I once read that real microblogging has never been tried before, and I think that's actually pretty true. I've certainly never tried it. I never tried to create a blog of coherent parts via small updates over time. And I think that's a bit of a shame and I'd like to correct that short-coming in my life.
- Microblog
- A series of small, frequent posts.
But what about the other kind of microblog?
Usually when we talk about microblogs, we are talking about blogs where the content is very short (like mentioned in the top), however what about the other way around? where the blog itself is small, designed to be spun up ephemerally, almost.
A blog containing only a small amount of content. That's more to the point of what I'm doing on this page -- spinning up little tiny blogs, each with tiny content. Little scraps of thought to see me through until the next time.
Probably I'll look at them eventually, maybe turn them into something bigger.-07.22
I think that this kind of composite writing is really interesting and putting it out on the internet is a really interesting concept. It's an evolutionarily unique situation, to be able to share each thought and how they develop in real time. In general, composite writing, like you see with Luhmann's Zettelkasten is just very interesting and I consider it kind of a unique approach in the sense that it's not really used as much anymore.
That's very funny in a way, because when I was very young, I lived in an old-fashioned town and my elementary school teacher was very ancient. (So ancient that she never even had to take algebra in order to become a teacher!) But when she was teaching us how to research and do writing she actually taught us to put any quotes or ideas we had on index cards, with the source on the back. Then, when we wanted to write our paper, to just arrange these cards to create an outline.
So, in a way, I think that microblogging is sort of a return to that. I feel that when these micro-topics mature, I'll turn them into "real" blog posts for you to enjoy more organically. But until then I will probably just throw them into sort of thematic piles.-07.14
Space to Grow. I've seen a lot of people become really negative towards travel lately, saying that it's just a way to have casual sex, or to cultivate your identity as "one who travels", and it makes me quite sad.
My idea of travelling is so different. I like to just go to a new place, and experience life there. Nothing fancy, nothing extravagent, just going to grocery stores and living my life, but just in a different place. Everyone seems to perplexted by this.
But I think it makes a lot of sense. I travel to escape the crushing weight of the expectations of others. It gives me space to just be myself. And it seems when I return home, others are much more likely to recognize that I've "changed". In truth, I'm the same as I was before, but they just wouldn't give me enough space to see that for themselves. -07.19
I miss Japan so much. Tokyo was really just such an amazing city. I miss drifting through the streets late at night, and meeting so many strange and interesting people.
I want to go back again, but I can't imagine a world where that is possible any time soon. I fear so much that I'll be held down by adult obligations and I won't be able to go again. I hope my husband can afford a job where this is something that we can afford to do once every few years. -07.17
Fast fashion and the decline of quality. Yes, fast fashion has ruined a lot of mid-tier brands. But the thing you also don't understand is how cheap the clothes that you are buying today are. Grandpa bought a $5 shirt in 1950 that lasted him 40 years. That shirt today would be $65. You bought a $25 pair of slacks in 1970? That pair of pants would cost $210 today.
You're not spending what you should be spending. But more importantly, you don't act like your grandma did, checking each fabric and each hem before deciding to buy.
And it goes further than this, of course. You buy a suit off the rack, you don't see a tailor. There was a golden age when you could get away with this, but that time has passed. "RETVRN" or whatever. -07.19
I feel lonely. Throughout my life, even before being trans as as "acceptable" as it is today, I was pressured to be/admit to being trans. I'm not trans. I'm just a woman with "masculine" hobbies. Yet, everywhere I turn, everyone I felt close to comes out as trans.
Two of my exes are out as transwomen. PhilosophyTube who I was constantly holding up as an example of how a man could be soft and GNC came out as trans. This person I was really enamored with for how they were GNC came out as trans.
My group of online friends from a year ago, all of them are now out as both trans and poly. My closest friend is a trans woman. An account I looked up to for being a woman in a male-dominated interest group recently came out as being detrans (so is now going to male). One of my closest friends from my college days came out as a trans man.
