.* ౨ৎ • 𝑒𝓁𝓁𝑒'𝓈 𝒽𝑜𝓂𝑒𝓅𝒶𝑔𝑒 • ౨ৎ *.

as my annual tradition of holiday depression drags on, i've been offline even more than usual. you may have noticed that i've not been replying on social much as i haven't been checking into those spaces (the ones i still kind of use like mastodon, cyberspace, and bluesky.) or adding new articles to my homepage reading list very often since i haven't been seeking out things to read online (i've mainly just been reading the blogs in my homepage blogroll.) part of last year's depression was the shock of the american election results and crashing out to the thought of how bad things were about to get. part of this year's is having gone through a year that met all my fears and maybe even surpassed them in many ways. i don't want to spend the last weeks of the year seeing the faces of all the evil facists and plutocrats that have been so inescapable the last 12 months as they make the world a living hell for so many people. i don't even want to hear about them incidentally while i'm already feeling low. i already have to feel their presence corrupting and corroding everything around me.

so i've been in recluse mode, waiting for the year to run out and hoping the arbitrary changing of the year number on the calendar brings something better. i know it likely won't but what if... (╥_╥)

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as i mentioned in my last entry, i've been wanting to get back to messing around with linux so that's what i've been doing instead of going online. i've been working on my cyberdeck^🂠 again (⌒_⌒;) i added a ups battery and a little e-ink display. i also finally got my pi to boot from an ssd by switching to an older msata ssd.

trying to get the e-ink display to work with my fedora minimal install was super frustrating so i switched to pi os lite. this also made the pi boot up much smoother so i guess i'll stick with it for now. i wanted to stay on fedora but i suppose it's really not a big deal to sudo apt instead sudo dnf ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ i don't really notice that much difference between these minimal base distros anyways for my use case. the main difference is now i just hear rosé and bruno mars' apt. song in my head whenever i need to install something from the debian repos (๑>ᴗ<๑)

i wrote a little python script that shows me the date and time on the display. since i don't use a bar on my desktop, i thought it would be fun to make the hardware give me that info instead. right now, i have to manually refresh it with a command but i might try to add autorefresh after i look at some ways to make the refresh rate faster on it.

also, i spent a lot of time the past couple weeks organizing my framework system's dotfiles. dotfiles are basically all my user settings/configurations and the reason to have them organized is so that you can respawn your system easily whenever you want. i wrote a bootstrap script that automatically downloads all the programs i use and then symlinks/connects all my personalizations. for example, it will recreate my neovim set up so i don't have to manually recreate it again! i wrote the bootstrap.sh for a fedora system though so i'll have to rewrite it a bit to work with pi os. i think i'll also try to have it install niri instead of hyprland to keep things even more minimal and efficient for the pi 4's more limited resources.

honestly, i kind of feel like i'm just preparing for when the corpo-gov ai consumes all of the world's compute manufacturing and resources and regular people who want to use computers are left to scavenge the outdated and decommissioned scraps of hardware and software from the bygone age of the personal computing revolution. i suppose that's why all the technology in cyberpunk fictions always looks like it's cobbled together from random parts. we're just heading towards that future.

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i've been slowly making my way through the whole ghost in the shell: stand alone complex series. i've never seen it before but i've read the original manga and the direct anime adaptations of that, as well as the live action movie with scarlett johansson. it's interesting to watch ghost in the shell these days. everything feels even more dystopian with the backdrop of our current reality. when i watched the other stuff in the past, there was probably a part of me that thought uploading consciousness to a cyberbrain could be cool.

but now, with where our real world tech has ended up, i feel like having a cyberbrain or being a full prosthetic cyborg would just mean being trapped in some billionaire tech bro's shoddy vc funded piece of junk full of surveillance and ads and drm and endless bloatware. imagine having to install/update third party adblockers in your brain like how, today, you might take acetaminophen or nsaids to manage a migraine. and if it's not full of garbageware, it'll probably be totally out of reach for the average person or have extractive subscription-based models. after everything i've seen with how technology has evolved into our lives, especially the past few years, i'm no longer optimistic that the people who could build this kind of technology would do it purely out of the goodness of their own heart to help humanity as a whole.

so yeah, even though i'm watching my dad's brain fail right now and thinking about my own brain eventually failing, i'm probably going to decline the cyberbrain upgrade if it ever becomes a real thing and just embrace the messy finitude of being human.

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this is probably my last entry for 2025 (unless i get inspired to write something next week) so i hope everyone reading this has a good end of the year. thank you for visiting my homepage in 2025 and reading along and sending me nice emails and messages. even though i'm not feeling good at the moment or really at most points of 2025, making this homepage continues to be a bright spot for me in dark times. so i'll meet you back here in 2026! ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ <3

it's december already and the year is winding down. i love winter. i love how calm and quiet and slow everything becomes when the temperature drops and the snow blankets everything. i love the dark and cozy long nights. i love bundling up to go outside and seeing my breath. but i kind of hate the end of the year. especially these past 7ish years of living with my dad's dementia.

the year ending just reminds me that i've lost yet another year to this horrible disease. each year gets harder, not just because my dad's condition continues to get worse and he becomes harder and more work to manage. but the time that has slipped through my fingers piles up even more and weighs me down with the slow motion grief of not just losing my dad but my own life as well. all this time i'll never get back. and i can't really do much about it. all i can do is scratch another tally mark into the wall.

it sometimes feels weird to me that i haven't changed my "now" status since i created this /now page. on most /now pages that i've seen, the status gets updated pretty regularly as people have lives with actual events to update with. in my status, i describe my current situation as a limbo and that's still what it is. for the most part.

i may not be in a position to do a lot of the things i wish i was doing or visiting a lot people and places in the world that i care about but i'm also not just sitting inert and wasting away. the nice thing about having a blog is that, even though i think nothing has really been happening, i can look back at old entries and see that it's not totally nothing. as small as the little adventures that i'm able and allowed to have on my computer or in my mind may be, they happened. it ain't much but it's a living ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

and also, caregiving is not nothing either. despite what the capitalist eugenicists want everyone to believe, lessening the suffering of another human being is probably a better use of my time than being "productive" contributing to things that end up intentionally or unintentionally moving the world faster towards whatever hypercapitalist ai hell we're in the process of moving towards. instead, i'm actually making incredible gains in terms of insight into the human condition (⌒_⌒;)

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a few people have mentioned to me that my blog has become hard to navigate because it's basically one long page and there are so many entries now. and i agree. when i started this blog, i never expected it to still be going at this point or have so much writing on it. i didn't have any confidence in my commitment to blog regularly so i didn't bother building a blog archive to list the entries. my previous attempts at blogging have always been pretty shortlived. i would make a blog, write on it for a few weeks and then new entries would shorten and become more and more sporatic and that's what i expected to happen again. for whatever reason, that hasn't happened yet. i know there are people with blogs that have run for decades so my 1.5 year old blog isn't really that impressive but it still feels like a big accomplishment to me ^-^

so, i suppose it's time to add some more navigation to move around the entries easier. it would also help me because sometimes i want to link back to a previous entry and it's become annoying to scroll or ctrl/cmd-f to find stuff.

i spent some time the past couple weeks making a nice html/css-only menu for the list on the flat blog page. i was tempted to misuse <details> and <summary> for this but, in the end, i went with the same checkbox trick i used for the xerox filter. this keeps things more consistent. now you can toggle on the entry list^🂠 at the top with the new control button next to the filter button and jump around the page.

i'm not 100% happy with it yet because it has some cross-browser issues because of the xerox filter on it. sorry chrome users, it looks a little bad on there. for now, it works fine enough but i need to think some more about how to solve it a little better.

i also added some more links in the 88x31 buttons section and on the flat links page, along with little tweaks here and there.

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i haven't had much time and energy to play with my linux setup too much lately. but i'm feeling the urge to dive back in again. i want to get around to trying out some other window managers. i also have a couple small parts that i want to try to add to my pi. maybe that's what i'll work on for the rest of the year. who knows how much longer normal people will be able to tinker with computers. computer components are getting so much more expensive as manufacturers succumb to ai brain worms. i just read that micron is shutting down crucial, their 30 year old consumer ram and ssd business to direct all their resources to the ai bubble business. i've always used crucial ram and ssds because they were always the most dependable in my testing. this sucks (╥_╥)

a couple weeks ago, a post from the cyberdeck subreddit popped up in my rss reader showing off a retro-computer terminal themed social website called cyberspace.online. it touted a web 1.0 vibes social media with no ai, no video, no algorithm, no ads, no crypto, etc etc. which sounded good to my ears since i complain about all those things regularly on here. of course, i've heard that story before and have been disappointed many times when it turns out to be just empty marketing tactics. but it caught me while i was procrastinating from life so i made an account (there weren't many users yet, i was user #28.)

i had to waive my rule of not joining any feed-based sites that don't provide bare minimum profile rss feeds. if you've been reading this blog for a while, you know i'm very tired of walled gardens and closed ecosystems. see my recent linux and hardware posts. even this very homepage was born out of the desire to exist on the open web instead of closed systems (and it's why i try to stick to using open standards like basic html, css, js, rss, openpgp, etc to make everything here.) i don't enjoy feeling like all the time and energy i'm expending online is trapped in and limited to one specific closed place that i have no real control over. one recent egregious example for me was another platform i was on for many years that semi-abruptly turned from a nice place for talking to internet-building people to now a full-on crypto casino. it's like if a local nightclub that brought in good bands and a cool clientele slowly kept adding slot machines by the bathroom area until the machines spilled out into the main space and the noise of slot machines drowned out all the music/conversation and only the only people left in the place were gambling addicts, grifters, and in-denial nostalgists (╥_╥) sigh, another profile with years of posts and connections in the trash heap. in hindsight, i should seen the red flags since that platform never offered native rss support (⌒_⌒;)

anyways, back to cyberspace. cyberspace is made by someone that goes by the name genghis_khan and, as the faq explains, is more of an art project than a commercial project at this point. i've been enjoying it. i love that it's terminal themed and text-focused. other things in this genre include itter.sh, a real terminal based social feed that you ssh into. i'm also @elle on there but i don't use it. again, no rss. there is also tuitter which is currently in closed beta. but cyberspace being a regular browser based platform that is just styled to look like tui makes it easier for the average user to get into it (so maybe it's more like the text-based subreply but styled for cyberpunks.) it has markdown and the codeblock formatting is handy for drawing ascii art. if you couldn't tell by a lot of the parts of my homepage, i love ascii art and kaomojis (cyberspace has limited image posting but i prefer not to use it.) it doesn't have likes or up/downvotes, or really any of the annoying dopamine-inducing clout metrics of mainstream unhealthy social media. it does have follower counts, which i could do without. there are chat rooms called circ and direct messages called c-mail. you can also navigate it with just your keyboard ^-^

it doesn't have fancy things like federation/decentralization, portable social graph, or even encryption (i assume khan can read everything everyone writes in the feed, notes, circ, and c-mail.) some things are a bit buggy and there are some weird superficial quirks. for example, why does an anti-ai platform have a giant ai generated cyberdolphin as the hero image on the support page (๑>ᴗ<๑) i know many artists who would be immediately turned off by that and write the whole thing off. whenever i see pure ai slop imagery like that on something like a newsletter these days, it's an automatic skip because it's kind of become a universal signal for low effort. of course, there's no way to stop users from posting ai junk in the feed but i feel like the platform itself should avoid that stuff in order to set the example. besides, the site design is so beautiful with just the text, it's a shame to pollute it that way.

the ui/ux of the site is very simple but in a nice way that's more about just talking to people. like on the old internet where you would wander into random chat rooms and see what was going on. it's a calm oasis in a very chaotic and overstimulating time on the web. because of the design and ethos behind it, it has attracted a particular type of person looking to escape the current social hellscape we live in. i've been meeting some interesting and fun people on there!

is this sustainable as it grows? i don't know. i feel like i'm already seeing more of the familiar signs of the bad internet discourse creeping in now that it's reached 3000+ accounts. i've been an early user of a bunch of social platforms and communities that always ended up crashing out and dying from growth. maybe that's the natural progression of these things ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

given my experiences, i also expect that as the user count grows, khan will be receiving more and more inquiries from sleazy vcs and companies looking to capitalize. the centralized nature of the platform makes it vulnerable which is why modern platforms are trying all sorts of "can't be evil" decentralization mechanisms or just being fully open source. currently, cyberspace is supported by user donations but the cost of scaling could get so out of control that it's just less headache for khan to take on funding partners or even cash out and exit. remember the slow motion heartbreak of david karp selling tumblr? on the $1.1 billion sale to yahoo, he loudly proclaimed "we're not turning purple," suggesting that tumblr would not be changed by yahoo. well, a palette swap was the least of tumblr's worries as we're still watching it suffer indignity after indignity to this day in its zombie form. hopefully the delete account button will be built before this happens to cyberspace (⌒_⌒;) in the meantime, i'll try to enjoy the fun days while they last.

i still maintain that the real web 1.0 experience is simply just having a personal homepage and an email address.

