lately, i've been spending my spare time making this homepage as a way to stay sane on the internet and in life. i'm currently in a weird limbo caring for my elderly parents who are in poor health so i find myself doing random personal projects around the internet for fun and to teach myself new things
okay, okay, i know i said in my previous entry that i would be slowing to a monthly blog schedule for the summer but now i'm already writing again a week later (⌒_⌒;) i just got the urge to make something for this pride month because i was thinking about how rough things have been over the past year for many people, especially in the united states (who, unfortunately, often sets the example for the rest of the world to follow or use as cover.) so i feel it's a particularly important time to show support and solidarity in some way.
i mean, rainbow capitalism seems to have mostly been abandoned now. maybe it's for the best to clear up any delusions that changing logo colors was anything more than performative and conditional engagement hacks to drum up business. i've noticed a lot of pride celebrations being scaled back or cancelled in many places. i've seen jerks in comment sections gloating and expressing relief that they haven't seen any rainbow flags this year. then again, the brains of these people are so beyond cooked that they probably see "bisexual colors" everywhere anyways (๑>ᴗ<๑) given the backsliding of "institutional" support, it's important for individuals to continue the celebration of themselves and their loved ones however they can. even if times are bad. especially if times are bad.
so i wanted to add a new outfit to my homepage that celebrates some of the culture that has impacted me and gone into the forming of my amorphous fluid self. or maybe just provided me a bit of fun and amusement on my life journey.
the details of the fit:
i hope you enjoyed reading about all the pieces i picked for this outfit whether you already knew about these contexts or not! i tried to keep it relatively brief on each since i could probably write books about any of these things individually (๑>ᴗ<๑) maybe a lot of this meaning is specifically just in my own head but i'm interested in how these more or less mass culture products get organically transformed into real and meaningfully positive shared culture. i'll take that over vapid rainbow capitalism any day. happy pride everyone! <3
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ps. i recently discovered my email has been broken for the past few weeks (╥_╥) it's fixed now but if you sent me anything recently, it likely got lost in an internet black hole. please resend if it was something important!
this entry is being published a few days later than usual. i wanted to hold off and post it on the day that the tiny awards nominations opened. because i'm one of the judges this year! so if you made a new website in the past year, you should think about submitting it. there are no real stakes, just fun. and if you really think about it, isn't still being able to have a tiny bit of fun on the internet these days the most valuable prize of all?
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a tiny change: i think i'm going to switch from my bi-weekly blogging schedule to a monthly schedule. at least for the rest of the summer. or maybe a monthly + "whenever i feel like it" schedule. one of the reasons is that my dad's dementia symptoms of hallucinations and anxiety always worsen during the summer months and he becomes more of a handful to deal with. i'm not sure if it's because of the heat or the longer daylight hours but it really messes him up and it's more work to manage him. and after back to back to back health issues of my own so far this year, i feel like i should try to relax my days a tiny bit more where i can afford to.
besides, i'll also be spending july looking at websites for the tiny awards so i want to make some space to do that. i'm hoping to see so many amazing websites that it restores my faith in the internet as that has been plummeting for a while now, if you haven't noticed from my writings. so, no pressure to the submissions/nominees, i'll just be looking for a tiny sign that the internet is a worthwhile place still (⌒_⌒;) jk, as long as i'm not subjected to endless slop vibesites through this process, it should be okay.
anyways, you can subscribe to my rss feed if you don't want to miss my more sporatic blog posts ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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even if i blog less frequently, i'll keep refining and adding little things to my page over the summer. here's what i've been working on lately:
a tiny update: so on my homepage here, i like to inline my images as base64 encoded strings rather than manage a bunch of loose externally linked files. when you do this, you end up with each image asset being ~50% more data. but my pixel drawings are so tiny anyways, it's only a kb or two extra. after working on my maid outfit in the previous update, i realized i could trim the base64 string length on all my outfit sprites by almost 40%. previously, my character spritesheets had frames for all eight directions. but the right-moving directions were just duplicated and mirrored from the left-moving ones. so i could just take out all the rightward frames and write the flipping into the movement logic instead. it would take only a few more extra lines of code to replace huge chunks of the base64 strings for multiple outfits. i had already considered doing this last year but i was too lazy to change the code or i had other stuff i wanted to work on. but seeing how much space the (now) 3 outfits were taking up in the html doc, i decided that it had to be done ^-^
i also took the opportunity to rewrite the movement and remove the trig calculations for the angles so that it just uses simple vector arithmetic. i had the trigonometry in there because that's just how i learned to do this kind of movement from seeing other people do it. but i always hated trigonometry in school. so gtfo my page (๑>ᴗ<๑)
the walking angles now are less precisely calculated but it was overkill for the type of animation i'm doing anyways and not noticeable in any meaningful way. and, technically, without the trig, it's using less compute. but with what i'm doing, it's such a small difference that it's unmeasurable anyways. it's just nice to think about and maybe (not really) a tiny courtesy to visitors using potato computers ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
i also made the outfits persist across refreshes/restarts by storing the selection in your browser's localstorage. made sense now that there's more than 2 outfits to choose from.