I feel lonely. Everywhere I turn all my friends and acquantances turn out to be trans. I want a cis female friend who has the same interests as me. It's so lonely. -07.19
Creative Freedom. One of the biggest things starting this website has done is give me a lot of creative freedom that I just would not have had otherwise. I got a silly idea for the AC Shrine and I was able to create it from nothing in like an hour. The hardest part was just finding good images and having them all fit together in a cool way.
The idea was fun, and implementing it was fun, and I now know enough CSS that it was easy to just have fun making it. And that's kind of crazy. With a normal computer probably I could have made a meme and posted it on Twitter, and maybe it would have gotten 1-2 likes-- but somehow it's more special when it's on my website! -07.22
Stuck in America. I just can't seem to find a job, and it's making me really depressed. I need money in order to finish all of the paperwork that I need to do in the United States, like legally changing my name, or getting a new passport -- but without a job, how am I going to afford that? And further than that, how will I afford to go back to Brasil?
My husband says he will find a way to pay for it, that he'll make enough money to bring me back, but I couldn't say how. A full time wage in Brasil is only about $300USD, and most of that goes towards basic bills like rent or food. I never want to be in this situation agian. -07.19
Twitter Hurts. I have emotional problems, and they cause me to act erratically sometimes. I often have a feeling of being trapped by the expectations of other people. I go through cycles of being very social, then drifting away from communities. One of those communities was the frog community. In general, there are some lovely people there. It's tight knit community, but that comes at a price: when I went on an unfollowing spree, the entire community took it as an attack.
On some level I understand, but on the other hand, being followed around and being spoken badly of really hurts so badly... That makes Neocities better, because everything is at a distance. The situation with the frog community literally make me cry sometimes. But it was also a mistake for me to follow people when I wasn't 100% sure I was interested, or to unfollow everyone suddenly rather than over time. Or maybe I should have nuked my account. But I felt like people were depending on me. - 08.12
Doing Better. I've been doing a lot better at not fighting on Twitter, and I've been posting a lot less. I would say that I've been spending the majority of my internet time working on this site. And I think that's good, because it's productive. At the end of the day, I have something to show for it. -07.27
Yet Again. I was fighting on twitter again. I don't know what it is about that site that's so triggering for me. Maybe it's a conditioned response, caused by the general atmosphere of the site. I don't know but I also don't like it. -07.22
Not even 5 minutes... I was on twitter for not even 5 minutes to check a notification from an account that I really like, he does some really amazing art, and I was already being rude and fighting with people again. I think finding my way off twitter will literally save my soul. -07.21
So Toxic. It seems that no matter how much I try that I always get stuck in this toxic cycle with Twitter. I think it's because when I get upset, I just can't think straight. I'm not really a very toxic person in general. I like people and I always try to be nice to them. And I do my best to support people. But, for whatever reason, I just get so toxic on Twitter, and I find it very disappointing. -07.19
Stuck in a cycle. I've been using Twitter for so many years now. I started in a serious way nearly 4 years ago. People have attempted to cancel me many times, created ban waves against me, and even partially doxxed me.
I was deriving part of my income from Twitter so it was pretty hard for me to pry myself away. But the pressure to maintain a solid identity was so toxic and the pressure of everyone's expectations really destroyed me. -07.17
I hate the idea of "adulting". There is no such thing as "adulting", there's just being responsible and mature, and being irresponsible or immature. And that ties in with competency very, very much.
In Japan, no matter your station in life, it is good to be good at your job: the best attendant, the best janitor, the best window washer. There is pride in craft!
I think that in the US this used to exist, because Germans once had it, but now that seems completely gone. The only people who still sometimes seem this way are quite religious, or foreigners.
I've been learning CSS for this website, and a lot of people acted like doing something like that, just some basic CSS and basic HTML would actually be difficult. I can't understand why. I think it's just that they don't put in the effort. -07.27
People talk about the "competency crisis" a lot, but one thing I don't see people talk about very much is the incompetency crisis. The difference might be hard to understand at first, but there's an important difference.
See, the competency crisis is the fact that there's no one who is qualified to do certain things, either due to dropping standards, lack of education, higher turnover rates, or any number of given factors. A related, yet distict thing is the idea that no one can know what they are doing which I will call the "incompetency crisis".
