Write​_

Oh hi.

It’s been like, a month or so since I last touched this. Guess why? SCHOOOOLLLLLLL. Oh, wait…

Oh okay so after I wrote that last post there, we flew for a week-long vacation in the Philippines. Yayyy. It was great. Yeah.

And then school.

xkcd obsession

I became obsessed with xkcd during that time. I especially loved the comics on Black Hat, and all the tech stuff. I even printed three of them to stick on my closet door:

School magazine?

I decided to launch a school magazine as an alternative to the official Press Team, with some friends helping me out. It was amazing when it was still being set up, and they made Instagram reels for it. Not so much now, when we’re all drowning in homework and it’s hard to get anything done and we’re all slowly rapidly losing morale.

Oh well, maybe one day.

Finally got accepted into tilde.club!

If you scroll aaaaalllll the way to the bottom of this page, you’ll see that this page started all because of my interest in tilde.club. Turns out, I was accepted around 8th August, and I just never got to checking my email!

So I went on a deep dive into using Weechat, an IRC client, as well as the terminal multiplexer rabbit hole. Eventually I decided on using tmux. Customising it was a whole other story. As of right now, I still haven’t set up my tilde site, but that’s for next time.

AS Levels?

AS Levels, so far, have been humbling. Haven’t been humbled yet. But for sure I will. I’m still delulu and lazy as hell. After one of my Comp Sci teachers gave us homework to write notes on like twelve pieces of hardware, I just gave up on my take-notes-after-each-school-day habit and just YOLO’ed it. Not sure what will become of that. Let’s see.

I took the following:

AAAAA.

Oh, and my new Comp Sci teacher is amazing! He fancies himself cruel, but he’s actually a really nice guy. Also great at explaining stuff, with history and all. I can see why he’s the head of the subject.

My Physics teacher is also the head of Physics. Now, our Physics teachers at this school are well-known for having the more or less the same ethnicity (South Asian), the same accent (Pakistani who grew up in England) and the same sense of humour (I hate everyone, you guys suck — all in the most unbothered accent ever). Oh, but they’re all kinda chill. One of them is infamous for always eating Cheetos in lessons. So, the head of Physics department? He’s got to be the most Physics teacher of Physics teachers. No, no Cheetos. I am convinced he has undiagnosed ADHD. He’s really fun. My best friend happens to now be in the same class as me (for the first time ever!) and we say the sussiest things. He gives us side-eyes.

My single-period Business Studies teacher will make my ears bleed. Interesting teaching method that breaks the ice and gets all the students crying with laughter for a good 40 minutes (i.e. the entire lesson) while some poor dude tries to figure out what trade credit is and the teacher suggests false answers to him and widens his eyes.

AS Levels have the best teachers, I think.

Actually, many of my teachers are great — save my Pure Maths teacher, who is honestly rather boring and quite a downgrade from my previous amazing maths teacher. I love slacking off, and he thinks I don’t get the lesson. Nah, I’m just bored as heck, and also kinda sleepy.

Oh, my website?

I tied off some loose ends with that website before school started. I love it! It doesn’t feel quite so polished now that I look at it, though…

Anyways, gotta tweak this website a bit. Signing off.

So my last post was 4 days ago. I guess there was no pattern.

Anyways, I’m done with my portfolio website! Yay! I suppose that means I can chill now and doomscroll or whatever again… it’s quite bittersweet, actually. Just like this website.

No more new features to add. No more things to expect. I can find some other hobby that doesn’t require staring at a screen and mumbling to myself about the weirdness — or the greatness — of CSS, and HTML, and static site generators.

There’s always still work to do. But not right now.

It was nice.

So now, I can just write random blog posts for either this website or that. I heard that having a blog is good for people looking at your portfolio. I suppose there’s some logic there that I’m not very bothered to parse right now.

So yeah. It’s chill. Bittersweet. Whatever. Signing off for now.

Let’s see, hmm, the last post here was… oh wow, it was 6 days ago.

Last time the gap was like 3 days. And before that 2. I think some mafs is mafemathisizing there. Idk. Anyways, ignore my rambling.

So, what have I been up to?

iGCSE results!

We got our iGCSE results back on the 13th! I woke up earlier than usual specifically for the hype. Uh, I can’t say it ruined my day. It didn’t. It wasn’t bad. It just so happened that some grades were lower than they were in my mocks, though some were higher.