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okay, that's all for now. see you here again in a month or so!
it was maid day (メイドの日) on may 10th (the word "meido" is a phonetic pun that sounds like may 10 in japanese) and i was talking to a friend in japan about it last week. i don't really know very much about maid culture in japan apart from stuff i've seen in pop culture, anime, and games. i watched burn the house down a while ago, which isn't really about maids in the cute maid cafe cosplay kind of way, but about a character named anzu who pretends to be a housekeeper as part of a revenge mission (⌒_⌒;) but i remembered really loving her outfits and style in that show. anyways, this all inspired me to add a new outfit option for my sprite!🂠 it feels appropriate since i refer to my homepage as a home and talk about doing housekeeping on it all the time ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ also, irl, i'm kind of my parents' maid too. i've been in a very meido time in my life for a while now.
every new outfit means drawing 56 new frames of my sprite. that's why i haven't added more fits to the closet. it's a slow and laborious process. but it's been a while since i spent some time drawing sprites and it felt good to work on this for the past couple weeks and just tune out the horrors of the world. i could just focus on drawing cute pixels rather than dwelling on all the bad stuff happening out there that i can't really change by sitting around passively absorbing more of it through my screen.
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it turns out that i declared victory over my neck/shoulder pain prematurely. a few days after i felt fully recovered, my opposite (left) side started to hurt (╥_╥) fortunately, it's not the same kind of numb nerve pain. i think maybe it's just from overusing my left (non-dominant) arm to compensate for my temporarily disabled right side for over a month. so it's just been sore. i guess i should continue to stay away from sitting at the computer for long periods (i say as i'm hunched over my keyboard writing this blog post.)
so speaking of housework, i decided to reevaluate my bed situation to see if maybe something (besides caregiving duties stress) was causing me to have restless and uncomfortable sleeps leading to injury.
maybe my pillow was bad? i've been using a memory foam cervical pillow for the past year. i got it because i was desperate to find a way to soften the sleepless nights i was having with my dad wandering around the house all night. and i just assumed those were the best since my mom's physical therapist was handing them out to all his patients like halloween candy. but maybe that guy was in the pocket of "big memory foam" (⌒_⌒;) and i fell into the trap of expert halo effect and authority bias.
whenever i traveled in the past, i would hate sleeping on the big soft fancy hotel pillows and always wake up with a sore neck. i think the best sleeps i have had were just on super basic, no frills, flat pillows.
i picked up a sobakawa pillow the other day. it's as basic as it gets. just a sack full of buckwheat hulls (๑>ᴗ<๑) maybe it's some kind of placebo effect but the past few nights of sleep have been pretty good. i'm not tossing and turning anymore. my sleep tracking stats seem to agree too so i guess i'll see if it holds up. with how bad this year has been going, i'll probably develop a buckwheat allergy from this (╥_╥) i hope not because i love soba noodles, especially zaru soba in the summer (∩❛ڡ❛∩)
the pain in my shoulder finally cleared up and i'm back to normal now, yay ^-^ hopefully i can go more than a few months now before another major health disruption (╥_╥) i'll try to be better at staying on top of things like stress management going forward but old bad habits are hard to break.
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my isp was having issues last week but i didn't really mind the downtime. i've been seeing an increasing amount people i follow talk about tech burn out lately. see ky's piece about the loss of an ideal and brit's post about stuckness. although they're talking more about the current state of working in tech, many of the points about feeling like a hollowing out of humanity is happening (largely due to llms) is something i feel applies to many things these days, especially the internet.
i suppose some horrible people like epstein pal, richard dawkins, are content that the breakthroughs in ai psychosis have given them a simulacrum girlfriend/boyfriend but that black mirror life is just not for me. though, it makes a lot of sense that the guy who had his humanist award revoked can't tell the difference between a human and an llm ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
so, as the internet grows more hollow, i feel less need to check it. i didn't miss it while it was down.
i just went back to working on my homeserver some more. i still haven't migrated all my data into it yet. it's a slow process of sifting through everything but made even slower with all the distractions (a lot of the times, not even good distractions) that the internet has to offer (⌒_⌒;) i did some more reorganizing of my system structure. i'm constantly learning new things about linux and the hardware so i'm figuring out better ways to do things as i go.
i decided to move the os from the micro sd card to an msata ssd for better durability since i'm always reading about how raspberry pi micro sd cards keep dying on people and i got paranoid about it. it was a nice exercise to restore my os onto a new drive with my backup os image. it was pretty easy and now i'm more comfortable about putting all my stuff on my homeserver. i wrote a little script to make a new backup image of the os every once in a while ദ്ദി( ˶^ᗜ^˶ )
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i didn't do much on my homepage since last time. just a little housekeeping and i added some more links to the various link sections. i've been trying to link back to people who are linking to me but since i don't use analytics tracking on my page, i just mostly find people by chance and wandering through webrings (⌒_⌒;) if you're linking to me and you don't see a link to you on my page, you can let me know. i prefer linking to personal homepages (real humans) rather than linktree pages and newsletter platforms which can kind of be internet dead ends.
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things in general are pretty much unchanged here. even though my shoulder has healed, i'm still feeling exhausted by home life and the state of the world. those aches and pains are persistent.
my neck/shoulder is still not 100% better but it has improved. in my own untrained amateur medical opinion, i think it's a pinched nerve in my neck or shoulder. i've had similar pain/numbness in the past when i used to play tennis and it usually took 3-4 weeks to get better. i'm in week 3 now so hopefully it doesnt last much longer (￢_￢;)
this means i've been trying to go easier on myself whenever i can between dadcare duties. mainly, that just means not as much sitting at the computer, doing regular light stretches, and taking ibuprofen before bed so the pain doesn't keep waking me up.
