For a while now, I've been feeling like I've sort of maxed out on programming, not to say that I know everything
there is to know about the topic, but that I've learnt enough to shape software
in exactly the way I need to tackle the problems I typically need programming
for. So I've been turning my gaze into other domains of life which I've all but
neglected while on this creative coding journey.
I've ramped things up a notch these past few weeks and dedicated more time to
learning about fitness, nutrition, anatomy and getting a bit smarter about
the way I work out. This new fascination of mine is teetering close to a full
on project, when even on rest days, a sizeable chunk of my waking hours goes
into reading about related topics and planning the next day's exercises and
meals. I might just keep on pulling on that thread to see where this leads. A
nagging voice in my head keeps going on and on about how this might just come
in handy in the very near future.
- Made Drifblim faster and smaller.
- Redesigned CCCC to match the other utilities.
- Wrote some new music.
- Redid the gelcoat on Teapot.
- Enjoyed the return of the cherry blossoms!
Long time no seen! A small life update
Phew, it's been ages! I am sitting on my couch with a blanket, in my apartment in Italy, waiting for my partner to arrive from Germany.
We will go to Poland next Saturday, and I will be there for a month! But first: it's my birthday tomorrow, and on Friday I will celebrate with my friends and then play our last D&D session to complete "Tomb of Annihilation".
I am reading “The brothers Karamazov” by Fedor Dostoevsky.
I am mostly listening to podcasts, and “Hit me hard and soft” by Billie Eilish.
Here are some things I would like to pick up:
- Learn Esperanto.
- Learn German (again).
- Pick up Python again.
- Run 10Ks regularly.
My goals for 2025 are:
- Document my life.
- Pension fund.
- Run again.
- Read every day.
- Eat healthy.
- Get my own car.
- Drive.
2025-02-20 Beep-bapping - a
On February 15th Devine & I celebrated our 9th year living aboard pino. Winters spent battling mold and condensation isn't always easy, but it is a minor inconvenience that does little to diminish my love of living aboard a sailboat.
ART. I have begun sharing pages of a new hakum short comic entitled sabotage study. I've been meaning to share updates to this project for some time, I had started those first 2 pages months ago, but as I am juggling ten thousand projects I've had to prioritize. I've released a new page for rabbit waves about the importance of packing an emergency bag, and made little animations to populate the Morse Code with Flags page.
I also cleaned up an old drawing I had done of black-headed gulls on a log to use as a divider for my update page (visible above). Seabirds on a log beep-bapping is a source of joy for me.
SEWING. I made a pouch for our angle grinder, and its accompanying dics out of some Sunbrella offcuts.
HOW-TO. After Devine & I worked on a zine for rabbit waves, I drew a guide on how to fold a zine.
HEALTH. I've long stuggled with being me. I have difficulty trusting people, and can't seem to be able to regulate my emotions. I've always assumed that I was just broken, irreparable. On an especially bad day, crushed by self-hatred, I was desperate to find news ways to cope. In my research, I read through Edward Bowlby's Attachment Theory. A lot of my issues seem to stem from having an anxious preoccupied attachment style, possibly due to the fact that one of my caregivers also suffered from this. I have an undeveloped sense of self. My self-esteem has always been dependent on the closeness and approval of others. Knowing why I feel the way that I do helps, I feel less broken, less alone. I will write a long post about it sometime, but it needs more thought...
MOVIES. I watched an English-subbed version of Das Leben der Anderen, a German film about the invasive monitoring of residents prevalent in East Berlin by the Stasi(1984). In the film, a Stasi officer is made to monitor(via bugs in the walls) a couple, a playwright and an actress, not because they are suspected of any wrongdoings, but because the Minister of Culture is romantically interested in the actress. The Stasi officer sits at a desk with headphones on all day, transcribing every uttered word, every movement. I will not spoil it further, but I really enjoyed it. Apparently, the idea for the film came as director/writer Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck was listening to music and remembered Maxim Gorky's saying that Lenin's favorite piece of music was Beethoven's Appassionata. Here's an excerpt of a conversation Gorky had with Lenin:
And screwing up his eyes and chuckling, Lenin added without mirth: But I can't listen to music often, it affects my nerves, it makes me want to say sweet nothings and pat the heads of people who, living in a filthy hell, can create such beauty. But today we mustn't pat anyone on the head or we'll get our hand bitten off; we've got to hit them on the heads, hit them without mercy, though in the ideal we are against doing any violence to people. Hm-hm—it's a hellishly difficult office!
BOOKS. I am reading Middlemarch by George Eliot, a book with many older English words that are unfamiliar to me, and that I have to look up mid-read(a friend lent a physical copy of the book). Although, after reading Sherlock Holmes, some words like "pew" are now known to me, even if I have no real use for them in conversation. It's a long book, but I am enjoying it so far, George Eliot has a wonderful writing style, very precise, witty, and humorous at times.
