5/29/2026

My back still hurts but is slowly improving. I had to get off the muscle relaxant, it was sending me into a ruminating, depressive spiral. I am feeling much better mentally now than I have for most of the past month.

Update 0.1.5_01: Added a poem (and therefor a new poetry section) to the "Keeping the Faith" page.

5/9/2026

Update 0.1.5: Most pages now have a small amount of content and organization, and the home page now features "latest video," which is a bit subjective given I have multiple channels but for now I'm sticking with non-stream, "primary" content. "Explorations and Adventures," "Fitness Log," and "Keeping the Faith" have the most content additions this update. "Gaming Diary" has the least amount of content added--it remains a hollow shell, a ghost town, much like my gamer life LOL. I need to go through my files and add some more photos to the photo gallery on the Explorations page, and then organize them in some way, probably chronologically. That might give me a good starting place for crafting a sort of narrative-based structure to the page.

The older I get, the less time and energy I have for all the various things I want to do, and the more things I seem to want to do but cannot find the time or money or energy for. The gap between all that I want to do and all that I am able to do...financially, logistically, and in most every other way...always seems to grow larger. Growing up, I was given the impression that the opposite would be true. Perhaps it was somewhat true at one time or place; perhaps I simply misunderstood.

4/27/2026

Update 0.1.4_08: Joined Cool Christian Webring. It appears that the convention is to have a button for one's site, but my first attempt at making such a button was very unsatisfactory.

4/26/2026

Update 0.1.4_07: Added an image gallery to the Explorations and Adventures page, but it is very basic and jank and only has six pictures and I cannot for the life of me, after hours of trying, get the pictures to take up the full width of their respective figures. Also I strained my back and I'm hopped up on muscle relaxants and steroids and I need to go to bed, but other than that it has been a lovely weekend.

4/21/2026

Update 0.1.4_06: Slight change to the formatting of the sidebar to include both a current read and a growing list of previous reads that I haven't gotten around to doing a full write-up for yet. This could become a problem, but better to read and write later than to write and not read...or something like that.

4/19/2026

Update 0.1.4_05: Started the fitness mini-blog on the "Fitness Log" page.

One of the dreadful things I felt over the past week is the encroaching sensation that my entire existence is being subsumed into duties. In a high-minded sense, this could be an ideal state if one's heart were perfectly aligned with the duties he must attend to. In reality, most of us are saddled with a handful of duties we really care about while we drown in a torrent of duties no sane son of Adam would ever concieve of except by necessity brought about by the dire circumstances we call "economics." We are indoctrinated into a system in which we are told that it our moral duty to attend to our toil, whose meaningfulness is tertiary at best, with the same zeal we would have if it were our own work. We are told to care in a situation in which the reasons to care are far too abstract for human consumption, and then force-fed a mountain of fluffy pseudo-virtues in order to justify this borderline worthless cause. This is, in my own words currently, the reason so many in my generation pine for some extremely ancient time when things were much simpler. "But you wouldn't last a day in that society," comes the response of the older croud, smug and even more poorly thought-out than the pining it is replying to. They are completely missing the point by framing the issue in the petty, insipid dynamic of boomer vs. millennial dick-measuring. Let me explain the point as I understand it.

There was once a time in human history, in many places not so long ago, when the duties before a man and the purpose of those duties walked hand-in-hand. The playbook was handed to him from birth by those who came before. One's duty was to hunt, to farm, to defend his people, to seek well-being personally and communally, physically and spiritually. The purposes of these duties were obvious and directly tied to the duties themselves. Hunt to eat, farm to live, defend to survive. That world is, for the most part, long-gone. Duty and its purposes are now separated by many layers of abstraction. One needs to feed his family, so he needs to give them food; in order to get food he needs money; in order to get money, he needs to give dozens of prospective employers a self-advertisement, and then sit and be interviewed by several of them, and then set an alarm clock every morning and drive half an hour away and perform some menial task whose purposes are complex and widely distributed, and he must do this for eight hours a day for five days a week, so that once or twice a month his employer will give him a piece of paper that represents money so he can get money which represents value so he can go to the supermarket and trade it for food which was produced by God knows who and God knows where and God knows how so that he can drive half an hour back home and put it on the table for his kids who spend eight hours a day living a similarly abstracted lifestyle.