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my field trip to cyberspace took up a lot of time the past couple weeks! since i've been avoiding social in general a lot lately, diving back into it via cyberspace brought up a lot of bubbling thoughts about these kinds of social spaces, as evidenced by the wall of text above (*~*)

so, for homepage updates, i didn't make any major changes this time around. mainly just some tidying and small additions:

• cleaned up some messy html
• updated the time machine with some more recent snapshots
• added some more blogging friends to the blogroll feed

i've been doing so much computering lately so i took a little break from linux and making cute little computers these past couple weeks. mainly, i desperately wanted some space from my internet connection to avoid reading all the daily upsetting news everywhere. i have to go online to do things like learning linux. but, whenever i log in, i inevitably end up also having to absorb content about shitty people doing shitty things to the world and gloating about how evil they're being. like cutting food aid to fund ice raids and then posting gaudy bathroom makeover pics or cringe ai slop. i hate how it's such an awful time to be on the web now (╥_╥)

i suppose one good thing that happened recently was zohran mamdani winning the mayoral race in new york city. i don't live in ny and it's been a long time since i've been there but his win still made me happy and i celebrated it. if only because it proves that the billionaires aren't omnipotent. and that caring about marginalized communities and lifting people up is not out of fashion and is still a winning message that is more powerful than the cynicism-drenched pvp times we find ourselves in. a glimmer of hope that society is not in a race-to-the-bottom nihilism death spiral. i'm really hoping he does well and actually goes even further with his plans and that the system doesn't water him down like they try to do with people like him every time.

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instead of reading things on the internet, i've been drawing more with my ipad (on airplane mode.) i haven't been drawing much lately and i've been missing it. getting lost in sketching for hours has always been a good way for me to refocus and clear my head, especially when my brain feels overloaded with negative thoughts and other garbage that i've accumulated from the outside world.

there's been a homepage feature on my todo list for a while now that i needed to draw some art for. to continue with the video games genre visual language i'm using, i wanted to make something that referenced visual novels/dating sims. i made a little kitty button that watches your cursor position and when you click on it, it brings up a helpful "tutorial" mode^🂠 in the form of a visual novel dialog ^-^ i like to think my homepage is inuitive enough to navigate but, if not, this can provide extra hints. and it's just fun ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

as i was sketching out different expressions and poses^🂠 for the main sprite, i kind of felt an urge to make my own vtuber model. this is something i think about doing quite often. i haven't done it because it's a lot of work to draw and rig a model and i don't really have time to do vtuber streaming anyways. so to make one and not really use it, i would only be doing it as technical exercise. maybe if i ever get around to making music again, i could use a vtuber model to make videos (⌒_⌒;) i think that's why i was so inspired by the music and animation of kpop demon hunters. while not exactly vtubers, i like how the kdh singers have kind of taken on the characters as personas like a music vtuber (ejae even said that she wanted to be an animated singer when she was a kpop trainee.)

anyways, i think vtubers are cool and a good way to exist in a digital world full of surveillance and deepfakes and ai porn. maybe i'll do it one day. i'm already halfway there as most people online probably know me better as my drawings since i don't post many photos of myself anymore (i learned some hard life lessons during my young and foolish instagram days.)

i was reading this profile about the trueanon podcast and found myself nodding in agreement with a lot of liz franczak's views of the current internet/"bum-fight content economy" and the desire to avoid it:

She also wants to keep as much of herself away from the algo-churn panopticon as possible, and instead to center her digital presence on her observations about the external world. “I have no desire to pimp myself out on Instagram. I respect my life and my family too much for that. I don’t know, is that a bitchy answer?

“The thing is,” she continues, “we need to all aspire to be more interesting than our own conceptions of ourselves. I genuinely believe that I have much more interesting things to say instead of talking about myself. Unfortunately, we have a social infrastructure that rewards that.”

this might be a somewhat weird opinion to be in accordance with on a personal homepage (⌒_⌒;) but i do hope i'm striking a good balance between the internal world and external world here that is interesting for more people than just myself.

more linux stuff: i swapped out hyprpaper for swaybg and hyprsunset for gammastep because i wanted more cross-compatibility. i learned that using all hypr ecosystem stuff meant being stuck in that ecosystem. which brings me closer to the apple problem again of giving up portability for small conveniences. if i switch to something like niri for my window manager, i don't want to have to install and configure another wallpaper or screen temp utility. also the hypr options are a bit more resource heavy and i want to keep things super efficient and light. gammastep actually works better than what i had set up with hyprsunset anyways. that said, i'm still using hyprland for now as i haven't found an alternative for hyprlock that i like yet.

btw, after all the framework stuff i talked about last time, i decided to go check out how hyprland's discord is and it seems to have been cleaned up from what it was described as a few years ago. from my cursory glance, it still kind of has teenage boy vibes (which is maybe just the discord vibe? idk, i don't use discord) but it doesn't appear to be another "young" republican groupchat 凸( •̀_•́ ) there seems to be some effort to do better (ie. stating clear community guidelines/rules that stress respect for others) which is commendable in a time when the more common pipeline for people who are caught being assholes is to dig in, double down, and radicalize into whiny bigot podcasters/influencers/politicians. still, i want to try other window managers because hyprland has more features/overhead than i actually need.

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regretfully, i must inform everyone that i have fallen into another time-consuming computer hobby (⌒_⌒;) with all the disappoinment in apple and then framework, i began jokingly thinking that, at the rate things are going, my next computer is going to have to be a plane ticket to huaqiangbei market in shenzhen to buy random parts to make my own cyberdeck. but that funny thought kept developing in my head after i realized that i probably don't need the plane ticket since i already have a bunch of extra computer components laying around that i could use to make something out of.^🂠 if i really believed in more sustainable hardware, i should make use of that stuff.

i have a spare raspberry pi 4 left over after i upgraded my homeserver to a pi 5 last year. i have the glassed ipad mini i mentioned a couple posts back (i say it's glassed as a variation on "bricked" because it's still functional but essentially bricked as liquid glass is a glitchy mess and i don't want to use it.) i have an old keyboard and a bunch of cables and adapters stored away that i'm not using for anything. as my linux setup has become more streamlined and lightweight, i wondered if i could actually just run it smoothly on the pi 4 with the ipad mini as the display.

now, do i need more computer hobbies? no, i barely have enough free time to work on my homepage and learn linux (๑>ᴗ<๑) but, following the pattern of those two things, it was probably inevitable that i'd end up experimenting with customizing/personalizing my computer hardware too. i guess i'm really in my serial experiments lain era. (sidenote: whenever i see the term selinux, i always think it stands for serial experiments linux ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)

i cobbled together all the pieces and installed fedora minimal for arm because i like the stability of fedora but don't need everything in the full install like on my framework. i had to reflash the os around 10 times because i kept making mistakes and kept bricking everything (╥_╥) after a lot of poking and prodding, i finally got fedora to boot up somewhat fine, did the initial configuration, and got into the tty to install hyprland, kitty, and other utilities. i learned a lot by having to repeat the same process over and over again!

as it stands now, there's some debugging i need to do to make it run more smoothly. the boot up forces me to manually kill processes to proceed. hyprland sometimes doesn't connect with the ipad/hdmi adapter and i need to fix the pi output aspect ratio. i also need to figure out why transparency isn't working in kitty. but other than that, it works pretty good if everything loads in properly. i would also like to figure out how to run it off the ssd instead of the microsd card. i tried and failed a few times so i just went with the card. it would probably be snappier from an ssd.

i don't know if i'll make this into an actual self-contained cyberdeck. i would want to get a smaller keyboard, maybe a low-profile 60% one, and figure out how to power it all efficiently on batteries. i'm fine with it just being a bunch of loose parts for the time being. if i need to take it anywhere, it's not difficult to throw it all into a box and set it up again. also, i don't want to get sucked into learning soldering and 3d printing right now, i've already got way too much going on (⌒_⌒;) i'm just happy i was able to get it working and now i have another linux computer to do experiments with and don't have to worry about messing up the computer i do my work on. maybe i'll try out some other distros like arch linux arm and see what that's like.

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finally, on my homepage, i just made some more minor edits on the flat pages. i fixed a possible accessibility issue with my self-portrait being a giant ascii rendering (ie. screen readers getting stuck reading a huge block of ascii gibberish.) i put the ascii block in <figure> tag and gave it a descriptive caption while also hiding the code block with aria. i also cleaned up some of the copy on the pages and added some more page headings for clarity.

that's all i've got for this update. i'm still trying to get my energy back up. not sure if i'm perpetually tired because of neverending home life stuff or if the constant horrors of the world have just totally sapped the life out of me. probably both (￢_￢;) hope you're all doing well <3

things have been pretty rough lately. my dad continues to get worse. every time i think it can't possibly get much worse than this, it gets much worse (╥_╥) things he could still sort of do a few months ago like dressing himself or using the bathroom are totally gone now. he's perpetually in a confused and frightened state because he doesn't know where he is or who anyone is or what he's doing. my mom also had another surgery last week because of her osteoperosis so it's been extra hectic at home while she recovers.

negative thoughts and feelings are probably creeping into my mind more than usual as i haven't had much sleep for the past couple weeks. i am not doing very well on my 2025 goals! at least i've somewhat achieved the goal that those goals were supposed to help with, which is staying off social ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ that just happened naturally because i no longer have the time or energy to spend in those online spaces. so maybe having to constantly clean up messes and accidents around the house all day is actually a good thing?

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as a result of having very limited time, i've only been able to do low hanging fruit projects around this homepage. this week, i've been fleshing out my /uses page more. if you've been following along with this blog, you'll know i've become more of a linux person lately and this has changed my computing set up a lot! (see last several posts for reasoning and other details.) i can't decide how much detail i should include with each item. some uses pages explain why they use each thing and some are just lists. i'm not sure which i prefer. but even the lists without context still paint a portrait of the user through the connections being made with their specific selections (sometimes) and that's why i personally like looking at them.

in this update, i mainly just added links to many of the things i use and also made a simple indicator system for things that are on the way out or things that i'm uncertain about. i'm considering adding a sentence or two to explain why i use each thing. is anyone even interested in that? i have no idea.

i think most uses pages are just for computer stuff but while i was looking around for ideas, i saw some people also include other things as well, like analog tools and furniture. i like how localghost included her skincare/makeup products ^-^ i was tempted to add that to mine too. but i don't want to fall into the trap of doing inventory of everything i have. i already went through that phase once in my life (๑>ᴗ<๑) i think i'll keep it limited to things related to my computer life for now. at least until i'm happy with how the technology section is presented.

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i've been continuing to de-apple my life and playing with my framework and linux.

one big project i've been putting off is reformatting my external ssd so that it works with linux. currently it's formatted in apple's proprietary apfs format(encrypted) which i guess is another way to keep people locked in their ecosystem ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ before i do that i also have another big project which is to export and reorganize my photo library outside of apple's photos app. this is probably a much bigger project as i have hundreds of thousands of photos because i used to be obsessive about photography. it's a daunting task. but i think it'll feel so good to not have my photos chained to one platform!

i'm also still learning neovim. i'm basically picking things up as i go. this week, i learned how to use iabbrev so i can set automatic text replacements for my most-used kaomojis. i also learned how to tab multiple lines of text using the angle brackets (⌒_⌒;) it's very different from what i'm used to with text editors but also quite fun. it feels like i'm playing with an alien computer.

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since i've been hyping up framework a lot lately, i should mention the backlash it's been getting the past few days and my feelings of disappointment with them. i had just read my friend paul's blog post about companies trying to both-sides things to avoid moral responsiblity (his post was in response to a different backlash last week with the bluesky ceo.) i share paul's opinion that this doesn't work at all because it only gives cover and credibility to bad faith actors which allows their toxic narratives to spread and harm people. but the day after reading paul's post, framework caught a bad case of both-sideism (╥_╥)

users called out the company on the framework forum for promoting and financially supporting omarchy and hyprland which are both led by controversial people, particularly omarchy's dhh who holds horrendous views about immigrants, minorities, trans people, and probably lots of other stuff i'm not even aware of. hyprland's creator/maintainer, vaxry, also has a trail of bad discord posts and questionable blog posts, though it seems like he's cooled down recently? unlike dhh, he's quite young so i hope his brain has had some time to develop more and he has not joined the permanently aggrieved tech narcissists club.

framework's ceo, nirav, responded by saying he wanted framework to be a neutral big tent company focused on open source adoption. while this sounds nice on paper, it doesn't really work in reality. this whole thing seems to be pushing people out of the tent. people who turned to framework because they were tired of giving their money to spineless big tech companies who present bigoted facists with gold gifts, who take down community support apps like iceblock. look at all the people on the framework forum understandably saying they're canceling their orders and no longer recommending framework to friends. the whole thing is sad because i think framework's mission of repairable upgradeable computing is great and healthier than what we have now. but that mission is sabotaged if people start suspecting that your judgment is too poor to lead such a mission or, worse, you'll be sending gold gifts to facists too once your company has the profited enough from its users.

am i going to smash my framework computer now? no, i still like it even if i agree all the criticisms are valid and i'm disappointed. nirav's response so far was a misstep but hopefully they can still course correct. he was smart to log off after his initial response rather than to continue to post through it and dig a deeper hole and then start banning people like the bluesky situation. to framework's credit, they've left all the complaint posts up while diligently removing the expected racist and transphobic posts that this topic attracted. i hope they don't disappoint me even more but given the world now, disappointment seems to be the default mode these days so i'm braced for it.

look, i'm still using many of my apple products even after all my complaints about them (⌒_⌒;) i'm using hyprland for the time being though maybe i'll check out niri or something else soon. with open source software, i have somewhat less worry about my money going to bad causes because it's free. i went through a period of time when i was trying so hard to be ethical in all aspects of my life. it got to the point where i was sewing my own clothes and making my own skincare products. but then you start thinking about where the raw materials came from because i didn't grow the cotton or press the oils myself. it's like the saying goes: there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. this is the unfortunate imperfect reality we're forced to exist in. all you can really do is pick the option of least harm and i think framework is still doing better than other options out there. not me looking up youtube tutorials for how to make a cpu because the american government owns part of intel now (￢_￢;)