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i added another new thing to my front page. the construction barrier now brings up a little sign🂠 with my tips (and reminders for myself) for making a personal homepage. the design is inspired by a photo of a hatsune miku construction sign i saw ^-^
the tips on the sign are things that helped me get over mental blocks like perfectionism and indecision when i was starting my page. often, we look around at other sites for inspiration and many of them are years old already so it's easy to get overwhelmed seeing something at a later stage when you are just at the beginning and not knowing how to start. but i think it's helpful to not think of personal sites as having a finished form at all. i think the best personal sites are ones that keep growing and changing with the creator of them.
i regularly get emails from people asking for tips on making personal homepages and these are the tips i usually give. i thought i should just write them out so every visitor can read them without having to email me if they don't want to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ of course, this advice isn't really technical advice. there are tons of resources out there for that. you can do the mdn tutorials to learn basic web building blocks. after you have that foundation, you can look at the source code of pages you like or search through sites like codepen to see how other people are building different things. you can connect with other personal homepage builders on the melonland or 32-bit cafe forums (or just look through the resources on those sites for how to get up and running.
mainly, my tips are more about an attitude towards building a personal homepage. this is also, among other reasons, why i didn't list using an llm in the previous paragraph even though it's a thing you could do today to take shortcuts. i just feel like those shortcuts can undermine the greater value and joy of what hands-on tinkering and doing the work can give you (it's really more play than work anyways.) i suppose those shortcuts could make sense if you're building a specific project with a deadline and it's just a job where your "productivity" is being measured and your boss is forcing you to use ai (╥_╥) but i don't really think productivity is a metric that's relevant to a personal homepage. yes, sometimes it can be frustrating to not have the answers immediately in this age of instant gratification but being challenged in that way is also part of the process.
anil dash's piece about the end of the open web paints a bleak picture of where we are currently. and it really only focuses on ai/llm's impact on the web. there are so many other negative things going on that are degrading the web like age verification laws and the ongoing effects of "social media." i'm skeptical of the hopeful "build good ai" note at the end. it kind of sounds like the "only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun" nonsense.
anyways, i expect mediocre ai generated websites and content to totally consume the web in the not too distant future. it's almost there, i find myself clicking off of repetitive and derivative ai-generated (or humans mimicking ai in the uncanny valley) content more and more every day now. i just really hope that there will still be a nice network of handmade personal pages to keep the internet a place worth visiting. i hope my little space here can help inspire people to make those personal pages and keep that internet alive.
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this week, i'm nursing a neck/shoulder injury (╥_╥) i don't know what happened or how i got it. it just started hurting over the weekend. maybe it's from the exercising i've been doing or sleeping in a weird position due to tossing and turning all night from the daily stress dealing with my parents. maybe it's from sustained bad computer posture. whatever it is, it's made it kind of hard to sit to write and code or do much of anything for the past few days.
i didn't get much done over the past two weeks. i found some weird ios rendering bug with my homepage blog's xerox filter so i spent a few days figuring it out and fixing it. from what i can tell, ios webkit changed something and stopped rendering the page if the filter is applied over a large area. so i had to apply the filter more selectively. that fixed it for ios browsers but then chrome on m3+i chips macos started to be a bit more buggy (￢_￢;) sorry chrome users. firefox-based browsers never had any problems before or after though! so i decided to switch the default look to the un-xeroxed text and you can turn on xerox if you browser isn't picky and you're adventurous. it's more important that the content loads reliably everywhere and the fancy stuff can be extra. i really hope we're not heading back to the internet era of having to make different versions of the same webpage for different browsers in order to do fun things ( ⸝⸝•̀ - •́⸝⸝)
my blog page was also getting quite long after blogging regularly for the past couple years so that probably exacerbated the xerox filter issue by making the page super long. so i split each year of entries into their own pages. this means all my previously shared permalinks on social media are broken. oh well, i feel like social platforms/posts are ephemeral by nature anyways so no big deal ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ those links will still take you to the front page of the blog, just not the actual entry. since i split it into years, i also had to redesign the dropdown menu and add some pagination links at the bottom of each page. at least now you don't have to load the whole archive onto a single page when you go to the blog (and, honestly, makes it much easier for me to edit and maintain ^-^)
this had me rewriting a lot of the css on the flat pages so i also used it as an opportunity to organize and simplify things a bit more. i even caught some typos that have been in there for months oops. luckily html and css is pretty forgiving and things kept working anyways.
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i'll have to end this update here. so many other things are breaking around me, besides my body and my homepage. like things and people in my house and the world and society in general. but it's too exhausting to write about when i just want to go lie down to stop my shoulder from screaming at me.
i mentioned a few posts back that i was doing a watch-through of the ghost in the shell: stand alone complex anime series. i made it a few episodes into season 2 before deciding to pause. i haven't really been in the mood to watch it anymore. it's not as fun to watch when the real world is already a technofascist dystopia with ai-powered wars, operating system surveillance laws, and pervert glasses.
all these developments like llms and social media just make me want to engage with technology less and less (￢_￢;) i just want to be offline now. that's why the extent of my interactions with my computer and the internet have pretty much been limited to my homeserver and my homepage this year. the rest of my time has been used for more irl things.
i've been keeping a pretty healthy routine. on top of my caregiving duties for my dad and mom, i've been working out 3 times a week, getting regular sleep every night, and listening to a lot more music (part of my ongoing homeserver data clean up and migration process.) i've only been logging onto the internet once a day. usually, after i put my dad down for the night, i will write some email replies and then check some feeds/yell uselessly at the screen for a hour before i cut myself off and go wind down with music or a show. i'll read stuff like garbageday and just be glad i didn't spend the whole day feeling annoyed about all the stupid stuff happening in the world that i can't do anything about. sometimes my life gets me down but at least it's real life.
