Old blog: 2026 August
Originally posted on my Neocities site. Some old text has been struck out.
2026-08-01 (Sat)
I posted the Gravity Well article, and started a hand-written RSS feed (see footer home page).
2026-08-4 (Tues)
Picked up Moby-Dick and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I was assigned the latter in high school, but didn't finish it for whatever reason.
I saw The Odyssey. It was enjoyable, though very much cut from the same cloth as Christopher Nolan's other movies.
I added an AI policy page for this site. I hate that I even felt the need to write it, and I hate that there's no way for me to prove that I don't use these insidious products. All I can do is express my sentiments with anecdotes:
Some time ago, for Christmas, a relative gifted me a travel guide to Maine. When I finally cracked it open a few months later, I was left scratching my head in bewilderment before finally concluding that it was generated nonsense. When I searched the title and author on Google, the AI information box told me that (I'm paraphrasing, it's been a while) "it is said to be the ultimate tourism guide to Maine."
2026-08-8 (Sat)
I've been walking later than usual due to a heatwave. A few days ago, at dusk, I spotted two open boxes on the road verge, presumably left for trash pickup, which were full of hardcover books. I kneeled down and plucked two books from the top layers: Beverly Gray's Island Mystery, and Tailspin Tommy: The Mystery of the Midnight Patrol. I was quick about it because I didn't want to bother the homeowner at dusk, and also because I spotted a skunk crossing the street. Tailspin Tommy's cover has some kind of water or sun damage, but doesn't look or smell mouldy; Beverly Gray, besides a minor gash on the front cover, is in good condition for a 1950s hardback.
There used to be two Little Free Library exchanges on my route. I checked them occasionally, but never saw anything that really piqued my interest. I suppose I could have stocked them with books that I instead donated to thrift stores. Oh well. In any case, I am trying to make more use of the local public library.
I do hereby pledge (cross my heart, etc.) to get some real project work done this upcoming week. Very boring blog updates are coming soon, about my UI library and some other Lua stuff. Pinky swear. Honest. It's happening, short of some personal disaster.
2026-08-10 (Mon)
Picked up The Silmarillion and The Ringworld Throne. I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as a kid, but I've never mustered the nerve to try The Silmarillion. I haven't read anything by Larry Niven, besides that Superman essay.
The instructions for my carrot seeds stated that they should be ready to harvest two months after sowing. It's been thirteen weeks, so I figured I should pull one out to see how they're doing. Despite the considerable frond growth, the root was still a small and colourless sliver. It did taste pretty good, though.
As promised: boring UI blogging. My project right now, ProdUI, is a graphic user interface for the LÖVE Framework. There are many such libraries for LÖVE, but to my knowledge, none of them fully pull together theming, scaling, layouts, virtual windowing and keyboard focus, and few of them are thoroughly documented. (Unsurprisingly, doing all of this stuff is really difficult. ProdUI development often moves at a crawl, and sometimes stops outright when I get burned out.) Besides all of that, users of a GUI library also expect to have access to a set of common widgets, like buttons, sliders, text input fields, and many kinds of menus.
Today, I worked on the Collapsible Container widget, which is a group whose contents can be hidden by clicking on a bar located at the top of the widget. This thing has been in a partially completed state for a while, and I can't move on until it actually behaves correctly. Tomorrow or Wednesday, I intend to fix the text label and add a little arrow glyph, and maybe draw a new 9-slice texture, and it ought to be Good Enough™ at that point.
2026-08-12 (Wed)
Well, I don't suppose this rises to the level of a "personal disaster," but I did catch a cold. Sore throat on Monday (I didn't mention it here because I thought it might go away in 24 hours), which became even sorer on Tuesday. It feels better now, but I'm tired and blowing my nose every few minutes.
I hope to be well enough tomorrow or Friday to put the remaining graphical touches on that stupid Collapsible Container widget.
2026-08-14 (Fri)
Finished The Year of the Flood, started Casino Royale.
I'm on the mend; I have graduated from a constant runny nose to a persistent hacking cough. Slept through much of today and yesterday.
No ProdUI work done since Monday. Ugh.
I created an account on Bear, a no-nonsense blogging platform that might be a better fit for me than Neocities. My site already looks like the average Bear blog, so I am thinking of moving over there. The main drawback is that I would lose control of some of the deployment process, since Bear is a full blogging service and not just a web host. (For example, with my current setup, I get a complete copy of the site in HTML form on my local machine before it is pushed to the web. Thus, it is not necessarily tied to any particular web host.) On the other hand, Bear provides the usual blogging platform amenities, like a web interface for making posts, RSS feed generation, and a tagging system. Do I want those things more than having total control of my site's build system? I'll put some more thought into it once this cold is expunged.
2026-08-15 (Sat)
Picked up two books by Elizabeth George: Believing the Lie, and Just One Evil Act. Bizarrely, some previous owner cut the copyright page out of the second book. What possible reason could there have been to do that? Anyways, I'm new to this author.
I'm feeling better! The hacking cough has been demoted to some occasional throat clearing, and I felt well enough this evening to do some yard work.
2026-08-18 (Tues)
I fixed up the remaining visual problems with the UI widget that I was complaining about last Wednesday. I don't know what to do next. Maybe I'll be more focused tomorrow morning.
2026-08-19 (Wed)
Finished Casino Royale. (Sweet tang of what!?) Started Djibouti by Elmore Leonard.
All right, I've more or less completed the migration from Neocities to Bear. This is the last thing I'll write here; I'll pick up blogging again on the new site in September.