status archive

there is a manga i cannot quite finish reading. i keep it around with me, as it lowkey deteriorates through wear in my backpack, and i do not do a good job actually reading it. it’s just there, waiting to be finished as i put it in and out of a bag.

fortunately, i actually started reading it recently, and i might even finish it in the next couple of days, considering i don’t have much to do at work this week.

[#100DaysToUnwind 18/100]

NOTE: this was originally published on 9th of august, 2026, and chronologically this was an 8th #100DaysToUnwind status. i accidentally set it to 9th of june, 2026, messing up the order, so now i will mess it up even more by bumping the date, perhaps to further amplify the spirit of this specific status.

p.s. i am still on this challenge, life is just getting in a way slightly.

feeling like pulling back on the inner workings of my statuses, both on the main page and in the status archive, because i think their implementation is actually a bit cursed.

you know how the statuses are sorted by date in reverse chronological order, and then grouped by month? you’d think i’d be storing some kind of timestamps to do so, but, in fact, i do not store date values. in fact, the “date” values have actually been string values all along!!!

this is what my typical front matter looks like:

title: my statuses are scuffed for an amazing reason
publicationDate: 9 aug 2026
originalId: 20260809a
tags:

all of these front matter variables are hand-written, no automation involved.

publicationDate here has a self-explanatory syntax and serves a dual purpose: it is displayed in each status title, and it is also the string that is converted to Date object in my SSG front matter, which is then used to group every status i have by the month of a year.

originalId uses the yyyy-mm-dd date format at the start, and ends with a letter, which goes from a to z in alphabetical order. the letter is only ever used when i post multiple times a day, so in case that happens, the first post gets labeled as, for example, 20260607a, while the second one gets labeled as 20260607b. likewise, originalId also serves a dual purpose: it is used for sorting the posts, and it is also the way you can reference them in the status archive. if you know the syntax, you can just go to the status archive, see this post, for example, and add its id to the link, so it looks like this: https://remblanc.com/statusarchive/#20260808a.

tags currently does not have a semantic meaning, and is only used for doing some wacky styling, like with the silly [definitely comic sans!] and flipped tags i tend to use in the certain sections of the site.

suffice to say, it all kinda works!

[#100DaysToUnwind 8/100]

to keep up with the pace for the challenge of writing 100 posts a day, i had set myself an arbitrary minimum target of writing things for 30 minutes. i try to follow it as much as i can, and it surely helps to set a minimum goal to hit, but it also feels like i am trying to jam time into a schedule that already feels very tight. i am kind of sabotaging myself with rigidity here to the point that i’ve been already skipping plenty of days for this challenge. won’t deter me from completing it tho!

[#100DaysToUnwind 17/100]

i got a bit hooked on energy drinks. monster energy in particular. i remember being told that it is basically the devil at some point, but here i am, trying to cheat code my way out of poor sleep. i should probably sleep better lol

[#100DaysToUnwind 16/100]

i’m skipping a bunch of days, i know, but at least this time i am writing while being awake since 4am xd. i actually went to bed quite early, which has surprisingly worked out for me well, as sometimes i wake up too early and still need more sleep afterwards. i had ample time to chill and… mostly just spend time watching ppl on twitch. it kinda sucks when some of the coolest people are outside your waking hours yk

[#100DaysToUnwind 15/100]

if there is any advice i can give you regarding engaging with content creators online, it’s that you should avoid harboring strong parasocial feelings towards them. never attach your own self-esteem to the value of someone else’s personal brand, because the risks of it backfiring can be quite devastating, and far outweigh the good feelings it brings in the moment.

even if the passion is benign in the grand scheme of things, and you maintain a solid degree of separation, sometimes it can still get strong enough that you devote a lot of your time to someone who’s, in effect, an internet stranger. you might get to know their strong and weak sides, absorb yourself deeper and deeper in the world they create… and then find out that they are just a human being, fallible like the most of us. and that they have flaws, sometimes very bad flaws. and by the point you see them, it feels incredibly bad to leave it all behind and it all just turns into madness.

being parasocial is probably not a bad thing in moderation. just make sure you don’t get to the point where it could lead to a harsh parasocial breakup.

