation community might as well drop the cope they formed around the yuzu emulator post-settlement that it contained some kind of illegal radioactive code inside that nobody should’ve dared to touch. this is nothing but nintendo’s open attack on emulation, and they are surely getting ever more blatant by day. frankly, at this point i’m so pissed at this shit, i wish i had a way to deduct money from nintendo’s bottomless pockets for how much i don’t want to give them a single penny at this point.

i hope one day emulation gets proper legal protections and game preservation is going to be the norm instead of an anomaly that it is now, sustained primarily by enthusiasts instead of greedy corpos that don’t give two shits about maintaining history and keeping games available.

part two of the post-mortem, where i shout out all the things that piqued my interest. i read through all of the submissions [part of the reason getting the post-mortem out took so long] and picked out everything that resonated with me. you can check out the jam’s page and see the remaining entries for yourself in case i left out something that may interest you instead [i definitely think i did]

shoutouts

here’s all the stuff that grabbed my attention:

• MiLKY-P’s Sound Synthesis: For Dummies! is a basic overview of sound synthesis that briefly goes over some of the terminology and possible ways of doing it. It was one of the earliest submissions, and so it’s on the brief side, but brevity can be great, and in this case it seems like it’s doing everything one needs to pique someone’s interest with the topic at hand. i am interested in music production myself, so this does prompt me to screw around with some software synth and see what it can do.
• Leilukin’s How I (Tried to) Implement Accessible Footnotes is a technical dive into implementing complex footnotes in the plugin for a static site generator. It attempts to address the shortcomings of the default implementation for a markdown-it-footnote plugin by sprinkling accessibility features into it, derived from a different article explaining these things in detail. I am curious about this since I do kind of want footnotes in my writing as well, and the technical breakdown does seem quite useful for my case, as I am an Astro user, and Astro relies on remark as opposed to markdown-it for parsing, so if I were to do something like this myself, I might have a decent reference with this article.
• varve’s Magic in Europe in Medieval Times seeks to debunk a common misconception that witch hunts were the thing of medieval era. I am not particularly interested in the subject of magic, but this was quite educational.
• fLaMEd’s IndieWeb 101 is exactly what it says on the tin. it provides the information on joining the IndieWeb ecosystem in a consise and easily understandable manner. i’ve been interested in doing so myself, and this might as well be my go-to resource for setting it up for myself.
• Coby Cat’s IMAX Films At Home is largely just a list of movies, but it is quite cool cos it introduced me to an obscure physical film format that aimed to replicate the original IMAX format for the home video. in case you didn’t know, IMAX in its original form is not what you tend to see in most cinemas that market themselves as having IMAX screens, but rather a very tall format of 1.43:1, which is almost resemblant of a 4:3 [1.33:1] format which used to be common on the consumer TVs. sidenote, the topic of aspect ratios and how the disconnect between the cinema and home screens shapes the movies in literal and figurative senses is really interesting in its own right, and i highly suggest checking out videos by noodle [2d version] and hbomberguy [this one’s highly underrated] on this specific topic.
• Trans Rats’ Pokemon Plush Collecting Tips and Tricks! needs no explanation. the guide is US-centric but has some interesting information on buying Pokémon plushies second-hand, which can be useful for the international readers. some advice can be also applied to buying used stuff irl and ordering from Japan, although i imagine those have specialized guides of their own somewhere on the internet. either way, this is straight to the point and covers the basics quite well [all while also confronting the reader with the unfortunate reality that looking out for used stuff may involve selling your soul to zucc]
• hermit’s incomplete guide to databases for small web applications is one of the more well-written tech guides in this jam, and it’s a pretty useful one as well, teaching the reader about the functionalities and syntax of SQL databases, which are the backbone of much of the world’s server data storage. i’m [un]fortunate enough to have this knowledge drilled into me all the way back from my university days [the third normal forms haunt me in my dreams], but this does check all the boxes for what i would call a basic overview, so maybe i will even link this to someone as a general overview someday.
• Matthew Graybosch’s A Place for Every Page and Every Post in Its Place answers the ages-old question of figuring out a folder structure for your personal website. [tl;dr do whatever the hell you want and watch all that you lovingly built crash and burn before your eyes] it’s quite a simple read that deals with mild technicalities of structuring a webpage, and i think this advice is worth at least peeping once for personal website builders [i.e. the most likely audience of this website atm]
• rem’s [oh hai there] yurinomicon is not a piece i find myself agreeing with [of little that it says, it mostly tells me we have somewhat divergent tastes in yuri], but the aesthetics are top notch, and it’s one of the most daringly stylish pages in this jam. i like the vibes.
• Biggus’s Paperclips Shrine is an enthusiastic look into the concepts behind an idle game Universal Paperclips, which is based around a Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment, one where an AI is given a task to maximize paperclip production without any other checks being put in place. comes with a half-functioning replica of the game coded into a website. if you feel intrigued by large concepts and the existentially horrifying implications of having the entire universe be turned into paperclips, check this out.
• Chaosgoat’s Board Game Design 092: A Brief Introduction tickled my game design fancy yet again for the n-th time at this point. I’m not a board game person, but board games are so adjacent to video games at times that their influence has spawned entire genres that are widely accepted in the video game zeitgeist of the current. really, board games are very cool and i want to get my hands on some of them, i’m just not sociable enough to play them more often ;w;
• xo’s This Page is About Weeds! is yet another well-written guide on something i wouldn’t hold particular interest in if not for reading it. this is an overview of what constitutes “weeds”, or, rather, the various things that we tend to call weeds. because it turns out that there no such things as a formal classification for a weed, waow
• Divergent Rays’s The Lowdown on Tuna seeks to answer the questions not that many people think about: what kind of canned tuna is sold in supermarkets anyway? Where does it come from? Which one is the safest and the most sustainable? This piece gets straight to the point and answers these questions exhaustively and with brevity, so it’s quite a good curiosity teaser.
• arevakhach’s VHS to Digital reads like something that’s been written by someone who’s been really onto honing the craft of writing for a long time [yeah, why am i saying this, it is literally the case xd]. it’s not so much an overview of the topic, but rather a rundown of the experience of looking into the topic combined with links to various places for springboarding research of your own, as well as words of caution regarding doing so, due to how apparently predatory some companies peddling certain VHS-to-digital conversion solutions are. this reads like a personal piece that doubles as a useful reference, and this does feel like the style i want to infer for some of my writing, even.

again, check out the jam’s page and see what i left out in case any of these got you interested. i am quite impressed with the quality of the entries present in the jam, and i cannot wait to participate in it some more.

special thanks to xandra for organising this [and also providing some needed words of encouragement to keep me going to the end]

the fifth 32-bit cafe community code jam has wrapped up quite some time ago. i wanted to write a post-mortem talking about my experiences with the jam and shout out all the submissions i liked. however, this is a bit overdue by now, as i had to take a small hiatus from posting here [had things to do plus got sick afterwards so i had no energy for anything], so to not seem completely dead as i am reviewing the remainder of submissions, i am splitting this into two parts: my own experience, and the shoutouts.

the one i wrote first goes first :p

anyway, the jam was quite fun to participate in. the theme was “back to school”, hence the prompt was all about teaching people something on whatever topic the participants were interested in. everyone chimed in with their specific knowledge, and it resulted in an interesting and quite varied experience ranging across a wide variety of cool topics. come look at them, may find something for yourself.

this jam is the first one where I actually successfully stuck through the end of it and had something to show for my work. it’s particularly fitting that what helped me get to the finish line was also the topic of my submission - productivity systems. couldn’t think of anything more fitting of the “back to school” theme than a section on how to self-organize in order to actually do things. i got a chance to geek out at my knowledge of productivity things, as well as demonstrate my current productivity process - full of holes, entirely supported by my NEET lifestyle, and not super effective at getting me to do everything i want to do, but it is at least enough to have me do some of those things.

getting the project to the end was far from smooth sailing for me, and i had to battle some frustration. i don’t feel like i’ve given it my all, i spent some of the time being on autopilot, unable to commit anything at all on certain days, and in the end i had to cut corners and deliver less than what i initially had in mind. i felt a bit like an impostor giving advice and talking about how a productivity setup improved my life while feeling like i didn’t commit my fullest because i didn’t totally stick to it. but then i remembered my own advice that i made sure to give right from the start, and realized that if not for having at least that, i’d probably do much less, if anything, than what i actually ended up doing. to give a shoutout to a certain somebody, being suboptimal is better than doing nothing, after all.

the project ended up producing two side effects:

• new experimental site section. in what some may consider a brazen act of betrayal [while i see it as an act of diplomacy and a declaration of friendship], i set it up on neocities instead of nekoweb. the reason for it is simple: neocities was a blank canvas that let me try out new things: primarily a template/digital garden engine quartz, as well as a setup oriented around github actions
• new productivity setup. oops

yeah, funnily enough, as i was planning for this jam writeup to be a description of the productivity system i used prior to participation, i ended up building a new productivity system for myself during the jam. the WHEEL is still there, but now I experiment with scaling my time blocking, picking a variety of tasks instead of just 3. I finally found a way to wrangle Anytype, a system i considered too rigid and uncomfortable for myself, into something actually useful for my brain. I employ Tiago Forte’s PARA method, and it actually lends itself quite well to the rigidity of Anytype. It does require some maintenance, but it is far from a dealbreaker, it actually feels quite right to use. Finally, I have switched my time tracking setup to use Flowtime/Flowmodoro instead, which I like because of how well it accompanies my flow state. It lets me be more dynamic and gain better understanding of how much I can endure before needing a break. It could be useful to enhance a Pomodoro setup too, as I now know I may tolerate 35 minutes instead of 25, and have 6-7 minute breaks to accompany that instead of 5 [too little] or 10 [too much]. much of my Todo stuff has shifted to Anytype to accompany the PARA method, but I still use Microsoft To Do for daily planning and do occasional note taking in Apple Notes for it being the fastest .