Thus, we no longer find any meaning in our work, at least not automatically, because our work is several layers of abstraction from anything we are compelled to care about. It is thererfor no surprise that in our culture we seek meaning in hobbies, social/political movements, and personally-tailored identities. Some of us manage to find meaning in our work, but it is meaning that resides high up in the heirarchy of needs, similarly to the meaning found in hobbies and the like. For the rest of us unlucky souls, our work is little more than drudgery. We can appreciate it for what it provides and for not being nearly as awful as it could be (thank God for that), but the meaning vaccuum remains either way.

And because of this, it is difficult to fulfill one's need for meaning when one finds himself without much time to attend to anything he personally cares about for his own reasons. I, for one, sometimes feel bitter when I cannot find time to attend to my creative outlets, such as this website. Oh, but what a fool I am! For in this very circumstance, I so often neglect the duties which do bring me meaning, and even the duties which return inner peace for my efforts. How many times have I neglected prayer because I do not feel like it, or become annoyed at the needs of my wife, or lazily rejected the opportunity for a lovely walk? How many times have I not bothered with my stretches and meditation? How many times have I satiated my hunger with junk and needlessly deprived myself of sleep because I childishly feel cheated by time itself? Lord have mercy upon me! Do I not believe in eternity? Why then do I kick against the goads of time?

Anywho, that's quite enough yapping from me for one day. I need to get to bed soon, my inescapable toil awaits me in the morning...but so do a lot of things that bring meaning, if only I will choose them as much as I can. And Lord willing, I will find time for things like this website along the way.

4/18/2026

Update 0.1.4_04: Added some meat to the bones of the "Keeping the Faith" page.

My wife and I took a hike today, very refreshing. I feel that I am beginning to recover from the dreadful slump I have been in for at least the past week. It's complicated, maybe I'll yap about it later, but I've been hoping and praying and strategizing to get out of it, because it just won't do to wallow in psychologically-imposed misery as I begin my 30s. You wouldn't believe the kind of catestrophism that my thoughts have been assuming lately, you'd think I was the most perfectly failed person in history! Lord have mercy.

4/12/2026

It's been a busy couple of weeks, and I find myself now with some time to work on the website, but I'm actually just gonna chill and play some Minecraft for a bit. You know, actually engage in one of the hobbies this website is about. What a concept!

Anywho, yes I have an idea (see yesterday) I want to yap about, but I don't feel like struggling through putting it into words right now, but I do want to note it down somehow, so I will be quick and sloppy:

Americans have become afraid to go outside. We're scared to let our kids play in the neighborhood. Everywhere you look, we have rules against just existing in public spaces. You have to have a permit for every stupid little thing these days, or someone will sue. The result? Our world is empty. Go outside and almost nobody is there, unless it is in a space specifically designated for people to be there. And even then, those places are very limited in terms of what kind of activity takes place there. This is what I grew up in, and it seemed perfectly normal to me until I met my wife and started visiting the Philippines. Don't get me wrong, it's a third-world country and all that, but the people there actually act like they live there. Where there is a waterfront, there are people and families and food and music. There are street vendors practically everywhere you go. There are people practically everywhere you go, not just cars. Humans walk places there. A car there is an accessory, not an all-encompassing and inescapable necessity. Their infrastructure reflects this reality, with everything being built at the scale of humans rather than cars.

But enough about car-dependancy, as that is somewhat tangential to my idea, and is a problem too deeply baked-in to be solved in a single generation. But I think there is a problem we can solve: we can go outside and act like this is our world to live in. We still do, I see little bits of it every day, but it is so limited. We need to start going outside and occupying public spaces. We need to stop hiding in our homes, afraid of our neighbors, afraid of strangers at the grocery store, afraid of the 0.1% of the population that might pose a danger to us or to our families. We've let ourselves be driven underground like rats.

I propose a movement. I know I'm shouting into the void here, but maybe this little seed will find good soil in time. I propose the Occupy the World movement. This isn't a left-wing or right-wing movement. This isn't a movement for the rich or for the poor or for the middle class. It is for everyone to go outside and start acting like human beings again. Have picnics and cookouts. Set up lemonade stands. Play an instrument at the park. Place coolers of water along the local greenway (a la Appalachian "trail magic").