[#100DaysToUnwind 14/100]

getting things done might be one of the most impactful productivity books i have ever read. these are not the words i am saying lightly, as i have been on and off this subject for years now, experimenting with all kinds of knowledge management and task organization systems and crafting my personal workflow through lots of trial and error. reading this book was an instant improvement on my self-organization, and i still feel like re-reading it so i can get the most out of its wisdom.

there are many productivity books out there that promise big solutions but come at the high upfront cost of committing to their specific vision in full, either by pitching something that appears sound but requires strong commitment in practice, or by introducing an elaborate system with clear delineations that are not necessarily fitting for everyone’s mental model. getting things done is nothing like that: even though the system itself is still clearly defined, and any variation of it you might encounter out there follows pretty much the same general outline, it is highly flexible and fairly easy to integrate piecemeal into your own workflow. it has so many great tips that are intuitive to work with that they provide pretty much immediate value at the first read, but also offer enough depth that i want to re-read it multiple times so i can slot in more of the book’s advice into my workflow.

with gtd there is no rigid plan attached, no specific piece of software required to use it, and it can all be set up with great success using entirely physical items, which might be the benchmark i will measure the productivity systems against from now on. it’s a glowing recommendation from me - if you’re struggling with getting yourself in order, much like me, this may be a great start for achieving more of what you want in life.

[#100DaysToUnwind 13/100]

i have issues getting my sleep in order, so in the morning i have a tradeoff to make: either i wake up early and go to work in time, sacrificing my sleep and general energy for the day, or i squeeze in as much sleep as i can get, and risk getting late to work, potentially losing some of my salary due to being paid by the hour. very wack tradeoffs either way: i want to get paid in full without feeling comatose in the evening like i am literally now as i am writing this post :v

[#100DaysToUnwind 12/100]

i’ve been interested in reading kill all normies by angela nagle for a while. its subject matter, one examining the development of the online culture wars since the rise of gamergate, is the one that appeals to me a lot as someone who saw much of it first-hand. with all the praise i saw for it over the years, i thought that it would at least be an interesting read to examine, so when i saw it in my local library, i decided to give it a shot.

i returned the book a few days later.

the main reason for the return was a passage suggesting that the revolution of dignity “quickly erupted into fascist mob rule”, which was a very strong off-hand remark that appeared right at the start of the book. there is a lot of baggage in that statement, and to drop it so lightly without sourcing it or ever giving it a proper elaboration is to completely ignore not just the democratic will of ukrainians, but also the rampant injustice, corruption, and extreme police brutality that was the catalyst for the revolution, as well as the subsequent indiscriminate shootings of the protesters that made this major event a tragedy for the whole country.

such a nonchalant dismissal of truth was absolutely appalling and enough of a massive red flag to me to drop the book completely. i sincerely thought that would be end of story with this book for me, but later i also found out that it plagiarizes writing from wikipedia and rationalwiki, does not cite its sources in general and straight up takes the alt-right’s word for it when there are more accurate accounts to the stories available. this completely soured my perception on the book and its author, and made this book the first item in my impromptu-created shitlist that i thought i would never make on this site. how in the hell did this book get treated so seriously and legitimized in multiple mainstream media outlets? this is utterly embarrassing.

[#100DaysToUnwind 11/100]

this is a public service announcement to all the curious people out there.

go read a book!!! any book you’d like to read!!!!!

if you have no idea where to start, go to your local public library and pick whatever is there!!! public libraries are actually very OP and you should harness their power, dear reader.

i may or may not talk about a couple of books i am/was reading recently here, but jsyk books are good and nice and reading them makes you very cool and swaggy.

that’s my post for today.

[#100DaysToUnwind 10/100]

per a bunch of glowing recommendations, i tried watching yuri!!! on ice, a highly bl-adjacent sports anime centered around ice skating. perhaps in any other climate i could theoretically enjoy this show, but the overwhelming presence of russian athletes in the main cast takes me out of it in more ways than one - set aside that anyone representing a russian national team in any sport in the current year is culpable in representing and sportswashing a genocidal regime, but also there is no way in hell they would let a gay person anywhere near the russian national team.

what also eludes me is the general infatuation with russian athletes that is fairly present in the foreign queer media. like, y’all, if you ever actually interacted with today’s russian culture for a second or two, your feelings about it would get extinguished pretty much immediately. that shit fucking sucks, trust me.