It was a bit of a weird relief when I finished this, but in hindsight I feel great because i was able to finish this.

[oh, right, i have no idea where to slot the link for my project without it feeling too awkward. you can check it out here]

i am participating in the fifth 32-bit cafe community code jam, which i consider a great opportunity to tackle an idea i had that is not necessarily primary to my vision of this site, but i’ve been wanting to cover for a while: productivity systems and how i approach them. the jam has already started today, and with the clear goals, along with a deadline of 17th of august put in place, i want this to be a test of what i can do if i concentrate my effort to the max on a single topic.

the 32-bit cafe community is pretty cool, btw, and it has lots of interesting resources for personal website making, so i highly suggest checking it out.

as promised in my convention impressions, here’s what i got in my merch haul.

two things to note:

• aside from buying things for myself, i was also buying things for a birthday gift [none will be shown here], so i didn’t go as crazy as i theoretically could for myself.
• i am genuinely surprised how relatively small the following is for most of these artists. ofc, all of them are polish, and they primarily sell things on polish conventions and fairs, but it still feels downright criminal that they are not as well-represented for how skillful they are, so if you still use social media PLEASE CHECK THEM OUT

posters

gonna start off with the only a5 poster in this bunch [rest of them are a4], which is also the only one i forgor the artist of [UPD the artist who drew this is zozoru] and the only one that requires a bit of a cultural reference: the cirno crossword book, which parodies the series of crossword books by the biggest publisher of said books in poland.

here’s both covers for reference.

next up is a bridget guilty gear strive poster by jojowentbananas [actually has a decent following waow], which was my actual first cop of the convention, along with a keychain i will show later.

another one is what i actually did buy as a birthday gift, but then realized it looked so good that i really wanted another one for myself: kafka from honkai star rail by ichigotutu [ig, tw]. i gave up on playing these glorified gambling apps, but their impact on anime culture at large is undisputable, and gosh darn these character designs look great, especially when fanartists get their hands on them.

the last print i got was a very y2k-ish miku by lvizux [ig]. she has a rather clownish nose here for some reason [desperately resisting the urge to honk it].

keychains

i got just two: brisket from jojowentbananas [as mentioned above], as well as yukari takeba from persona 3 by lovbir [ig]. both are really cute and i really like how yukari one has variation on each side.

stickers

i chose to prioritize keychains and posters bc i don’t have as many places to stick things to anymore [and it’s too easy to overspend on stickers specifically cos of how many cool ones there are], so i decided i’d rather make it count, and, to my surprise, the answer didn’t wait for long: fear & hunger stickers by hellacutish [ig].

i also individually got stickers for basil from omori [also by hellacutish] as well as makoto yuki, protagonist of persona 3 [by lovbir], which now reside on my macbook along with an enki funger sticker that didn’t make the previous photo.

money well spent, i’d say.

the anime convention i’ve been at this weekend has wrapped up, and i got things to share. the event in question was animatsuri 2024, and this is the second time i’ve attended it [first time was last year]. much like the first time, it was a lot of fun.

the venue change

the biggest disruption the convention has experienced this year is a venue change. the old place of dislocation, one they stuck to for years, was quite special, as it was a medical school area with multiple buildings, including the main building [used for panels, karaoke, video game, board game and rhythm game areas], a basketball court [used as a merch area], an outdoor area with food trucks and an open-air stage, as well as another multi-floor building with a big stage on top. this year, instead of that, we got Expo XXI, a facility purpose-built as a hangar-esque area for large-scale gatherings like job fairs, exhibitions, conferences, etc. much of what was represented by tangible space was relegated to a single 13.5k m^2 area, with the two exceptions being food, which was mostly put in the area outside, and the panels, which were relegated to six conference rooms on the second floor.

this new arrangement created a different kind of cohesion, and with the talks specifically, it worked well, given how easy it was to hop between them and retreat for activities downstairs at any time. the main area wasn’t quite as pleasant to me, largely because of how noisy everything was and how amplified it got by the ongoing concerts. the games area was good for general video games, but the karaoke was mildly annoying due to its placement right next to the rhythm game section, which, combined with the general noise [and the concert noise when those were happening], made it kind of hard to hear the music one’s supposed to sing along to. i ended up singing at karaoke less than anticipated this year simply because of the placement change.

the major boon of the new setup, though, was higher accessibility. it’s just two floors with convenient elevator access, which made the event much easier for people on wheelchairs to attend, and it was very evident that it worked, given how many more such people i’ve seen this year relative to last. if anything, i can absolutely understand the change for this reason alone, and my personal issues with the new setup did not detract from my overall experience, which was good. they also seemingly resolved the queue issues that plagued the last year’s convention, which is nice to see, so hope the momentum will carry over to the coming years in that regard.

things i tangibly experienced at the convention

the panels were quite okay, although i couldn’t really stick with some of the ones i thought i’d like due to the fact that the hosts just couldn’t really carry the topics they presented in an engaging way. at least the talks based around activities that i was interested in doing were pretty good, and a couple of the other ones made for some memorable moments.

gaming-wise, the event was sponsored by bandai namco, so it had a tekken 8 stand [an opportunity to 3ddy someone was not passed up on] as well as the demo for dragon ball sparking! zero, which i enjoyed despite not being much of a dragon ball person [something that one of my friends is looking to fix]. i played some guitar hero 3 [rly need for that plastic guitar to enter my life proper], guitar hero live [ngl it’s a shame that it has such a shit tracklist cos 6 fret actually feels pretty good to play], and taiko [second time ever i played it with a drum controller as opposed to a keyboard or touch screen].

the merch stands did not have anything sulemio-related [0/10 worst convention ever]. doesn’t mean that i didn’t purchase some cool swag tho, i’m just too tired to do shoutouts atm, so i will get to those later, possibly in the next status. the biggest surprise for me was seeing fear & hunger-themed stickers, but i guess it’s fair for a european convention to have that, just glad to see one of my favorite things [that, unfortunately, is not sulemio] go over as well as it does. all in all, merch-wise, i was quite responsible with my money and spent it wisely [i will be living off of instant noodles for the next month]

conclusion

great con, will attend again next year xd.

despite my less-than-great money situation i am surprisingly doing a lot of vacationing this summer, and today an anime convention will be starting up in my city. i will be there in action for the whole weekend, til mid-sunday, and i can’t be more excited ‘cause of that.

unlike the last year, i am actually coming in prepared: i got the pass a day early, i laid out the entire plan for the talks i intend on attending [to the point that i, sadly, might be skipping out on karaoke this time], and specced my backpack for it like i am leaving the city for three days. the biggest obstacle i am expecting to face is gonna be sleep-related, as i do plan to see both late-night and early-morning events on all three days, which i’m sure is a bulletproof plan that is going to cause no issues whatsoever [oh god this is going to be a trainwreck]

hope that by the end of the convention i’ll buy some cool swag, get to know new people, and maybe actually squeeze in some time for karaoke and rhythm games. wish me luck!

i should give myself some credit for a bunch of things i’ve been doing that i found fulfilling and positive for my personal development.

here in the back i feel like i pressure myself a bit too hard when it comes to my writing due to the feeling that i am not committing nearly enough to it, hinging my self-esteem on how much i write and work on this site, but it would be factually incorrect to say that i am wasting my time when i don’t do it. i’ve been actually having some successes elsewhere, and i want to list a couple here.