I was especially worried about Computer Science — I was bad at theory. Never put in any effort learning that. Then I realised that if I really really wanted to pursue a career in tech, I needed to up my game. But doing that right during the exam season wasn’t really effective. Thank goodness though, I got an A*! Perhaps my cramming did it? Or I did so well in the 15-marker coding question that it upped my grade (people often just skip that)? Whatever it is, the grade validates my A-level choices.

Portfolio website

I’m still working on my new portfolio website. A few days ago, I finally finished my 6-day todo list. Yipee! However, as with any project, you just keep going and going because there are simply so many things you want to do with it. Add new features! Fix the code! Make it pretty! Clean up the spaghetti!

Who knew pure CSS could make such wonderful, tangled-up and messy spaghetti?

What else has happened since…?

Nothing much, really?

I suppose I started singing a bit more in my bedroom while I fixed my website. I managed to reach an F#5 a few days ago! I was able to practice the F5 with Chappell Roan’s ‘Good Luck, Babe!’. I can see why everybody’s obsessed with her album nowadays — I’ll admit, I may be one of them!

Oh and also, we might be flying next week. A sudden week-long vacation to the Philippines just before school starts! Yay.

My dreams have been weird lately

I had a dream, maybe 2-3 days ago, where I was somehow some Main Character and I was facing off some woman with a gun. After attempting karate (and ultimately failing. My basics were fine, but they were too good waaa) and dodging bullets (more like dodging the gun itself, for some reason), dream-me just surrendered and gestured that she just shoot her in the chest. Y’know, to avoid pain. And so she did.

Dying in the dream… that felt weird. I knew there was some sort of dull pain, like wanting to faint. A similar sensation to a really bad fever in the night, when you feel your consciousness randomly going in and out of focus, with a dull throb at the chest. Something like that. Not knowing whether to turn or just lay still in a weird position. Go in the fetal position laying sideways like I would in my bed? Lay on the grass and bleed out? I dunno???

And then I died. Apparently. Then after that I somehow was alive. Not really alive, more like living an afterlife. I was in some hospital room. Then suddenly my entire life was just Fedi. YES. FEDI. In my dream, it was just a screen. Not like a physical screen; all I could see were the contents of the screen. Same as how you never see the edge of your vision. It just ain’t there. And it looked kind of like Misskey… but also a light-blue-ish dark theme. Some pink. Some white outlines. Something, something. Yeah. And I found that I can still interact with it. Post stuff. Almost as if I was alive.

Then at some point, I was actually alive again. Perhaps I woke up (within the dream, of course). Perhaps I was given a new life. Anyways, I remember having this huge appreciation for life and death at that point (within the dream).

…

I remember having another weird dream the night before last. I forgot what it was though.

But the main thing is: my dreams feel… important lately. Significant. They’ve all been feeling more like adventures lately, where I somehow play a big role and I’m just plain old me — but stronger, somehow? More courageous. I suppose that’s what happens when you have life-and-death experiences and you just go into your raw instincts.

Hey! I haven’t been here in like 3 days so I really oughta catch up.

On the past few days

On the 6th (my last post here), I started out with my new portfolio website. Y’know, if I ever need one. Anyways, I worked with that a bit more on the 7th, and late at night I went to browse some other portfolio websites on the internet, and, woah I was blown away.

So I then got onto IbisPaint and began designing my dream website. My old parallax image header was boring. The waves I’d spent hours that morning to fix were nice, but also didn’t bring as much excitement as it should’ve. I needed something a lot more modern for today, in a world of flat design, not a revamp of my old website from when I was 14.

And so I got this idea of making a website inspired by terminal GUIs — you know, when a terminal app uses lots of ASCII and makes a GUI that is somehow more impressive than actuall GUI apps? I used a dark colourscheme, with pastel pinks and blues.

Then I made a 6-day todo list for stuff I would have to do to make that website design a reality, HTML, CSS, Lume templating and all.

Yesterday and today

I kept working on this project, knowing that with determination and a lot of time (and exploiting hyperfocus), I could make the website that I’ll be proud of for years to come.

I’m making progress. Nothing too impressive, but I’m making progress and I’m quite proud of it.

I discovered a new font!

It’s called Recursive. See, I saw someone post on r/ProgrammerHumor yet another post about using Comic Sans or Papyrus for their IDE. Aaaa. Unironically though, I quite liked Comic Sans. It just needed to be monospaced.

So I found the NERD font for Comic Sans. I wasn’t very thrilled once I got it onto my terminal, though. Something about it felt a little off to me. Probably the huuuge font weight.

Anyways, so I went and DuckDuckWent: “best monospace fonts”.