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i started watching a jdrama series called kimi ga kokoro wo kuretakara (english title: the gift of your heart.) this show is emotional torture for me! it's only 11 episodes and i'm on episode 4 but i can only watch one episode a day because i'm bawling my eyes out for an hour after of each one. every time the first notes of hikaru utada's naniirodemonai hana start playing, i know i'm about to be utterly destroyed (╥_╥)
i relate way too much to the lead character, ame aihara (i haven't made any tragic faustian bargains with any death guides that i know of though.) part of what makes the story so devastating to me is that all the frustrating decisions she makes are very much like decisions i would make or have made in my life and so i find myself internally screaming for her to not make them. but i know she will anyways because her character's logic/morality are similar to mine.
it's a very sad and melodramatic story but i feel like getting emotionally invested in and crying about human level things like love and heartbreak, dreams and failures, life and death, even if fictional, is somehow healthier than getting worked up and numbed out by the large scale horrible problems that the algorithms want to force into my view to make me feel bad and powerless.
in the show, ame is a pastry chef and the story is a lot about memory and the senses. it made me miss cooking and baking, which i used to do a lot when i lived on my own and before my dad got sick. i can't really cook anything nice and fancy for my dad anymore because his condition makes him only able to eat very simple and plain foods. anything complex in taste and texture, he will just get confused and refuse to eat it or spit it out. in the early years of his disease, i used to make him elaborate meals that he loved eating but, over time, little by little, he began rejecting everything as his brain began to disintegrate. now the focus is just on making sure he's getting the nutrients he needs, no adventures or aesthetics.
it makes me so sad as food was a big part of his life too. when he was able, he loved cooking and firing up the barbecue. i think he was a little disappointed when i became a vegetarian but he still went out of his way to make a special meal for me whenever we ate as a family. he worked in restaurants his whole life. when i was in elementary school he used to take time out of work and make me and my sister hot lunches. it was really important to him. he would drive over to my school and wait in the parking lot for me to come out to get it. i'm not sure how he didn't get fired from the diner for skipping out during lunchtime to do this every day (⌒_⌒;) i think most little kids usually feel embarrassed when their lunch is "weird" and not conforming to the standard protocol of ziploc bologne sandwiches, lunchables, and juice boxes that everyone else had. i think my sister felt embarrassed. but not me. i just felt lucky. i still remember the delicious taste of the fried egg sandwiches that he would deliver us wrapped in foil. i don't know what he put in them. seems like a simple thing to make but i've never been able to recreate the exact taste. now it's gone forever.
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sorry, i went on a sentimental tangent there. that show has really been sending me into my feelings a lot. but my homepage update this week is related to all of this. i finally got around to doing something with the boba drink sprite on the ground ^-^ in the early iterations of my page, the sprite was a stanley mug. i just put that in because i thought it was funny. the stanley cup was an annoying meme product at the time (i never actually owned one.) eventually i swapped it out for the boba tea to make it more personal and accurate to life since this is a personal homepage after all. taro matcha milk tea is one of my favorite drinks. it also has a lot of sentimental meaning for me because it's linked to a very special, somewhat bittersweet, time in my life.
i wrote out my semi-lazy recipe for the drink🂠 and put it on the page for anyone that wants to make it for themselves (⌒_⌒;) i like the idea of having stuff on my page that sometimes points to doing things offline and having human level experiences rather than just more hopping around the web.
okay, i'm going to go mentally prepare to watch another episode of the show and become a puddle afterwards.
for the last couple weeks, i've been tied up with parents stuff (╥_╥) just random health and general issues kept popping up for them non-stop. things have settled down now but i haven't had much time to mess around on my computers. i'm not really even sure what to write about this week but i feel like i should write something just so i don't break the habit ^-^
maybe it's partially my lack of sleep lately due to my parents, but i've been feeling extra exhausted that another war has broken out in the time since my last post. i hate it. it feels like a hopelessly endless cycle of more suffering, more destruction. it's made even more intolerable by the assholes in charge of it. it just makes me feel like there's no point in doing anything in this world if we're all just trapped in this neverending loop where nothing gets better. but the stubborn part of me feels the need to keep going no matter what. even if it's just to irritate the powers that want everyone to become apathetic and complacent.
it's just so fucked up that the world is still fighting wars in the year 2026 when we probably have more knowledge and technology than ever to figure out peaceful solutions. but some people just won't allow for it to ever happen. whether it's driven by greed or ego or hate or sheer stupidity, so much human ingenuity and energy is wasted building anti-human machines and deadlier weapons instead. all so warmongers can generate their cringe slopaganda and cosplay as tough guys committing real war crimes with their vibe warring.
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since last time, on my homeserver, i've added:
now i think i've got everything i want installed. i still need to move the majority of my data in. but before i do that, i've been doing some administrative tasks like consolidating all my working notes that i've written down from scouring forums and website tutorials. i'm working on writing out documentation for my whole system. just in case i need to remember various commands and how to restore every piece of it if something breaks or i want to upgrade to new hardware at some point if hardware is ever reasonably affordable again (￢_￢;) not very exciting work but good for keeping my mind from crashing out over all the simultaneous global horrors.