• i am learning a couple of languages rn: polish, chinese, and toki pona, and i am back at doing it in more-or-less consistent fashion. i’ve had some significant successes with polish: i finished my a2-level class and got through all the polish material there is on duolingo (first non-native language i got through there), which gave me a strong enough confidence boost to start building further upon the knowledge i have. i started more actively watching things in polish and trying to speak more of it outside of the class, and i realized i know more than i thought i did, which made me feel even better about my progress. this caused me to go back to studying chinese [doing flashcards and comprehensible input now], and i also decided to go through toki pona flashcards and finish up with o pilin e toki pona, a comprehensible input playlist for toki pona, in order to actually understand the language more.
• i started dabbling with music production and finished a song for a small time-limited challenge. i don’t feel particularly comfortable posting it here yet, as i want to fix some obvious mistakes i made in it, but finishing it made me feel like wanting to do more with it to the point of actually making something quite ambitious for my scale. the tool i made the song in is pretty interesting btw, and i am thinking of doing a nekoweb-related thing in it. will tell more once i figure it all out.
• i got back into properly learning web development, making it my commitment to go through the odin project start to finish. i am still at the foundations path, but i can already recommend checking it out at least for the fundamentals of html/css/js. odin is genuinely a very comprehensive course that i like a lot for not just teaching the fundamentals, but also putting a lot of emphasis on the mindset to learning web development and programming in general. it has all the needed material, yet it doesn’t do much hand holding, instead highly incentivizing going through it on your own and mastering the craft of google-fu. i’m not that much of a noob to strictly require being taught that, but the emphasis on that is very much appreciated, and it’s incredible that all of this material is available 100% free of charge. my ambitious goal is to finish the whole course, fundamentals and nodejs paths, until the end of this year, but i’ll still make sure not to stress myself too hard over it.

also i want to dabble in drawing, but we’ll see how i manage that because there’s already a lot of stuff i am juggling between. i got some writing to do anyway xd

this status was originally conceived from out of a rather dire mental state, but after having a good walk i feel better now c:

been meaning to return to doing things these past few days, but i’ve been hammered quite hard by my poor sleep schedule to the point of feeling like my entire life has been effectively paralyzed. it will take me some time and effort to bounce back and get the creative juices flowing again, and i know i can do it, no matter how tough things are and how awful i may feel in regards to them happening to me. that was true when i felt like crap when i first wrote this starting bit, and that is even more true now that i feel much less like crap.

despite these past few days being quite rough for me, my mood was lifted quite a bit by me receiving quite a bunch of nice shoutouts and encouragement to do things from some nice people. had a bit of a silly one when i got retweeted by eposvox over me semi-jokingly suggesting that i may use his davinci resolve tutorial as an excuse to finally get to making youtube videos [btw i am a semi-regular on his forums which i recommend checking out along with his second youtube channel, which explores topics such as videogame nostalgia, state of modern gaming, and plainly navigating the modern world and the current online landscape], but i also got quite a bunch of genuine flattering comments about me and this place, which feels quite unusual to me. this site is the first thing i made that i actively receive admiration for: people tell me how much they like it, both on discord and in my guestbook, tell me that they are interested in seeing what i make next, and some people, as i noticed, are even getting inspired by/copying the look i go for, which is something i’d never think people would do in relation to me. and i just want to let you know that even if i might not show it, every time i see something like that, it genuinely warms my heart and gives me inspiration to do more, to not stand in place, to keep moving forward and push myself to actually try new stuff. especially when people whom i genuinely admire say nice things to me like holy shit i don’t even know what words to come up in order to respond to that asdklfshadfjsalfkasgdflkasfhsafhlkasjfhkasf

i certainly feel a bit of a pressure to continue doing things with this site, but i’m glad that it comes in the form of positive reinforcement more than my brain telling me that i need to perform well, or else. that certainly qualifies as one of the intended results of my work, so it’s about prime time to double down and do more.

during the walk i also realized that an anime convention coming up in my city is just a week away, and they have finally published a list of talks and events that are going to be happening on it. i really enjoyed it last year, and the new lineup looks no less interesting, so i am more than excited to spend next weekend having fun, buying up some cool fanmade merch, and staying up late singing my heart out at karaoke. maybe i’ll gather up my courage and get to know some people even.

returning to writing on here after a decent break feels kind of weird. there’s a sense of insecurity i experience when thinking up things to put into text here, which seems to me like a consequence of the whole grand promise that the site is predicated on in my head. i thought of linking this thought up to the toxicity of social media for a bit, but then i remembered that coming back to twitter after a while is actually not that hard to do - you just say “i’m back” and/or go right into posting things again, and that’s it. it’s better to let go of disproportionately high expectations. [note to self, especially in a place you made specifically not to succumb to such expectations, dork]

at least i leveraged this mental unease by channeling it into an excuse to clean up my drafts, which, while not plentiful, felt like a lot of weight on my mind. i had drafts made even for the statuses, which feels weird to me as someone who practically never uses drafts feature on twitter lol.

a tragedy has struck my home country of Ukraine, where Okhmatdyt, the largest hospital where children with serious health issues are being treated, was struck by a Russian missile, killing at least 2 people, injuring at least 20, including 7 children, and damaging lots of equipment that saves lives of the most vulnerable in the country.

this is one of many heinous war crimes committed by Russia against us, and i hope i don’t need to explain how inhumane one has to be to strike a hospital known for treating children with cancer. there aren’t many words left to describe the cruelty russia commits against us.

our government initiative united24 has set up a fundraiser to help the hospital recover and keep saving the lives of children. please donate and spread the word wherever you can.

per a certain recommendations page that i browsed yesterday, i am testing out the most dangerous writing app, a writing web app that erases your progress if you stop writing, up until you reach a set session length. i stuck with the default of 5 minutes to give it a spin, and this is my refined writing that came out as the result of that experiment.

before committing to the idea for my rough draft, though, i caught myself thinking about the topics i choose when i try to do certain creative things. because the immediate topic i reached towards… was the idea that i challenged myself to writing this in the first place.

i am not exactly sure what to make of it. of course, there’s nothing bad in writing on this topic, but why do i feel like having that be the first thing i latch onto? because this is not the first time i am doing this: i did this a year ago when i tried blogging on bear, i did it again when i tried to constrain myself to writing something in 15 minutes for that too. this site has the sole introductory blog post where i went meta and voiced my plans for what to do next. hell, when i tried myself at standup comedy once, i felt like making jokes about the act of doing comedy itself.

the fascination i have with the meta of a given creative thing is quite genuine, i feel, but at the same time i can’t help but wonder: isn’t it a bit counterproductive to write things for the sake of themselves that do not inherently warrant being written about?

after all, the constraining strategies like this app, or the good ol’ timer solution, are meant to get ideas out of you. and for some reason i only get an idea out of them, and then never come back to the approach again. as if there is nothing else worthwhile to write about other than the writing itself.

…hmm, this was pretty good, actually. gotta try drafting some other topics with this one.

i urge everyone reading this to sign the petition in support of internet archive’s mission to provide open digital access to books for lending. major book publishers are trying to force internet archive to shut access to more than half a million books in their greedy attempt to gate the knowledge behind their paywalls. it is quite a despicable attack on libraries and the freedom of information that disproportionately hurts the poor and disenfranchised, and this scummy behavior should not be tolerated.

i updated this website.

i was too hung up on trying to write lengthy explainers for the site updates, so here’s a quick and mildly inaccurate version history instead.

remblanc pre-1.0: first shot at the site, no blog, just a frontpage with statuses and some stats.

remblanc 1.0: zonelets-based blog section added, taglines made, last.fm integration added, various things tightened up.

remblanc 1.1: everything is moved to astro and prebuilt wherever i saw fit to do it to make the site look good without javascript. zonelets is ditched, blogging engine replaced with astro-based solution. both posts and statuses under the hood are individual statuses now. everything is optimized agressively so the site loads fast af now.

remblanc 1.2: posts section is ditched and pending replacement. site guide is added with potentially interesting site links that used to be hidden up until today.

going through biko’s digital garden entries as someone who sees their site as something rather close to the personal ideal of running a website in this space, i can’t help but notice how deliberate they were in maintaining their garden as something that is, while at first overwhelming with amount of things to check back on, is, for the most part, very deliberate and thoughtful upon close examination.

things feel right in that place - many notes, thought pieces, even rambles and complaints try to not be dead air there. i am a bit self-conscious myself about what ends up in the status section at this place, but i can’t help but notice the difference in standards, and how we approach things on personal levels. even the most minutae thoughts have form, and with time it’s noticeable that the standards get raised and the nuggets of writing try harder at being more profound.

and i can’t say it’s a bad thing, because it does seem to succeed with that. most of the 202 notes posted there, sans three notes explaining how the format works, carry some meaningful thought nuggets, big and small. the commitment to thoughtfulness feels almost stoic, until you come across that one personal bit that dispels the illusion, representing something addressed at certain life problems and internalities.

this difference in perspectives makes me think quite a bit about where i want to lead myself with this status section.

unlike biko, i think it feels fun for me to throw out a straight-up junk piece from time to time (let’s be honest it’s probably twitter that conditioned me for this), which is why i now have a “silly” tag for statuses that styles things i don’t take particularly seriously in comic sans. i want to play loose and celebrate the silly when that comes up, because silliness is genuinely quite valuable for me, and i want to truly cherish that in my way, the best way i can.

at least i’m sure to say that we are on the same ground philosophically, in that we both treat forging websites as something to do in the way that speaks the most to the self, rather than to anybody else. celebrating that tenet of personal web is something that attracted me to their website in the first place after all.

these are side notes to my previous status, which is a recovered entry from a certain dead personal website.

the means by which i backed this entry up along with many written works from it [internet archive, begrudgingly, not used] is going to be quite an interesting story for another day, but i really wanted to shout out the brilliancy of certain design decisions on biko’s site, which i’m awed by the more i explore the wrecks i managed to salvage.

this particular entry was based in the site’s “garden” section. i’m awed by this page because its navigation, informed by pure-html authoring workflow, was ingeniously low-tech, relying purely on id-based linking and plaintext hashtags, which encouraged the users to ctrl+f a given entry or category. the plain-sight visibility of metadata makes the browsing rather joyful even in the face of reference link rot this backup is infested with, and i am very delighted by that.

