new photos (bugs mostly again), also some adjustments to the backlog! i know i was just going to do updates over rss, but this was a pretty big batch and i haven't posted here in a month. eh.
looked through the older photos on my camera today. i really screwed up in my initial choice of shots to put on the website- the garden spider picture might have been a suboptimal choice from the set i had, and i somehow shunned the most compelling Badlands landscape shots in favor of representative, yet drab ones... might swap some pictures out. part of me feels like the photo log is an immutable record (semantic conflation with a diary??), but really nothing i put in the starting batch was intended for public consumption and my first selection is no more honest than a new one. also i'm overthinking things. i don't know what makes me so neurotic about tweaking my own site when the culture of the personal web generally favors redesigns and reorganization...
anyway. uh. new things. things people might actually notice. the last set of bug pictures i put out was incomplete in that i saw some sweat bees but they were too nervous and flighty around me to photograph. today the flowers were swarming with them (along with the usual honey and bumble bees) and i got way too many pictures! luckily there were a few other bugs around to break up the set. selections forthcoming eventually.
scratch game ports update: not the kind of thing i can find energy for while studying engineering! did look into (read about, not test) engines and "neptune.js" seems just barebones enough for me while still providing the features *ahem* collision *ahem* i'm too dumb for. the only issue i can see with it is i have no proof it works, because i can't find a single platformer or otherwise sprite & collision based game using it. in fact, the only game i could find using it is a clicker by the same developer. will see in a few months how this pans out
other unimportant update: last year i was complaining about having to compile Ardour, the supposed best open-source DAW, if i wanted to try it. i think i might have mentioned i knew it was a default package for Ubuntu Studio but somehow i never checked if it was in the regular ubuntu repositories. i am an utter fool, or at least was a year ago
site's a bit slicker (i hope)- smudged the background vertically to make it a bit less busy, took out some glow borders, added some shadows. as for that platformer engine- one of the thoughts i jotted down before summer classes started worked, to an extent- the hitbox now successfully hits walls without going through or bouncing off weirdly, but its velocity tends to act weird due to unforeseen effects, some of which i don't understand the source of at all. not feeling particularly invigorated by this outcome and starting to come to my senses, i think. kind of would like to make a game rather than a silly reinventing-the-wheel tech demo, so maybe i'll look into engines now.
checked twitter, instant regret for topic of last post
hi, it's time for my monthly (damn it, this was never supposed to be infrequent as monthly) log update.
site news: there is no site news, i've been doing summer classes. wrote some notes for potential fixes in my platformer engine right before i quit doing it, and i'm now distant enough from my frustration i can believe i might finish it. will update after i can work on it again later this month.
album reviews kind of ended up being a common topic on here (ok, i wrote two, but that's still one more than i really should have), so uhh time for another one. new will wood album just came out. i only remembered two tracks from streams he hadn't put out as singles yet, "becoming the lastnames" and "i'll be in my coffin," the latter of which i loved and the former of which kinda bored me. hearing their album versions... somehow "lastnames" is harmonically interesting to me now, and "i'll be in my coffin" is good as i remember (weird new name though). i enjoy rather than just tolerate every track on here besides "falling up" and "white noise" and "white noise" has been growing on me. kinda subscribe to the common complaint of similar sound/similar structure in a lot of tracks but only in an "i notice it" sense; not enough to complain about (funny how similar the strumming in "let's get you home" is to "tomcat" though, almost gave me as much whiplash as a miracle musical melody showing up in "williard"). production is very lush but usually doesn't sound overproduced ("tomcat" has been feeling more overproduced the longer i hear it, still a top track though). top tracks: "tomcat," "hangover," "main character". no comment on lyrics (bad at focusing on them) except for two phrases: "am i the cup" is very funny and "ride my a-bomb" is iconic.
man o nam, i have stupid plans. i've been working on the engine for my scratch project recreations fairly continuously since finishing the website tidying. i've built up point, line, triangle, and rectangle objects, written methods to find their intersections, got some basic wireframe drawing and controls in place, built a rectangular hitbox from the shape objects... aand that hitbox constitutes most of the *new* work i've done, because i cannot figure out for the life of me how to correctly *interpret* and *act on* its intersections with the world geometry. really starting to wish i had the sensibility to just use a preexisting js engine, but given the hitbox is the last really hard problem i (necessarily) have to solve, it'll take some effort to get over the sunk-cost fallacy. maybe i'll take a break for a while. i'm starting up the next TARDIS console model (<3 1975 ruscoe) and a bit ago i made a track i'm pretty proud of for the quasi-shitbost band i'm in. maybe i'm good enough at music now to actually focus on it, i don't know. summer classes are starting soon anyway so maybe it's all a moot point
Updated the site style, expanded the linkroll (buttons and descriptions), added some new photos (resolving the recent dearth of bird photos), and added an rss feed. From now on this log probably won't specifically mention when pages are added, as I'm pushing log updates to the feed alongside page links (and duplicates would be silly). Also touched up the site theme- not sure whether this looks less rough or too gaudy. some pages were redesigned more than others, such as the flattener tool, which still doesn't look great but ought not to be as active an eyesore.
minesweeper scaling was broken since last update, ope. is no longer so
Speaking of minesweeper, I've been spending more time than anyone should on that MMO implementation of it, m3o.xyz. (It's an MMO in that it's got a daily leaderboard and more importantly, uses a permanent map 2^54 cells wide.) Fun to travel out to distant coordinates and see if anyone else has been there (sometimes they have!); sadly there aren't very many messages or drawings that i've seen, and little in the way of impressive megastructures, despite the inherent humour in using a minesweeper board as a canvas. Guess people mostly just want to play the game.
this site now uses exactly one (1) media query! the navbar no longer takes up an unseemly amount of room on small page widths. also the "play the bach" button is now accessible and can be tabbed to and switched with the keyboard.
this update was posted through the neocities command-line interface!
just did a bit of a touch-up: improved some text contrast, youtube links switched to an invidious instance, etc
i pass some of those patches of ice with air pockets underneath on my daily walking commutes and somehow most of them are intact. oh, we're all adults now and somehow that means everyone's too busy to crack the air pocket ice?? losers. bet they don't push in the lil bubbles on soda cup lids either
hopefully i will write one of them site update posts soon. difficult to find time for those now, especially because it's difficult to find time to update the site, what with winter break being over. as for the whole scratch project recreation thing i first mentioned in. uh. last may. i actually got part of a 2d engine whipped up in january! it's not *most* of the work but it's, i think, the hardest part. the part i would skip if i made wise choices like using libraries rather than building from a low level out of fun/practice/masochism.
feel obligated to post an update for the new year. i don't really have any site news; i've been whiling away the hours hanging out and ripping cds so's to have backups. i enjoy the latter as a chance to stick it to the FBI and copyright law in a manner that has never resulted in a single prosecution in the united states