Maybe the neighbors will complain. Maybe HOAs will fuss. Maybe cops will demand to see permits. Let them. This world of ours outside our windows, our own shared backyard, has been ceded bit by bit to fear, over-regulation, and gloom. I say, no more! It is time we take a stand. This is our world, let's live in it.

4/11/2026

Those astronauts made it home alright last night, it was awesome to see. YouTube played an obnoxious ad at the exact moment of splashdown on the stream I was watching, thanks YouTube.

Spitballing an idea into the void:
brb

4/5/2026

Happy Easter! Christ is risen!

Update 0.1.4_03: Added starry background to this page in honor of the Artemis II mission. 12-year-old me would have peed his pants with excitement seeing this moment in history. Major inner child moment for me. Now that Holy Week and Easter morning are past and my attention is free, I've been glued to live updates all afternoon and evening. I just love it, it's so cool. May God be with the crew all the way to the Moon and back home again.

4/4/2026

Update 0.1.4_02: Added my wife's Pikachu drawing. Home page is now 20% more wholesome.

3/31/26

Update 0.1.4_01: Added descriptions to resource links on the Explorations & Adventures and Keeping the Faith pages. Might have done a couple other little things, it's been a couple days. It is currently Holy Week, so I won't be working on this site as much this week. I'll be back after Easter. I think I want to add a guestbook soon, via an external service. Besides that, I will continue fleshing out the pages bit by bit. I am thinking about adding a new page focused on Filipino stuff. If you didn't know, I am married to one. It might be fun to have a page here dedicated to her culture.

Anywho, see y'all in April. Hopefully we get to see that rocket launch (Artemis II) tomorrow, that would be pretty cool. Don't forget to take some time away from the noise this week. We need silence. There is much that we need to hear in our souls that cannot be heard in the noisiness of our modern lives. May God bless you this Holy Week and Easter.

3/28/26

Update 0.1.3_03-0.1.3_06: added starter content, layout, style, etc to all remaining pages. None of the pages are yet complete enough to meet my criteria for updating to 0.2.0, namely having enough content and layout to "get the ball rolling," but nonetheless they all have some kind of actual content now, so I am going to take an Archive.org snapshot and update the version to 0.1.4.

3/26/26

Update 0.1.3_02: added starter content, organization, and stylization to "What I've Been Reading" page.

Currently listening to Super Nintendo Piano Collections Vol. 1 by Lucas King. Takes me back to my year in Riverton every time I hear it. Hard to believe it's been ten years.

Oh by the way if you didn't notice, there are a couple more sites in the "My Friends' Sites" section on the home page, go check 'em out! (Full disclosure, I added them from my smartphone while at work because I just couldn't wait. -20 digital minimalism points for me.)

3/24/2026

TABS BABY!!!! Tabs are the answer. I just found the HTML Dog page about how to make glorious, beautiful tabs, and I am instantly certain that this is probably the way to reduce the overall messiness of trying to get a lot of content on the various pages of this website. H*CK YEAH, TABS!!!

P.S. - Tabs are not the answer 😭

P.P.S. - edited the "page not found" page for funzies, and added a new section labeled "other cool sites" at the bottom of the home page. That's 0.1.3_01.

3/22/2026

All pages now have unique color schemes, fonts, and title stylings, except for this one, which remains identical to the home page as an homage to the fact that its content used to be part of the home page. I really don't recommend viewing this thing on mobile. In fact, I recommend ditching your smartphone entirely in favor of a good dumb phone, if you can manage it. I haven't been able to yet, in part because I do not currently have the cash to purchase the phone I am interested in switching to. I have also noticed lately some friction in my efforts to leave behind my smartphone overuse. At first, leaving my phone in the closet when at home felt purely freeing, like a great relief. Now, I have noticed subtle ways in which the old neural pathways are naturally resistant to the change. Perhaps it partly explains my mood swings lately. Change takes time. My brain is used to a certain pattern of behavior, and intentionally breaking that pattern isn't going to be an entirely smooth process. I have begun to learn this in recent years, as I had to make certain changes in preparation for getting married and certain changes have come with married life itself. I don't think I have learned the pattern well enough to precisely articulate it yet (which is why this paragraph may seem kind of vague), but I have begun to see it.