[#100DaysToUnwind 9/100]

ok i’m finally done with my stuff, time to get back on the treadmill! i’ve been itching to continue this challenge so badly, but it did end up hitting the wall of actually having to deal with life responsibilities, and then having to chill due to having to commit to those really hard. now that i’m done with it, i think we can keep going.

i am currently unable to keep up with the writing challenge due to certain urgent commitments i have to address. will take a couple of days before i can give some spare attention to this challenge again. promise it won’t be long :p

over the last couple of years i managed to flip through so many communities both irl and online that i didn’t even bother to count. some of them on amicable terms, others less so. some i just lost interest in, and at least one had me leave due to a fiery drama it got through. one i wanted to leave badly, others are just no longer available to me because i had to switch entire cities.

our social environments can be deceptively ephemeral. you’d think that whatever you have right now is the safe ground you will always stay on that will never change, but much like tectonic plates, everything keeps moving. communities come and go, friendships begin and end, and just now i had to prune a bunch of links from my buttons list due to them no longer being active. nothing ever stays the same.

and yet there’s always a pull to socialize, hang out with each other, support one another, and maybe even get into an occasional argument or two. it feels damn good to be around people and participate in a constant exchange of thoughts and ideas. and perhaps the constant change is for the better, as it lets us keep our perspectives fresh and always be challenged by our surroundings, making us come up with ever more inventive answers to whatever is thrown at us.

[#100DaysToUnwind 7/100]

i had to check my old statuses on the site in preparation for one of the incoming posts i am planning, and i lowkey felt cringe looking at some of my earlier writing here.

it was the intention for this section of the site to be a lower quality text dump, but looking back at it, there are things i now feel should have stayed in the drafts. the running theme with most of them was me oversharing the mental health issues i experienced at the time. i’m not ashamed of talking about them necessarily, but the way i wrote about them was not very responsible on my end, i feel. i’m doing good enough and have more-or-less functional support networks to keep those matters private nowadays, and i will be more tight-lipped about the personal matters of mine from now on. i am removing a bunch of those posts as the result.

additionally, i have vaulted a bunch of things that i do not feel are up to my standard anymore, but i did pick up a couple that i think i might revisit at some point. interesting enough topics for me to still mention, but i think i could do them better nowadays.

think that’s all i got for today.

[#100DaysToUnwind 6/100]

i did not have much time to spend on writing posts today, so none of my drafts are making it in today. rest assured, i am sitting on 12 drafts rn and my ideas are not showing any signs of slowing down, so i’m more than sure i will keep my pace going. i just had to study intensely today, is all.

[#100DaysToUnwind 5/100]

i started working on a brand new project at my job this week. the first week on the project turned out to be a whole lot of nothing in practice, so, with my job being a kind of knowledge work, i saw this downtime as an opportunity to revise my work-related notes.

we work with things that are covered by nda, so there are stringent requirements on software we can use. the way it is enforced in practice is far from what is described in the training material [e.g. instead of having a centralized company-curated software repository, we basically just use what our team leads say is okay to use], and my bet is that it has something to do with the issue i am about to describe. nonetheless, we are fairly constrained in the software we use. which basically means that we are mostly confined by whatever microsoft made.

boy microsoft software is a lot of jank.

so, at home, and even on the go [which is where i happen to have written most this post], i use obsidian to write my notes and draft my writing. obsidian itself is a powerful piece of software that lets me organize my knowledge, and also, with a spaced repetition plugin, create flashcards out of my notes that let me study some of the information i process in it.

naturally, obsidian is technically prohibited at work despite having a highly permissive license that would make it fine to use in a corporate environment. the most likely reason obsidian won’t ever be adopted at our workplace is because our it department does not care, but i could also make a good argument as for why it wouldn’t be a great idea to adopt it. for one, the community extensions, while being a great advantage of obsidian, can also cause security issues that an employee with less wit may not be well-equipped to handle, so the paranoid approach is kind of reasonable in this case.

