Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AILRTVU Wordo: LABIA

  • "Connor of the Cats"

    Connor closes his eyes and rests his palms on his thighs. around him he starts to feel the tall grass move, hear the brush of cloth and the creak of leather as the witnesses circle the pair in the grass. they say nothing, time stands still until the King speaks again.

    "to be counted as one of the Feral Kingdom, to be part of the Cat King's court, you need to make an oath, if it is ever betrayed there is no punishment but there is no retaking it, you will simply no longer be part of the Kingdom."

  • how to find blog post topics, non-trending edition

    A question from the MelonLand forums this morning (and one I've seen in a lot of other small Web communities): How do you choose what to blog about? How do you find topics/ideas?

    My second day job is generating corporate Web content. In that world, I've answered this question a million times. That answer typically involves references to tools like ahrefs, BuzzSumo, and/or Google Analytics - on the theory that we humans can't possibly know what will interest other humans, but The Algorithm(TM) can reveal this wisdom unto us.

    On the human-being Web, however, you couldn't pay me to utter the words "trending topics" as an answer to "how do you decide what to blog about?" Ew. No. My day job stays at my day job.

  • Grimdark Magazine

    An online magazine dedicated to grimdark fantasy in different media but I've been enjoying the book reviews the most.

  • Lousy Smarch Weather; Little Libraries; Snow

    The first part of the title a Simpsons reference, the kind that're easy when you're my age (xennial, late millennial, Oregon Trail Generation, whatever you prefer). The details of that episode (Homer's got a misprinted calendar, that's all I remember) are long lost to me, but "lousy smarch weather" has been a phrase my partner and I have used forever when we get a patch of wintery weather when it should ostensibly be spring. Last night, it snowed a bit. Not much, maybe half an inch, but enough to cover up all the bare ground exposed by a week of mild temperatures that suddenly turned cold again.

    We've for years had a little library, unused in the garage: one of our friends is a shop teacher, and made it for us as a birthday present to my partner. But we needed to install it, and in that way that you do, we never did. Last year we went to the states with our friend for a concert. Her husband stayed behind to house-sit; he wasn't a huge fan of the act, and was looking for, as he put it, "a relaxing weekend of drinking beer and hanging out with the dogs."

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Another Website Redesign - CSS Naked Day Prep

      If there's one thing I certainly like to do (possibly a little too much?), it's modify the look of my website! I think that's an issue with a lot of folks who enjoy playing around with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. This design change is, funny enough, to get rid of ALL CSS. I had already gotten rid of all Javascript quite a while back ago and very recently was surfing through some old websites and noticed one that had somewhat less CSS than I was already using.

      April 9th is CSS Naked Day, where some websites decide to spend 50 hours (yupp, 50, in order to make sure everyone on Earth experiencing April 9th can experience CSS Naked Day) with absolutely 0 CSS. The CSS Naked Day website is linked below.

  • Programming

    • Devlog 13

      I've not done anything yet, but I've been brooding a lot about the state of the web and how much I dislike doing things the way I've been doing them. When I started making eigakanban I approached it the same way I've approached all web projects: create an API that serves JSON then create a frontend that consumes it.

      For fun, I recently converted a project from a sprawling React behemoth to a single page of HTML with inline JavaScript. It really gave me pause and forced me to think about the state of frontend development these days. I realised that I don't like the way I'm doing things, and that there is a better way to approach it. I've come up with two major pieces of work I want to do to make the project better.