The caracature that I don't know what's going on, my boss doesn't know, and no one can really know is a terrible and toxic type of mindset that makes solving the competency crisis pretty much impossible. If people think something can't be fixed, they won't put in the effort.
This kind of mindset is shockingly common in tech, where people just act like everything is something unknowable. It's not unknowable!
Code is not a series of magical incantations. If you properly understand the way that each of the functions in a program work, and how they interact with each other and the computer, then you can know exactly what is going on. There are "wizards" who do this.
The thing is, they aren't "code monkeys" who just bang things together as fast as possible to arive at a destination. They are "script kiddies" who just copy paste things off of the internet without understanding how they work.
They take the time, they read the documentation, and they proceed through code in a logical and orderly way. You can do that too. -7.22
I've been doing daily updates for 2 weeks now, is that "consistency" yet? I don't think so. I'm not sure at what point one can be considered consistent, but I think that it's more than a month, at least. -07.27
Can someone like me even become consistent? -07.22
How do I build consistency? -07.21
I regret my inconsistency. I was struck again today by the power of consistency. For example, the way my life might have been if I started something when I was 18 and I had continued it for the last 12 years.
Like for example having a professional website which detailed my grades in school, my extracurricular activities, links to my official social media, the jobs I had, testimonials from my customers, and so on. If I had made a once per month post related to whatever my work or schooling was at the time with helpful tips and insights. Can you imagine how powerful that would be by now, with 12+ years of content?
And if I had done the same with my "persona" online as well -- all of the projects and things I had done by pseudonym all connected in one beating heart, with one discord that had people in it from all of the different stages in my life?
But at the same time, my life now is hardly over. I'm hardly dead. I expect to live for at least another 40 years. If I regret not doing something for the last 12 years, then surely I will regret not doing it over the next 40!
Consistency is not a habit I have, but from everything I can tell, it is the most essential habit which determined success in nearly everything. Just showing up can be the difference between success and obscurity. And I think that's just something I'm going to have to drill into my head. Nothing is perfect. But it doesn't need to be perfect. Plenty of writers much worse than me are currently making a living writing just because they bother to show up. -07.21
Recent Illness. I have this issue where I find it difficult to balance my health (mental, physical) with doing things which are productive. I find myself in the last week spending maybe 20-30 hours learning about html and css and trying different approaches to make this blog work. And it's been gratifying.
But at the same time, I've used my illness as a huge excuse not to do anything physical, while my mom who is equally ill is always pushing herself to do things. I do feel legitimately unwell, and as soon as I stand or move around I begin to feel unwell again, so that can make it hard to accurately judge just how unwell I am.
But I should start taking up my responsibilities again tomorrow. To just do some until I feel unwell, then to rest a while, work on my computer, before pushing myself again. It's the only thing that's reasonable. I don't want to be a lazy person. -07.22
People in the past were more honorable. How often do we hear this? In a certain way it is true, because people had tighter social networks that controlled their actions much more tightly than they do today, in our more disconnected world. But also, we remember those who have honor, and we try to erase from our mind every one of our own who were without it. --07.23
Envy. I honestly feel a lot of envy for other sites that are cuter and more "aesthetic" than mine. They have so many pretty pictures and assets and all of this stuff, and while my website isn't ugly, compared to them it's quite plain. Often, when I try to add things, I think I've added too much, so I end up deleting most of it. I want a pretty website too T.T
And now, a lot of the things I'm noticing... I would have to completely change my blog layout, and what I've already created just wouldn't work in that kind of environment, which is honestly pretty sad. I don't want to have to abandon all of this work!
I mean, it's only basically one week of work, but it has been nearly 40 hours worth of work, and I've already completely re-designed the site once already. There are a lot of pages I haven't even created yet. --07.23
What's so bad about COBOL? I've been reading articles and watching books about COBOL a lot lately. I tend to hear the exact same things said over and over again, but I just don't see any evidence of that actually being the case. I don't ever see any proof provided. I even catalogued some non-examples.