thus, with a resigned sigh, i decided that i would try substituting my obsidian workflow with onenote. and the more i am using onenote, the more i am realizing how jank it truly is.

on paper [for how much i try to avoid that with my bits and bytes], it largely works. the old-fashioned file cabinet structure makes it a decent enough fit for zettelkasten and gtd-style project management, and i can technically make the backlinks between each note due to linking being treated as a first-class citizen. everything can be tagged, and flashcards are actually very easy to make, as every entry is collapsible and thus highly suitable for the format. all i need is technically there, so what would even be the problem with it all?

well, unlike with obsidian, linking is a manual process that requires multiple interactions with context menus, and the links are not automatically made bi-directional. this makes the friction of using a onenote notebook sharply increase with the amount of notes present in the system. tags technically function, but they are best perceived as a visual delineator, as the internal tag indexing tool suffers from an allegedly decade-old bug that causes some of the tagged items to not display, with the only known workaround involving removing the notebook from onenote and adding it again. and while flashcards are doable, the most obvious thing missing from making the experience feasible is a spaced repetition system that could make them work together.

of all these issues, at least i managed to to figure out how to deal with spaced repetition. my current system is basically a digital representation of the Leitner system, which is designed for usage with physical flashcards. i have 5 notes representing the “boxes”, and i move the items around manually, with ctrl+x/ctrl+v, depending on my confidence in absorbing the knowledge i embed into them. this approach is weird, it is a brazen attempt at bending the tool not designed for my particular use case to my will, and it feels like i am approaching the problem with technological prowess of patrick star, but it seems to work, at least.

[#100DaysToUnwind 4/100]

for some reason, commuting takes me out way harder than the work itself. i didn’t even do much today at work, so i didn’t even feel all that tired, but the bus ride back home killed most of the energy i had. weird!

[#100DaysToUnwind 3/100]

i did not go to any anime convention this year, and, considering my current financial situation, i am not planning to. it wasn’t the money that prevented me from going, though, it’s just that the experience i had last year at my local one was not great for me. i am not the kind of person to make friends in loud places while being stressed in attempt to catch up on every panel i am interested in, plus the panels were not all that interesting to me last year, so i did not have high hopes for this year.

turns out, the panels at my local convention were actually interesting this year, so i kinda regret not going now xd. especially as there were multiple panels dedicated to nintendo 3ds, one of my most favorite handhelds i ever had the joy of experiencing, and it also involved a really cool reverse-engineering project i would really love to see the details on. alas, i missed out on that, and my only hope is that its creator will find a way to get it up on youtube :v

[#100DaysToUnwind 2/100]

i am restarting my impromptu #100DaysToUnwind challenge. what prompted me to do this, aside from one of my friends telling me to post here again, was me observing someone else doing the challenge and noting that they were doing it regardless of the quality of their writing. admittedly, that was the thing that kind of stopped me from blogging here in the first place, as it was consuming a lot of my time, so perhaps i will try hitting that quantity.

my current plan to hit that 100 day streak is to pre-cook a bunch of short things in my drafts and strictly stick to one post a day. the consistent pace might cause me to throw something out really quickly, but it can also keep me going on many things i have on my mind and perhaps also help me not fully compromise on the quality standards i typically put in writing. let’s see how it goes.

[#100DaysToUnwind 1/100]

i kind of fell off on this site, and many of the concrete plans i had for it fell in turmoil. nonetheless, i’m here to acknowledge the belated birthday of this site and a lot of what it meant to me over the past year i’ve been working on it. i will reflect on it in private and figure out where to move forward with it, but just know that i won’t be ditching this project anytime soon.

thanks for sticking around.

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

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

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

my 2024 failures

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

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

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

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

my 2024 successes

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

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

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

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

conclusion

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

happy new year everyone!!!!1

[7/100]

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

wack.

[5/100]

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

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

[4/100]

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

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

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

[3/100]

i am trying to score a good position in the qualifier for a buckshot roulette tournament. no buy-in, no strings attached, just score well enough to qualify for a tournament and get a chance to win a cash prize. frankly, that didn’t make things any less tense, especially as the other participants scored high enough to raise the bar to what i feel like an insurmountable degree. despite the game having some logic and skill to it, it is still largely a game of chance, and i feel like i’ve been dealt some very bad luck this tournament. partly due to lack of experience with the game, partly due to plain bad rng. nonetheless, it feels like a solid preview of what would happen to me if i ended up diving into gambling. and a whole list of reasons not to get into gambling.

