At the Edge
Awful month. Terrible. Zero stars.
The Status Update Zone
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.
The Time To Build Is Now
I tend to say a lot of things.
That might seem like an obvious statement to you, but for those that know me well enough, know generally how I feel about the state of the modern web. I am no stranger to loving open, interoperable things.
Yes, I will admit that generally hating siloes for merely existing is a bit of an old way of thinking, but the game can only be played for so long, and open solutions to modern technological problems require attention in order to be pushed into usable states.
Encroaching Darkness
I've always wanted to make an immersive sim.
Some of my earliest exposures to games when I was young were games like Thief and Deus Ex that emphasized several ways to resolve an obstacle with additional design for large, believable (but not open, in the modern sense) worlds. The challenge, is that usually immersive sims require hundreds of systems to snap into place late in development, and I am one person with extremely limited time and a crippling coffee addiction running on little sleep.
A little while into my first exposure to these kinds of games, I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons proper after hearing it in passing for a couple years at that point, particularly paired with faint echoes of the satanic panic. Unfortunately, the group fizzled and I had a pretty difficult time getting a group together (Roll20 didn't really exist yet to my knowledge and it certainly wasn't widespread until a hot while later). My exposure to and interest in TTRPGs up until 2019ish waxed and waned often. I was mostly playing Warhammer 40k until 2015, at which point the game just stopped being fun because of awful players and Games Workshop being generally a nuisance, and thus we swapped to other games like Corvus Belli's Infinity.
On the Perils of 'Everything'
Ah. Scope creep rears its ugly head again. Except... it's by design, for some reason.
Previously, I mentioned that there may be a post regarding 'everything apps'. In actuality, I described it using the term 'rant', but I think I can structure this in a way that doesn't require a flow of consciousness.
For starters, I suppose I should mention that I'm not entirely adverse to people and companies trying to do different things in software. My opinion, however, is that an application or script should do at most three things, lest functionality, usability and sanity be sacrificed for an ever-expanding featureset.
Logical Progression
uhhhh whoops! Looks like I accidentally skinned bootstrap4!
I'm absolutely NOT DONE with customizing this, but I mostly wanted to get the theme rolling so I had SOME idea of what I wanted to do. The main objective to be trying to get somewhat close to my personal site, which I'd say the theme is pretty close to.
Next, I'd like to add a sidebar of the most recent posts and an archive tree. After that, I'm probably done for awhile.
Let me know what you think about all of this!
Blog Changes
Check this out!
You may have noticed I have swapped out the theme from hack to bootstrap4.
I'm doing it mostly for ease of customization, but it's becoming incredibly clear that I may just have to do a pure overhaul of most themes. There are huge 'one-liners' of CSS that make it pretty difficult to modify the theme further.
As such, this will be a temporary theme until I have the time and energy to bring things into my personal spec.
Automation-wise, I haven't really worked on that yet either, mostly because it's largely dependent on me settling on a theme, but I might just go ahead and write the pipeline anyhow, since I have to rebuild the entire project anyways every time I want to post.
Like the theme? Don't care for it? Let me know (mostly because some of this theme might end up in the real semi-permanent one).
Ramblings of a Cryotank
I'm mostly writing this to take my mind off things.
Tragically, I'm trying to keep my mind off of not getting an immediate response from an HR dept about some work, since self-employment didn't treat me all that well. Learning new things as much as possible is excellent when the job you have gives any kind of consistent income, which is not how this has gone.
I digress, and will build myself a better future as necessary.
Nikola's templating system is interesting but I haven't had a huge amount of time to pick it apart and make my own. Respectfully, the documentation could be slightly better, but I admit it is perhaps a personal failing that I don't exactly understand it immediately. I intend to draw and plan out my theme and throw it up for those using Nikola as well, assuming I can get it to my liking.
With a customizable config, of course.
Starting Back
Back, In A WIP form
Well, here we are again.
This is kind of a continuation from a substack blog... I decided that despite the blog's many failings, I should try writing again. I'll actually be throwing a post out over there once I'm finished writing this to prove I'm not just saying things to say things.
I wanted a more elegant (read: deployable) solution, but this was the best I could do in my current circumstances. The nice thing about this is that I get a proper RSS feed now, and I can use it for multiple things. Once I get some domains figured out, things just kinda fall into place.