2022/11/12 stray thoughts
November 12, 2022
assorted thoughts and things
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dA recently had a small explosion over AI stuff, it’s a lot of frustration blowup and that thread on thresholds is good. anyway I’m staying but that’s another good kick to save my shit
keep entertaining idle thoughts of a code tutorial of some sort, since then I can actually Direct People To Something whilst shilling the benefits of DIY’ing a site
grudge against carrd ended today after reading the creator’s twitter for a while & his page on how he made it. it’s not his fault the kids are feral and have DNIs that, if printed, would unfurl comically like a toilet paper scroll and make trees cry. anyway carrds are apparently basically static sites which is surprisingly very cool
thinking maybe it would be nice/good/interesting/etc. to treat storybuilding more like programming—ship early, ship often, get feedback, keep iterating, the job is never truly done etc. well that last part’s a misnomer, it’s gotta stop somewhere, but if nothing else I could probably stand to distance myself from the mythic ideal of The Perfect Finished Product spawning impeccably from the creator’s forehead. (gold star if you get the mythology reference)
addendum: people used to not write things down (and surely still don’t, wherever oral traditions thrive) and stories got told just fine, is what something in the territory of what I’m getting at. the Perfect Immaculate Canon is a myth.
sometimes when I’m writing primarily for myself I’m like twice as excitable/unhinged as I am when actually talking to people, sometimes (like this post) it’s a lot more subdued. duality of man or whatever. I am very conscious (probably too conscious) of how typing styles can be the internet’s equivalent of audio tone and body language, which makes the current lowkeyness sound kinda dry/dull, but it’s also relaxing idek
anyway I don’t welcome the AI overlords but they’re already here and I’m simultaneously really tired of the fearmonger-y “it’s stealing all our hard work” and yet not motivated enough to research thoroughly to write up a decent debunking. it’s cool, I made a “The angel of death corgi” last night on NightCafé which turned out hilarious, I already made a big ramblepost about this (and other things, but mainly this AI stuff) so “aggressively ambivalent” (emphasis on the ambivalent) is still the best way I can describe my thoughts on it.
it’s weird (read: not weird at all) that I can just spitball this easily and be like “yeah publish that” with blog posts, an output to which I ascribe little self-imposed standard or embodiment of talent/self-worth, as opposed to stories and art and such.
it’s dark at 6:30pm and it feels like I should be going to bed soon. unsure whether to fight the circadian rhythm with continued blasting of high-powered screen light into my retinas or succumb (I did not sleep until like 2am last night on account of self-control writhing in the face of catsite), though in all realistic honesty I would simply lie down, stare at the ceiling, be haunted/annoyed by TV noise, check my iPad “just real quick,” and then we are back at square one.
time, man. what is it.
(p.s. update: half the reason I was stalking the carrd guy’s twitter was morbid curiosity about whether he knows what the site’s being used for. (the other half was genuinely being interested in the little snippets he puts out.) looks like he does, and with that my grudge against the core site itself is rescinded fully, god bless.
[quote of tweet, in case it ever goes down]
Honestly looking back at this code has been nothing short of inspiring
Who would've thought a guy who started out making simple website templates would eventually go on to build the #1 platform for stanning anime characters
no forgiveness for the kids these days, though. with all the self-awareness of someone who was like ~5 years away from having one of my own, yes.)
(p.p.s. publishing this over an hour later on account of 1) This Repository Specifically having very slow build times for mysterious reasons, and 2) messing with the layout yet again. the current “plaintext” layout neglected to account for my verbose tendencies, but I’m not gonna retroactively change it on existing posts so maybe I’ll redo it some time :V
the jekyll thing remains a mystery to me, though. I have repositories with a fuckton of images, and yet this one has barely any... it’s a tiny thing but may have to actually replace the data/includes on older layouts with static HTML? trying to diagnose the bottleneck with the build thing doesn’t work for apparent lack of a Gemfile (there are certain cons to using technology I do not understand) so manually messing around with stuff it is.
and other asides laypeople would understand!)