This page is a "blog" of things I'm doing or thinking about, but which do not warrant "publishing" (as if I were ever to do such a thing). Basically just half-baked thoughts that haven't fully developed, thoughts I might not even agree with in a month, but nonetheless things that have been on my mind; plus things I'm up to, including developing this website, and just whatever random stuff I feel like noting for whatever reason.
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.
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.)
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 đ
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
My wife and I just finished watching the finale of Person of Interest, the episode titled âReturn 0.â 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 doesnât 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 donât 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 diesâand so will I. I wonât 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 wonât be missing anything, because nothing will be missing There. Iâve shared this thought briefly in my streams about the subject of gaming, asking the silly but potentially thought-provoking question, âWill there be gaming in Heaven?â 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 wonât 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 canât pretend to imagine what that will look like, but thatâs my answer.
Howâs that for an answer to the classic question, âIs there baseball in Heaven?â
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:
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.
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!
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>.
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:
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!
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.
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:
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.
P.S. - I just started the CSS tutorial and learned how to make my text a different color. Mind = blown.
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.