Journal

My journal for smaller posts & updates.

now

Playing the McDonald's Rewards Points game. Like the credit card rewards points game but you get diabetes before you get bankruptcy.

2024-07-25

I accidentally a YouTube channel. Again.

The first time I accidentally a YouTube channel, I wanted to comment on a video about making a clone of Flappy Bird for the Nintendo DS. This time, it was also to comment on videos, but I also wanted to upload random videos that no one would care about. Turns out, my first video that I ever published on my new channel got 300-something views. Whoops.

So, I decided to make a Valorant funny moments compilation and upload it to my channel.

I've been thinking about doing this for a while. I've been collecting clips on my medal.tv page for over two years at this point. Over time, I've slowly gotten better at the game and grown to appreciate it more and more. I want to start making content for Valorant, not just "funny moments" but also analysis videos and tutorial videos. I have an idea for a video about "map control" and how important it is to winning rounds. I may not be the best person to give advice about the game (I'm only a Silver 2 after all), but I feel like I have had enough experience with not just Valorant but Counter-Strike as well to start giving my two cents about things. It would also help me ease into making more scripted content like videos or even my narrated articles that I keep bringing up but never actually making.

So, yeah. I'm back on YouTube. I don't want to get famous. I just wanna keep exploring the medium of video cause for some reason it is my most comfortable.

You ever listened to a band named Andrew Jackson Jihad? No? Now you can. See ya in a few days I guess.

2024-07-20

I've been watching CDL Champs over the past couple days for the reason most people are: the in-game rewards you get for watching it. As I've been watching this event, I've noticed that the competitive meta for the game seems very... very stale.

There are only three weapons that I've seen used throughout the entirety of CDL Champs: The MCW (ACR), Rival 9 (Scorpion EVO 3), and Renetti (93 Raffica). That's it. The Rival 9 never has any optics on it, while the MCW almost always has the Mk. 3 Reflector (seemingly based off of the red dot sight from Advanced Warfare like the JAK Glassless Optic). Some players run the Renetti without an optic while others slap the Slate Reflector (a callback to Vanguard) on it.

The individual players may put different attachments on each of their guns, but they never differed enough for me to immediately notice. Whenever I look at the gameplay, I either see an MCW or a Rival 9 paired up with a Renetti, and all that seems different between them are the special camos that are given to each team. And that kinda sucks.

MWIII as a casual game is most notable for having the most amount of base weapons in any Call of Duty game -- over 100! And yet only three of them seem to show up in professional play. The pros have either banned or agreed not to use entire categories of weapons such as shotguns and snipers, and no-one seems to pull out alternative weapons in the categories that aren't banned. It was this way in MWII as well: remember how many people complained about the TAQ-56 (SCAR-L), TAQ-V (SCAR-H), and Vaznev 9K (PP19 Vityaz) being the top meta guns? But here, it seems like the competitive meta hasn't fully reflected the casual meta. Sure, lots of people still use the MCW and Rival 9, but there are a wide variety of guns being used in casual play. So why aren't those guns being used in CDL? Why does a game with 100+ weapons only have 3 being featured on the big stage???

It just really infuriates me and just makes me hope even more that Black Ops 6 ends up being a hit. We need to have a more interesting competitive scene please Bobby i beg you

Anyways, House mix pogchamp, house mix pogchamp.. I need to catch up hard with school stuff so I'll mostly be focusing on that for now. As such, I don't know when my next blog post will come out, but hopefully I can get it up by the end of this month. See y'all then!

2024-07-16

You know when I said I should stop working on improving my site and start actually writing stuff? Turns out I forgot to follow my own advice. Whoops.

The sharefeed has been officially implemented again. All the old journal entries I had on the old website are back, and most of the old sharefeed entries have been ported over too. I dropped a couple due to the power of hindsight, but you won't remember them anyway lol.

I also changed up how the RSS feeds work. Now, when you click on the "rss" link, it will take you to a page listing all the feeds you can subscribe to. I've also added a prefix to each post in the main feed so you can tell what type of post it is at a glance. For example, blog posts will be marked [blog], To everyone who already subscribed, I am so greatful for your support and I am so sorry this will probably screw up your feed lol. It won't be the last time this happens either... I may do a little more trolling over the next couple of weeks, including adding journal entries to the feed.

The last thing I am going to do tonight is attempt to record a narration for my first blog post. Hopefully it goes well. I'm really excited about narrated articles, and I hope I can inspire others to try similar things with their blogs.

Another album recommendation cause I'm awesome. See y'all soon!