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over here on my homepage, i made some small layout adjustments and fixes on the flat pages. i also updated my uses page since my homeserver has altered my setup a lot! i also added some new people the blogroll and button links section.
like i said, i didn't have much computer time this week. so that's all i managed to accomplish.
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sorry if the title of this entry made you think it was going to be review of the pt anderson film rather than a literal description of my life right now (๑>ᴗ<๑) i did see the movie a while ago and thought it was good and pretty relevant to the current times we're living through. but i don't have much to say about it that i haven't said in other ways on other topics ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
another film i watched just the other day was good luck, have fun, don't die. it was quite entertaining and full of dark comedy even if it's maybe a bit heavyhanded in delivering its message. though i suspect that the lack of subtlety is somewhat intentional since it's about societal and reality collapse due to social media, ai, brainrot, etc. maybe it's probably trying to reach people who have already offloaded a lot of their reasoning ability and media literacy to the machines so it's attempting to speak in their language. i think that's also probably why it's lit and shot to look like the artificial high-contrast style that ai imagery (particularly sci fi stuff) is known for (that it ripped from movie cinematography to being with.) and then the costume and prop design mimics the inconsistent/illogical generic garbage style that has become recognizable as ai slop aesthetic. it even has the piss filter tinged color-grading (╥_╥)
i didn't know much about the movie when i went into it so i don't know if that was all intentional but i thought the visuals made a lot of sense with the story. afterwards, i had to go look up if parts of the film were actually ai generated. but the director, gore verbinski, is pretty clear about his feelings on ai (if it wasn't already clear enough in the story of the film): "Why is AI helping me write a song or tell a story? I don't want it to breathe or fuck for me; I want it to solve cancer."
worth watching if you want to cry-laugh about the current state of the world. maybe even more worth watching if you're stuck bed-rotting in the doomscroll or if you feel yourself slipping into ai psychosis.
i've been getting a bunch of new visitors on my homepage recently thanks to being mentioned briefly in onio's great youtube video about the indie web/web revival <3 (you can read more about this idea of the web revival on the melonland wiki.) it's been an interesting mix of people that have jumped into my cursor chat or sent me a message/email. many seem to be new to the idea of an internet outside of the social media/platform landscape and i'm happy that my little place here can help show what is possible beyond today's mainstream web.
if you have read my recent posts, you probably could feel through my words that i've been getting quite disillusioned about the state of the web in recent times. i've been taking a break from online for the past month or so and slowed my work on this page to work on my offline computer projects, like my homeserver, instead.
it feels bad to be on the mainstream internet these days. the doomscrolls, the algorithms, the brainrot, the slop, the grift, the scams. today's mainline internet is like an dystopian web of hate and vitriol and everyone's brains are getting cooked by it, even the brains of people who control the world. and it's not easy to just avoid the toxicity when surfing online. it's infected everything.
so lately i have been privately wondering a lot about whether it's just time give up the net as a lost cause. it's easy to feel like no one really wants the kind of independent web that i want anymore when everyone's internet usage is concentrated in slopweb apps. and how can personal websites even compete with the overwhelming flooding of the zone by the infinitely resourced corpo-backed algos? the lan is so much more peaceful than the wan. no worrying about chat apps harvesting identity and biometrics into systems backed by evil corporations that build databases and tools for secret police to carry out human rights violations. no worrying about being violated by ai bot home invasions.
my homeserver is like my personal internet where i actually get to choose what i want to do on my computer rather than have things forced upon me by all the automations and dark patterns and bad actors that have become dominant on the internet. of course, on lan, i'm not really connecting directly with other people but that's what email is for (⌒_⌒;) how much longer can we expect to have real human connection on the internet anyways with how bot-infested the web space is becoming. i was sad to see my internet friend, steph, limiting her rss feed (understandably) due to llm scraping theft (╥_╥) it makes for a much poorer internet when people feel like it's not worth sharing online anymore.
a lot of my web optimism has faded over the past few years but meeting some new nice people through my homepage this week has been a good reminder of what i love about building this place. it's not just for myself as a playground (honestly, i can just do that on my lan now if i just want to have fun with html.) it's also a way to connect with people on my own terms and to introduce others to a world that has the potential to be better than what is prescribed by those with too much power and control over everyone's lives. things feel bleak but i'm not ready to give that up.
thanks to everyone who stopped by. thanks to everyone who reached out and said nice things. i hope i inspired some new homepages to materialize! i'll keep working on this place. i guess i won't become a full-on lan recluse just yet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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i did spend most of the past two weeks working on my homeserver again. it's just so much fun researching and learning about ways to do the things i want. and then figuring out ways to do it better. writing scrappy code and making little tools. i'm super happy with how it's shaping up!
most of my time, however, was put into building a simple terminal dashboard🂠 with python using rich and textual to give me a quick overview of my system. my python knowledge is rough but i can just get by with some creative skill-transfer of my better but still mediocre js understanding (⌒_⌒;) then i spent a lot of time making it all pretty by poring over the textual documentation. textual has its own a kind of css that's somewhat similar to web css which is much more in my comfort zone ^-^
i'm tempted to make it weirder and cuter now that i have a good grasp of its code. i can do whatever i want with it since the interface really only has to make sense to me as i'm the only one looking at it (๑>ᴗ<๑)
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i think i'm pretty close to getting my homeserver fully set up. then it'll take some time to properly move my stuff in. but maybe i can also start working on new homepage stuff again.