[the preview below is unstyled/does not represent how it looked originally]

fun fact, every status on this site has an attached id, which i intentionally added for easy cross-referencing for whenever i need to do that. i already showcased it above by linking to the status where i originally mentioned the entry i am talking about, but it is in fact a direct inspiration from biko’s garden that i just didn’t bother to visibly expose for now as it was on that page. i’m thinking of making it even more alike by bringing in the hashtag functionality, which is probably gonna have more of a dynamic flair due to me being able to supercharge it with an SSG.

on 11th of march, 2024, i wrote a response to a remark posted by bikobatanari on why they preferred not to show their age on their site [you can read it here]. since they seemingly left the internet for good a while ago, i figure that as the means of my personal opposition to link rot, i’d republish it for the sake of maintaining a living reference/context to what exactly i was even responding to. i originally left it vague to encourage some thoughtful exploration of biko’s site, but since it’s dead, i don’t think i have any other option to preserve the reference in the first place.

it’s quite an admirable way of looking at one’s age relative to online presence, i’d say. also, now that i think more about it, my original response makes me look even more like a doofus for not fully understanding what they were getting at.

I used to have my age plastered somewhere in my About page a few years back, but I removed it since it doesn’t add anything to my work other than satiating people’s curiosity.

I suppose I removed it as a way to reduce initial judgment and expectations regarding who I am and what I say. My age is not particularly important to the context of my writing anyway.

People can be somewhat quick to judge someone based on their age. It’s a decent heuristic, but there are always some exceptions—I’ve seen teenagers more mature than some 30-year-olds out there. They’re not common, but they do exist (though, given how things are shaping up right now, I think that such a thing will become exceedingly rare—if it’s not already).

If you were to read a large majority of my writings, you’ll inevitably see some hints about where I’m at in life, so you could deduce (or even find) what age range I’m in. Shouldn’t be too hard.

i feel like it is necessary for me to take focus away from my website and to heal up, partly mentally, partly physically.

for quite some time i’d been trying to make myself more productive, set up systems just to be able to do more things more consistently. i finally more-or-less got myself a working idea for such system, and i am kind of proud of myself for actually doing things i want to do now. this past month i feel like i have done more things than i was able to just a month prior, and i should give myself all the credit for coming up with a system that finally works for me without serious hiccups. it is still being constantly iterated upon, and i will probably be sharing it for the productivity nerds out there sometime in the future.

my problem with having a well-oiled productivity system is that working is something i feel like i need to be doing less of. for the past few, idk, years i felt like a constant failure in terms of being able to do things. that put me in a constant mindset where i judged my self-worth by my output, by the work i do. and being able to do work better does not solve the core issue at hand.

to put it simply, i forgot how to rest. everything feels like work now. the time for work is work. the time outside work is the time not spent doing work. even resting in my mind needs to be a productive activity of some kind, while the rest i do have is not something i feel satisfied with. i feel like a drone doing it, and it doesn’t feel refreshing at all to me.

worst thing of all, trying to fix this state also feels like work. and that sucks. it really sucks.

i will still be doing some journaling for 280, as well as maintaining comms and peeping on retrospring along with my guestbook. anything serious is gonna be on hold, though, and i’m sorry for not even properly talking about what i am actually working on.

gtg bye for now.

i have a guestbook now. come sign off in my guestbook.

also, i gained a new presence. don’t bother much with it, though.

=> gemini://remblanc.cities.yesterweb.org

my ongoing fight for systematization of my productivity is going decently in the sense that i am actually committing to doing things i want to do, but, unfortunately, same cannot be quite said of things that i need to do. the way my daily work plan is set up is that it allocates the most time for the most important tasks, and more often than not what ends up happening is that i start off with things that i do enjoy doing, in all the shorter timeblocks, and then put off things reserved for the largest timeblocks until bedtime, when it’s too late for me to do anything. anything that doesn’t interest me enough to miss out on bedtime for anyway.

have a couple of disjointed thoughts

• can’t stop playing balatro ngl
• decided to swap statuses and posts for now bc while technically posts should be the site’s main attraction, they’ve been laying dormant for a while now.
• i have drafts for release notes for both remblanc 1.0 and remblanc 1.1. both are in limbo and one of them doesn’t even make sense to post anymore. lol
• i can’t stop updating this site on the technical level so there are lots of unannounced under-the-hood improvements that made it a much speedier experience. i am personally very proud of these optimizations (tbh it’s more a fascination that page transitions are now near-instant, at least on chromium) but i admittedly got carried away not just from writing things, but also to the extent from life stuff as well. oops!
• oh wow i am actually writing these the way i used to write these
• i realized i missed my therapist appointment today. oopsie whoopsie moment, but also due to certain contrivances i need to seek it out elsewhere anyway so i am pretty much on my own now.
• i need to take things slow again. i need a proper day off cos i feel like i’ve had all work and no fun. that feeling kinda sucks ngl

returning home on a bus right now. bus rides feel quite weird to me when it comes to passing time: it seems like there’s a whole lot of downtime you can spend while commuting, but focus on something specific for too much, and you already missed your stop. that’s why i usually don’t do much during said downtime, besides listening to music and watching some youtube videos.

right now i’m listening to BEEF by evaboy for god knows what time. really solid record tho, goes quite hard and i want to write about it in detail at some point.

[may 11th, 2024, 2:30. recording excerpt, edited for clarity]

this is the first time I am not actually writing a status, but recording it with my voice instead. It is not a voice memo, just voice dictation being put into my notes app, but it’s an interesting experience nonetheless. I wanted to try it for a while, but I had a bit of discomfort thinking about trying it, because, you know, if I do this in public, people around me can hear what I say.

maybe it’s not worth worrying about it all that much, not like people care that much about me, and I am generally not voicing any private details, so I might as well play around with this concept.

[below are some voice memos that were written/recorded in the same manner, as I did have quite a bit of fun with the format]

writing is kind of a lengthy process ngl

[2:30am recording continued]

I had this realisation that writing is very time consuming, and I think I’m growing more and more towards actually accepting that fact the more I consciously write things.

when I first started writing statuses, I had an idea for it to be just short stuff, it would be a bit of an icebreaker, the tool for me to write more and not get overwhelmed by thoughts of writing big things. but the way the format evolved, my statuses became longer and longer, and then I made a bunch of behind-the-scenes changes that led to my ideas basically simmering in my head and, despite being constantly developed, not really leaving my drafts. I tried to remedy that by dedicating some more time for finishing my thoughts, but the more effort I threw onto it, the more it felt justified for me to actually think more about the topics at hand. And now it feels fine for me to let things take some time.