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i finished watching season 3 of alice in borderland and it was disappointing. season 1 and 2 were already a complete story anyways so this just felt like a netflix cash grab that added nothing. the worst part is probably how it ended like the ending of squid game where it seems to be the soft launch for an american remake so netflix can keep milking money out of the ip. i'm tired, boss.

so, apple's new os 26 came out last week. and it is the first time in my life that i didn't obediently update my devices on day one. i still haven't updated any of my main devices. i did finally install it on my extra ipad mini the other day. i didn't want to judge it without trying it first and it couldn't actually be that bad, right? well, it's worse than i feared. i had kind of downplayed it in my mind as just a garish new os paint job. now that i've used it, i feel like the problems are much deeper. for example, the animations are so slow. does the "liquid' in liquid glass mean it's supposed to feel like you're computing underwater? and it's so glitchy. when i swipe away the app library, the folders all clump up into the corner?? the floating buttons blink annoyingly when trying to adapt to what's underneath. these are just the things i noticed in the first few minutes.

i also manage my mom's ipad so i wanted know what to turn off in case she upgrades accidentally and it confuses her. i disabled the transparency and the animations in the accessibility settings and it makes things even worse! the contrast is all messed up and it's still slow and does weird fades in and out. did the apple team just assume, "everyone's going to love liquid glass! we don't need to consider anything else!" it feels very hubristic, moreso than usual for apple. it's almost heartless how bad the accessibility options are. i suppose it's just another reflection of the compassionless times we live in where governments are legislating whole populations of people out of public spaces and society because they don't fit into a narrow conservative box and fox talk show goons are on live tv talking about how they want people with mental illnesses to be euthanized (╥_╥)

some may say that i'm not being fair by trying the os on a machine that's a couple generations old. but that's part of the larger problem i'm having with apple these days. they keep putting in more "features" that i have no use for. probably, the last feature they released that was useful to me was airdrop and icloud syncing and that was in 2011! now their "innovations" just feel, more than ever, like sleazy ways to force new hardware upgrades just to deal with the ongoing bloat and added overhead. it makes the things i could do perfectly fine before harder to do now.

i'm keeping all my apple devices on the previous os as long as i can. maybe the os will become more tolerable over the next few years. or maybe once my current apple stuff dies, it will be the end of the road for me with apple products (i can't buy new apple devices because they only have post-26 os and no easy way to install older versions.) i have been thinking about full linux phones lately or even just going back to a dumb phone ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ my m3 macbook air sometimes gets bogged down by basic tasks now even without being on macos 26. meanwhile, you have linux which lets you do more with less.

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speaking of linux, i've been continuing to have a lot of fun with my framework! in my last post, i wrote about some things i did on my fedora gnome system to make it more like what i was accustomed to on mac, ie. convenience features like airdrop. gnome is already very apple-like. but lately, i've been thinking, "wait, why am i recreating my mac experience when i have the option to totally craft the os into exactly and only what i want/need?" all the apple os annoyances this week got me interested in just making my own dream os.

i really started to get into the idea after i installed kitty (i liked the name ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ) one day and played around with the files to customize it so i could have a prettier terminal. this got me thinking about neovim again. i know i only just settled on kate as what i wanted for my code editor but i couldn't escape the feeling that i could make something more bespoke and streamlined with neovim. i would just have to learn some new terminology and keys like "yanking" (￢_￢;) i had thought that i didn't have time for it (which i probably don't, with my dad's dementiacare and all) but what else am i going to do while waiting for the dumpster fire world to end?

when i tried neovim last time, i was being lazy (lazyvim pun not intended) and just installed a neovim framework called nvchad which is sort of a preconfigured way to make neovim into an ide. it automatically installed a bunch of stuff that i didn't really understand and i got overwhelmed by it all and undid everything quickly. i thought maybe i should take the same approach that i use for my homepage. no preconfigured setups or prebuilt templates, just do things more manually and try to stick to the basics to achieve what i want. and enjoy the process and the journey.

this time around, i first installed basic neovim and then took some time to research. i added to it piece by piece until i got exactly what i needed and nothing more. treesitter for syntax, nvim-lspconfig for semantics, neotree for file explorer, telescope for search, bufferline for tabs, lualine for the status bar, and autotag to close tags automatically. that's all and it's perfect for me. i know what all the parts are and how to manage them and i can also customize it to look how i want ^-^ sooooo much control!!!

it took a lot of time and work but i was obsessed. i wanted to do this to my whole os (⌒_⌒;) this led me to look at hyprland.

bare hyprland is just a window manager, that's all. when you install it and launch into the environment, all you really get is a kitty terminal window on a blank background. you have a keybinding to spawn more terminals and another keybinding to exit hyprland. no menubars or docks or buttons or icons or anything. opening it for the first time was a bit daunting but it was also refreshing. what do you mean my first task on first boot isn't to delete every preinstalled default app i don't want?? it's a blank canvas. i love that.

so i started building things out from kitty as needed. i wanted wallpaper so i installed hyprpaper. when i closed/opened my lid, there was no lock/login screen so i installed hyprlock and hypridle. i was working late at night and felt my eyes burning so i added hyprsunset to change the screen color temp and then learned how to make some scripts and timers to automate it. all this configuration and customization was just done by editing the text conf files of each of these pieces. then i started getting into writing simple shell scripts to do some basic things for me.

while there are a lot more hypr branded and non-hypr branded add-ons that you can mix and match, i wanted to keep installs very minimal and do as much in kitty as i could. for example, you can install things to have a mac-like graphical overview of your workspaces. i didn't really need anything fancy, just something to keep track of my open windows, so i wrote a small script that i can call in terminal and it shows me an ascii diagram of all my open spaces and the number of windows in them. i also didn't install a menu bar so i made the script tell me stuff like date/time and battery levels.

since i had set up neovim, i could do all my writing and coding in a kitty window. i also added nnn so i could use kitty as my file explorer (⌒_⌒;) the one thing i can't really do in kitty is web browsing. i know there are terminal browsers like qutebrowser but in today's internet, having access to extensions like adblockers, password autofill, etc., is a must so i'm still using a normal web browser.

i'm using firefox and i wanted to make it match everything else so i cracked open the firefox userchrome.css for the first time in over 10 years maybe and made it a super simple one-bar ui with my terminal font. i'm actually surprised css editing was still an option in ff with the way things are going but i'm happy it's still there.

now, my os is pretty much keyboard driven. i can use keybindings to move around my desktop(s) as well as open things like kitty and firefox. no need for a launcher when i mainly use only 2 apps and i can just hit super+k or super+f to launch them. i also made some bash aliases which are just short keywords i can type into terminal so i don't have to memorize long commands to type to run my scripts. trackpad/mouse is still used for websites, of course. i'm still keeping gnome as a login option for when i use this computer in tablet mode ^-^

that's my current set up for now.^🂠 it's all still a work in progress but it's working. i may move to something even more basic in the future like dwm/dwl, idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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needless to say, i didn't do much in terms of homepage updates this week. just some small clean ups and tweaks here and there. but i guess doing all this linux tinkering is still working on the homepage in a way. i'm sharpening the tools that i build my homepage with (⌒_⌒;) it's also nice that it has kept me mostly offline the past 2 weeks as the "discourse" has been some of the most vile and ugly stuff ever. i'm constantly going between "the internet is beautiful" and the internet is a mistake" and lately it's been mostly the latter.

a big part of my interest in making my homepage and now getting into linux is definitely due an adverse reaction to the way a lot of the world is going. how there are forces trying to homogenize everything into a one size fits all solution. and part of that is seducing people with the promise of being able to stop thinking, stop learning, stop putting in effort. new technology just seems to be about offloading hard work. but it's the hard work which is actually fulfilling, beneficial, and self-enriching and what makes us better humans. i saw the meta ai glasses demo where the guy stands there uselessly waiting for the malfunctioning ai to tell him how to mix ingredients, begging the ai, "what do i do first? what do i do first?" and i couldn't believe that this is the future we're getting (╥_╥) it doesn't feel that far off that soon the streets will be full of people walking around, encountering the most simple things, and yelling, "grok explain this."

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i think i'll take a little break from hyprland and irl land this weekend and watch the final season of alice in borderland that was released today ^-^

yay, i've moved all my homepage files onto my framework ^-^ i finally found the perfect code editor (for me) on linux.

here's what i tried before i landed on what i landed on:

• vscodium — i installed this when i first set up fedora since i was coming from vscode on my mac. i thought maybe un-microsofted vscode would be fine but i still didn't want to use it.
• geany — this was okay but had some weird ui things i didn't like.
• gnome builder — this is not explicity for making websites but it can be used that way and has live preview. but there's too much extra stuff in it that i'll never use.
• gnome text editor — just a tiny bit too basic and limited but it was okay like geany.
• neovim — this was very interesting and kind of fun but requires too much set up to get what i want and then having to manage all that. also, i'm not really in a place to learn a whole bunch of new keybindings. maybe i'll learn slowly over time and come back to it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• zed — this is fine after turning the ai stuff off but felt too much like vscode again (￢_￢;)

the editor that works for me is kate! it's super smooth and fast, doesn't have a lot of useless bloat, and i can quickly configure it exactly how i like. i also installed the python livereload command line tool to act as my live preview when working on my page. it's all working great and maybe even better than when i was working on my mac. i'm still surprised how snappy everything in general on this computer is even though i'm using an older i5 chip and haven't played around with any manual optimizations to fedora myself yet.

since some people have expressed interest in hearing more about my linux adventures, here are some other things i did over the past couple weeks. sorry if my linux terminology is off. i don't really know what everything is called ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

• the framework 12 doesn't have any biometrics or apple watch unlock so i figured out how to set up a yubikey 5c nano with pam_u2f for simple one touch passwordless login and sudo. i also set it up for keepass access. i can just pull the yubikey out if i need to lock down my computer. sooo convenient ^-^
• i got a 1tb storage expansion card with my framework and formatted it as a luks encrypted drive to use with timeshift to do scheduled snapshots of my system config and pika backup to do scheduled backups of my files. it's like having time machine integrated into the body of the computer rather than having to carry around external drives that i always forget to plug in to run time machine.
• initially, i was worried about not having airdrop on this machine and would be relying on network shares to move things around. but i found out i can more or less have it by setting up kde connect/gsconnect. now i can airdrop stuff between my iphone and my framework. it just works ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ
• i've also been trying to resist the temptation of going too far down the rabbit hole of os customization, or as the linux people call it: "ricing". as i've been researching all the stuff above, i keep coming across crazy and beautiful customizations! like some people have full ascii ui (0o0) i feel like if i got into that stuff, you'd never see me again. i did do a few minor cute customizations like making my top bar transparent and changing highlight colors and fonts. i think doing a little bit is not too much of a diversion, it helps learn how everything works.

that's most of the things i've been doing to this computer so far. it's been taking most of my time outside my dad's dementiacare and my homepage but it's fun and kind of relaxing to explore all this new (to me) stuff.

last week, i deleted every social app from my phone. i just realized that whenever i look at them, all i'm mainly getting is second or first hand accounts of people with far too much power and influence doing the most heinous and loser shit ever all the time. i don't want or need to carry that around in my pocket. i think too much exposure to that stuff has actually been highly corrosive to my soul and i've let it go on for way too long. now i only have my socials logged in on my macbook so i have to use that machine if i want to doomscroll. since i've been on my framework more lately, i haven't been getting sucked into that seedy underbelly of the internet.

on my phone, i've scratching the "need to scroll" itch by using tapestry. it's an rss reader that has a social scroll form factor (you can follow mastodon and bluesky with it too, i'm not doing that) but since it's just my rss subscriptions, i only get what i've chosen to be delivered to me and it's finite! you'll also notice that i've been doing some posts lately that i don't share to all my socials, like my framework/fedora post and my interview with İsmail Şevik the other day. so you should get an rss reader too if you want to keep up with everything in this blog (⌒_⌒;)

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if you're reading this post on my flat blog page, you'll probably notice something slightly different with how the text looks. this week, i wanted to do some work on the flat pages. they haven't changed much in design since i first made them a year ago. while the front page has been steadily worked on. but i was just looking at my blog and felt like it needed more texture, it was too clean and bland.

when i was little, my mom would get me a 200 sheet package of lined binder paper from the dollar store and i would just write and draw for days and make little books. in grade school, i had some teachers who encouraged this and introduced me to the photocopier. later, i had a cool older friend who made zines and i learned a lot from making zines with her. all of this was happening around the same time as i was learning to make websites. making zines and making homepages are kind of the same activity in my mind, it's self-publishing. i wanted to bring that element of my history into this personal homepage.

so i started playing around with css svg filtering. these flat pages were originally supposed invoke the simplicity of early html pages but i thought i can make them look like xeroxed pages too. i think it feels more organic now! it also provides even more contrast to the very digital aesthetic of the front page pixel art and computer uis.

if you prefer to read the text ultra-crisp and digitally sleek, i added a little toggle at the top right of the page to turn off the photocopier ^-^ i did have to break my no javascript rule and added one line of js to persist this user preference across pages. i feel like it's worth it in this case. and the pages will still work even if js is turned off anyways, you would just lose that persistence functionality.

i'm going to have to do some edits to the content of the flat pages in the near future. especially my uses page as that has changed a lot!