I just cannot seem to find a good, valid argument against COBOL, except that it's old, and opinions of it formed in the 1980s and never changed. Hell, I've even found videos online of people successfully coding games with COBOL. Does that make it the right tool? No. Does that make it a completely useless thing? Also no.
The truth is, it's just not "hot" and "popular". It has some features that are very cool and not common in modern programming languages. For example, most modern languages suffer from "floating point" errors. What this means is that if you add 0.1+0.2, a computer will say that's it's not equivalent to 0.3 -- instead, you have to multiply the numbers by 10, perform the calculation, then divide them by ten to get the correct answer. In COBOL, this is handled natively, and 0.1+0.2=0.3 every single time without any intervention on the part of the user or program writer. Additionally, it natively handles rounding in the way expected by law in US financial transations. - 08.10
Cobol. No one ever seems to be interested in COBOL, but I guess it's because most people who get into software are wanting to "create" new things, and don't see any point in "wasting" all their time on maintaining important systems. I think that working within the contraints of an old system like that, with all those limits, has to make you really creative and resourseful, and that you probably know exactly what you're doing. I suppose it's a cross between an accountant and a janitor. I'm excited to learn about it, mainly because it's just so old that it makes it seem kind of magical in a way. -08.05
Why are so many resources so shit? I have looked at some of the best and most recommended sites for learning HTML and basic CSS and I just find them NOT good. Visuals help many people learn, and a lot of them just don't have great visuals, and I struggle to understand why.
Another thing, is that often people say, "the box model is not as hard as you think", but who exactly was thinking that it's hard? It's very simple, and yet they still manage to explain it badly.
For example, they don't produce what I think are very good visuals. I am considering switching to paid hosting so that I can embed videos which will explain these concepts in what I consider to be an easy and intuitive way with short videos. -07.27
Changing Attitudes. I remember about 10 years ago, a lot of older programmers were very excited about Python and how it was being embraced by schools and introductory programming courses at community colleges. They felt it would be a really good stepping stone, allowing people to learn the basics of programming.
However, in recent years I have noticed that this attitude is really changing, more and more experienced programmers are really hating on Python. Orignally, they thought that Python would be used as a stepping stone towards other, lower level languages, but this really never materialized.
That's because python is just strong enough on it's own to be used alone for most tasks, even if it's not the most efficient way to go. This meant that the expected transition, as had happened in the past with higher-level languages never happened.
This leads to a lot of awkward situations when these Python programmers are hired. Generally, in the past it was assumed that programmers were familiar with a certain suite of concepts and strategies, and this allowed them to adapt to a large variety of different programming languages pretty quickly.
However, Python was at a high enough level that it was possible for programmers, even with a few years of experience, to not have a good grasp of these concepts, making it difficult for them to transition to lower level languages.
It seems likely that this trend will continue, as there are languages that are even higher than Python being created, to make learning programming even easier. But, this is creating a vicious cycle where we are creating an entire generation of programmers who are graduating or existing programs fundamentally unequipped to deal with maintaining older infrastructure.
This infrastructure is written in lower level languages like Cobolt, Haskell, Lisp, C, Fortran, and other "old" programming languages, which still form the basis of important business and governmental applications and databases.
To be clear, there's nothing wrong with Python, especially for the hobbiest: as I said, it is powerful enough for most general applications. However, it's inappropriate for it to persist as the only language used past the introductory level of a programming degree, perhaps the first year or two.
After this, students should be moving more towards older, more complicated languages, building off that initial platform of knowledge, allowing them to grasp more complicated concepts one at a time, instead of being deluged by different concepts, some quite complicated, all at once. -07.24
IT ISN'T MAGIC! Will people stop treating code like it is magic? Will you stop just posting code and saying, "do this!", without actually explaining anything about what you just made? There is no way that people will learn if you don't teach them. This kind of stuff is what makes so many people such weak programmers.
I'm really disgusted by the whole state of the ecosystem. The literal default is just to post up something that might as well be arcane runes and act as if you've answered the question. Think of it like math: is the answer to "how do I solve this problem?" ever going to be "2x+37xy-4x"? No, because that's the destination, not the process.