The site is currently at v0.1.2_04. My plan is still to update to v0.2.0 once all the pages are stylized and organized and have enough content to get started. So far, they are stylized. The next step is to figure out what content to add and how to organize it. I will update to v0.1.3 when I am ready to start tackling that chunk of work. I noticed my bandwidth is already close to the monthly limit, so I am considering upgrading to a NeoCities Supporter account in order to avoid any issues. I have only used 4% of the free 1GB storage, but once I start adding photos to some of the pages, that number could climb fast. Anywho, too tired to make any big decisions right now, I'm gonna go try to rest and get to bed at a decent time before the new work week begins.

P.S. - I also just went ahead and added the version number to all pages. Gosh, I wish I knew how or even if there is a way to change it on one page and have it update to all pages. Oh, well.

P.P.S. - added page plans to help me develop each page in the future, and updated the version number to 0.1.3. Okay, NOW I am going to bed. Or at least I'll try.

3/21/2026

Work is proceeding slowly on stylizing, organizing, and adding content to the various pages. This is mostly tedious work, with the creative elements involving a lot of trial-and-error, so it is very slow going.

I decided not to stream on the SteleCat channel today. I'm just not really feeling it. For one thing, the weather is quite nice today and I would rather enjoy it while it lasts. In just a couple of months, the weather will be perpetually much too warm for my taste. Besides that, I am troubled in spirit (as I sometimes am) by the imperfect integrity involved in trying to be a YouTuber, even at my modest level. While I am grateful to have an audience with which I can be largely frank and chill, even I have to wear a little bit of a mask. But this discomfort is really no different than that which I feel among coworkers or among my discord friends in an ordinary VC. I can never really be true to myself...at least, not the self I would like to be. Even at church, among fellow Christians, the subtle problem persists under a different form. I am caught between a rock and a hard place. Look one direction, and I find fellows with life or interests overlapping with my own, but whose worldview is nominally Christian at best and thoroughly antichrist at worst. Look in the other direction, and I find brothers and sisters in Christ, common in mind and heart, but with whom there is nothing to do or to talk about that we would share interst in. And all this is in some sense just the present manifestation of a lifelong loneliness, of never quite being able to find my "tribe," of always feeling myself on the periphery even where I am included. My spiritual father back home understood this when I once shared it with him. He attributed it to a circumstance we happened to share, that of having been adopted as children. Something about that early experience of disjoint lingers and echoes throughout one's life.

I took a walk this morning. I remembered the old Saturday walks I took years ago as a student at Wind River Job Corps Center in Riverton, Wyoming. I didn't have a phone with GPS back then, so I learned the streets by heart. Sometimes I would look up places on Google Maps back at the center, and I would memorize the turns in my head to try to get there in person on Saturday. The shuttle would drop me off at the library. I would spend some time there using the wifi on my laptop, maybe check out a DVD or CD, and then I would walk. If it was Winter, I would usually head directly to the Wendy's across from the Walmart to have the 4 for $4 meal for dinner. In the summer, I would visit various parks along the way. I learned the layout of the town, my own secret shortcuts, the way the seasons changed the landscape. Sometimes I was alone, sometimes I was with a friend. Often I would somehow miss the shuttle pickup in the evening at Walmart and have to walk all the way across town and up the hill to get back. Maybe my cell phone clock was buggy, maybe my ADHD was just that bad. Those walks are some of my fondest Saturday memories. I was so restricted in many ways back then, yet somehow those memories feel like a freedom I haven't experienced in a long time. Maybe it is because of the responsibilities that I have now but didn't back then. All I know is that I miss those walks dearly, and this morning, streaming Minecraft felt like a sad replacement for how I spent my Saturdays that one year so long ago.

A few years ago I visited Riverton again and tried to walk my old path. Someone had built a fence across a space between two properties that I used to rely on to get to a dry creekbed I would pass through. Maybe it was only a winter shortcut, I can't quite remember. Spring runoff may have sent me somewhere else. All I know is that memory proved ungraspable, like vapor in the wind. But perhaps, just maybe, I can build new memories by following the pattern of the old, engaging in such simple exploration as I once did. Or maybe such things only happen once in a lifetime. I guess all I can do is try.

3/17/2026

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Update 0.1.2_01: added filler descriptions and crosslinking to all pages, with formatting developed earlier for the home page. Now this place is a bit more interconnected. Nice!