i don't have much to write about this time in terms of homepage updates ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ive only made some small edits here and there like new links to other people, etc. most of my time for the past couple weeks has been spent on working on my homeserver.
i've really been enjoying the process of finding all the pieces and trying not to make catastrophic mistakes that require me to start all over again. so far so good. as of right now, i have: jellyfin for my movies, tv, and music library; browsersync for website testing over lan; komga for my ebooks and manga library; immich for my photo library; notmuch for my email archive; and borg for backups to my second ssd. i still need to add an rss reader (i'm thinking probably freshrss but i'm looking to see if there are other options.) and maybe find another thing to read my email archive with. notmuch is good for quick searching but not so great for reading (⌒_⌒;)
so my setup is pi os on the sd card and then all my data and files on one of the ssds with borg backing that drive up to a second ssd a couple times a week. i was able to write a simple script so i can run a single command on boot up to decrypt both the ssds and then start all my services ^-^
my goal is to centralize all my computer stuff on this lan-only homeserver machine and not have things spread out over my various computers/tablet/phone. i made some samba shared folders so i will be able get to everything i need over the lan ^-^ now i can treat my computers as interchangeable client machines.
that's the basic skeleton. i have a lot of files and data to migrate and organize. i think this will probably be the most time-consuming part of this project. it also doesn't help that i keep getting distracted by things in my archives that i haven't looked at in a long time. like reading and getting sentimental about old emails from friends from 15 years ago (╥ ᴗ ╥) the feeling of time passing can be quite intense.
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i've been pretty checked out of the world while working on the server and haven't scrolled social media at all. i kind of have the worst personality type for a "user" or a "consumer." it's easy for me to get obsessed with things and be really into them for a while but after i feel like they've run their course, i can just as easily step away from them. i don't really have the addictive personality that everything seems to be trying to prey on these days with the gamifying and gamblifying of every product. maybe my dopamine receptors are broken ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe that's why i'm not really into gaming that much. so with things like social media, it's hard for me to start using it again if i've decided i've had enough of the experience.
i had a pretty offline january and now it's half way through february and i still have no desire to log on. maybe this will be a whole offline year. i've noticed that i'm less irritated during the day without all the constant slop and regurgitated noise from the screens. it's made it a bit easier to manage my parents' frustrating reality without my mood being dragged down all the time. it's freed up time and mental space to focus on more local things (and not just my computer local area network (⌒_⌒;)) and i'm starting to feel motivated to do healthier things for myself instead of being depressed about things that i have no power over. i just ordered a new yoga mat to replace my old one that's falling apart because i want to start working out again. i probably do need to get a bit more fit to survive the dystopia this world is quickly transforming into (╥_╥)
my break from social platforms continues. i have no real desire to go back to using them anytime soon. i still stop in to reply to people who leave comments on my posts but that's it. cutting myself off from the feed has helped me a lot mentally. and has given me extra time every day to do more meaningful and productive things.
not being on social doesn't mean that i avoided seeing multiple angles of another state sanctioned murder last week. it doesn't even mean that i haven't been crying and feeling hopeless about how messed up the world is. it's hard to avoid how bad things are unless you wilfully blind yourself to reality and/or live in constant denial and sociopathy, a "dual state." without the social feeds, at least i have a bit more control over when i'm exposed to the repeating infinite loop of horrors invading and assaulting my senses.
i saw that people have been deleting tiktok as it has been captured by the american government and its cronies. good. though, i'm so jaded about the internet now that i don't think that signing up for upscrolled or whatever as an alternative really changes anything. i don't have anything against upscrolled in particular. i just now believe that these types of services will continue to have the same social vulnerabilities and repeat the same negative patterns given enough time and scale. it's best to limit dependency on any service that filters and packages the internet for you. i'm convinced that the only way to break out of this cycle is if people just made their own websites again. even then, you can be at the mercy of hosting providers (if you don't self-host), domain registrars, and isps. but the risk is so much smaller because there's less hassle to just switching providers that aren't serving you well.
i'm not sure i have much use for social media in my life anymore. i do feel sorry that i'm not on there replying to friends. i still read their blogs and hope that anything they really want to say will be written on their blog rather than a social platform anyways.
i've also been writing a lot more emails lately to old friends as well as new people who have recently discovered my homepage and reached out to me ^-^ it's been nice to have more thought-out communications with people instead of quick exchanges in comments and replies sections.
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speaking of lessening dependencies. i've been making progress on de-apple-ing my computer life. as i mentioned last time, i cancelled all my big media and cloud subscriptions and am moving to a rebuilt homeserver setup. this includes getting rid of apple music, apple tv, and icloud+. tim cook seems determined to do everything he can to make giving money to apple feel as gross as possible. i can't wait to get more of apple's hooks out of my life. i'm still stuck with them for managing my mom's computing and homekit and i haven't found a phone option that's not equally as bad morally and ethically (￢_￢;) but it feels better not paying them monthly anymore.
for me, apple hegemony only works if they maintain the illusion of being one of the "good ones." like the illusion that propelled american hegemony post-ww2, allowing it to become the power it is today. but it no longer works if the nazi-defeating heroes are doing more and more overtly nazi shit themselves. we overlook flaws and contradictions and live in illusions which allow power and resources to consolidate in exchange for convenience and safety because the illusion soothes our consciences. as canadian prime minister mark carney said last week. but illusions can become lies that are too rotten to tolerate. is apple's hardware and ecosystem good enough to justify its cost if their progressive marketing illusions are hollow? for me and my use cases, no, and especially not with the recent developments there. (i know apple doesn't totally equate to tim cook but he is still the head and the one steering the ship for now.)