I found some article that talked about some of the most common favourite fonts, and the most overrated, and the most underrated. I, eager to try something new, went for the “most underrated” fonts.

One of them was this font called Recursive. The name spoke out to me. I wanted to try out a font with all the cool quality-of-life features like those cursive italics and such. I was not disappointed.

I got me the NERD font. I tried using it on my website, but unfortunately it didn’t fit in as well as my current picks (Anonymous Pro headers, Khula body). Right now, though, I’m using RecMono Casual (one of its NERD fonts) while typing this very log on Neovim. My eyes are feasting on it. I especially love how its italised font is automatically its cursive variant as opposed to its roman variant.

I suggest you try it! It has an amazing website too, full of really cool interactive stuff.

The enthusiasm of whoever made that font is also contagious. It sounds like a work of art.

Some other stuff

I was browsing through my RSS readers yesterday and found that CSS-Tricks published an article about someone’s talk: Christian Heilmann: Let’s make a simpler, more accessible web. I suggest you give it a read because I love topics like these!

Hey!

Yesterday I didn’t really update the site much because it was just some random RSS feed stuff and waiting and we had to go somewhere again.

Anyways, today I realised how little I have to do here now… everything’s pretty much done. But, of course, I had a thirst for more. So I did more.

No, not here. I installed Neovim. I set my mind. I went through the entire Neovim tutorial (which was great! I’d forgotten all of those tricks, even though I used Vim almost exclusively while making this site). I did git init on a new project folder.

I decided to try out Lume — an SSG similar to the one used for this very site. Sorry Hugo, but I heard that while your build times are unmatched, and your simplicity is amazing, you’re not quite as robust.

I actually didn’t config the hell out of Lume yet, nor really utilise what it’s made for, but it’s a start. I got the website and webserver set up. Then I set out to design the site like there’s no tomorrow. It’s quite amazing to see how much progress I made in around 6 hours. It came from a website with lightgrey and lightblue colours and awkward design to something that makes a lot more sense.

Unfortunately, I will not link this site here as it is meant to be a portfolio site for future use and contains my real-life credentials and such. I will, however, tell you my favourite parts of it so far. I love haikei.app and its SVG curve generators! I made my website have SVG waves between the full-height header and the content, as well as the content and the footer. I’m rather proud of it. I had to figure out how to get rid of all the horrible space, though, as the waves only filled slightly more than half of the SVG.

The full-height header? Oh, a parallax image, a flexbox to centre all my elements, et cetera. The navbar’s transparent but has a 25px blur effect on everything below. I love it! I mean, I used <div>s like there’s no tomorrow but this site’s for showing off. It’s not like someone’s going to load that website in a potato anyway.

Content Warning: sarcasm and unhingedness. Proceed with caution. Also a ridiculous amount of “I"s for starting paragraphs. Clearly this demonstrates my superior and diverse vocabulary!

Some theming stuff

I’ve been busy yesterday. I managed to fix some links and fix the lastmod date of all the posts (they all ended up showing “Edited 02 Aug 2024” after I fixed the folder structure, which is totally helpful), but then I had to go to the city and not much was done then.

I also began to dream about making a new theme for this website, as I initially wanted it to be minimal and use as little resources as possible. That went well into midnight, when I decided to write up a specification for how to choose colours and implement the theme — hyperfocus, anyone?

I actually got to implementing that theme on this very site… until I went, hold on a second. I loved the site as it is! Its beautiful, minimal monochrome. As I tried to get the tags to look nicer, I realised how beautiful my site already was, without some fancy dark mode theme.

I probably do need to fix the line-height and font-size though, because HTML defaults for those are just kinda ew. Oh, and turns out I can centre divs without flex, so maybe I should get rid it in favour of margin: auto.

Say no to CSS! Say no to bloat!

Okay, not exactly. I still love CSS, but if you ever want to view my website without any styling, you can now view the no-CSS version of this site. The only page with styling is this timeline page, since it works differently from the rest of the site. Besides, anti-CSS people (if they even exist) would probably forgive me for doing inline CSS on a site title and three declarations within the <head>.

If you got to this page, I assume you’ve clicked on several links already and you know that I was inspired by the mfing website, which was one of the reasons I took a lot of care to use as little CSS as possible — or, in the case of the no-CSS version, none at all.

As this journal is all about random stuff that really don’t fit anywhere, expect a mishmash of random topics here.

Yapping poetic about computers

Earlier today I had something of an emotional breakdown. Guess what ultimately calmed me down? The thought of having to fix this website’s RSS feed! Strange, perhaps even dumb and superficial, I know. But something’s so comforting about computers and programs. There’s almost always a solution. It’s always simple-minded and somewhat predictable. Unlike people.