It endlessly fascinates me how writing is a rather paradoxical activity: you spend hours and hours and hours on end to produce at most 5-15 minutes worth of text. that’s genuinely crazy ngl, but it also makes me admire writing as art more than if I didn’t actually consciously write things.

severing links

[may 11, 19:30]

I feel kinda shitty because I had to distance myself from someone I consider a very good person. Someone who’s fun to interact with, talk about interesting things, but also a rather emotionally vulnerable person who I really wanted to help. But their clinginess felt so incredibly overpowering to me that I feel like I cannot coexist with them. It feels really cruel to reject them the way I am doing it now: ghosting them, blocking all my communications… but it feels like it’s something I have to do, because I genuinely find them tough to handle, and it is tearing me apart. I feel like an asshole, but I can’t see any other solutions that don’t compromise my well-being, which itself feels kind of fragile at this point.

the posting trinity

disclaimer: this part mentions consumption of alcohol. drink responsibly and do not seek out alcohol if you’re under 18, as substances like that can be quite seriously damaging to minors. they can even screw up adults big time, heard some stories, had live examples, it’s horrifying. please take care of yourself and reach out if you do need help with substance abuse

[may 12, 22:40]

I am recording this note while getting slowly intoxicated by a 0.5 L glass of beer. t’s a craft American pale ale brewed in Poland that has 5.6% alcohol levels or smth like that. frankly idk what these percentages mean. you can def tell i’m not an avid drinker given that i don’t even know what that means besides the general number being higher than usual lol

anyway, this note is being recorded because I feel obligated to fill space. for some reason it feels kind of wrong for me to end these notes on anything but the number three. I’m not sure if it’s either my human instinct getting me to do this sort of symmetry in my statuses, or it may be that I am influenced by orthodox Christianity, and all these eastern European traditions that I have internalized that much.

ofc for anyone familiar with christianity it’s obvious what the number three represents, but outside that context it’s really interesting how we as humans sometimes give sacred meanings to the numbers practically based on our vibes. I still haven’t broken the cycle of threes when it comes to the topics I cover in these statuses at least, and I’m not sure if I’m ever gonna let go of that. Maybe if I do it’s gonna be five topics, because I do seem to have an affinity for odd numbers.

closing notes

To be clear, all of these notes are heavily edited. Not just because voice dictation is not entirely reliable (although it is surprisingly effective), but because the way I write, coupled with my writing senses, actually greatly differs from the way I speak.

I can’t help but notice that I am much more of a writing person than a talking person. I am not particularly great at forming the arguments in speech, for instance, but I am much more able to properly articulate them when I write.

Both means of communication have some interesting tradeoffs: speaking feels more like a stream of thought, while writing is more eloquent and to-the-point, but also something I keep thinking about and constantly rewriting to meet a certain imagined standard that I can’t quite reach, seemingly ever.

This experiment is definitely an interesting way to generate thoughts, though, so I will definitely do more of it.

holy shit y’all, we made it!!!!!! welcome to the other side!!!!!!!!1

remblanc 1.1 is here, and it appears to be working.

ngl, the rollout for this was actually kind of dumb, and i definitely should not ever do it the way i did it in this case (deleting everything in the folder and plopping the new stuff into it). at least i was wise enough to make a git branch so i can still access the original working version of this site, but i did keep some untracked things in a separate folder that are now completely gone xd

whatever, as far as i see, the site did not catch fire, everything works as planned, and a new feat in the history of remblanc has been achieved. kinda dope ngl.

i def need to explain in greater detail why this is lowkey exciting, but got way past my sleep schedule getting all this to work, so i am in serious need of resting rn. gn y’all

this is an urgent announcement!!!!!1

this site is in the process of being migrated to astro framework.

expect a bunch of turbulence or something, bet i will forget smth and at least one thing might fall apart, but the finishing line is approaching and i am super determined to cross it.

i am very poor at talking about the site updates, and i still haven’t explained the conception of versioning that i have here ever since i shadow-dropped 1.0 (yep, 1.0 has been here for a while now), but i am quite excited about astro due to the possibilities it opens for site and content management in the future. zonelets is being ditched for good, everything will be statically pre-generated, and posting is going to be as easy as plopping a markdown file into the right folder.

got no time to waste as i am currently in the midst of a sprint to get this up asap. see you on the other side.

gave myself 10 minutes to write this for not much good reason.

i’m feeling alright right now. quite refreshed, rather fulfilled, ready to go to bed and see a doctor tomorrow for plenty of things health.

i dedicated myself to writing a bit today, even though i was not particularly enthusiastic about it. i did manage to add some words to one of my more personal writeups. i sorted things around in my drafts folder to correspond more to the plans i have for this site (i intend to elaborate on those in one of my future statuses, also in drafts, where i will explain a bunch of site changes).

i kind of stumbled once more with doing anything of worth. my initial burst of energy that came from trying to help my mom dwindled, and i didn’t feel particularly energized to do organized work again.

i have no idea what else to write right now. time is running out anyway. feeling kinda mid upon finishing this.

this status is written in a state of unease, one where i feel highly overwhelmed by the possibilities i can take with my productive currents: countless opportunities for work, many means of self-improvement or improvement as a whole, a lot of paths to take in different directions, some more important, some less… and zero idea what choice i can actually make in this sea of choices. it’s a massive mental barricade i have towards making any meaningful progress on a macro scale.

this time, though, i actually tried to systemize it: i assembled the list of activities i felt like i want and have to do, and attempted mapping them on the Eisenhower matrix, and found that almost all of them are either in the “Do” or “Schedule” box, “Do” stuff being important things like looking for a job and writing an app to automate something for my mom, and “Schedule” being all the stuff that’s good for me, but probably better tackled on the side, like managing this site and working on making YouTube videos.

this reflection and sudden mapping of my priorities ended up adding quite a bit of clarity to what I actually need to do, so now I can actually think of setting priorities right. in case you’re curious, i started with writing a program for my mom. a bit overdue related to when she asked me about it, but it will help her a lot hopefully.

i had statuses in plans today but i didn’t finish them in time lol happy weed day tho

more of a weighty update today, i just want to talk a bit about my health and my general headspace. you don’t have to read this if you’re not in the mood of seeing someone complain about life, you can just close this status anytime, such and such. i’ll probably manage.

overall i’m not feeling great today

today feels like a slow and shitty day for me. just as i got into a different sleep schedule i started having different sleep issues from my usual pallette: i seem to be undersleeping and feeling like shit every time i wake up. i have a piercing headache right now, and it sucks. this kind of state is really terrible for me on all fronts: can’t even take care of myself properly, let alone work on the stuff i want to work on. wack as heck.

therapy update

to update on yesterday, things went okay, although it turned out that i need to look for someone else, as the org in question is kind of overstretched right now and there aren’t any specialists there who can provide assistance for my particular needs. i was actually suggested a program related to government healthcare, which, well, wasn’t something i even thought of, so might as well get to it.

the creative rut

feels like i haven’t been doing shit besides working on this site. aside from writing statuses, this might be the case, frankly. i lost the energy i had for working on a youtube channel, and i lost steam on all the post ideas i had, continuing the trend of that page laying dormant and without use. first thing i’m gonna think about once i feel better, aside from life and jobseeking stuff, is how to shake myself up creatively and finally get to work on all the things i planned to do.

fin.

not proud of this writeup, so i think i might even delete it later. my mind puts the feeling i have about this into the category of me once more straying from the initial purpose of statuses, as i ended up pouring much more effort into writing them to the point of feeling like i set myself a baseline for quality that i now have to meet for ppl to like me, which feels extraordinarily weird to my brain also. something something consistency, something something the perceived need to perform social media dance, just some funky shit i can’t put into words.

i should probably go eat lol

fun fact, this is the first status i am writing using vim. less so because i decided to become some kind of a tech nerd, more because i do not have a computer rn. i usually come somewhere where i do all kinds of creative things with a laptop, but sometimes, like today, i came without one bc i decided to do it spontaneously.

what this place does have is a couple of spare keyboards, a freely available monitor, and an android tv box, and what i have on my and is a server to connect to. so i installed termux, connected to my server via ssh, cloned the git repo this site is on, and am writing this status in vim! tech is cool :p

i have a couple of things on my mind today that i would like to air out. still an unapologetically sizeable amount (promise i will use the posts section eventually), it just makes me feel better to talk about it.

time to get right into it.

mental health update 2: therapy collision course

first off, i got therapy session set for tomorrow. just realized i didn’t explain why i need to have one in the first place, but basically it amounts to my depression and whatever is causing me to just lay around in bed and sink time into nothing, or procrastinate by doing whatever thing interesting me in the moment and sometimes doing something interesting as a byproduct of it.

primary reason i am seeking it out is my unemployment. finding a job in tech, more specifically breaking into the industry, had been immensely tough for me, both because of my internal pressure not handling well the fact that i need to write a cv, trying to adjust to some nebulous expectations i have no idea how to meet, as well as having the companies i do end up sending cvs to either not responding, or just rejecting my application. i have no idea whether it is because of a shrinking tech industry, or because i’m just not good enough, but either way my brain can’t cope with it and as a result i am not able to apply to anything.

ideally, cv-wise, i feel like i’d need someone to help me focus on this, assist me in writing the right things in it, but due to a whole host of other issues i lost courage to write it, and i also lost courage to ask someone.

i also, generally, lost courage to show weakness and, most importantly, be myself. i feel like i’ve gotten more inert, unwilling to against the currents of life, instead feeling like sinking in them and just moving down the stream. i lost energy.

this spiral began for me a while ago, before i even created this website. i tried to book a therapy session at a charity fund where i am able to receive help for free (naturally, due to not having a job, i can’t make money, and we still have to pay rent :/), but it was booked very early, and, due to my sleep schedule being terrible, i could not make it at that time. that made me kind of embarassed and afraid to come again for months, for reasons i did recognize as irrational, but still couldn’t overcome.