anyways, in preparation for my homeserver rebuild, i moved my pi-hole to it's own dedicated pi zero 2w. previously, i just ran it on the same computer with my other homeserver stuff. i think it's probably better security to have it on its own machine anyways and i also went ahead and added in stubby as well to give my isp some extra work if they really want to spy on me (๑>ᴗ<๑) i didn't want the pi-hole to keep going offline while i experiment with getting my new setup working. i will probably be making mistakes and rebooting a lot. i actually thought i fried my pi 5 board last week while i was changing the os but i only corrupted the eeprom and just had to recover it (⌒_⌒;) oops.
this weekend, i'll start getting the basic structure of my homeserver together. then i'll start processing all my files off of my apfs formatted backup drives and out of apple photos, etc. i got a pimoroni nvme base duo to attach storage to my pi but i've been waiting for the mailman to deliver the second drive i ordered. ssds are soooo expensive now (╥_╥)
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i did a bit more work on my cli page these past couple weeks.🂠
i figured out a way to do a parameter input for the blog so readers can set the text to wrap at a certain character limit. without it, the terminal window just prints blog entries full window width and breaks words at the end of the line to wrap. that can get annoying to read so i came up with this option ^-^ to use it, just do this: curl elle.sh/blog/w=123. replace 123 with whatever width in characters that you want.
the text formatting now has formatting like italics and highlighting now ^-^
i also added two other pages which are self-explanatory ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ curl elle.sh/about and curl elle.sh/help.
i'm finally recovered from the vertigo attack. i was over the main bppv after the first week but the residual dizziness took a long time to go away as my body's gyroscope and accelerometer had to recalibrate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it was a lot of days of slow movements and rebalancing exercises. but mainly, it was just sitting around and doing nothing in the dark (bright lights would give me headaches during this whole episode.)
normally, it would be torture for me to idle this much. but it was really out of my control. my body was not going to follow any of my directions so i just went along with it. and, honestly, it was a very refreshing forced break from everything. a break from content.
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yes, i still heard about the horrible things like president kidnappings and masked psychopath cops murdering people. i felt sad about the state of the world but i wasn't pulled into it the same way i would be if i was physically able to doomscroll. it was more like reading about tragedies in the non-real-time newspaper and parsing them with some distance and delay and at a more reasonable pace.
i did catch myself feeling weirdly guilty about not being able to doomscroll, that i was excusing myself from the collective outrage against all the livestreamed acts of cruelty. it shouldn't be this way. it became clear just how much worse things had gotten in this current iteration of the internet. i was really confronted with the fact that this internet is no longer the internet i grew up with that taught and gave me so many positive things. this is a totally different machine that is shaping people and the world in many ways that i don't believe in. and it's exhausting.
henry wrote a beautiful essay recently about the "web we want" and i really want to believe in that still but it's getting harder to.
young people coming online today for the first time probably just experience it as a place to watch pain and psychic abuse being inflicted on others or to be attacked themselves. some probably think the main utility of the internet is for trolls and perverts to ask a robot wizard to nonconsensually remove the clothes in photographs of women and children. every day, i feel more relieved that i scrubbed my younger and more foolish instagram account a long time ago, before ai deepfake revenge porn, before any of this. at that time, it was because social media was already at the point of causing so much damage to my body and self image. i thought that was already bad enough for society, humanity. i guess that was just a beta preview for much worse things to come. the best case scenario today is that newly online people experience a week or so of wonder before they are profiled and fingerprinted enough for the algorithms to decide what brand of psyops to apply to their character type.
i've been seeing a lot of people write about how everything is "content" now. that the way the world works is no longer based on what's reality but, rather, what is the more memetic content. this is the slop and lies firehose strategy of the current fascist american regime that wants to consume the world's attention and impose their reality by sheer algorithmic force around the globe. it doesn't matter if it's their cruelty filmed and disseminated by their own officials and agents or by protestors and bystanders. their content is being broadcast all the same. the american slopmaster-in-chief literally signs his shitty social media posts with "thank you for your attention..." as if gloating that you've just ceded a bit more of your limited life energy to absorbing his vile and evil trash. the internet as most people know it is totally captured by this content.
being unplugged the last couple weeks made it clear to me that maybe i don't really want to spend time on today's internet. i fear that by doing so, i'm just playing into the sadistic hands of those who want to dominate my attention and demoralize me from doing anything that's actually good for myself. i don't know how it helps the world to constantly subject myself to these conditions and making myself feel more powerless to do anything in this world. maybe the only way to fight it now is to deprive it of the attention oxygen it demands.
i had already withdrawn a lot from social platforms over 2025, just keeping one foot in the "good ones" to stay in touch with the people i do enjoy talking to. but i don't know if that's enough. maybe it's time to fully disengage.
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in my dizzy state, i made some rough plans or intentions or resolutions or whatevers for 2026:
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lastly, some homepage updates ^-^
since i've been enjoying doing more stuff in terminal these days, i made a satellite page🂠 that you can use curl to call up if you are also a cli person (⌒_⌒;) i saw wibby post about making a lite version of his homepage a while ago and it make me want to do something similar but as i was designing an ultralight ascii layout, i got derailed by the idea for this instead ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ just type curl elle.sh in your terminal. or you can type curl elle.sh/blog to get my latest blog post. i might build it out some more down the line, it's fun.
other than that, i've just made some minor additions like more 88x31 button and text links to people and did some tidying up here and there.