The problems feel more concrete and solvable. The variables are plentiful, but limited. There’s something comforting about that that makes me want to live the moment and stop thinking about all the bad things in life. Computers are amazing.

I can see why the tech industry attracts neurodivergents like bees to honey.

I discovered RSS feeds

RSS feeds! Amazing!

It’s basically like being able to view tons of websites, except they’re all in the same format! It’s like subscribing to a newsletter without giving your email!

I fixed up the website’s RSS feeds so that it won’t show random stuff anymore, but it’s still the Hugo default. Perhaps I’ll make my own RSS template to allow entire posts to be loaded rather than just the summaries.

Anyways, as I tested out my RSS feeds, I installed an app called Read You (from F-Droid)… and it kind of just started from there.

Right now, I have 8 feeds (excluding the ones from my website):

Yep, you can add subreddits in there too! Quite useful if I’m trying to avoid the ads and/or comments and such.

Rant about all the ‘best x’ lists online

So I did have to DuckDuckGo “best RSS feeds” to get some ideas of what to subscribe to. The results though… I have complaints.

Like any reviews on software, you can expect links to the software. However, the links are horrible. They all redirect you to some sign-up page for some service made by the writers of the list, instead of, ahem, the actual RSS feed. For those who don’t know better, they’ll fall for that. I’ll give you 500 Monopoly Dollars their #1 goal is to take data too!

And so I DDWent (y’know, past tense of ‘DuckDuckGo’) the websites of those feeds and easily found links to their feeds, completely public without any sign-up forms or whatever.

I hate ‘best x’ lists, even though I always end up on them for many things.

Would be great if we had people make actual good lists that weren’t just copies of other sites’ lists — i.e., if you wrote one of those lists you would have actually tried and tested each one yourself — that didn’t try to promote a product of their own. Because. Why can’t the internet just have stuff made with the goodness of people’s hearts anymore? Everything is freaking capitalism.

I mean, those things do exist, but not in the quantity that the horrible lists are made. And they tend to be buried due to their low SEO scores too, unlike the huge sites that kind of cheat the SEO system.

So, yeah.

Salt air and the rust on your door amirite? Happy folklore track 8 everyone!

Website stuff

The git repo should be a great way to tell you the most recent changes on my site, but let me tell you the most recent changes anyway. It’s currently quarter to one, but some changes are small and easy to make.

  1. I fixed some links regarding the about page, especially as the public/ dir required purging and I forgot to do that yesterday.
  2. Fixed more links! Yipee!
  3. Put the three files regarding the #fediverse in order or writing, because I did not bother with their dates lol.
  4. Used Netlify to build the site instead of building on my machine then pushing to GitHub and getting Netlify to just take public/ from there, which causes the commit hashes to sometimes be outdates by a commit.
  5. Did some more cleaning and freshening up with the design, to make sure you don’t get overwhelmed with so much info on the list pages.
  6. Give this page its very own template, inspired by tilde.club/~ford’s web journal, independent of any other templates to make it look really minimal (yet classy).

I should probably also address the thing I forgot to say here yesterday: I really forgot it for good now. No telling what it might’ve been, but oh well.

Personal life

Personal life, huh? Well, here goes. Our iGCSE results will be released on 13 August, and everyone’s anticipating that. To be honest, I quit caring so much about what grade I might get anymore. I probably won’t fail. I just hope I get the minimum grades to get into the A-levels I want.

Quite worried about Computer Science because I actually did not try hard enough to learn any theory. Hopefully my excellent 15-mark-question algorithm in Python would make up for it though!

Some stuff about health: my right hand is suffering. It matches all the symptoms of dishydrosis and it sucks. It’s ugly, it’s itchy, it’s [insert scream here]. Ugh.

So today I decided to make a little timeline. I like posting stuff about this beloved website, but simply don’t know whether to post it on Fedi or make a post about it here. As of writing, #dev has the most posts (9), but #meta is a running second (6). Surely there’s got to be some place for all this meta without making actual posts on /posts/?

Recently, I got an interest for places like tilde.club. I was browsing around some people’s personal sites there and they’re mostly timelines that just explain the status quo — a literal web log!

It excited me. I already signed up for an account there, but unfortunately I haven’t recieved any updates, so I’m back to here. Perhaps I will make the über-long page right here in my site then!

So yeah, this is the first log here. Hello.

Wait, I was gonna address something here before I did hugo new content timeline.md. Hmm, what was it?