thankfully, the time i wrote my first update on this issue was the time i finally tried to overcome it, and now that i fixed my sleep schedule, heading into tomorrow, i feel confident that i can make it in time and take a shot at fixing myself once more. wish me luck, i guess.

leaving twitter for now

speaking of mental health, twitter fucking sucks and is conductive to some of my worst impulses, and i felt very overstimulated today but all the shit it threw at me, so i am now taking a forced break from it. fuck this site, and while i’m at it, fuck all the social media platforms that are driven by the algorithm and push algo stuff front and center without consideration for anything. “for you” pages/tabs are transparently evil, and it is so apparent on new twitter how they shape themselves around the hottest drama you interact with it’s not even fucking funny. fuck this platform so much, it sucked so much energy out of me it’s outrageous. i need to rebound from that shit.

biko update, or following the white rabbit

i do not intend to walk back on my statement that i respect other peoples’ right to be forgotten. however, i still really wanted to back up some of biko’s writing to study it and draw some wisdom out of it, only to find out that their wayback machine entries were also purged per request, only further confirming the deliberate nature of the site deletion. this caused me to despair even more, for reasons i will probably examine in detail in a proper post i seek to write, which are more philosophical and touch upon the nature and the pressures of upkeeping a website. regardless, after that short despair, i ended up brainstorming alternatives, accidentally stumbled upon some dirty laundry in the process (don’t spin up your imagination, it’s nothing terrible or even particularly private, but disrespectful nonetheless), and in the process actually ended up accomplishing the goal halfway.

basically, i got exactly what i wanted, but both in the process and as a result of it i did some breach of ethics, and now i feel like an absolute asshole :v

i swear i had good reasons for it, but now it feels super dirty given how i basically sidestepped their clearly deliberate attempts to remove themselves from the internet, and i sort of indirectly publicize that by talking about it as well.

i am still intent on honoring the short impact they had on me, and possibly spreading some of the ideas of theirs that really resonated with me on my own accord. i now realize, however, that i cannot in good consciousness straight up republish the articles i preserved and intend on restoring, which is something i originally wanted to do as part of a reference archive project somewhere in my site backlog. i got way too far with my quest to the point that it would feel like a downright desecration, even if i were to omit other reasons that would be pretty bad to do, ethically and legally speaking.

the takeaway i want others to have from this little story i’m sharing is that preservation can sometimes be at odds with someone’s privacy. if you were to do the thing i do, with restoration of something you really like and whatnot, it’s really important to consider the ethics of doing it, because no matter how staunch you might feel about leaving the mark, preserving the web and fighting the entropy of link rot, in the end you have to consider the wishes of the people who made the things you want to preserve. for as hard as it is to delete things from the internet, people are right to want to escape from it, erase themselves, be forgotten and left with nothing but their solitude. sometimes that is something they might really need, and the internet makes it incredibly hard not to leave traces and have that wish actually meaningfully respected.

not that i am suggesting not to preserve things, just don’t be like me in this situation where i very clearly overstepped and learned something i was not supposed to.

closing thoughts

welp, a bit of a low note to end this on. other than all of what wrote above, seems like today’s a good day for me! i decided to get my ereader back up and actually start clearing through the massive backlog of books i have on it. i have not decided what to read yet, but a start is a start.

hope you have a nice day as well~!

wanna keep things short: the nice links have been fixed, and i am on them now. the siteboxes are still not addressed, but at least i know the workaround and the bug has been reported. quite a good site update overall.

i am now considering moving this page to astro, so the experimentation on that front is underway. this promises to be somethins interesting, we’ll see how this turns out and how much of “backwards compatibility”, if one can call that, this will retain. i def have a strong reason to move to something like that, and that is component reusability, which will come in handy both for automating the existing things and potentially putting them on a CMS, as well as potentially iterating more on the more ambitious things i still have in plan for the site.

can’t believe i’m having fun with a javascript framework. hope i won’t be stubbing my toe once more here.

making an addendum to yesterday’s status. i guess the thoughts are not so disparate now that that they’re the subject.

mental health update

i successfully booked the appointment. gonna take a bit, and i will have to wake up early for that, so it’s gonna be quite a challenge. i feel less comfortable talking about my mental health today, so all i am going to say is that i have no intent not to follow through with that.

a sudden posting epiphany

my yesterday’s tangent on modern web being as long as it was made me ponder quite a bit about the nature of these statuses.

on one hand, i think it fits my intention with the status section quite well: even though it took me 1 hour and 30 minutes to write, i did it in a continuous burst, unfiltered, rapid fire, straight out of my brain. exactly what i wanted the section to facilitate.

on the other hand, that was a lot of text! 7 paragraphs, 492 words, 2874 characters. wow. it’s a blog post length. it’s as much as what my friends from a small blogger accontability group wrote.

i thought blogging is more of a deliberate thing, and i kind of worked myself up to some kind of a high standard, thinking that i’d need to exert high effort to commit to that. and then i just went and spat out something i am kind of proud of for how little time i spent of it, now considering giving a place in my blog section, touchups included.

it led me to questioning the site structure i planned for myself here, with “high-effort posts” and “low-effort statuses”, such and such. i do not have the alternative for that structure just yet.

what i know now, however, is that by telling myself to chill i successfully rewired my brain into producing something i actually like now. wild.

have a bunch of different things i want to air out. none of these thoughts are cohesive, but they are all on my mind at once, so might as well give them some place

remblanc 1.0

remblanc 1.0 has no set timeline anymore. there still is a perceived goal for its finale, for its solidified form, but there’s nothing technically blocking me from moving on and just continuing the approach of spontaneous iteration that so far has driven the development of this site. i’m not saying it’s done just yet, but it sometimes happens that the software dubbed as release candidate just pretends to be the release version and works fine anyway, so it’s probably something like that. i’m not sure if radical change or some new major feature is on the horizon at this point, but i’m perfectly accepting of minor tweaks or additions to the things that are already here.

speaking of tweaks, many thanks to lel for pointing out that there is a pixelated rendering option in css that, unsurprisingly, makes the elements designed to be pixelated look much nicer. turns out it also works really well with 88x31 site buttons, so i enabled it for them for the crispy goodness. the buttons section looks much better now.

my life is a bit of a wreck right now

not feeling like delving into details, but life has been wrecking me hard lately. my sleep schedule spiraled out of control once again, so it feels like night and day have swapped for me in some very twisted ways. no systems i try to build for myself or have built previously are working for me right now, so currently my life feels like i am constantly dealing with slippery road conditions.

i’m going to try to get myself together today and go seek mental health assistance, because i really need one and i should definitely mention it somewhere for that small bit of perceived accountability i get with the goals that i set for myself. get some natural strength to assemble and actually commit to it ✊🏻

webdev feels too professional for me atm

i started gazing back into the pit of web development frameworks (looking to experiment with astro right now), and i think i realized that i have a particular gripe with the lingo modern webdev has attached to it. all the professional-sounding terms and webdev buzzwords just don’t sit right with me, with how much of it all talks of, idk, “optimizing the product by preloading fast hydration for efficient user consumption of a web app”. you know, things that make web development sound impersonal, commercial, industrial, alien to the layperson.

i don’t want to be an outright rebel and reject the commercial side of webdev, even though i obviously go against the grain with how i currently do things. the way i make my site right now is sidestepping what i perceive as my weaknesses in graphic design by being blunt, simplistic, and rather utilitarian with my building approach. for how strong i perceive my aesthetic sense, designing sites is not my forte, and i won’t pretend it is.

professional web developers, just like professional developers in general, are absolute wizards that can come together to realize some of the bolddest ideas by building really strong foundations and designing great visuals that look nice no matter the device one views things on. the technical prowess is undeniable, and looking at some of the showcased pages on astro’s site stuns me. i kind of want to jump up there, but i am way below this bar, i cannot reach it.

but when i step back and look at all these pizzazzy showcase-grade pages, i realize that i feel something impersonal in them. they look cool, but they’re products. they lack some individuality, and that is obviously a consequence of the fact that these kinds of sites are often either built by teams of people for corporations, or, if they are made by individuals, to promote their creators to such corporations. it either feels like a corporate twitter account, or an “x premium” blue checkmark gushing at the brand new javascript framework.

the way things look there is decidedly not like things i see on personal web that often. there are some fancy sites round here, but even the most mindblowing examples i admire, like, say, öngezell, have the character to them that is out of place with much of the professional-made, professional-grade stuff. even if there are elements of self-promotion, like it is obviously the case with öngezell, there is a personal touch, the sense of a living person doing cool things.

i think that with web development, heck, even with software dev it’s easy to fall into this trap of professional expectations and try to school oneself into professional ways of making things, obscuring from the view all the coolness, the fun that can arise from doing these things recreationally, for enrichment of the self.