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the tiny awards just announced the winner today! the winner is not me but i'm happy to be nominated and happy to have connected with a bunch of nice new web people over the past month.

the winner is fifty thousand names which i think is an appropriate and important winner for this year with the state of the world being what it is. i don't know if saying congratulations is the right thing to say given the situation. the total deaths from war and famine in the gaza genocide is now around ~65,000 and still climbing. meanwhile, it feels like most media are bored of the story and looking for fresh meat to pump their metrics. same with politicians and public figures who would rather trip over themselves to make revisionist eulogies about a hateful, misogynistic, and bigoted internet influencer than bring themselves to call a livestreamed genocide of this magnitude an actual genocide. we can't depend on these people to call things out. the internet still gives us the ability to do it ourselves. this win is a good acknowledgement of that.

a couple weeks ago, a turkish blogger named İsmail Şevik emailed me out of the blue and asked if i would do an interview. i said okay and answered a bunch of questions about my homepage and the internet. İsmail translated it into turkish and you can read it here. if you don't read turkish, i've posted the original english below for you to enjoy if you are interested ^-^

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1) Start with the basics: Can you introduce yourself?

my name is elle. these days i just go by my first name mononymously online. when i was younger, i was a little too open with personal information online and that led to very bad and dangerous things. so now i'm more protective of my privacy, especially in the age of deepfakes and ai.

anyways, i have a personal homepage online called "elle's homepage."

2) What's your blog's story?

it doesn't really have a specific story. it's just about whatever i'm doing, thinking, or feeling. these days, it's mostly about building my homepage, random thoughts about the world, and my day to day home life.

i started it because i was sick of what social media has become and what it has turned people into. i'd always had a website growing up before social platforms took over the internet so i decided to go back to that time when the internet was still a fun and exciting place to explore and learn from.

3) What's your daily routine? What's your typical day like?

most of my day is spent taking care of my dad who has severe dementia. i'm his full-time caregiver so it's mostly cleaning, feeding, and other caregiving chores. whatever time i have left, which is not much, i try to spend on my homepage. that's why it's an ongoing work in progress that is being slowly added to over time.

4) What do you enjoy doing outside of work?

i don't really have time these days to do much else besides what i described above. i don't even have a job because of that. i used to have a much different life before my dad's decline. i used to work in various web and design fields and was a musician and i loved doing those things. i also loved traveling, being outside in nature, running, riding my bike/skateboard, dancing, and learning to make different kinds of foods. sadly, that's all in the past for now and i don't know when/if i'll ever be able to return to that life.

5) What do you enjoy most about your work?

by work, i'm going to assume you mean my homepage, which i don't really see as "work." i just like making things and the problem solving process. from drawing pixel art to coding, it's all about organizing elements in a pleasing way that i find satisfying and stimulating. given that my home life is lacking a lot of creative stimulus, my homepage gives me a much needed reprieve from that reality as well as the darkness of the current world. it keeps me from falling into deep despair and depression.

6) Your blog's structure is very nice. Can I ask why you chose this design? How did you come up with this design?

do you mean the front page or the actual blog page? the front page references isometric pixel games, old and new computer icons, ascii art, and other familiar ui elements. a lot of it is just draws from my love of computer/internet history and aesthetics.

for the character sprites, i loosely based them on the mega man battle network style. that game series is about having adventures in the internet.

because i've been building the page a little bit at a time, there isn't really a master plan. i just think of different things to add and try to integrate everything together and hope it doesn't get too messy.

for the "flat" pages of the site, like my blog page, i wanted to create very minimal html documents that felt more like early webpages. so they are made with all html and a bit of css and no javascript. there are also no images on those pages, they are all text and some border elements.

like i said earlier, the whole site is an excuse for me to experiment and play. so some pages let me experiment with more modern techniques while others let me play within strict limitations to try to create something nice.

7) Could you tell us about the tools you use?

for my homepage, i just write vanilla html/css/js in vscode. there's no cms or framework, i write my blog directly in html and xml (for rss.) i use pixelmator and resprite for drawing. this is mostly done on a macbook air and ipad pro. recently i got a framework laptop 12 and installed fedora linux and i've been doing some work on there too. i've been trying out different code editors on fedora and seeing which one feels the best for me to use. i don't really like vscode so it would be nice to move off of it.

8) Are you happy when you visit the internet? What's your perspective on artificial intelligence? What quality do you look for when browsing the internet?

lately, i haven't really been very happy to visit the internet. at least not the social media internet which is hard to avoid when you go online. there is a lot of turmoil in the world and social media seems to aggregate and magnify it in a way that just makes me feel terrible if i'm on it too long. i don't know about your feeds, but mine are mostly full of anger, scams, and slop. there are some good things mixed in there but i wish i didn't have to go on there to see it. the good internet is still in the background though and lately i have been spending more time browsing that part of the web but it's hard to avoid getting drawn back to the platforms. part of the reason i built some of the feeds on my homepage like my blogroll is so that I can keep up with what my friends are posting without actually going to the social platforms.

i think the net effect of ai/llms is negative. early on, i tried to stay openminded about it. the theory of it seemed like it had potential for being useful like a super powerful search/autocomplete/extrapolation tool for researchers. but the more I see of it, with its ethical, political, environmental, societal problems over time, the worse my opinion of it becomes. also, any optimism i had of its potential has been repeatedly and thoroughly dispelled as its output is mainly mediocre, mid, slop. all the writing output sounds the same. all the image output looks the same, all the code output produces radiused buttons (⌒_⌒;). anything with merit that has come out of it is only because of the user enhancing it with interventions and usually those people could make that output without using any ai tools. they just saved some time is all. and i don't know if that time-savings is worth all the other problems (also sometimes using ai costs more time to fix hallucinations and errors.) most people seem to just hit send on the bare output without human intervention beyond the prompt and that's why we're drowning in homogenous slop.

in relation to the internet, i think ai is a risk to the good internet. for some reason, all the companies now are interested in building ai browsers that summarize websites for people. i feel like this is an affront to what makes the internet good. what made the internet good in the first place was direct connection and communication. people could publish whatever they wanted without being mediated or having to find a publisher. this resulted in a vibrant and diverse internet where you could see totally different perspectives from all around the world. things like ai summarizers want to mediate everything and average everything, stripping out the humanity. or worse, reshape everything to fit the narrow beliefs and prejudices of the people who control the technology. that's not an internet i'm interested in using.

i want a messy internet that's full of surprise and wonder. a good internet doesn't feel like a chore to visit. it feels like a treat to browse. The main selling point of these ai browsers is to save people time. so you no longer need to search or browse or visit websites. that implies that we have an internet that is so broken that no one wants to spend any more time than necessary on it. and in a lot of ways that is true of the current state and only getting worse with algorithmic social media and the tidal wave of ai slop. but i don't think the solution is to use ai to paper over everything. i think the solution is to reassert the humanity of the internet. stop ceding control to the monolithic platforms and algorithms.

9) I really like your website. Can I customize your design? :)

i'm not sure what you mean by customize since there's no template and a lot of it is just what i arbitrarily put on the page ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but i have a built-in html source viewer on the page because i'm happy if people want to look at the underlying code to see what's going on and learn from it. that's how i learned to make websites. i would just read people's source if i saw something interesting that i wanted to know more about.

10) What's your perspective on making money online? How should a content creator earn money?

i don't really know the answer to this. i've explored many different methods of earning money with my content over my years on the internet like selling products, commissions, brand sponsorships, patronage/donations, subscriptions. none of them really worked for me. but i think it's more that i don't enjoy tying my creative work to making a living. for me, the fastest way to kill my desire to be creative is to attach money to it. suddenly, it no longer feels like you are no longer doing something because you want to but because you have to. then again, i know it's difficult because if you have to work a side job to survive, then that also eats into your time and energy for your own personal work. i just choose to live very modestly so i don't have to generate a lot of money to sustain my lifestyle (with my current family situation, i'm also kind of forced into a very simple life with not many expenditures.)

11) What advice would you give to someone just starting out?

i would say just get a domain name, make a website, and put it online. given how we are moving towards more control and mediation in the world and the internet, i think it's important to have a space online that you can truly call your own. at least as long as that is still possible to do on the internet.

it doesn't have to be perfect. you can keep working on it. and while working on it, you will learn how to make it better. i have a time machine feature on my homepage that shows you what it looked like at the very beginning when it was just a simple page with a couple contact links on it.

before i returned to having a homepage again, it took me a while before i could commit to uploading anything. i kept waiting for the right idea for a personal homepage or the perfect time. if you wait for those things, you could be waiting forever. but once you take the first step, the next steps get easier.

12) If I were to ask you to give us a list of suggestions, what would they be? (Movie, book, TV series, blog, YouTube Channel, etc.)

my homepage is basically an ongoing collection of recommendations. you can just go there and check out my readings list or links to friends and other interesting websites. i add to it regularly. and i often write about things i'm enjoying in my blog.

the last really fun movie i saw was kpop demon hunters. it has an amazing soundtrack!

13) Is there anything you'd like to add?

i don't think so! i think i've probably taking up more than enough of your time ^-^

through this homepage, i've run into a lot of people who are so passionate about wanting and creating a better internet. people who say they miss going on the internet and leaving with good feelings afterwards. leaving full of knowledge and wonder. this is in contrast with our current always-online screens of all-you-can-eat misery and cruelty.

what happened? why did we accept this? it's like everyone got addicted to a food that was good and nutritious but the producer slowly changed the recipe so that everyone is just mainlining poison. google's motto used to be "don't be evil". now we have tech bros who act like supervillans dominating the ways we access the internet. which has accelerated to results like sycophantic openai chatbots helping teens kill themselves.

Incoherent empty men want to sell me the chance to stop reading and writing and thinking, to stop caring for my kids or talking to my parents, to stop choosing what I do or knowing why I do it. Blissful ignorance and total isolation, warm in the womb of the algorithm, nourished by hungry machines. - Anthony Moser, I Am An AI Hater

i suppose it's not just the internet but a larger trend. there used to be leaders that ran on platforms of hope and change and optimism (or at least made the effort to pretend that being good was critical to their success.) now we see leaders somehow thrive with platforms of hate and fear and oppression. this cascades down from the leaders to the followers. they're all trying to outdo one another in being the worst. i don't even know why since they all seem more angry than ever, even when then get their way. and if they see someone not playing the race-to-the-bottom game, they get angry at them and attack them for actually caring about people. why choose to live life in permanent anger?

i don't know if today's internet is the cause or the reflection. it could be both. the question is: how do we bring the good internet back to the forefront and change the feedback loop and maybe restore some of our humanity?

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i'm still in the process of getting acclimated to linux. it's going slow because the "switching cost" is real after being solely in the apple ecosystem for most of my computer life (╥_╥) i just have so many old apple habits to break. but that feeling of dependency is what makes me even more eager to branch off. i know i said i wasn't going to worry about macos tahoe/liquid glass but the more i see of it, the worse it looks.

part of the hold up is because i also don't want to import previous bad habits by just installing the closest 1:1 app dupes of my mac experience. i'm exploring better ways to do things and more comfortable software to use. for example, out of habit, i use vscode on my mac to write web stuff even though there are a lot of things i find annoying about it. but now i have a jumping off point and maybe i can use something else now, which would also let me divest more from microsoft (i purged most of my github last week as part of my effort to get away from evil corps.)

so far, i'm finding a lot of general things that i actually enjoy more on fedora than macos. like why is the system search so much better, more accurate and smoother than spotlight on mac??

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my homepage updates this week are mostly behind the scenes again. i discovered that my page doesn't render properly in gnome web (epiphany) – the main webkit-based browser on fedora. it seems that the browser compositor is very picky about the ordering of things on the page and gets confused if there are a lot of images from spritesheets. i don't know if that's a known bug with webkitgtk. but since kagi is working on their orion browser for linux using webkitgtk, and that's one of the apps that i actually do want to bring over from my mac, i needed to do something about it!

after a lot of trial and error, i fixed the problem by restructuring and grouping everything in my html more neatly. it's probably something i should have done anyways but this gave me the motivation. the improvisational way i've been making my homepage meant that i just throw things on the page and hope the forgiving nature of html smooths out the wrinkles. it usually works unless it doesn't (⌒_⌒;) i also took the opportunity to rewrite and reorganize the js so it's more consistent and cleaner too.

other than that, no big flashy additions. i didn't really want to change things too much this month while the tiny awards voting was going on.

i was nominated for the annual tiny awards! the tiny awards celebrate "the best of the small, poetic, creative, handmade web." what an honor to be shortlisted with 10 other websites that i've loved visiting this past year <3

it feels a little weird and embarrassing to be the only "personal webpage" on the list. by personal webpage, i mean a general site that's about a person, a self-portrait, as opposed to a concept or specific activity driven site. though i guess you could consider some of the other great nominees like i feel so much shame and consumed today as self-portraits ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

in any case, i'm proud to represent personal webpages! one of my hopes for this homepage has always been to make something that encourages and inspires people to create their own personal sites. to show that having a place on the internet doesn't have to be limited to the rigid format of social profiles. i feel this is super important for the health of the human internet right now as it becomes more overrun with manipulative algorithms, mindlessly generated slop and spam, corporate and political interests, and all sorts of other malicious entities who want to harm people for their own enrichment or entertainment.

outside of the mediated mainstream online spaces, you can still do whatever you want to do.

so if being part of this fun little event helps show more people that, i'm happy. i already got a couple emails from people asking advice to make their own sites so i guess mission accomplished.

voting is open until the end of august. go visit all the nominees, vote for your favorite, and share the link!

