wow a post

me when I identify a behavioral pattern that does not benefit me (bottlenecking site updates) but identification does not stop the behavior (site updates being bottlenecked): :o

Happy first quarter of 2026!

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First of all, I like attempting to log in to github dot com and (at least with my special cocktail of blocker add-ons) I cannot even see the fuckign login button. because it is behind a wall of Try Our New Copilot AI Bullshit Right Now Fuck You. I will continue hosting my site on GitHub Pages as long as Pages is an option but christ alive.

Anyway.

Sorting dispatches by category this round, in roughly chronological order within said categories:

site updates

• /shriblets has finally been moved to its very own repository! This makes basially no difference on the frontend (what you, the viewer, sees), but is organizationally more manageable for me . If/when I get around to rounding up “hidden” pages across my other sub-sites, it’ll be vastly easier to handle them in a standalone repo like this.
  • Along the way I had to modify a bunch of links. Kinda makes those “last updated” notes at the bottom of some pages… inaccurate? pointless? The content of the pages hasn’t really changed, just the code—but that’s part of what I’m saving, too. People into restoration and preservation of physical media probably know more about how this sort of thing gets ~properly handled. For my own purposes, I just leave that visible ephemera intact.
  • I also (re)discovered the stash folder, where I (completely forgot I’d) shoved a bunch of unpolished code tests. It’s not linked on the shriblets index yet, but here’s the thing!
• /ygbtdm: Found a nifty piece of Jekyll that automatically iterates through all static files in a directory. Subsequently made a page that just dumps all the colorscript files in one long HTML conga line—or, uh, it’s supposed to do that. Checking the live page now it cuts off, actually. I forget if it’s supposed to do that or if it’s an oversight on my part. I’ll round back to it….
  • also done while I was here: auto-converted a PDF of various setting inspirations into an HTML page. I cobbled the original together through Google Drive, with all sources linked. The resulting page is huge, but all links and images are intact!

music recs

• Found on a 3D kick: The Imitator’s “What if you fly”. I looped it considerably while playing around in Blender; the titular quote sample still plays in my head occasionally. What if you don’t fall? What if you fly?
• Stumbled across a random twitter rec of Igorrr’s Nostril. I already knew this guy through one track, and that from YouTube autoplay on the heel of an album he mastered. (And that was through an art description on dA, and that artist I found through…)
• well anyway point is I have a strange fascination with music that sounds like discordant noise. with some straight-up screaming, as a treat. Went ahead and binged the rest of Igorrr’s discography, plus Ruby My Dear for good measure. This is ongoing because I got “stuck” on these fun lil EPs: Balloon & Phlegm. (No vocals in these!)

other bits-n-bobs

• Read the entirety of How Dare You?!, a Chinese webnovella inexpliably hosted on a Jane Austen Fan Fiction website, on a whim. Surprisingly good! Nice mix of humor and drama, actually made me care about a central romance (historically a difficult feat), fun stuff. I enjoy the existential horror of the male protag’s life immensely.
  • Also unsure if lines like “CharacterName: ‘?’” are a translation quirk, but I enjoy those too. I do. Works great for comedy.
  • The whole thing, in English to an eye wildly unfamiliar with the genre conventions of the online webnovel (let alone in Mandarin!), reads as somewhere between “proper” prose and a concept script, and I actually like that format a lot. Makes for a breezy read despite the broad scope, and when scenes get full dialogue focus, they’re all the more significant for that. Thing to keep in the writerly arsenal.
• Random snippet from a February stab at a blogpost (not saved, got folded into this one) that I wanted to preserve:

  there was a moment many years ago where I was out for a walk, took a different route. the sun was setting just right, and I had that classic capital-r Romantic monent of thinking, oh yeah, this is it. this is what life is.

• A (roughly paraphrased; I did not note when it’s said) quote from a video dissecting character design: “It is designed that way because someone wanted it to look that way.” Applicable to characters, to everyday objects; to a lot of things, really. Food for thought.
• Spurred in part by January’s adventures with a 3D video game, I took another stab at 3D modeling! Turned my favorite character du jour into a dog about it. There’s a bigass process page about that sitting in the shriblets repository, 90% finished albeit lacking polish—as was the model, when I made the page. Have since spruced up the model a bit, but the page is So Big that I kinda intimidated myself out of finishing & updating it lol whoops.
  • Whatever. Here’s the link anyway.
• Also got back into console games a bit, courtesy the Delta emulator. And by “console games” I mean these badboys:
  • ROMhack Pokémon Unbound; stupid well-polished, feels like an official game but if the official franchise actually matured in terms of storytelling and gameplay. I haven’t finished it yet, on account of the following two games, but I’ve had a great time with what I did play & look forward to rounding back!
  • Viva Piñata: Pocket Paradise, the Nintendo DS port of a franchise I always thought looked cool on commercials as a kid but never had the console to actually play. Did you know it’s an ecosystem/resource simulator game? I had no idea it was an ecosystem-garden-resource-management game. The amount of mice I unintentionally churned through in like level 1 of this children’s game, before I succumbed to looking up a guide (which was updated this year?!?), is kind of delightfully insane. The colorful low-poly animals make for fun little pieces of eye candy, too; more on them in a bit.
  • Good ol’ Pokémon FireRed, alongside a friend playing LeafGreen. It’s kinda weird playing the original game, no mods no hacks no nothin’, after being re-exposed to the story numerous times in the 2010s via nuzlocke challenges and other romhacks, but having… probably never beaten it myself? I don’t think?? There used to be a website with a bunch of GBA games playable online without an account or download or anything; I know I’ve started a ton of runs, but do not remember if I’ve ever managed to finish any. Eh. Memory lane aside, Kanto 2 holds up nicely, even if the older mechanics keep tripping me up!
• Figured out how to use Blender as an AfterEffects with (many, many) extra steps, for 2D cutout-type animation. Grease Pencil is kinda cumbersome for this, so alas I don’t have a single-program animation workflow quite yet, but it’s doable! It’s not Adobe! It’s free and open source! And it’s complicated as fuck if you’re not already familiar with Blender as a 3D tool. I liken the 2D process (fondly) to hammering a nail with the butt end of an electric screwdriver.
• I have no fucking clue where to publish my art anymore.
• More recently: I have been clawing at the bars trying to extract those piñata models, or really anything usable, from the aforementioned game. For 3D reference, for sport, for enrichment. Thus far I have broken a .bin file at least three different ways, and none of them have gotten me any closer to the gold (er, candy?). Bluh, no knowledge wasted; I’m learning more about hexadecimal and compression and such, and now I have slightly better understanding about why multiples of 16 (e.g. base64, 255 as a maximum value) are everywhere! and why HTML colors (e.g. #0080ff, alternatively rgba(0,128,255)) are encoded Like That! and why no one else has ripped this particular game yet oh my god—

endnote

So, like, that “new thing every month” idea that I had and then kinda forgot about.

…I’d really like to have something ??finished? to show for this month :V As a general rule I feel better Making Things than “consuming” them (a piece of terminology I don’t love, btw, but it’s quicker than “watching/reading/playing/etc.”), but I guess after spending 1.5 months completely hyperfocused on learning a new-ish program (Blender), the creative brain might need to chill for a bit.

Onward to the year’s next quarter…!