MUSIC. I've long been a fan of TOMM¥ €A$H, and it's why I was excited to see that he was entering the 2025 Eurovision song contest for Estonia. His entry, Expresso Macchiato, is very fun and catchy, moreso because it is laced with criticism of consumerism and globalism. It is his most family-friendly song ever, in that there are zero mentions of sex or weed. I especially love that the video was inspired by an 1982 video of Andy Warhol eating a Burger King Whopper burger(filmed as part of Jorgen Leth's art film 66 Scenes from America, 1981) for four minutes and 20 seconds.
"As an immigrant, Warhol admired the idea that in America the same food and drinks are consumed by people regardless of their status – the president drinks the same Coke as him. The clash of cultures deeply influenced the subject matter of his art. A burger might as well appear as a tribute to the idea of American life."
Listening to this song, I am reminded that with the rising price of coffee, that I ought to enjoy it while I can still afford it. I buy 2.2 kg bags of whole beans at a local store, and I've had to pay 10$ more than last year. It is crazy to think that something as ubiquitous as coffee will eventually be a luxury.
QUOTESDo not remove a fence until you know why it was put up in the first place.
G.K. Chesterton
ARTICLES/VIDEOS I LIKED
WEBSITES I LIKED
- Collapsible Systems, a wiki gathering information with the goal to prepare for an era of collapses.
I've had various little undocumented utilities
hanging around that didn't share a clear connection in terms of design. I
recently needed a desktop calendar to track some personal stats and decided to
riff on Note Pad for its UI, which is itself already
a port of the classic Macintosh program. To tie it all
together, I gave the same treatment to the music player, which was inspired
from the first generation iPod. They all look really nice next to each other
now.
- Ah yeah, I also wrote a spreadsheet editor.
- Object-oriented stack machine assembly is such a joy!
I seem to be alternating between working with html and Lua/LÖVE. In the last few days I've been trying to extract some more timeless tools out of the ad hoc static site I replaced my old Rails website with a couple of years ago. Here's the project. Requires just Lua (any version after 5.1) and nothing else. In particular, it doesn't mess with any Markdown variant, just leaves you to edit raw HTML.
There's 3 tools that you can use independently:
- slapping a common template around many files/pages/posts
- generating paginated index pages for a list of files/pages/posts
- autogenerating a feed of the most recent posts in a list
All 3 tools use a common data source of a) files with some `---` metadata up top and a small number of VARIABLES that get substituted in, and b) index files containing a list of files that constitute a site.
All 3 tools are single-file and so self-contained and easy to move wherever you want, mix and match. For example, my site has two distinct blogs (main site and devlog). I run the first tool once and the others twice each.
I can't quite cut my site over to this, though. Open questions I ran into with my site:
- How to style the pagination links. Those bits of html are hard-coded in the generator.
- Some of my older blog posts have no titles. Then I want to show the date in the
<title> tag, but show no title in the <body> (because I already show the date and it would be redundant). It's unclear how to do that without a whole templating language.
I'm sure there are others. SSGs seem to be one of those things that everyone a unique-snowflake version of. But check it out if you're willing to leave Markdown behind. Using HTML is more accessible than Markdown. For example, it lets you distinguish a couple of key categories of <code>: keyboard shortcuts with <kbd>, references to names in other snippets with <var> and computer output with <samp>. Markdown's backticks can't do that. It doesn't matter if you never share your posts, and it's natural to not want to look at HTML given how monstrous it can get. But HTML also has a lovely core that a lot of civilizational effort went into, and it's sad that layers above don't use all of it. A little more manual labor can provide a nicer reading experience for others.
For the last three weeks and up through May, I've been acting as a teacher's assistant for a course introducing computer science and project planning fundamentals. This has been a highlight in between the more pertinent work of moving forward immigration affairs. It is fascinating to see how younger people relate to computers now, and to some degree I'm not sure that teaching has changed all that much. Yes, students can "cheat" with generative AI, but it wasn't all that long ago when the most visible solution online was Experts Exchange, a popular means to give folks (bad) advice absent useful reasoning, for a fee.
Events of the last month have reminded me that even family members I often look up to tend not to recognize trouble is brewing until it affects them. I am doing my best to be patient, as I try to move quickly when I can, when there is news to act upon.
It's warm again in Bucharest at the end of January. The weather forecast says we'll have a winter without snow. That's unheard of. Even last year we had a little, a couple of times. Things are changing fast.
In other news, I'm still burnt out on coding, after doing way too much of it last year. Note to self, that can happen even with one's main hobby. That didn't stop me from releasing a new version of
AntiWiki, because I'm using it more again, and it was lacking.
But mostly I've been working on my websites. Lots and lots of that. Learned all kinds of new tricks. Made some experiments, too, of which I can announce a couple at last: my redesigned
photography website and my new blog.
Overall, I've been a lot more active again starting in December. It's obvious from the amount of notes I've been taking. That's a good sign.
February started with a cold spell for a change. Not even as much as last year, but I'm no longer used to it. Didn't stop people from going out a lot, anyway, myself included. And now it's all sunny again.