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as i mentioned in my framework/fedora post on the weekend, i've been working on making my homepage more cross-platform friendly. previously, i'd been using the generic serif, sans-serif, monospace font names for simplicity and to reduce kilobytes, hoping it would be close enough on all systems. unfortunately, i discovered that "close enough" wasn't close enough when i looked at my page on the main linux web browsers (⌒_⌒;) there were some minor cases of shifting that caused the layout to go slightly off. so i guess i have to be strict and embed fonts for consistency.

if you're a regular vistor and paying super close attention, you probably noticed me trying out different fonts over the past week or so. this was also a good opportunity to select fonts with better readability/legibility, especially since there are areas of my page that have small text. i settled on 3 open source fonts that aren't too far off from the generics on mac but also have some visual, accessibility, and usability improvements. lora for serif, atkinson hyperlegible for sans-serif, and jetbrains mono for monospace. i subset all of them to cut down on kb bloat as much as possible (i used python.) i think these three work well together and look nice together too ^-^

also for general performance enhancements across platforms, i rewrote some of the js to be less taxing on computers that don't have apple m chips or whatever magic apple does with webkit in safari. hopefully it runs smoother for everyone now!

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lastly, i made some small improvements to the blogroll^🂠 on the front page. i fixed some weird formatting that was happening for some people's feeds. and now it also shows titles if there is one for a post. before, i left the titles out to make it look more conversational but for some posts, the title is important context. now it's much clearer.

i also added a bunch more blogging friends to it that i've met lately who have great websites.

other than that, i'm just continuing to comb through my code and do housekeeping on it, making little optimizations behind the scenes wherever i can. it's a very meditative activity for me. maybe i can condense it enough to offset the extra kbs added by the embedded fonts.

last week, i received the framework laptop 12 (diy version) that i preordered a few months ago. i got mine in lavender^🂠 with the i5 processor. this isn't really a product review, just some initial thoughts about it so far!

i never thought i would have a plastic computer again after so many years in aluminium apple land (⌒_⌒;) but it's not bad. i actually like the shell materials a lot. it feels nice to touch, kind of nostalgic. same with the keyboard. it's slightly squishier than my macbook air keyboard but in a way i don't mind. i've also never had a laptop/tablet convertible before and now i wish my macbook and ipad were a single device.

the assembly process was fun and easy. it only took a few minutes to install storage, ram, keyboard, and expansion cards. there's a nice psychological effect with doing some simple assembly on your own computer that makes it feel like it's actually yours. i found it more satisfying than the ritual of tearing tabs and peeling protective layers in apple's pristine packaging. the framework even came with a cute color matched lavender screwdriver ^-^

i installed fedora on it and it was also super easy. it's been a long time since i've used linux as a personal computer os. there's always linux stuff around me though, like in my nas, raspberry pi, and i have tails on a bootable usb drive somewhere. my first computers were windows machines and then i switched to mac when i was old enough to buy my own. my previous linux phase was when i had intel macs, when it was still possible to easily dual boot linux on a mac. i tried things like ubuntu and elementary os but it never stuck. at the time, it all still felt too rough and clunky compared to osx/macos.

i'm happy to discover that things have improved a lot since then. but maybe i just feel this way because the gnome environment is a lot more apple-fied now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ actually, i like that it's more streamlined and simplified than apple ux. i know i can mod it more but i'm not really interested in doing lots of customization and fiddling with little settings apart from getting things set up to do what i need it to do. after that, it just has to get out of my way so i can do what i want.

it's only been a week so i'm still getting everything set up the way i like when i have free time (installing apps, moving data/keys, etc.) i don't know if it will become my primary machine because apple's m-series chips and screens are hard to beat for intensive creative work but it works great for a lot of the things that i like to do like coding and pixel art.

i got this computer for two main reasons.

the first is that i wanted a non-mac machine for testing my homepage on. i've been making my page in a very mac/ios-centric way, assuming everyone has access to the highest performance hardware. this is obviously not the global reality. the laptop 12 is advertised as being more in the category of an educational machine but better than a chromebook. so i ordered it expecting things like the colors on the screen to be a bit washed out and the cpu not being invincible to everything i throw at it. it's already helped me find and fix a few things on my homepage so that it's more accommodating to different hardware and platforms.

the second reason is just to have less dependence on apple for my computing. a lot of the things they've been doing in recent years have given me the ick. like trying to cram apple intelligence into everything, "liquid glass," etc. to be clear, they've always had issues, maybe even bigger than those things, like their labor and closed/locked system practices. but the problems were somehow easier to take on balance with their seemingly progressive big picture policies. tim cook prostrating himself before a corrupt sexual abuser that goes against everything that apple supposedly stands for really pushed it over the edge. look, i know tim's just doing whatever he can to save his struggling fruit startup company (￢_￢;) but it's giving "democrats adopting anti-trans disinformation to win over voters who will never vote for them anyways and losing the voters they do have in the process." maybe just put out a simple press release next time you build an american factory. don't be so eager like all the other billionaire ceos to suck up to a government that has masked men roaming the streets abducting people. do better. think different. yes, apple makes quality products but it's also always been a big hype and "vibes" company. people used to talk about steve jobs' "reality distortion field" because he was a master at cranking up the hype on otherwise normal things. unfortunately, the vibe has continued to deteriorate since he's been gone. and without the vibes, it's in for a bad time. i feel the hopeful apple i grew up with no longer exists. maybe it never did.

the framework+fedora combo seems more in line with what i imagined/wished apple was. open, inclusive, conscientious. humane. and if these things turn evil, it feels way easier to go somewhere else as it's not as locked down.

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overall, i'm happy with this new computer and it's just fun to explore and learn something different. i've got a lot of homework to do to get up to speed. so much of my muscle memory and habits are trained to my mac (⌒_⌒;) at the moment, framework's stylus is still not available but i'm looking forward to using that too. i'm hoping framework will release more upgraded parts in the future since the machine is made to be upgradeable. there's no guarantee they will but it's a sustainable computing vision i support.

for the past many years, i've depicted myself in my self-portraits with grey colorless skin tone. part of the reason for this is because i've always been super pale. my friends and even my immediate family would often tease me and say i look like a ghost. once, i met some extended family for the first time in miami and they were shocked and thought that maybe i had some sort of chronic illness or something (⌒_⌒;) i think i've actually gotten even paler since then as the combination of the covid pandemic and full-time caring for my parents has drastically reduced my outdoor time and sunlight exposure even more. so it was kind of a joke that i leaned into when drawing my profile pics, etc.

the other, less jokey, reason is that in the last few years or more, i've felt like an actual ghost in my own life. i was an emo, gothy girl when i was younger but that was more an angst aesthetic applied over a fairly conventional life existing amongst the living. however, that life was turned upside down with my parents' aging and health downturn. now my current life feels like i'm completely removed from living world. i don't have much of a social life or a work life anymore and the skills i've acquired from doing the things i love just sit dormant and collecting dust. tangible things like relationships and goals and achievements which many use to gauge the experience of life, i've had to step away from those as my priorities shifted to caring for others. i'm mainly just surviving on my intangible interior life – but i think ghosts may have those too?

i'm in a weird purgatory where time doesn't even matter because every day is just the same pattern more or less, watching my parents slowly fade away before my eyes. much of my time is spent thinking about death and dying because of the process they are going through, that i'm attending to. as the years progress, i kind of became resigned to being a living ghost. and that's the morbid rationale for why i've been drawing my avatars the way i have.

vale recently made a post outlining "wishes upon my demise" which i read and thought was a useful thing to have on a personal homepage. see also: slash death pages. i tried to spend some time thinking about making my own but i didn't get very far. weirdly, because i feel like i'm already in an afterlife in a lot of ways, i'd rather think about living instead ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ but by drawing myself as a zombie all the time, i wondered if i was actually just manifesting it into reality.

so instead of making a slash death page, i decided to recolor my avatar.^🂠 i pumped some blood back into the veins by adding some actual hue into the palette. though, it's still in range of "not beating the sickly victorian allegations," closer to irl.

after i did that, i thought it would be a good idea to totally redo the colors on this whole homepage and have a more cohesive and consistent color system. i always like it when people make personal palettes, like wibby's and goose's. previously, i was just eyeballing the colors between my image based assets and my html color codes. it was more or less arbitrary because i've been adding things to this place piece by piece. but i finally took the time to go through all of the colors and brought them in line with each other. it was a bit more work than i expected but i'm glad i got it done. i decided to set a limitation so that i could only pick from the 4096 3 digit hex codes for the main rainbow roygbiv colors. no reason for that, just for laughs and headaches. i would have liked to have done the neutrals with all 3 digits too but there just weren't enough options for how many i wanted (i didn't want the neutrals to be totally hueless.) and there are other places where i have to break the rules and use 6-digit hexes too. can't be a slave to the rules all the time ^-^

the result is a bit brighter and livelier and i'm happy about that. this homepage represents the intangible interior life that that's nourishing me. the part of me that still wants to live. i don't need it to be a memorial just yet.

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oops, got a little existential there. but i can't help it.

i finished watching the ending of squid game. this show can be pretty on the nose. as a metaphor, it's not a subtle one at all for the evils of capitalism where the most desperate in society are lured into fighting each other in games of death at the pleasure of the rich.

but i've been thinking more specifically about the main character, gi-hun's, arc under the backdrop of current events. it's the story of how much cruelty a kind person can witness and endure before their spirit breaks and they lose all faith in humanity.

every time i open social media now, i feel as if i'm entering the squid game world as a flood of genocide, injustice, exploitation, and selfishness and the resulting pain fill my screen. it's wearing me down. i'm desperately looking for the helpers to keep my hope alive, just as the show gives you good and moral characters like hyun-ju and ali to root for.

the final seasons of the show have a mechanic where the survivors vote after each death game to decide whether or not to continue. again, a not very subtle mirror to the real world where it often feels like being outnumbered by people who actually revel in the suffering that's being inflicted on others and want to continue to do more. and you keep screaming at the screen.

as geum-ja says to gi-hun: "Life is just unfair. Bad people do bad things, but they blame others and go to live in peace. Good people, on the other hand, beat themselves up about the smallest things."

maybe that's too much thinking about squid game. of course, there's the ironic meta of it implicating the viewer as complicit in enjoying the death spectacle which leads it to becoming a huge money-making franchise ip, spinning off actual reality competition shows, and even mr. beast making it his whole personality, seemingly oblivious to the morality play aspects of it. also the creator/writer/director, hwang dong-hyuk, being coerced into making the the 2nd and 3rd seasons by netflix's truck of money at the cost of high stress and losing his teeth (⌒_⌒;) this all makes it more ridiculous and undercuts the hopeful message in it and enforces the pure nihilism.

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some other small homepage updates i did this time around:

• while editing the colors, i also redrew and refined some of the pixel art
• fixed a bunch of non-critical typos in the css that i found while combing through it
• i joined omg.lol and added the statuslog service to my aggregated social feed. there's a lot of cool stuff they offer that i'm still playing around with

i think for the rest of the summer, i'll be doing html/css/js housekeeping to tidy and simplify all of the stuff i've been adding lately. it's gotten to be a bit of a mess in some areas!

as i add more things to this homepage and it continues to grow, it's getting more complex to navigate and to find things. part of that is by design. this isn't really an informational website like a job portfolio or a storefront for service hours/company details or a public/educational information resource. it's more of a playground, a free range site, where meandering is part of the experience. it's not crucial that visitors see everything when they visit, just like visitors to my irl home don't need to look in every room when they stop by (⌒_⌒;)

with a physical house, however, people can get a sense of the whole without seeing every room because they can see the general shape and boundaries of the house. this is not really possible with a homepage. there is no overall outside shape that can be discerned with a glance. it exists in pretty much limitless infinite space. i could tuck a page into a sub sub sub directory and probably no one would ever find it by wandering or even intuit it exists unless i explicitly draw attention to it with a link.

where meandering – just aimlessly wandering, exploring, and discovering things – can be fun, getting lost is not fun. being lost is usually frustrating. the last thing i want is for things to be so convoluted here that visitors have an unpleasant time. there are already enough unpleasant, annoying, unusable things on the internet – ads, captchas, paywalls, dark patterns, etc (╥_╥)

so i was thinking about how to add some more usability the past couple weeks and ended up making a map^🂠 as another way to explore this place. mystery is fine but the mystery can be better with some clues. to continue with the video game-like mechanics here, it's partially inspired by pause maps like in zelda but moreso the ascii art elements of old text-based mud games. i was too young to play muds but i have faint memories of seeing them being played so my map is kind of what i remember/imagine them looking like. the balloon to access the map is supposed to also reference the pin marker icons we see in map apps floating above locations ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ it's a pretty small map for now but having it opens up a lot of possiblities for more expansions in the future!