something has to change about all of this. there has to be more fun in this world.

unfortunate coincidences happen in life, and this time it kind of struck me, even though it’s most likely not about me whatsoever.

not that long passed since i wrote my status about the difficulty of judging someone’s age, casually referencing a webspace dweller who goes by bikobatanari. on my end it was largely a tangent based on my life observations wrt judging other ppls’ ages and how my age was also misjudged not an insignificant amount of times.

mere days, probably a week since i wrote that, the site went down.

as a tech-savvy person i immediately sought leads on where i could possibly contact him on that situation, only to find out that it was no ordinary outage. the associated communication channels, ones not tied to the website, disappeared. the contact form on some japanese shoutbox service was shutdown. the youtube channel that powering the rather silly NostalgiaTube page, gone. it’s hard to believe it is not intentional.

such a nice facade, a cozy place with fun quips and some really insightful writing, all were torn down with deliberacy, no stone unturned.

my dumb traumatized brain in such situations keeps piecing two and two together and producing a conclusion that it was all my fault for flippantly dismissing what i myself dubbed as a flippant remark about age, but i really don’t think there is a rational explanation to that line of thinking; i am kind of an insignificant blip even by personal web ecosystem standards (the explore section on nekoweb doesn’t seem to amount to much, frankly), and frankly i think i did at decent job noting that it’s completely fine for him to hide his age on the internet, so, really, it’s probably something else that got to him. (edit: going through internet archive i realized i was more of a dumbass about my age remark than i initially realized but i digress) running a personal site independently is no easy feat after all. in this day and age site hosting may seem simple, and there are companies making it easy to get in, but one weird site traffic incident and you might just get charged an obscene amount of money. hosting a site on your own in this day and age is more akin to handling a deployed landmine.

i haven’t had a chance to see all his site has on offer, but i can tell that what i saw, i really enjoyed. he had a knack for writing, he wrote some really interesting observations on various things, and he undoubtedly influenced my outlook on internet, what it means to interact with it, to run a personal website. i still haven’t absorbed it all, but the fact that some of this wisdom is now lost just doesn’t sit right with me.

regardless, for me, the legacy of his site will live on. this very section of the website has navigation implemented the way it is specifically because i saw it on biko’s garden section. it’s kinda wild to realize something has influenced me in more than one way like that.

i will not question his decision to go offline, because everyone should be able to exercise their right to be forgotten. i will also respect his decision to never put his website back online ever again.

i probably won’t find out if he sees this, and that is okay. been nice to see the site when it was up still.

bikobatanari, july 2020 - march 2024. i’d love this to be a massive overreaction on my end, but it genuinely mattered to me that much.

i’m still taking things slow and trying to get myself back together, but in the meantime i might as well flesh out my spur-of-a-moment thing and give back to the nekoweb community with something useful:

a sitebox previewer!

it wasn’t hard to make, but i know i needed it, and i know others need it as well, so i am more than glad to share it. this is quite likely to enable some unhinged sitebox edits on my end in the future.

grab it from github today!

i’ll be honest with y’all, i feel like i am wasting my time hard rn. im in my total brainrot phase and it feels ridiculous. i am beyond scattered across everything and nothing is moving forward. everything i had on my mind is completely derailed, i have no direction and nothing feels right besides me flailing my hands around and being kinda reckless. i’ll see what happens with all of this while i am winding down, but currently all my plans are out of the window and i will be working on a new strategy when i get myself back together.

i think i want to be more straightforward and state what i actually mean when i talk of remblanc 1.0. at this point this site de-facto is 1.0, and what it embodies in general is what the page you’re looking at already is. the 1.0 at this stage, prior to me giving things a final pass for whatever inconsistencies i might notice, is just me writing a blog post commemorating a milestone that 1.0 is for me, its sentimental meaning, the things i’ve done already, and the direction i am planning to take, both creatively and in terms of building this website. that’s it, really, and the fact that it’s quite a bit delayed now is a combo of me having a prolonged birthday celebration and me having to come up with good writing.

speaking of writing, i tried to push through with a particular idea i had since when i started writing the announcement, but as i am writing it now i realize it doesn’t work for me anymore and i have to discard it. i’m not at all bummed wrt it, though, since i am quite used to doing this nowadays. it no longer feels sad to throw things away when i write something, and in the end it basically is a learning experience that informs me of things that do or do not work. so even though i spent time on something that won’t make it into the end result, it’s not a wasted effort, it’s rather useful actually.

i wanted to format this more as a piece of advice a couple of hours ago, but my attention drifted away towards something rather pointless, mindnumbing even, so i kind of lost the momentum. but nonetheless i want you, the reader, to take away from this that it’s okay to discard things. you don’t have to be attached to something that feels forced or unnatural to do, and it’s worth at least considering changing things up if you do experience a feeling like that. it’s for the better to learn to sense that and act on it instead of digging in and working up a heap of disappointment.

there was a promise on my end that i would not make any updates until i actually got to the 1.0 mark. i also promised that i would release this on my birthday, and now i am posting two hours too late to tell you it’s still not done :p

i did not contribute to the site whatsoever, and my birthday was kind of decent. i got some interesting gifts for myself, i had some fun, the day felt like a birthday. i ate out with my parents in an indian restaurant, and i dared to have one of the spiciest meals on the menu (it’s spelled “v i n d a l double-o”). it was indeed very spicy, and it was too few rice for me to get through it, but i ate it all and enjoyed it.

now, my actual plan for the day was to eat at a chinese restaurant with my friends, but that had to be delayed to saturday, so maybe technically my birthday celebrations just started? all i can say is that at least i’m not dead, i had a good time starting the twenty-fifth year of my life, and i am spending it the way i want.

emergency interjection over, i’m not dead, i’m not in the rut, i’m still having fun, see y’all at 1.0!

due to this being the final day of my deadline, i will dedicate all my resources to finally taking this site off the ground and working on the proper introduction of a 1.0 version. the release is going to be timed with my birthday, and i hereby stipulate that no further minor update is going to be issued in production until the 1.0 version of this website hits the ground.

it’s time to get things going.

metrics can be addicting as heck, especially for the kind of person that is really susceptible to getting that hike from the competitive spirit, that desire to be the best, to get the highest score, or idk, simply see the number go up. sadly, i am one of those people, and i caught myself really fussing over the view count and appearing on nekoweb’s page 1 in the “most views” category, grinding my ass off implementing all kinds of small changes to this website squarely to increase my chances of receiving hits and rising in the viewcounts.

i was obsessively looking on other peoples’ stats in order to see how long it would take for me to claw that last place on the first page from the clearly inactive sleepdrowning site. i was just doing my thing, as i never intended to play dirty or anything, and really i had no reason to do that whatsoever, but i would lie if i said that it was a fulfilling experience. i know someone else in my position could easily end up hurting someone else in the process of going through this kind of chase, but for me it was simply about doing things for the sake of doing, and loathing myself for not doing better, and not doing more, and not doing faster.

the only real rival i was fighting by trying to get to page 1 was myself. i’m not even sure i’d be satisfied even if i did arrive there first. i quit competitive games and completely barred myself from playing idle/incremental games because how easy they make for me to fall into such a state, but the worst realization i have from this particular experience is that i put all this time into menial shit that i could spend actually going with my plan, wrapping up the version 1.0 of this site (whatever that means for me now), and working on the damn video essay i was excited to start working on like two weeks ago. feels like a sick and twisted version of procrastination ngl.

anyway, want to congratulate wappydog for inadvertently accomplishing my intended goal and arriving to page 1 before me. i’m happy that i no longer have to worry about this because of your site, and i am really eager to see you shine even higher in the ranks. definitely one of the coolest site designs on this whole place.

now it’s time for me to rest and let go of this nonsense.

i stumbled upon an entry on bikobatanari’s website elaborating lightly on why they choose not to disclose their age to people [edit: link is dead, i republished the entry i was specifically referring to for archival’s sake], and my attention was caught by a part that sort of flippantly stated that it “shouldn’t be too hard” to guess one’s age by reading their works. while it’s an observation they make of themselves (and i, to be clear, fully respect their decision not to widely showcase themselves, whether in terms of personal detail bits like age, or in general), frankly, i couldn’t disagree more with that as a general statement. my experience of guessing someone’s age generally resulted in either me colossally misjudging other peoples’ ages, or other people misjudging my age solely based on interactions with me.

putting biko as an example, the writing itself, for how interesting and gripping it is, does not immediately scream a certain age to me. it is seemingly in touch with my wave, but i would need to meaningfully dig pretty deep to find some more solid leads.