3/16/2016

Updating to 0.1.2. It seems appropriate after having made several major restructuring changes to the home page. Today I added the welcome description, and removed the "stuff that might be on this site" section since it is growing more and more obsolete. Taking an Archive.org snapshot of v0.1.1_06 before removing the aforementioned section and changing the version number. Work in 0.1.2_x will focus on laying out and adding content to the new pages. I think once each page has just enough layout and content to get the ball rolling, this site will be ready for the jump to 0.2.x.

P.S. - I figured out how the CSS marquee animation works, and it is still just as unreliable for animated gifs as the HTML marquee tag, so...shrug.

3/15/2026

My wife and I just finished watching the finale of Person of Interest, the episode titled “Return 0.” She had never seen it before. PoI has been one of my favorite TV shows since it first aired from 2010-2015. I bought it on DVD several years ago. This must be my fourth time watching the entire series, and probably the last time I will do so for quite some time, maybe even for the rest of my life. My wife doesn’t strike me as the watch-it-over-and-over-again type, and I think I can live with that. I felt a sadness creeping toward the end of the final season as I realized that, knowing that this might be my last time saying goodbye to these characters that I have enjoyed spending time with over the years. Not the sort of sadness that leads to denial and bargaining, not grieving. Instead, it is the kind of sadness that makes one think about what the dynamic causing the sadness means, and what the structure beneath it means, and what the ground beneath that means.

I don’t want to prattle on philosophically for too long, I just want to spill a quick thought or two. Just as a certain character reflects on in the Person of Interest finale, everyone dies—and so will I. I won’t be taking PoI or its characters with me to the grave, let alone beyond. Me missing my time spent with these characters is a very temporal phenomenon. Where I am going, I won’t be missing anything, because nothing will be missing There. I’ve shared this thought briefly in my streams about the subject of gaming, asking the silly but potentially thought-provoking question, “Will there be gaming in Heaven?” The best answer I can give to my own question is that whatever it is in gaming that is truly good (good in the most ultimate sense) will be there. And so it shall be with my old fictional friends, the characters from one of my favorite shows, and the world they inhabited. I know that I won’t be sitting around watching Reese kneecap bad guys after the end of time, but that does not mean that the entire essence of the imaginative creation that was PoI and its world and characters is fundamentally obliterated. Whatever spark of transcendent truth, goodness, and beauty was found within it will live on. I can’t pretend to imagine what that will look like, but that’s my answer.

How’s that for an answer to the classic question, “Is there baseball in Heaven?”

3/14/2026

Just gave this site a major organization overhaul after my stream this morning. Updated the version number to 0.1.1. Most likely, I will spend the next few days adding content and layout to the new pages. Once they feel more or less complete enough, I will probably start learning more about how to layout the main page in HTML/CSS (so my links aren't just plain lists, etc) and update to 0.1.2 as I do. I currently have no clear conception of what a 0.2.0 update would entail, although it will probably come whenever everything I just described is "done."

Oh! New page ideas:

• Gaming Diary
  • What games I've been playing, how I've been playing them, and what I think of them
• Keeping the Faith
  • Reflections on my spiritual life, thoughts on theology and philosophy, resources I use, etc
• Free Space
  • Literally anything and everything

Last note before bed. Just added more pages, I've got six pages now (seven if you count the home page). Will probably work on them in the order they appear on the main page. I would like each one to be somewhat unique in terms of style and layout, themed and organized according to the subject of each page. Still learning more and more, little by little as I go along.

3/13/2026

On Limitations and Authenticity

Going forward on this project, I commit to never implementing something that I do not understand (with the exception of external services). I say this because as of late I have been using ChatGPT to help me figure out things that I haven't yet learned from the HTML/CSS tutorials I have at my disposal. Sometimes what it gives me is something I am knowledgeable enough to grasp and implement confidently. Other times, I would simply be copy-pasting something I only understand well enough to plug it in, so to speak. It would work, but I would learn nothing in the process, and the results wouldn't be my own. I actually want to learn this stuff, and I want as much of this as possible to be "hand-crafted" by yours truly. As such, certain things I might like to implement will simply have to wait until I have gotten far enough in my learning to know what I am doing when I implement them.