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that's all for this update. i don't really feel like writing about the world this week. things continue to be bad all around, everyone knows. if i dwell on things too much, it's bad for my mental health and paralyzing. so i'll save you from having to read another rant this time. i just want to keep moving. i'm still dancing to the kpop demon hunters soundtrack but that new blackpink comeback jump song is fun too with the weird europop hardstyle stuff. the jump music video is crazy!! the whole thing is so heavily 90s coded (๑>ᴗ<๑)

i can't believe i've been building my homepage for 1 whole year now! i probably wouldn't have believed it if you told me at the beginning that i'd keep up with updating, expanding, redesigning, and blogging multiple times a month for twelve months straight (especially with all the other complications in my daily life.) but here we are and it's still going. happy birthday, homepage ^-^

how did this start again? by early 2024, i was already deep in disillusionment about my internet life. i was spending too much time on the platforms and the platforms were becoming hellholes as things like twitter's transmogrification into x became fully realized and ai generated slop started taking root everywhere, metastasizing and exacerbating already existent spam and social problems and everything was ever more clearly just about hijacking attention for profit or propaganda. because i've been the full time caregiver for my parents for many years and it's limited my ability to travel freely, the web was usually the place i could escape to, a connection to new and wonderful things going on outside of my hyperlocal daily chores, a respite from watching my dad falling apart and suffering. by summer 2024, i did not feel like the time i spent on the internet was beneficial to me in this way anymore. at least not if all my time was spent on platforms. if anything, it just made me more depressed about life.

platforms, to me, are like prepackaged mega cruise ships where millions of random people are crammed into a single enclosed space. the space prescribed what activities you could do but anything you did would be onboard and within the boundaries of the vessel. the best memories of the internet in my life are not of scrolling posts and clicking little heart icons. sure, i've met a lot of good people on social websites, and i'm glad for that, but it felt more and more restricted in the same way i was restricted irl. what i really longed for was to get back into the uncharted waters of an open world/internet. my best internet experiences were exploring and making things that i cared about. what i needed was a lifeboat or maybe my own sailboat so i could go off on my own again.

i hadn't had a personal website of my own for many years. the ones i had in the past never lasted very long. when i still had real jobs, my professional websites always took priority over my personal ones. for the last few years, i had been threatening to make a new personal page but i only finally got around to it as the world appeared to be entering a new dystopian phase, with the spectre of authoritarianism growing everywhere. who knows how much longer we'll all be able to publish freely on the internet. and watching my dad's cognitive decline, i'm constantly reminded of my own human limitations and lifespan. might as well make the best use of these things while i still can ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

i'm glad i have this homepage. it really is a lifeboat for me in many ways. not being able to travel anywhere in the real world and not even having much physical space due to being a live-in caregiver, it's nice to have a virtual space that i can organize and decorate the way i like.

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to celebrate this 1 year anniversary, i added a wayback machine/time machine. you can flip through snapshots of some of the updates to my front page room and see all the tiny little detail changes i've made.^🂠 i also added a swatch internet time clock to the status bar. to open the time machine, just click on the time. for aesthetic/conceptual reasons, i've omitted from the timeline all the changes on the side pages like the lofi site, 404 page, and splash page.

i've always loved it when people put a gallery of their old site designs on their homepages. this is a more incremental variation of that idea. i had to dig through my backup drives and remake some of the earlier iterations of the front page in order to get the snapshots but luckily the internet archive started fully archiving my page a few months after i started so i could use that to get snaps (⌒_⌒;)

obviously, i took inspiration from apple's time machine ui (i also felt like bringing back the cute os9 wristwatch cursor for when you hover over the internet time.) you can scroll it, use the arrow icons, or click on the timeline. trying to figure out the logic to do all the stack ordering, movements, timing, and animations kind of drove me crazy all week! maybe my brain wasn't working well because it's been hot here and also sleep has not been great. but it was a good challenge and welcome distraction from the worsening state of the world.

it's only been a year but flipping through it already makes me nostalgic. it's funny seeing the time that has passed laid out in this way, adding up all those sporatic hours i've spent refining things down to the pixel.

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finally, i just want to say thank you so so so much to everyone who's been visiting my page and reading my blog this first year <3 and also thank you to everyone that has talked to me about this page. i do occasionally drop into social platforms (some are still okay places to visit but i don't want to live there) to share updates and it's nice to chat with people on there about this. when i started this, one thing i didn't expect was all the emails i have gotten from curious and likeminded people. i kind of assumed pulling up stakes from social would mean being an internet hermit and i was okay with that. but it wasn't the case at all and people still found me so maybe there is an alternative to the digital world we're given. nature finds a way ^-^

what's in store for the next year? i don't know. i didn't really expect to get this far. but i've still got a list of things that i want to make here. and i'll keep blogging about it. maybe i'll start doing some off schedule blogging about other topics. for example, i watched kpop demon hunters the other day and i loved it and it could be fun to write more about it. the designs, animation, songs, themes, characters – it's all so good! or maybe just general life stuff. usually i try to keep the things that i include in my update blogs somewhat relevant to the update, even if only thematically. but maybe i can be looser about my blogging format. the sky's the limit. this is my homepage so i can do whatever i want ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

it's been a while since i made any major updates to the partykit cursor chat on my homepage so here are some:

i added a button to the chat menu so that you can manually choose whichever cursor type you want to be – sphere, cat, cube, bunny, or slime, yay! ^-^

i also completely overhauled the chat name system.^🂠 previously, i used ens to display domain names in chat because i liked that it didn't require sign ups or collecting user data (i don't want anyone's data at all ever.) but it kept breaking and i kept having to fix it. it was usually because some library or dependency got updated and introduced breaking changes. i don't mind fixing problems that i create on my own but it's annoying to constantly have to find and fix things that break unexpectedly outside my control. just for this little feature, i was using viem, the ethereum database, ens ccip read, dns records, eip 6963, browser extensions. there were just too many moving, fragile parts.

i wanted to simplify the chat name system and make it more in line with the philosophy of the rest of my page which avoids dependencies, libraries, and frameworks and stick to stable, mature, general basic building blocks as much as it can (partykit/cursor party being the major exception.) i want to make things that are durable and lasting.

i tried a couple iterations. the first used indieauth/indielogin and it worked fine but made things dependent on indieauth endpoints which could be a new weak spot. i wanted to strip things down even more and get rid of that intermediary.

what i landed on was just using the fancy 1991 technology known as pgp keys. i already use my pgp key to log into indieweb services. so i took the basic idea and format from there of calling a public key hosted on a website as the way to authenticate ownership and prevent impersonation.

tutorial time! to set up your key for chat:

1. if you don't have a pgp key, you can generate one with gui tools like gpg suite (macos) or with the command line (most linux distros usually have pgp stuff by default.) *make sure the email domain extension on your key is your website domain!
2. export your public key (see links above) as a .pub, .gpg, or .asc and upload it to your webserver
3. add a link to it in the head of your website's index page like this:
   <link rel="pgpkey" href="https://website.net/key.pub">

now you're ready to authenticate!

1. open the chat menu on my homepage by pressing forward slash (/) on your keyboard and then click the user icon. enter your domain into the prompt
2. if you added your key correctly to your site, as above, it will see it and give you a challenge message to sign. highlight the text and sign with the openpgp services in your right-click menu if you have gpg suite on macos. or sign it in terminal with this command:
   echo 'put challenge message here' | --gpg clearsign
   if you have multiple keys, add your email address to the end of the command to pick the one you want: -u user@website.net
3. paste in the whole signed message output into the bottom field and click verify, and that's it!

there, i think that's much simpler and even enhances the benefits of the previous system. now there are far less dependencies, you don't need a browser extension, and there's not even a database involved. everything is done locally other than the external call to the public key on your website (so higher privacy/security.) your browser stores your verified domain in localstorage until you clear it by clicking the user icon button again.

let me know if you run into any problems if you try it out ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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some other updates: i added delta.chat as a contact method, if you want to get in touch with me that way. it's a chat that runs on the fancy 1980s email technologies known as smtp and imap. incidentally, it also uses pgp keys for encryption ^-^

other than that, i made a bunch of cosmetic edits. i got rid of the slide up animation on the zoomed items and changed it to pop out animations instead. seems to make more sense. i also added some blurring with the pop outs to pull focus to create a bit more depth.

i was kind of thinking about apple's new "liquid glass" ui skin when i was designing the chat name authentication modal and then carried some of the design elements back into the rest of the page. personally, i think the liquid glass preview is a mess and the things that are working, like the blurs and semi-transparency, are things that already exist in the current apple os, just less bubbly, less refraction. but it's probably all a marketing thing where you preview an exaggerated or outrageous version of what the public release will be so people will post about it – like concept cars or the sonic the hedgehog movie.

overall i'm not too invested in the liquid glass discourse. it will be on apple systems for a few years and then probably evolve into something else again when it falls out of fashion. but i can't shake a bit of sadness that this was the big news coming out of this year's wwdc. i just feel like this is the continuation of my ongoing slow-drip disappointment (goodbye mickey mouse glove ( ;´ - `;)) in the post jobs/ive era which is pushing me away from apple towards things that instill me with more wonder and curiosity like framework (i get mine next month!!) or a uconsole and linux. maybe i'm becoming danish.

i'm just so sick of living in the superficial, disposable, and vapid, trend-chasing, engagement-farming, looksmaxxing, growth-hacking, pivot-to-video-to-vr-to-ar-to-mr-to-xr-to-ai, move-fast-and-break-things, planned-obsolescence, get-your-bag, empty slop content culture of today's world where everything is constantly breaking changes and falling apart like cheap shein/temu dresses.

sigh

be the change you want to see, etc etc etc.

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in irl news, i've reached some new brutal levels of doing dementiacare and haven't slept for a few days (╥_╥) things are not going great!

sometime last year, i filled out a web form to submit my homepage to a project called internet phone book by kristoffer tjalve and elliott cost. i actually kind of forgot about it until a couple weeks ago, when the printed phone book was released. my phone number in it is 677. unfortunately, by the time i went to order one, it had sold out and i'm not near any of the physical shops that have copies (╥_╥) i'll have to wait for a reprint.

i saw elliot make a post on bluesky about adding a phone book badge to one's own website. so i did. but i didn't want to use the iframe they provided, i'm not a big fan of iframes. instead, i rewrote/recreated their badge code in my own. but then i kept going.

on the internet phone book website, there is also a nice dialer interface that lets you enter phone numbers from the phone book and it gives you the url. it's a really fun approach to the idea of a links section or web directory. what if every website had it's own phone interface to get around the internet of homepages? so i decided to rebuild that in my js as well and added a dialer^🂠 that reads off the internet phone book json file. now you can dial up random links to explore other sites after you're done here (⌒_⌒;) i love typing in a random number and visiting a place i've never seen before. i also added a 0 (operator) entry so that it credits the source.

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i've still been mainly keeping to myself, just doing odd, small projects whenever i can. like the above just to keep my mind moving and not let it be paralyzed by the cascading injustices and atrocities and horrors of the world.

i watched andor season 1 and 2 (and rogue one) over the past couple weeks. i probably should have been getting my sleep but i kept seeing people speak highly of it so i cheated on my bedtime to take a look. i'm not a star wars fan at all. i haven't actually seen very much star wars stuff besides the original movies but i enjoyed andor. maybe it's because there was no jedi/force/etc stuff in it. it's often billed as star wars for people who aren't into star wars. it's basically intergalactic sci-fi les misérables.

i appreciated it because, in this moment, i really just need to watch stories about oppressed people fucking up seemingly all-powerful oppressors and their oppressive plans/systems, against all odds. maybe that's why i like severance as well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ andor is not a happy story – there are close parallels to many of the horrible things that we face in the world today like authoritarianism and genocide. it's brutal but it's also about hope in the face of these things.

i also watched mountainhead, which satirically profiles a lot of the gross public figures and their echo chamber brainrotted hubris sludge that clogs the internet pipes in real life. it was interesting to watch it after andor because it was not a far stretch in my headcanon to graft the mountainhead characters' ugly rationalizations and selfish distain and disregard for others to the motivations of the empire in star wars. it does a good job depicting how even allegedly smart people, with all their privilege and resources, can get high on their own supply and end up arrogantly building things like surveillance states, megaprison islands, and death stars.

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speaking of hope, a new internet magazine called good internet launched this week and i've been enjoying all the thoughtfulness in it. it has a lot of reminiscing about and maybe even mourning of the web we've lost but also a lot of hope for finding it again. the piece about building a slow web really resonated with me.

i feel like i've been on a very similar journey with my homepage and my relationship with today's internet. hearing someone else express the value of what the web can be for them reaffirms for me why it's important to make even silly little personal homepages which just exist to say, "hey, let me share a bit about myself with you", in a world that feels like its turning away from empathy and compassion. maybe it's like how the rebels in andor appropriate, recycle, and repurpose the imperial technology that oppresses them to use in their fight for freedom (our internet originated from a military/government project after all.) it's a way to resist and rebel against those who would warp and flatten the web with their grotesque power and distorted vision into a feed of pain to numb us into hopelessness. "rebellions are built on hope."

the blogroll thing i made in the previous update has been a real sanity and time saver for me. i made it for fun but i've actually been enjoying it a lot as a social media replacement.

some days i wake up to a handful of new blog posts, all of which i'm excited to read. other days there are no new posts and i can just go on with my day. never is there an algorithm filling my feed to the brim to keep me locked inside. why did everyone accept the infinite scroll state as our reality so easily? if i just want to follow people and things i'm interested in, why do i also have to suffer all the ads, empty filler, engagement baiting, and 99% irrelevant recommendations (╥_╥)

it's not just a social media thing either. say you finish enjoying a show on a streaming service. the algo is immediately offering more, mostly inaccurate, recommendations. what's wrong with just sitting and contemplating what you just watched rather than rush to what's next? maybe i'm just picky but i've never discovered anything worthwhile via a recommendation algo that i didn't already know about or had on my watchlist anyways.

i grew up in the time of online piracy where you really had to seek out what you wanted. i don't think there was anything wrong with having to do that leg work. if anything, it made me more discerning about the things i absorb.

on the creation side of things, i learned that youtube has a weird "inspiration" tab now that gives ai generated ideas to youtube creators so that they can keep churning out regular content. i guess anything to keep both creators and consumers on the infinite treadmill (and their eyes on the ads.) it feels very dystopian and not really about inspiration, just a slog to fill all available time and space.