LOL, I even asked for an explaination and pointed out the things that didn't make sense to me. "I don't really feel like explaining to you." You are the problem, you are what is wrong with this entire industry! -07.23
Should I teach English? My husband suggested that I try teaching English online. I've kind of shyed away from this in the past, because as a monolingual person, it seems hard to teach a language to someone when you don't actually speak the language.
But he pointed out that I could simply cater to advanced learners. I do think that I have something to offer, as I used to do English tutoring when I was in school sometimes. I like English, I read a lot, and I have a pretty decent command of even uncommon forms and modes of speech.
From being sick, I'm still really depressed at the moment so it seems really insurmountable, unfortunately. But I should think about it more seriously again when I'm doing better.
I have in the past thought about created English language educational materials for advanced learners, kind of similar to what you see in Sou Matome. I love those books and they are so good! -07.25
No one seems to like the redesign... When I started the website I told myself I wouldn't care about metrics, but i's hard to say that when you can still see them. when I moved from my "cutesy" layout to the current one, people quit checking out my site, which makes me a bit sad. I'll keep making an effort to make it more attractive again. -08.13
I wish I had started sooner. My biggest regret with having a personal website is not starting one sooner. The feeling of accomplishment from learning how to code my own website, and the freedom to post whatever I like, in whatever format I please, in something really amazing.
I really sincerely wish that I stayed with my first website making attempt back in, I think it was 2010. I have had blogs before, that I never kept up with, because I couldn't do with them what I wanted to do. I ended up needing many different platforms just to talk about all the things that are "me". But now I have a "me website"!
If people don't like it, then that's awesome! They aren't forced to see it if they don't want to. It's just like Henrik said, A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox. And how much more long and complex of a search query is an entire website! -07.27
Chat with my husband. I was telling my husband about the changes in my site in the last few days and he was asking if I was looking at my (Github) commit messages, and it was interesting to explain that I kept a manual changelog on the blog.
It was already on the website the last time he looked, but probably he just didn't notice it at the time, or maybe didn't understand what it was. The way the navigation works is probably confusing, and I hadn't explained it yet at the time.
It was also interesting to talk to him about trends that I see in creating websites, like how many tutorials create navigation bars using a div, then optionally a nav, then an unordered list, then list items, and inside those list items are the link tags. In reality, you can just have a nav and fill it with link tags, without all the other steps. I wonder why this is case.
It' also the case that I notice that using self-closing tags is only popular among older programmers who got in the game early, but they're not common in tutorials. Stefano says he hadn't really seen anyone using them, or at least hadn't noticed any patterns with them. I wonder if in the past they were obligatory but now they are depreciated. It's hard to say, exactly.
He says it will be fun to talk to me more about my website after he is finished with the Piscince, and at this point he things I'm learning quickly and doing well, and that we might know a similar amount about front-end at this point. I think that's probably unnecessarily humble of him at this point, since I don't know anything about Javascript at all.
Another thing is, he was trying to reassure me that as long as something works, it's basically fine. I don't really agree with that mentality very much.
There are clearly some kind of best practices, and I would like to follow them. I enjoy following rules and knowing that I am doing things in the right way. If I am violating those best practices, I want it to be a conscious decision that I am making. -07.25
Weird little win today, while I was making my AC shrine: I realized that I could made a sort of trade off, between perminance and space. The AC shrine is something which is mostly just a fun thing, rather than serious.
By using images that are "perminantly" hosted on the web, which are chosen just because they existed, and not because that specific picture had any serious value, I can save a lot of hosting space.
I realized that adding only 3 pictures of a very reasonable size would completely bloat the overall size of my website, but I could just link to them instead, because they're hosted by large, commercial sites rather than fellow neocities accounts. -07.22
1 GB. When you have a neocities account, you get a really generous free 1 GB of hosting space. I've become kind of obsessed with the amount of space I'm using. I'm not really big on pictures, and I don't really plan on hosting any music or things like that, so I doubt I'll have to worry about getting close to that 1 GB limit for a long long time...