if i were to stick to the surface-level observations to attempt judging where they are in relation to me, i could guess that they are older than me on the merit of seemingly living a relatively stable and self-sufficient life. they do look fairly established, i could guess they have a good enough job, and the setup they have is quite pristine, with a nice looking pc and a custom mechanical keyboard on the desk. but that criterion itself could put things anywhere in the 20s or 30s range, and kind of barely says anything at all.

one could gravitate to the cultural references, like how they clearly vividly remember the old youtube layout that is culturally kind of alien to me, and that would probably narrow the window down somewhat. but then i think, had i had more consistent access to the internet when i was 6-9 years old (i think i distinctly remember seeing youtube at 6 on my uncle’s pc, but i was unable to have those interactions bc we got proper internet access in 2010 or so), that could’ve been a way different, more equalizing experience.

besides, the cultural references tend to differ regionally as well, even with western media, depending on how things reach to people. i grew up on re-runs of charmed, which premiered in the states two years before i was born, as well as cartoons like ducktales and chip ‘n dale rescue rangers, series that are so quantifiably 90s that the latter received a movie adaptation that put the main duo squarely in the context of being washed up 90s superstars. the banger nes game that capcom made was one of the first video games i ever played, and i was just a 5-year-old in eastern europe, and the nes in question was a chinese famiclone resembling a keyboard that my parents bought me at a village market on sunday.

side note, the cultural rift is something that is quite beautiful for ee in general, and i assume it is not dissimilar to plenty of places in the global south. the way things moshed together and cross-polinated culturally in the 90s-2000s led to whole generations of younger people having awareness of culturally “older” stuff, but without that context it would probably age them up in someone else’s lens, should things move in the north-west direction. kinda sad that something like that got kind of lost with the ubiquity of the internet as a cultural equalizer, but on the other hand i think it’s also even better in that sense because older stuff is even more accessible now for wider groups of people.

funnily enough, age misjudgments keep coming up for me in particular a lot. i was branded by my partner as “mature for my age” because i’ve been talking to them about so many smart/in-depth things that they assumed back in like 2020-2021 that i was 24 or 25, when i was, in fact, 20-21 years old. and now i keep getting caught off-guard about people coming up and popping off, becoming fairly respected and prominent online, because i’ve been conditioned by my long-time presence on the internet to assume that they must be older than me, only to find out that they are straight up as old as i am. and then i make friends with ppl who are like 5 years younger than me, have literally the same cultural grasp as me, but then we talk nostalgia, and it’s just completely different worlds.

age is fucking weird, man. though i kinda like parading my birth date a bit, it’s a cool number plus it makes me a millenium kid 😎

i forgot about the miku day. how can i even manage to let something unacceptable like that happen? how can i ever recover from something as terrible as this?

i feel frustrated because i wrote a whole massive status regarding short-term plans for my future, and it felt like a good idea a couple of hours ago, but now i decided to just scrap it and it feels like a waste of effort.

frankly i did not even intend for these statuses to be long, but it turns out that sometimes i put a lot of me even into what i consider low quality/stream of consciousness kind of writing, so it just kind of balloons unwittingly.

i think i’d probably be paying for twitter blue had twitter not been owned by elon musk, because some of the features in it do feel somewhat appealing to me. too bad i’m not an active twitter user anymore for the reason of it being an utter hellhole, and at this point “x premium” is just a loser sign that puts your money directly into the pockets of a fascist manbaby.

ngl, insomnia is super painful. it’s 1am here and i feel not very sleepy, plus im also a bit hyperactive without having so much as an idea of what i even want to do with my time. i think i haven’t slept in around 24 hours now, yet i don’t feel sleepiness much, all i feel is dread and tension in my body telling me to do something. partly out of frustration and internal guilt scorning me for perceivably not doing anything during the day. i struggle to classify this well, but whatever it is, fuck it so much, please stop tormenting me, dear brain

international women’s day

happy international women’s day! women kick ass and deserve the world and if you’re in disagreement with that you are cringe lol. don’t forget to take care of your friends, partners and such, listen to their struggles and maybe even help overcome shit that patriarchy throws at them. if your government is shitty with abortion laws or really oppressive towards women, cis or trans, fucking torch it lol, give em hell and demand better. best day to do it on no less

rip rooster teeth

i’m quite bummed that rooster teeth is getting folded, even though i’m not particularly invested into rooster teeth. wbd is onto some absolute fuckery rn and i hope that its execs burn in hell for their conscious malpractice that ruins so many things people love. if you care about rooster teeth content, get yourself yt-dlp, go onto youtube and rooster teeth website and back up things you like. yt-dlp accepts links for the entire series so if you were to feed it a link for, say, camp camp, it will parse the whole series season-by-season and download every single episode of it. there is a bit of an issue with it currently grabbing the shows with video ads embedded, but there is a pull request coming for that, which i used to make a build that works quite well. if you need help with setting that up then hit me up in dms on discord, you can find me on nekoweb discord server.

EDIT: if you want to contribute to the archival of Rooster Teeth content, particularly from YouTube, i just found out that there is a project called Archive of Pimps. seems like a good idea to coordinate with others on the effort, so might as well give the direction to whoever cares about this. it’s a good idea to stick together during the dark times.

speaking of camp camp, i decided to binge watch it with my partner, and we had quite a blast with the first season. the show is exactly as good as i remember it being back when it premiered in 2016, and with this revisit i can’t help but admire how well-executed the show is and how it all feels right when put together. even when the jokes kinda make me chuckle at most, they are obviously well-written and tightly paced. clearly the show had a lot of passion poured into it, and it is an interesting piece of web animation as a whole that embodies the mid-10s attempts to make competent web animation work on youtube, which youtube kind of unceremoniously squandered with its monetization policies. fuck youtube too, doesn’t matter that i’m making stuff for it.

warnermedia was supposed to empower this kind of show, and to extent it did seem to have a good 4-season run, but the fifth season started dropping literally a week before the announcement of rooster teeth folding, and i really hope this doesn’t mean we won’t get to see the now-final season in its full glory. praying for wbd to not fumble it like it is currently fumbling coyote vs. acme.

remblanc 1.0 release deadline

i spent a bit too much time beating around the bush when it comes to finalizing what i call the 1.0 version of this site. it’s a bit of a formality, but i deem it very necessary for myself so i can let it go for a bit and shift my focus back onto other creative pursuits. the final part of the rollout will be a proper post explaining the rollout, and that is what i am setting my deadline for. i intend to release 1.0 as soon as i can, with the deadline being 14th of march - my birthday, incidentally.

think that’s it for my thoughts. take care of yourself, dear reader, and please don’t forget to drink water.

one of the driving factors behind me building up this web space is a desire for curation, rounding up all things i like in entertainment and building up a showcase of sorts as to why i think they are good and worth your time.

while i am ways off of actually realizing that goal, i just realized i can do something silly: queue up a playlist of youtube videos that i really like, and have them running somewhere on repeat, accessible 24/7, so i just went and did that.

welcome to remblanc’s based video shack.

keep in mind that i do not filter videos by sensitivity levels so some of these have content warnings attached to them that may not be apparent upon watching them live. also, i decided to leave the chat disabled because i do not want to be looking at this 24/7, just want to have yet another window into my world accessible on-demand.

you ever have that situation where you just keep the template files of your, say, blog starter project there so they just kind of sit in the same place as the rest of stuff? sure don’t think i would do something like that, would i?

i did not exactly expect to have so much fun working and iterating on this site, but i want to use this opportunity to remind myself, and maybe even others visiting, that it is okay to slow down and take a pause. it can be tough to do so at times, especially with those who have conditions such as ADHD (probably includes me) and for whom fun creative endeavors can be attention-sucking to the point of being downright addictive, but maintaining a site or doing any other creative pursuits is really not as important as sleeping, eating, drinking water, maybe taking a shower, and generally taking good care of yourself. things like this can wait a bit, but your personal wellbeing matters, because it is the backbone to functioning generally and being able to more efficiently get to the heights you set for yourself.

had a bit of an impromptu idea to add these onto the site to express my thoughts in short form, as i do feel that some things i want to talk about do not warrant a full blog post. i’m thinking of automating this in the future, but the intent for now is for these to be easily appendable even via manual means, so i will probably be updating these by hand.

anyway, i want to pay some respects for the developers of the nintendo switch emulator yuzu, who just got clapped by nintendo and forced to pay $2.4 million for “facilitating piracy at a colossal scale.”

my stance on nintendo is that it is a horseshit company, their legal attacks and the ruination of peoples’ lives are utterly deplorable and terrible for the game industry and the software freedom at large. i will never buy anything, neither a game nor a device, from nintendo directly, and i implore all others to be vocal with dissatisfaction regarding their utterly slimy behavior, as well as support the tools that extend life of nintendo hardware and make preservation of nintendo games possible.

fuck nintendo.

addendum: remembered this james stephanie sterling classic that could not be more appropriate for this case. once again, fuck nintendo.