March 31st. International Trans Day of Visibility.

The 15th one, to be precise.

Before we go into the weeds, I want to make a slight callback.

I've mentioned before that I've always wanted to make an immersive sim, but in that post I felt like I did a bad job of describing what, exactly, preempts me from doing so, outside of the thousands of systems needing to snap in place late into development and the fact that I am one person.

The fact of the matter is that I'm not a great writer. I feel I have no writing voice, especially not for fiction. Yet, I write anyways, inspired by works and authors of the past, in hopes that one day I'll be good enough to make my own stories worth telling. Until then, I'm enamored with the imagery of the scarlet stepped pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, reminded by the echoes of a linguistic Metavirus, and personally involved in the actual allegorical basis of two different-colored pills in my own way¹.

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Got a bit of a quick one for you today.

On March 15th, 1999, RSS was initially released to the world on the Netscape.com portal.

Previously, I wrote about RSS as a part of an experiment where I tried to find one cool thing weekly. I failed at that experiment, but I think it was a good experiment. It's a shame it had to be on substack first.

So now, I revive that post somewhat in an in-depth appreciation for RSS.

Happy birthday.

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I honestly expected this to be A) sooner, and B) before the politics post, but neither happened so here we are.

To start, the blog has been reskinned and the template swapped. The blog should have proper opengraph media previews now! This has been a small but frustrating issue to work through since adding them on bootstrap 4 didn't make them want to play nice with fediverse platforms in particular, and since that's my most likely posting location these days, I wanted them to at least look pretty. It's also much faster since it's not loading a 4k image as the wallpaper (an admittedly rookie mistake), and I'm still thinking about transferring the blog to gitlab or some kind of VPS. This does somewhat mean I need to figure out a new comment system for it, but I'm looking into the viability of the mastodon comments system plugin for Nikola, or the cactus comments system, but I'm not sure how I like having guest accounts comment freely (that typically leads to spam). Or maybe I'll write my own. Who knows.

The major tie-up with the opengraph tags is that I'm more mad that I spent the time on a template, just for a swap to bootblog4 to end up solving most of my issues. I'd like those hours back, please. But no, time moves ever forward. Also I should've just used bootblog4 as a base in the first place, but I digress.

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Hello! It's been awhile!

I have plenty to write about but due to certain... aspects of those prospective posts, I wanted to push this one to the front and engage with those aspects somewhat directly in a separate post.

Normally I don't like to shove politics into things, but at this point I feel like having unvoiced opinions is significantly worse than voicing them at all. Given the nature of this election cycle, I find it's important to touch on things leading up to it in an attempt to vocalize how I feel about things, and channel some frustrations. In addition to that fact, my mere existence is political, and whilst I don't think screaming about things endlessly on social media is particularly productive past a certain point, I find that muzzling myself is going to cause more problems than saying anywhere from little to nothing.

Enter: The Trials of the Election Year: A US-centric series of posts talking about policy and the modern body politic, all the way throughout the chain.

Make no mistake: I'm not so deluded as to think that my opinions alone should be the law of the land, I am not a political science major, I am not the standard for everyone, and I am certainly not above critique in any manner. I mostly want to stir conversations that I feel need to be had in order to create and engage in dialogue. I'm also aware that these posts probably won't help me make any friends, but I'm willing to accept that risk. Constructive feedback is welcomed.

This post will primarily cover my observations on social media discourse, particularly in the context of social media, primarily Twitter. If it's not that interesting to you, you can probably skip this one. There's a lot to cover generally, and this one is somewhat banal if for no other reason than to ease into the format. In this instance, it's more anecdotal than future entries will be. A little more casual, if you will.

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So, this is it, the end of 2023.

Is that... another post before another month passes us by? Mark that on the calendar. Granted, it's short, but too much of what's been going on has been just terribly mundane.

I have a lot of work ahead of me until New Years' so let me kind of elaborate on the nonsense and we can start working towards the goals, one step at a time.

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:'3

I wanted more posts out more frequently but that sure didn't happen lol. This one's gonna be a bit more rambly so you can probably skip it.

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Autumn's here, and that means it's time to iterate harder.

Typically, I have avoided posting what I do at all outside of a specific thing due to a perceived lack of interest, but Months are actually considerable periods of time when you're doing a lot of waiting, and a lot has been happening recently. From a blog authorship perspective, I'm more realizing at this stage that I just shouldn't care about constantly posting actual interesting things, since that was the pre-switch format in the first place. I simply do not think I'm cut out for content creation in that way.

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Finally.

Getting the spare time to write has been generally pretty challenging. Work itself generally eats up my entire weekend, but I actually got out early today.

Working third shift and permanently detonating my sleep schedule has given me a bizzare perspective. I'm one of those people who tends to go on really, really long walks to get some exercise and reset myself, and doing it at three in the morning adds onto the weirdness. Put simply, the world just isn't designed to operate at night.

However, in that silence there are still things that reveal themselves. As an example, I rather like the night sky, what little of it can be seen from my neck of the woods. For a long time, I wished to do astrophotography.

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Awful month. Terrible. Zero stars.

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The title says it all, basically. I dunno how often these will even be necessary, but I've definitely put myself in a corner with how I'm handling the actual blogging.

Firstly, I'm working on getting my old substack content off of the platform and put here. Once this is done, it'll be under the 'digest-archive' category. It is far past time I stopped relying on that platform for hosting any of my content. The posts will be properly backdated, and all links will be replaced.

It's been roughly a year since I tried to do a weekly arrangement of interesting things, and since then, I've burnt out probably three times over and have gone through multiple life-changing events. I'm slowly getting my groove properly again, but I'm still finding it pretty difficult to do things efficiently as of yet. Recovery has been... challenging.

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