All that to say that is my excuse for why the running pikachu gif sometimes doesn't animate properly as it scrolls. I don't yet understand the CSS required to make a supposedly more reliable gif scrolling effect.

P.S. - Thank God it's Friday!

3/11/2026

This is me rn tbh

Also it's pouring rain outside and I am tired and I need some rest, I'll come back to this tomorrow, oh I added a scrolling marquee, it's literally just <marquee>text</marquee>.

3/10/2026

I learned some cool stuff (classes and IDs and how useful they are), added the primordial form of what will be a Minecraft-style splash text (once I've learned enough to make that possible), then ate dinner and now I am tired and I will mess around with this some more later.

Oh! I just remembered. I wrote down in my pocket notebook some ideas for "tabs" this website might have in the future. Here's what I've got so far:

• Thoughts & Notes
  • already implemented, obviously
• What I've Been Reading
  • A place to talk about books I've been reading, with a subsection for my Reading List of books I'd like to read in the future.
• Fitness Log
  • A place to document my fitness journey. Not a daily log, just occasional milestones & highlights.
• Explorations & Adventures
  • Places I've explored (or would like to explore) and things I've done, with pictures and links to videos.

Most of this will not be implemented until I learn how to organize this site into linked/tabbed (whatever the correct term is) areas.

I got impatient with the available tutorial resources and just asked ChatGPT about it and all I have to do is create new .html files in my NeoCities dashboard and link them here. New pages coming soon!

3/9/2026

Today is the day I begin the HTML/CSS Intermediate tutorials on HTML Dog and update to 0.1.0. I am making one last Wayback capture before I proceed.

Thought of the Day: Digital mimimalism. I have recently begun leaving my phone in the shoe closet when I am at home. In just a few days, this strategy has subtly changed my daily life. I have tried other things before: custom launchers, grayscale screen, all that jazz. None of it worked for me, I was as hooked as ever. But physically consigning my device to a closet I only visit 2-4 times a day seems to have done the trick, thanks be to God. I feel mentally lighter. I have no idea what I am supposed to be mad about, or what I am supposed to be afraid of, or what I am supposed to feel like I'm missing out on. I really can just live the day and do my thing without being inundated with information overload and ragebait.

I still bring my phone to work, and while there I do use YouTube and Podcast Addict as well as check discord, but the draw of Facebook and Instagram and even Reddit has lost its hold on me. I feel, in a subtle but fairly stable way, more free than I have felt in a long time.

Well, there. I just updated the site to 0.1.0. Not much has changed--the pace of learning new things will naturally slow as the new things to learn get more and more advanced--but I was able to change the size of the version number within the main header, which I wasn't able to do before. And I added abbr tags in the first paragraph of today's blog just because. The HTML Dog Intermediate HTML tutorial hasn't done me much good so far because I don't yet know how to apply most of what it is trying to teach me, but the CSS Intermediate tutorial seems more promising in that regard. I really want to learn how to organize this site using tabs and what not (so that it doesn't turn into a massive wall of text), but I suppose we'll get there when we get there.

3/8/2026

Just got home from church, still going throught the CSS beginner tutorial. Regarding versioning numbers for this website:

v0.0.1-v0.0.x refers to my time going through the beginner tutorials. v0.0.1 (retroactive) was what I made using NeoCities' built-in tutorial. v0.0.2 was made as I went through HTMLdog's HTML Beginner tutorial. v0.0.3 is currently being developed as I go through HTMLdog's Beginner CSS tutorial. Once I reach the intermediate tutorials, I will probably bump the version up to v0.1.x. As I go, I will be archiving successive version of this site here.

On a completely unrelated note, I think that Daylight Savings Time is wrong and it must be stopped.

P.S. - Before bed, I built this pixel art on Greffen's MTTA Classic server:

3/7/2026

I just learned how to make HTML tables, but until I start learning CSS, it won't do me much good. But just for an extra bit of practice, here's a line of whatever made using table code.

This is

technically

a table.

I have also learned how to make forms that do absolutely nothing (except trigger a 405 error), so here's one for you.

You:

Comments and Complaints:

TYPE IT NOW.

P.S. - I just started the CSS tutorial and learned how to make my text a different color. Mind = blown.

3/6/2026

I want to write a thought but it is late and my wife wants me to go to bed and she is right, I should go to bed.