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Busy Weekend

Though I didn’t have any big plans this weekend, I kept myself busy around the house. I mailed some packages, did the grocery shopping, prepared some meals for the week, rearranged my kitchen, cleared out some expired food, and cleaned up my desk. It feels very good to be this productive.

X-Men 97

I’ve been keeping up with X-Men 97 weekly, it’s such a good show. I love that it has a pretty serious plot but also keeps some of that Saturday morning cartoon charm. The weekly release schedule is so nice, I love spending the week leading up to the next episode hypothesizing with my partner about what will happen next. It’s also gotten me into the X-Men more in general, I’ve been watching the original 90s cartoon in between episodes, and I think I’ll pick up some comics as well!

Doing New Things Is Scary

I’ve been looking at gigs on Upwork to try and bring in some extra cash and bolster my experience. Some of these jobs seem braindead easy but I’m still so afraid to apply for them. Logically, I know that if something goes wrong nothing bad really happens, but the fact that something could go wrong terrifies me. I guess I just don’t want to disappoint people. My browser currently has a half-filled out proposal for a job. It would take me a couple hours to complete. I just need to submit it.

Clearing My Game Backlog

I love video games. Or, at least, I think I do. I don’t finish very many of them. I either play them for a few hours and forget to come back or I hyperfocus and get like 75% through the story but lose interest before getting to the end. This summer, I’d like to make progress on my backlog of unplayed games. I’ll start with Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077. These both fall into the 75% category and I last played them recently enough that I won’t be completely lost with what’s going on in the story. After that I’ll dig into some indie games, stuff like Hades, Hyper Light Drifter, Hotline Miami 1 + 2, because they are shorter to complete and do a lot of interesting things. Then I get back into AAA games and beat one beginning to end, just to prove to myself that I can. I’m thinking one of Persona 5 Royal, Spider-Man, Ghost of Tsushima or Final Fantasy VII Remake. A challenge I face with this goal is that a lot of first-person and third-person games trigger my motion sickness, so I can only really play for an hour at a time until a build up a tolerance to them (which I lose if I don’t play for a few days). Usually I stick to top-down games like strategy and simulation games to get around this, but I really want to play these games, so I will try my best to persevere.

Intermittent Fasting

I’ve started doing intermittent fasting to help achieve my fitness goals. It’s only been a week so far but I’m liking how it’s making me be more intentional about my eating habits. My eating hours are from 11am to 7pm, so I basically get two full meals and some snacks. I thought the hard part would be waiting until 11am to eat, but it’s actually pretty easy (probably all the coffee helping there), then when I do eat breakfast I can put more thought into it than when I’m half awake. What is actually hard is not being able to eat after 7pm. I eat dinner around 6 but by 9:30 or so I’m starting to get hungry again. Maybe the solution to this is just going to bed earlier. I imagine it will get easier as my body gets used to the new schedule and I figure out exactly how much I need to eat in those 8 hours.

Happy (Belated) JS Naked Day

JS Naked Day happened this week, and as usual, I’m fashionably late. I decided to permanently remove a significant portion of the JavaScript from my site as it was affecting load times. There wasn’t a whole lot of JavaScript to begin with, which made this pretty easy to implement. What I did have was the following:

I just removed this as I just wasn’t finding it amusing anymore. Maybe it will return later, who knows? Certainly not me.

Dedicated Instant Messaging was Better

fLaMEd’s post about instant messaging programs got me thinking about my own IM journey. I’m too young to really have experienced the peak AIM and MSN days, but I did use MSN/Windows Live Messenger in the late 00s to keep up with some online friends I had met through various forums. Eventually, I moved to Skype as that is what all my IRL friends were on at the time. I was also on Curse Voice for the brief time it existed, mostly for voice calls during League of Legends matches. As Skype started dying out, I moved over to Discord in 2016, which made me a pretty early adopter.

Music Discovery Is Weird

As a teenager, the music I listened to was music my dad shared with me, music my friends would play when we would hang out, or music from video games and movies I liked. I remember spending time on Pandora creating stations based off my favorites in hopes I could find something similar I liked. I would discover a few songs this way but otherwise didn’t have much luck. As a result, I find I just listen to the same stuff over and over again, but there is so much music out there, I want to find more! But how?

Recreating the Windows Live Messenger Avatar in CSS

This past week I’ve been working on a big redesign of my site. I’m trying to recreate the vibe of MSN / Windows Live Messenger around 2008-2011. Today, I spent most of the day recreating the avatar frame from WL Messenger in CSS.

At first, I was trying really hard to recreate the kind of squircle shape from the login screen. It turns out this is quite difficult in CSS, and the only way I could possibly have done it is through creating an SVG path that I could use to clip the HTML element, but then I would lose access to the border and box-shadow properties. So instead I opted to just make a rounded square, using the first-radius value to round the corners with an ellipse shape rather than a circle. After all, we’re going for the vibe, not a 1:1 recreation. After hours of tinkering with just the shape, I added the gradient background, as well as a <span> on top of everything to add the “glossy” effect. You can see the code on CodePen.

February Updates

Man, my one blog post per week goal sure fell apart quickly. To avoid going too long without a post, I figure I’ll give a quick update on what I’ve been working on. Over at the 32-Bit Cafe, we announced we are expanding into a Discourse forum! I’ve been spending a lot of time setting it up and working alongside the rest of the mod team to get it ready before the February 15th launch. This weekend, I was able to find some time to work on projects, though. I built a PC for my partner, which they have been enjoying! It was a much needed upgrade over their old system, which was a frankensteined build made out of the core of my first PC build from 2015. I also spent some time working through Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment. I’m working on the first homework assignment, which is a simple program that copies a file. It’s been a fun challenge and I’m learning a lot. On the fitness side of things, I haven’t made much progress yet. I actually took the week off from the gym because of a combination of sleep issues and hurting my back, but I’m feeling a lot better now and will be back at it tomorrow! While the first month of 2024 hasn’t gone quite to plan, I’ve been keeping busy anyway.

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