2025 is finally gone. yay. but it still had to slap me in the face one last time on its way out. i got vertigo for christmas and i don't mean a copy of the 1958 hitchcock film (╥_╥) i mean benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (bppv) and it was/is a nightmare.
i self-diagnosed myself so don't take anything i write here as medical advice, it could be totally wrong. because it's christmastime and hospitals are backed up with the h3n2 mutant superflu and with my dad's condition being what it is, i wasn't left with many good options than to do what i could on my own. so, again, this is not medical advice, i don't have any medical training beyond the things i've learned from being a caregiver for many years. if you have a serious injury, you should seek real medical help. i'm just some random person writing about this in my diary here.
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i woke up monday morning and the whole room was spinning. i initially just thought it was a bit of sleepy disorientation. but then i tried to stand up and the whole room went upside-down and i fell back onto my bed. i wanted to throw up. closing my eyes didn't help. even though i was laying on my bed, i still felt like i was falling. after a couple minutes of being frozen in place, things stabilized. i picked up my phone and called my mom upstairs. i told her i couldn't move and that she would have to make breakfast for dad and get him through his usual routine (toileting, etc.) i felt so bad (physically and emotionally.) it was the realization of my fear of being totally incapacitated and not being able to do anything for them. she kept asking if i needed to go to the hospital or an ambulance but i said to wait and maybe i could sleep it off if she could do what she could with dad.
at that point i started getting intense chills so i crawled back under my covers but then i started overheating and sweating like crazy. i was shaking and my teeth were rattling. that little movement of curling up into bed made everything spin again. i was getting overloaded with conflicting signals and my brain hurt and my stomach was churning and i just kind of semi-passed out for a little while.
i stayed like that for the rest of the morning and into the afternoon. my mom kept checking on me and i kept saying i just wanted to stay still. when i regained full consciousness, the room wasn't spinning so i thought it had passed and i tried to get up. but as soon as i sat up, everything went crazy again. i got back into the sleeping position i woke up in and waited for everything to settle. i called my mom and told her i had to rest for the whole day.
i realized that as long as i didn't move my head, things seemed fine, almost normal. i slowly reached for my phone and started looking up all my symptoms like you're not supposed to do. i ruled out viral infections like the flu and covid since i didn't have any other symptoms of those and also i haven't been in any public gatherings for weeks. i've had those and this felt very different. i've never had vertigo before but i know people who have and it was feeling like how it's been described to me. so i spent a couple hours laying there learning about the crystals in your inner ear that can get dislodged and end up in your semicircular canals to totally fuck up your life.
i learned about the posterior canal being the most commonly affected area for bppv and the dix-hallpike test. i did the test on myself. it was scary to do the first time since it intentionally triggers the vertigo and i didn't know how bad it would be. i didn't want to vomit (a lot these videos suggest having a bucket nearby.) but i got through it and it seemed to indicate positive. then i learned about the epley maneuver which is a sequence of positions that moves the crystals out of the canals. this also triggers the symptoms when performed so i just focused up and got through it as well. surprisingly, i immediately felt slightly better afterwards. i treated the right side since that was what was testing the most strongly but then the right side pretty much cleared up after a couple days but the left side was still causing symptoms. so i've been repeating the maneuver for the left. things are getting better.
currently, i still have some residual dizziness but it's manageable. i also have to walk super slow to not trigger any vertigo. if i'm staying perfectly still and keeping my head level, things mostly feel normal. that's how i'm writing this entry. i haven't been able to eat much for days, mostly just trying to stay hydrated. i was finally able to shower and wash my hair on the third day after two days of feeling gross.
i don't know what exactly triggered the bppv. the day before it started, i banged my head on a cabinet door that my mom left open so maybe i got a mild concussion ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ or maybe my dependence on wearing active noise canceling headphones overnight to sleep through my dad's nighttime wandering has finally caught up with me (there is anecdotal evidence that sustained overexposure to anc vibrations can cause bppv.) i don't know, those are just my theories. i'll see how things go over the next week and if there's no more improvement, i'll consult a physical therapist to make sure i've not misdiagnosed myself and i don't have a brain tumor or something. i'm just going to try to get as much rest as possible but it's proving to be a challenge if i can no longer use my headphones to get through my dad's dementia at night. that's on top of having to sleep in the most uncomfortable semi-upright position to keep the crystals from falling back.
thankfully my dad was pretty subdued on day one and two so my mom was able to handle him by herself. but on day three, his hallucinations flared up (probably because he sensed a change in the environment with me not being very present for a couple days) and he started acting out and i had to step in which caused a few super dizzy episodes for me.
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i was hoping to start off 2026 on a good note with some fun new additions i've been working on for my homepage but i guess everything is on hold for now while i tend to my new hobby of moving around ear crystals. hopefully this doesn't foreshadow another bad year to come (╥_╥)
then again, all the time i've spent the past week sitting in silence and stillness hasn't been all that terrible of an experience. it was quite peaceful once the room stopped spinning. if the foreshadowing means i'll be doing more of that peacefulness instead of falling into the toxic internet attention sucking traps, then it might be something to look forward to.