Yet I find myself watching my "used space" tick up by the day, by the character with some sort of apprehension. Even though I'm currently using 0.0% of my alloted storage space, and I know that I could pay to have access to more. It's just some sort of strange psychology issue, I guess. -07.21
You Broke My Table! Like I've said before, I really want to like AI, and I really want to use it (which seems to be an increasingly popular opinion on the DIY net, oh well), but the issue is just that it's not very good.
I was having a problem yesterday with a table breaking column rendering on mobile. I'm glad that I added a mobile compatibility check to my Maintenance Check because there's no way I could have noticed otherwise, as I don't view my own site on mobile.
When I asked ChatGPT for help, two of the solutions it provided didn't even work, and some even broke the webpage. One solution ripped the rows apart and just displayed the cells vertically, which was actually quite cool, except for the fact that there wasn't any extra space between the original rows to make it obvious they were seperate. If I had understood the code enough to fix this (which I didn't), I would have used this strategy as it was unique looking and pretty visually appealing. But I didn't understand it well enough to fix it, which means I don't understand it well enough to use it. (Though I'm going to try to learn about this today.)
As far as I could tell, using an "nth child" command didn't work because I had used colspan in the table.
The final solution left to me was just to manually put in a command that under my narrow media query that the specific cells should be hidden. It was very annoying adding this manually to each individual cell. To be fair, that isn't something that I was originally considering doing, because I think I just didn't understand that "display:none" is as powerful as it really is. But does that really count as a ChatGPT win, or should I have just asked Google instead? -07.27
I want to like "AI". In general, I like technology, and I want to use AIs to do cool things. I see other people use them and really like them. To me, no matter how hard I try, I can't seem to find any usecase where in my life they are worth more than the trouble they cause.
In the past, I tried to use ChatGPT to help me write outlines for essays, but it would usually ruin them and it would take longer than just doing it myself. Yesterday I tried to get feedback on my code and it mostly went horrible, though it did solve a problem I was having with a class, as well as helping me find better semantic tags, to make my code more readable.
Overall though, it kind of made me feel disappointed with myself, because my husband swears by it but I can't usually see the use. -07.26
English with Kanji. I've always loved to come up with wacky ideas, and one of the ones I have come up with is to replace English letters with Kanji. Not hiragana or anything like that, but instead a map of English characters to Kanji.
Since there are a lot of Kanji, it could be fun to map different versions of a letter, like "a", "A", "a", "A", "a", "A" all mapping to different kanji, and maybe final vowels being mapped to different characters than their other positions, and the return of a "long s"/"interior s" as well.
Purely a fun idea of course, though it could totally be done using a custom font. I think it would be fun to learn this. -07.29
Otaku Culture.
Is databased culture debased? Is the "tropification" of media killing it? And, when you subvert a subversion, what's left behind?
The Cult of Character: As overarching themes/narratives fall to the wayside, otaku consume media and buy products due to the characters involved. Characters composed of database element (tropes) but lacking in personality perform best, because they can be read into any situation. -08.03
Concrete Illusions: Japanese "appreciation" for nature isn't what you'd initially expect, instead the Japanese seek to control nature and it's destructive forces, which shows itself equally strongly in both bonsai and in huge construction projects that reshape the natural landscape.
Japanese Web Design: Weird, but it works. Here's why11m: Japan, both on paper and digitally, favors a more intense, bright, colorful, and information dense approach. This fell out of favor in the West nearly 10 years ago, but still remains popular in Japan.
Why Japanese Websites Look So Different:This div continues to look at Japanese websites and their aesthetics, and provides more visual examples on the topic. -08.03
I used to really believe in free will and that got me through a lot of hard times. My husband always found this idea and obsession kind of odd and would argue against it in favor of "compatibilism" which is just another kind of determinism. But he challenged me a few months back, saying if I really believed in free will I would be able to change some of my personality features, which I know are not changeable. And pondering over that really broke me and I don't believe in free will anymore and its an empty, sad feeling. But I try not to think about it. -2024.08