[2/100]

[cw for death, end of the world scenarios, and brief mentions of suicide]

y’all wtf, i just realized it’s been exactly 12 years since the purported date of the end of the world. 12 years since december 21st, 2012. crazy.

aside from the death of my grandpa 6 years prior, 2012 was instrumental in embedding existential dread directly into my brain. my exposure to 2012 as a cultural phenomenon was a catalyst that made me hyperaware of my own mortality, and that is undoubtedly one of the most incredible things a 10-year-old me could get exposed to. it brought me a lot of anxiety, it had me cry a lot, and watching a namesake disaster movie at night during a long and uncomfortable bus ride circa 2011 was one of the scariest things i experienced in my life, at least at the time.

this life event of mine was of character-defining impact, and it left quite a sizeable scar on my psyche. to this day, speculation on the end of the world is a rather touchy subject i am not particularly keen on engaging with [that one wikipedia article is a great destination for self-inflicting psychic damage if i ever feel like it], and likewise my fear of dying is more heightened than i imagine it being in an average person. i feel kind of grateful for it, however, as i feel like this existential dread carved itself into my self-preservation instincts so much that it overpowers any potential desire of mine to harm myself or lay hands upon myself, even if my mental brings me theoretically close enough to ever think of that. guess one could call that some kind of weird superpower of mine.

as for the 2012 itself, i kind of stopped caring about it when i went online sometime in 2011 [and basically never logged off since]. my skepticism ended up keeping me at bay, and by the time the “judgement day” rolled on the calendar, it ended up being nothing but the jokes and the rage comics about how world was totally ending now, amirite? lol xd.

looking back at it all makes it especially funny, not just due to 20/20 hindsight, but also because many of the dominant ideas that spread around the phenomenon were basically nonsense that straight up originated as a joke sometime in the 1970s and got lost in translation somewhere down the path to the conspiracy theorists that turned it into part of the 2012 mythos. i highly suggest checking out a video retrospective by Quinton Reviews that digs into the topic and explores the media that spawned around the phenomenon. it’s pretty funny, and even though it focuses on america specifically, it is surprisingly reflective of the kind of related stuff i saw on our tv as well. the international reach of this specific brand of conspirajunk fascinates me to no end.

[1/100]

noticed that my local convenience store now has cup noodles on the shelves, and i was really curious to try it out as i’ve never even see one of those in person [also cos it came from place, japan, naturally]. the specific one i got was big soba yakitori chicken.

my impression was pretty positive. the process of preparing it was interesting [specifically the water draining part, for which the cup had holes that the water went through], and the noodles felt much nicer and tastier than the typical instant noodle offering i’m familiar with. i had a plate of salad and a leftover fried duck leg in addition to the noodles, so overall i had a good meal.

however, i ended up making a fatal mistake by dumping the contents of the sauce bag a while before pouring hot water on the noodles. this resulted in the top layer absorbing most of the sauce and staying firm even after being in hot water for a while. the rest of the noodles ended up largely plain in taste, while the top layer brought me some fond memories from my school days, when we bought packs of instant noodles and ate them raw on the way home. good times.

my master plan for the end of the year is to finish up with remblanc the site and get it ready for me to just focus on writing things for it. the site will be split into three major sections with distinct purposes. with the foundations for the first [statuses, this site] and the second part [remarks, the thing i have on neocities] already being there, the main focus of my work will be on the media catalog i’ve been intending on having from the very start. i want things done by 2025 so i can realize some other ambitions i have on my mind.

the site as it is will probably remain unchanged, being incorporated into the larger structure i have in mind. some reshuffling will be happening in the process, and possibly the major change here will be shift in focus for what i write here. i never wanted this section to be particularly long-form, so i’ll probably just shift to the shorter and more earthly stuff here, while any bigger thoughts i have will be relegated to remarks.

i don’t want to promise much anymore, so i think the most interesting stuff will be out when it’s actually done. feel like it’s more interesting that way.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.