as if the worst thing in the world is unstructured free time.

but that's when i get my best ideas. that's when the least external input is influencing my thinking and i can really entertain whatever's on my mind. that's how i learned all the skills i have today from art to music to html, etc etc – everything because i could just explore and play around with things. my dream is just to have a day with no plans, no schedule, to do whatever i want at any pace i want. that's an impossibility with my current life circumstances.

since i've been scrolling social less, i've had a bit more time to play and explore. the url for my homepage is a subdirectory (/page) so that means the root url is open. there's just been a very basic placeholder page there that redirects to /page. but i thought that's a wasted opportunity to make something nice. so i challenged myself to make a fun splash page using only css – no fonts or images! (taking some inspiration from lynn fisher's css experiments.)

i've done different video game perspectives for different pages like isometric for the homepage and top down for the 404 page so i thought i should do a side scroller view for the splash page. i also found this amazing archive of nes title screens and i loved looking at all the weird and funny pixel typography.

so that's where the inspiration for my title screen came from. since i was dealing with pixel art, unlike the smooth shapes of fisher's css drawings, i had to come up with a way to draw all the pixels. there are tools online to convert pixel art to css using the stacked box-shadow method but i found that they weren't very efficient with the bytes so i came up with a way to do it by combining stacked box-shadows, clip-path polygons, and a bit of linear-gradient. it was kind of an exercise in masochism, plotting out all the coordinates, but also very meditative ^-^

i haven't decided if i'll add some music to that page but i did finally get back into garageband to play around on the keyboard!

some other things i worked on the past couple weeks:

• fixed the blogroll button logic so now they go to the next post from whatever position you are in the list
• added a few more bloggers to the blogroll area
• fixed my webmentions so now i can send and receive link notifications here. finally!
• made my blog microformats compliant
• ongoing html/css/js refining

due to having no me time these days because of my dad's health, my time spent on passive online scrolling has plummeted. but that's a good thing and i'm pretty grateful for that, given how things have been going in the world lately. as hank green wrote: "...it's very easy for any social content platform [...] to be a misery machine..."

i tried to think of what i do miss from when i was spending more time on social platforms. there's not much. i don't really need hundreds of running public monologues to keep up with. any critical news will reach me via other methods. i could be missing some funny one-liner jokes but those just feel like empty calories usually. the only thing i worry about missing is people i follow sharing real and interesting things that they are doing or working on. that's what i'm interested in. things that people actually spent time and effort making, put their full hearts into.

because i have such limited online time, i'd much rather look at my rss subscriptions than social media because that's where i still find the most substance for far less attention cost. i still love using rss. i feel like in this age of information overload, with everyone streaming every unprocessed musing through the data fire hose, someone taking the time to collect and organize their thoughts into an edited form before transmitting is a special kindness. we somehow ended into a place where everyone wants as much attention as possible by putting in as little effort as possible and many tools are being built today to facilitate that impulse and it's mostly yielding a dismal reality. please try. i know i'm happier to see rarer well-considered and composed longform essays only a couple times a month than overabundant hourly disconnected, contextless updates.

i've never really been a truly addicted social media person. i never got into posting about everything that comes to mind, engaging in endless "discourse," chasing engagement and massaging the algorithm. i think i mainly use social platforms as shitty rss readers. it was a compromise because platforms removed rss support in their services but people kept posting on them. but a "social reader" is kind of like crapware that's prepackaged with useless stuff as features i didn't ask for and don't want. it's getting worse now with all the low effort generated slop being shoehorned in.

that's the thought process of this week's homepage update. in my ideal internet, social profiles would just be personal homepages and the timeline would just be one's collection of other people's rss feeds. so i wanted to make something to see what that could look like.

i added a zoomed view to the 88x31 links pop up,^🂠 a little semi-secret area that's a twist on the old blogroll idea. it's a hybrid blogroll/feed that's similar to dave winer's blogroll with chronological ordering and post previews. closer in form to what we think of as a social feed.

it pulls in a bunch of website blogs that i enjoy by people i know and/or that have come into my orbit since i began building my homepage. the kind of blogs i like to follow are personal ones about life in general and about making websites. i was disappointed when i found out some blogs i wanted to include didn't have rss feeds (╥_╥)

some design notes:

• the feed updates hourly
• i think it's funny and ridiculous to have to draw a pixel portrait of anyone i want to add to the feed. it's totally unscalable beyond a handful of blogs. but that's also good because it keeps it focused on things i really want there. none of the follow-for-follow nonsense of social media because of the higher effort required
• each blog has a border color that i sampled from the actual blogs (or approximate. i still like using hex colors on my homepage but some of you like the fancy stuff like oklch (⌒_⌒;))
• you can also use the controller buttons the move between posts if you want. i haven't got the logic just right yet so it can be a little janky ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ i wasn't originally going to do anything with that but i might as well not let that space go to waste
• you can use the bottom screen to draw and save drawings. it has nothing to do with the feed above other than to display the blogroll title but why not make the space interactive and invoke some pictochat nostalgia?

i'll add more blogs as i think of them or find new ones. i don't know if i will add blogs that are published on writing platforms even though there are a few i like to read regularly. nothing against writing on platforms (well, maybe like a lot of people, i'm against substack) – i know they are useful tools for people who maybe don't want to mess with a full website – but at least put it behind your own domain if you can! i usually just post those kinds of sources to my readings list anyways. i like that the blogroll takes people to personal sites.

i don't have a lot to talk about this week. i've mostly been disconnected from the larger world, focusing on little projects around my irl home and my url home.

recently, i've kind of hit a limit with my online "content" intake. it all just blurs together now. if i didn't save articles i've enjoyed to my homepage read list, i'd probably completely forget about them. it just feels like there's so much all the time and everything keeps getting overwritten the next day. no one seems to retain anything or there doesn't seem to be a point to. maybe i need to do an overinformation cleanup like alex. my rss feed reader is probably my calmest window into online information though. the worst for me are the algorithm driven endless scrolls like social media and news apps. i'd like to make it so that there's less junk and empty filler when i spend time online.

for now, i've just been ignoring the growing unread/unwatched badge numbers and open tabs. i've been going for short bike rides when i have spare time and still running sporadically. but, apart from that, i don't have much time left over with my dad getting worse and needing more care every day. it's difficult and depressing to think about all the things he could still somewhat do only a year ago that he can't do now. basic things like stringing more than a few words together in sentences or going to the bathroom by himself. all gone, so fast.

watching his decline, i'm constantly reminded that i need to make good use of my brain, body, and time while those things are still available to me. i don't believe keeping up with all the brainrot on today's internet is a good use. my brain will likely rot on it's own some day anyways. i'd rather experience other things before i get to the point where i have no other choice but brainrot.

homepage updates^🂠:

• refined the 404 page a bit more. put a subtle shadow on the caption box so it has more of that floating lcd look and also made the text type in when the page loads. it's the little details ^-^
• added a zoomed view for the readings pop up on the front page. some link titles are so long and it makes reading at the isometric angle kind of a pain!
• rewrote a bunch of of my spaghetti js to clean it up and make it more consistent and performant. it's a constant process. i saw someone make a bug report on bugzilla that my homepage was causing firefox to go crazy. so i managed to drop it from 100+% cpu load to a more normal ~20-30%. sorry ff users, i'm bad at checking my site in that browser.

escapism

in this week's homepage update, i finally got around to making a 404 page.^🂠 i'd been thinking about what to do about it for a while but i kept putting it off because i didn't have any ideas that really excited me until now.

i've been fantasizing a lot lately about leaving the (human) world behind and disappearing off the grid into the forest or mountains because, you know, the world is a nightmare (more so than usual) at the moment. i wish i could say i've been good about staying away from social media to protect my mental health but i kept getting drawn into watching the horror show these past couple weeks. i don't know why i can't look away. constant attention doesn't really help anything and the bad news will reach me in time anyways. it's like knowing i'm firmly within the blast radius of a slow motion explosion but i still want to torture myself with real-time updates about when exactly i will be vaporized ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

anyways, in another era, i could have just picked up and left to go live quietly in a remote fishing village in a fjord or something but i can't really do that now as my parents need me so much more to be here. particularly my dad, he's been deteriorating quite rapidly every day and needs help doing the most basic of things. home life is another kind of horror show that i can't get away from.

so in lieu of actually being able to escape into a forest, i made one for my 404 page ^-^ i was talking to my friend allsee the other day about making indie rpg games and she told me about yume nikki which has a really cool ambience and gameplay. then i found the yno project of fan made games that expand on the yume nikki world. playing some of them, i got inspired to make some top down sprite art for my error page. it was a nice change of pace from drawing isometric sprites.

at first i was just going to have a simple static image on the page but one thing led to another and i ended up making it playable. you can use the onscreen buttons or your keyboard arrows+a/b to find your way back to my home. i think i just kept adding more work to distract myself from the world. there were a few good solid days of drawing, coding, and problem solving tucked in between cooking/cleaning/caregiving that kept me offline. now if i can just keep that up every day for the next 4+ years (╥_╥)

some other recent stuff:

• added my pico blog to the homepage micro feed. my friend brad told me about pico. it's an ssh powered service and it's fun to play with.
• i decided to stop using google search and switched over fulltime to kagi. it's great and i don't miss google at all! no more useless ads and slop pushing down all my search results. and with everything that's been happening in the world, i'm just so sick of using the tools of the tech broligarchy. i think i might also have to get back into linux. i really want one of the new lavender framework 12 laptops but i don't know with all the tariff chaos and i don't know if i'm just too entrenched in the apple ecosystem at this point (⌒_⌒;)
• i haven't been very good at keep up my sleeping/running/music goals (some reasons mentioned above.) but i'm still trying. now that the weather is nicer, i can also start riding my bike again.

wolves in sheep's clothing

for the past few days, there has been a social media trend using chatgpt to "redraw" photographs in the anime style of studio ghibli. my social timelines have been flooded with these images that i just find vacuous. i love hayao miyazaki's work but the reason why nausicaä is one of my favorite films is not just because of how it looks. it's something more than the lines and colors that make the image. there's something deeper that makes it speak to people. when i look at these ai filtered images, they feel nothing like the wonder of watching princess mononoke. they just feel trite and makes my timeline feel polluted with endless stuff that sucks. i know i'm comparing feature length films to what is essentially a snapchat dog ears filter but i feel there are some unsettling things going on here.

i'm reminded of this youtube video i watched last week about conservatives and the alt-right co-opting fashion styles that are more associated with progressives and the left. an important point made in the video is that this annexation of superficial elements happens because the right is incapable of the creativity that is necessary to create these desirable aesthetics. this is perhaps why progressives have billie eilish and chappell roan and conservatives have kid rock and post-mental breakdown kanye.

i personally believe a lot of desirable aesthetics comes from empathic practice (ie. being a decent human being) because empathy is what allows you to understand people's feelings, perspectives, and, of course, desires. i'm not saying "the left" is the empathic side but it seems obvious that the rightwing hate and reject empathy (elon musk calls empathy a weakness of civilization – tho it's debatable whether he even understands what empathy is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.) but they still want to be seen and adored the way decent people are without having to give up their racism, bigotry, etc. so they appropriate the easy signifiers and become wolves in sheep's clothing. and as the video points out, when they take over the look, it ruins it for everyone else.

the ghibli filtered images are doing the same thing. many people want to harness the pureness of miyazaki's vision for their own purposes without having to go through the empathic study that miyazaki goes through to hone his style, thereby completely missing the point of what makes it good (i recommend everyone watch any documentary about miyazaki's life and practice (there are many!)) all ai can do is take the superficial, reproducible, elements and use it as a wrapper. one of the most disgusting things i saw was the assholes in the white house using it to illustrate their dehumanizing acts of cruelty. i guess it really is true that ai is the aesthetic of facism. when used in this way, ai allows vile people to cosplay, taking and mimicking qualities they will never ever have. it's telling that ghibli/miyazaki is the main target of this trend, rather than some other more morally compromised, less "principled", yet no less virtuosic, visual style.

anyways, i had to get this rant out because i was annoyed about how my feeds are clogged with slop, defeating their main usecase for me (i use social to talk to humans, not to look at people's prompt history. i can chat with ai on my own if i wanted to.) i kept having flashbacks to the era when vapid quizzes and listicles were inescapable on the internet. but maybe i should be grateful that it pushed me to stay off social even more than usual because it let me know i wasn't going to miss anything special or interesting during the slopstorm (⌒_⌒;) i have some more complex thoughts on this that i could ramble on about re: ethics, artists, creativity, etc. etc. but this post is already too long so maybe i'll save them for another time.

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some homepage updates:

• added a small animated transition for when the source viewer loads.^🂠 now it loads with kind of an interlacing effect ^-^
• fixed some of the ascii spot illustrations in the source. i got reports that some of the unicode characters were too uncommon and not rendering on some devices
• edited all my pages to 2 space indents rather than 4. i did this to make the things look nicer in the source viewer but i decided for consistency, i should change it on every other page as well.

i've been getting a bit more sleep lately. not because i've figured out how to manage my sleep schedule but because i've been sick the past couple weeks. i think i had the flu or maybe it was stress from dementia care and/or world affairs but my whole body just ached for days and forced me to shut down. i'm feeling a little better now. i went for a short run on tuesday but i was definitely still struggling.

i can't complain too much – the forced break from the bleakness of the world has been nice. maybe the best thing about the internet right now is that you can still log off.

during the down time, i've been slowly continuing my edits here on the homepage. emphasis on the slow (⌒_⌒;) i sometimes envy the ignorance-fueled confidence of brain-rotted billionaires who just want to go fast and break things, hacking and slashing functioning systems with a chainsaw, committing little oopsies that need to be quickly reverted, all while being fully insulated by their position from the consequences of their actions as real people suffer. what a carefree existence! my only problem is that i actually want my homepage to work though. not only that, i'd like it to be accessible and responsible (well, as much as it can be with its weird structure) and not just "efficient" above all other considerations. i'd like it to have some humanity in an internet that feels less and less for humans.

The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; the second worst enemy is total efficiency. – Aldous Huxley

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some inefficient upgrades^🂠:

• i added some more ascii art to the html to break up the sections better and make it more visually fun.
• i decided to inline all my front page js so that you can also see it in the source viewer overlay i added last time. i know having so much css and js inlined is not the best practice but, hey, the front is a single page anyways and i'm not building a commercial/corporate website here ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ conceptually i think it works better and is worth it and my whole initial page load is still only ~170kb and hopefully i can get it down even more as i keep editing (there's still a time and place for efficiency improvements, just not at all costs.)
• on the "2d" side of the site, i replaced my self-portrait image with an ascii version + some css transform tricks to smooth it out a bit. previously the image was a base64 encoded image. i've been meaning to change this for a while because i wanted all the 2d pages to be nothing but text and only html/css. thinking about little details like this just makes me happy.

i was pausing on adding new front-facing features to my homepage for a little while in order to tidy up my source code and reorganize it a bit better. but as i was doing that, i started making little ascii doodles in the html comments and began thinking of it as another dimension to this place that people should be encouraged to explore. after all, that's how i learned to make websites myself. i love clicking "view source" or "inspect element" on everything interesting to see how things are made.

so i ended up adding a new feature. a "view source" button in the status bar^🂠 that will turn on a little ascii "x-ray" view of the page that you can look at and scroll the source in. you can also always just click view source in your browser and it's a little easier to read in full browser width.

as the internet has evolved towards more closed off and proprietary formats and services and big companies hold more and more power and control over it, it's actually pretty amazing that you can still make whatever you want and put it on the internet yourself. you're not limited to using only services that some megacorp deems will generate them enough money to build and provide to you for "free." at least not yet.

i get it. it's easier to just make an account. it's easier to just to be a poster on a platform. to make tiktoks and not have to think about how to get the video from your phone to other people's phones. but i can't help feeling that a lot of personal agency gets lost there, traded for a more convenient yet diminished relationship with being on the internet.

that's why i believe people should always learn a bit of html. and why i think it's important to highlight the source here in some way, even if mine is not the most pristine html/css/js ever (⌒_⌒;)

anyways, that's what i've been busy with these past couple weeks. it's getting harder to make things that are joyful while watching the world turn upside down with people losing livelihoods and rights and hope on a daily basis (on top of everything that's going wrong in my own life). but i keep reminding myself that if i don't make that joy myself, i will have none at all with the way things are going.

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a couple other additions:

• octothorp.es – a nice project that's part web ring and part hashtags for websites. i integrated it here. hopefully it's working, i won't really know until i upload this update ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• some new links on the links page and links pop up

i don't have a lot of website stuff to write about this time. i've mainly just been doing little ongoing invisible things around the homepage – cleaning up code, tightening up nuts and bolts, fixing bugs, adding/editing various material and copy. i'm still trying to organize the html/css better so that it's easier to manage since i write everything out by hand.

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a little check-in on my 2025 goals

• running – still only a few times a week. not very regular, i blame the weather (⌒_⌒;)
• music – i've been singing to myself and making up lyrics but haven't sat down to mess around with recording anything
• sleep – abysmal. i can't stick to a reasonable bedtime. my dad's worsening condition isn't helping (╥_╥)

every time i feel a little motivated to get things on track, that feeling quickly gets sapped by the horrible developments in the world bleeding into my peripheral view and ruining my focus. i'm doing my best to stay off social media and news feeds but it still gets through. i'm usually left feeling "why even bother?" about doing anything like reaching goals. i'm painfully aware this happens every time i scroll these days but i can't help but be drawn into looking at the trainwreck.

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a couple things i've been inspired by this week

• season 2 of severance – this show gives me something good to look forward to and helps me shut out the real world for an hour every week. i like that it's something to get fully engaged and immersed in (as opposed to the "second screen" content that netflix execs seem to want ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
• kendrick lamar's halftime show – i have zero interest in the super bowl and have never really cared about halftime shows. but i watched kendrick's online afterwards. there are so many great and powerful moments in the performance, the setlist, the design, and the choreo. i was surprised and happy to see sza make an appearance in there too! extra points for making a bunch of anti-diversity twitter bigots confused and mad >:)

having art and creativity that stirs up thoughts and emotions is especially important these days as a way to transcend the current conditions and maybe even as an act of resistance. the people who want power want everyone numb because it's easier to control and herd sleepwalking masses. the antidote is to be awake and attentive and enjoy things and get inspired. so whenever i slip into the feeling of "why even bother," these things help me remember me why. and even with the world is crashing down around me, i still want to make things that do that for others as well.

there's really nothing i abhor more than cruelty. especially punching down, bullying cruelty. it feels weird to even have to say this. like, shouldn't everyone be on board to reject cruelty? maybe, once upon a time, i had more faith in the kindness of strangers, the better angels of our nature, etc etc. but not at this moment in time. cruelty is platformed more than ever by the most powerful and spreading at higher speeds. even when i try to avoid social media and the news cycle, i can't escape seeing all the instances of cruelty being inflicted on people from the top down by a cruel government in just the past two weeks.

like the crackdown against immigrants, who have very little legal recourse and resources, being terrorized in workplaces and schools and then paraded around as props in photoshoots to feed the people who are sated by cruel acts before they are shipped to a black site (concentration camp.) or executive order after executive order to obsessively erase the existence of gender diverse people who are scapegoated as an existential threat despite only making up less than 1% of the population and so have very little political power and allies to fight to not be deprived of basic human things like access to a public bathroom without trouble. the cruel are eating well now.

and if you show any sensitivity, empathy, or compassion for the marked targets, you get cruelty directed at you – as people like bishop mariann edgar budde and selena gomez experienced this week for trying to share what should be perfectly normal reactions and feelings towards the horrible and heartless things taking place. in many ways, it's a weird inverted version of cancellation mobs by the people who supposedly hate "cancel culture."

normally, i would be hyperlinking all the stuff i'm mentioning but it's not hidden knowledge. people aren't accidentally being cruel because they don't know these things are going on. many are lapping it up and getting off on the cruelty, sharing these stories proudly as accomplishments. it's everywhere and i don't want to go look at that garbage again to get the links. and i don't like to link out to hate.

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i'm suddenly remembering something that happened when i was in grade 4.

that winter, there was a tiny after school creative dance program that my friend and i were in. in winter, we wore boots to school and would put them on the entrance boot rack as we changed into our dry shoes. my friend had just got some brand new boots that she was so excited about. we didn't live in a very well-off area. shiny, new things were rare.

anyways, our boots would be the only ones left on the rack after dance because everyone else had gone home. but one day, after our session of laughing at dumb dances we made up, the joy was quickly drained out of us. her boots weren't on the rack as we were leaving. we panicked and looked all around the muddy, slushy boot area. we eventually found them in a trash can buried under all sorts of gross kid trash. i still remember the look on her face. she was heartbroken and despondent. i was mad and confused. we sobbed as we walked home talking through it, trying to understand the reason. it seemed intentional but i couldn't understand why someone would want to do something like that and hurt someone. did they even consider that another person would be hurt or did they just get a thrill from inflicting cruelty? is cruelty the point?

it wasn't the first time i encountered cruelty in the world and certainly not the last but for some reason i remember that moment.

we drifted apart soon after that for no particular reason. just growing up, i suppose. in middle school, she reinvented herself as a popular girl. i continued to be the "strange" one, being a loner, following my own interests in the arts and computers. deviation from the standard in school usually puts a target on you and so i was on the receiving end of cruelty by the popular groups she was a part of. she was never directly cruel to me in her new role but she also didn't express any disagreement with her friends doing it. but i never held it against her. i understood that maybe she found safety from cruelty by allowing the cruel to direct their cruelty at someone else. i had a rich and fufilling enough life outside of school anyways that i could just brush it all off. it's just sad that this continues to happen on much more dire and devastating levels than teenage school drama to people who can't just ignore it but also can't do much about it.

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since i'm trying my best to limit my cruelty-porn intake, i've been using social media even less than before (sry if it sometimes takes me days to reply or react on social.) but i still read things around the internet that i like to share. so i added a bookmarks section^🂠 to my homepage in case people are interested in what i'm looking at. it's also another easy way to have more regularly updated content on the page between blog posts.

other updates:

• fixed some rendering bugs for firefox
• added multiple rss feeds so that now when you search my url in an rss reader, you should get a feed for this main blog, one for my aggregated microblogging posts, and one for my readings list.

i probably have to put a moratorium on new features for the next few weeks because i need to take some time to rewrite/refactor a lot of my code. it's getting a little out of hand (╥_╥) and i know there's a lot i can probably simplify.

since my last post, i managed to get out for a few runs and it felt good to do. unfortunately, it's gotten quite icy here so i haven't been able to go consistently. i've been making up for it by dancing a lot in my room while listening to music. just trying to restore my cardio.

i think the most difficult of the three goals i set is the sleep goal. i haven't been able to improve it much at all. my dad requires 24hr care and is prone to wandering and hallucinating in the middle of most nights which keeps me up. during the day, he's no better and it makes it hard to focus on doing/completing things so i keep running out the clock, pushing back my bedtime. i'm writing this while he's dozed off for 10-20 minutes probably (@_@;)

still, i'm trying.

the overall goal of reducing my doomscroll time is working though. i mainly just catch the smallest glimpses of irritating headlines about billionaires being shitheads and instead of feeling helpless and hopeless about it, i just move on to doing things that are better for me.

like adding useless things to this homepage ^-^

the other day, i was surprised to discover that imood.com is still around! i hadn't thought about it in over a decade or more and it still has active users. pretty amazing for something that started in 1995. now i've been noticing it more around the small web like on neocities sites. i guess it kind of became invisible to my brain for a while somehow.

i decided to add the imood status gif to my homepage as another source of live activity. it's an easy way to do an update, especially when i don't feel like writing anything. i landed on the idea of making a little os-style status bar to put it in.^🂠 that led me to make a little battery meter as well. it's not really measuring any real energy source – it's more of a timer. it drains during the day and shows the % of daytime left until night mode kicks in at 10pm. after that, it "charges" back up to 100% to start the next day. hopefully, it will also work as a visual reminder to help me keep track of the day better and go to bed on time.

other recent updates:

• restyled the left and right walls to unify the colors and create a better sense of visual depth and cohesion
• added some new links in the 88x31 and links page sections
• new open graph card design
• fixed some weird behavior bugs in my js
• css tweaks

i wanted to write a 2024 year end review but, really, the thought of doing so is kind of exhausting. the year marked the end of a lot of things for me and even though there were highlights, i don't feel like revisiting the disappointing ends at this time. all i know is that things have changed and i need to make some changes too going forward.

3 things i want to work on now:

1. start running again
2. make music again
3. sleep more again

i'd always been online a lot but my online-ness intensified when the pandemic hit. that, plus having to attend to my parents' health pushed me more online as an alternative for not being free to travel much anymore. being online was an escape from all that. online was also kind of a numbing agent for reality.

for a few years, it worked. but i think it stopped working in 2024 due to how the internet is evolving. by "online-ness", i'm mainly referring to infinite scroll-type internet like social media. the endless stream easily filled the gaps in my life for a while, overloading me with persistent content that could distract me from what i was missing in life. i don't know if human brains are really meant to handle this.

like most addictions, you need to keep upping the dosage for it to remain effective. it eats up more and more of your time and life, supplanting it. frequency increases and exposes you more and more to the dangers of using it. perhaps the people producing the recreational drug you've become dependent on begin lacing it with poison and you don't even notice what it's really doing to you. and when it stops working, it's hollowed out your world and you have nothing left without it.

i don't want that happen to me.

the three things i listed above are things i used to do more that made me feel good and healthy, physically and mentally. they gradually got pushed aside over the years because they do require some discipline to keep up whereas it's so effortless to slip into passive, mindless scrolling. the three things also require lots of offline time to do. i got lazy and traded them away for more online time. maybe they can be the antidote to how bad i've been feeling.

i've been struggling with stress and fatigue lately and i think bringing these things back into my life, even in small amounts, will help me feel better. at least i hope so, especially with what feels like an even more unpleasant reality looming in the near future (both in the world and as my parents get even older and frailer.) i don't want to be on social media when the news cycle gets even more annoying/depressing/devastating than it already is. i'm getting out of the doomscroll.

if you've been keeping up with this blog, you know i've already been pulling away from social networks. the apps are off my phone and i've been managing to only visit the sites on my computer once or twice a day and not at all on weekends. i'm going to spend what online time i give myself on intentional things. like working on my homepage or learning something useful or absorbing something beautiful. if i catch myself scrolling aimlessly, i'll go for a run or write a song or go to bed early (there are other things i can do too like reading a long book or going for a bike ride but i'm keeping the three listed nearby for quick access.)

i don't really do new year resolutions but maybe that's what this is.

ฅ^⸝⸝• ﻌ •⸝⸝^ฅ

i didn't really do much on this page over the holidays. i cleaned up some css and bought another domain name. elleshome.page also leads here now (⌒_⌒;)