2024-07-08

I'm starting to do actual reseach for my next article, which, i lied, it's actually going to be about Geminispace. It seems like everyone stopped talking about it after its boom a couple years ago, but it seems to be thriving in its own sense, with activity every day on places like Antenna and the Geminispace BBS.

I made a random post asking people for cool sites that show what you can do under the limitations of the Gemini protocol, and I got a bunch of responses. I even got a pretty detailed list with categories from someone who wished not to be documented on the web.

Still, that doesn't mean that everything is sunshine and rainbows. Two days in and I already found someone promoting alt-right anti-Palestine behavior on Station, another bulletin board like platform for Gemini. It sucks that sort of stuff has popped up here, but one has to remember that even if this is the "smallnet", this is still the internet. There will still be assholes.

Song recommendation numero tres.. Hopefully I'll have more to say tomorrow.

2024-07-06

I have a problem: if I want to update my site, I have to shut both it and my Forgejo instance down in order to have enough dedodated wham headroom to actually run pnpm build without making it crash under error code 137. Whoops. I traded one problem (having to do a compile process every time I want to change my website) for a worse one (the same thing but i also have to explicitly shut down both it and something unrelated in order for it to run without crashing).

I could, of course, just throw more money at the problem by upgrading my VPS.

I have $50 in my bank account. That's not an option.

Another way to fix this problem is to move to something like Astro that's specifically designed for my use case. I had some trouble wrapping my head around Astro last time I tried it out, but it may be something I have to do in the future. I'm putting a pin on it for now, but I'm not going to hop over just yet. The future stuff I want to do (such as auth & comments systems) will likely be easier on Next than on Astro since Next is the McDonald's of React-based metaframeworks right now.

This journal update is an attempt at seeing if I can make use of the secret third option: only compiling the contentlayer MDX files unless there's something I want to change outside of that. If that's an option I can utilize, then I can probably just make a git action to automatically recompile the MDX whenever I push a commit containing an MDX file. That'll do for now.

UPDATE: NO. NO IT DOESN'T. THE SITE DOESN'T UPDATE THE PAGES WHEN I JUST COMPILE CONTENTLAYER. I HAVE TO DO EVERYTHING EVERY TIME. IM SCREAMING

Anyways please listen to these jungle sets, they are amazing and i love them and i want to make out with them. Thanks.

2024-07-05

Welp, I did it. I got the journal implemented.

I decided to make it its own MDX file stuffed in its own special folder and grabbed by its own special TSX page... because I want to be able to use MDX to write this stuff. I don't wanna have to put <p>'s everywhere lol.

I've thought about implementing a table of contents so you can jump to the day you want to see, but I'm deciding against that for now. One day I'll update the TOC to be collapsible, and once I do, I'll add it to this page, automatically collapsed (unless you unfurl it, in which case that state will be saved via cookie for later).

I also finally gave some much-needed love to my Hello Again article. I was not very satisfied with how it got published. I rushed so fast to get my site ready and out the door that I forgot to properly proofread my article. So, I'm doing that now. Hopefully these changes will make the article flow better and easier to parse.

Finally, I think it would be a good idea to post the old entries of this journal on here. I don't have them on me right now, but once I figured out where I put them, I'll throw them on here for archival purposes.

As usual, here's my song recommendation of the whenever. See ya in a week or so, I guess.

The following contains older entries ported over from the previous version of this site.

2023-08-20

My CalcKey instance has been perpetually upset at me. It sucks because if I undo my migration, I'll likely lose all of my follows and followers. I think I might need to upgrade my VPS so it isn't using up all my server's resources... but I'm not sure if I can afford it right now. If you have some suggestions as to how I can fix this, email me lol

Also, sorry for fucking up the sharefeed and not realizing until more than a month later. whoops.

2023-07-05

I've been meaning to create an online forums for a while now to serve as my blog's comment section and provide an alternative social space for queer nerds like me. I thought I found the perfect solution in Discourse... but it eats up so much ram. Only around 70MB is left of my VPS's 2GB of ram. Ouch.

Thus, even though you may have noticed that I had Discourse serve as the comments section of my site for about a month, I am disabling it for now to make room for a Calckey instance. Sorry about that!

As an apology, more sharefeed stuffs coming your way! :3

also listen to this album plz: This Town Needs Guns - Animals

2023-06-03

Tried to wrangle IndieWeb stuff like h-entries and h-cards. I want to murder IndieWeb now.

In better news, I decided to roll my own social links in the footer instead of the side bar, and I think it works well!

Gonna throw out some more sharefeed posts in a bit. yay.

2023-06-02

I found out something funny about the new Etrian Odyssey HD remasters.

The digital release of all three games is priced at $80. There is no physical release of the game except in Asian markets.

However, PlayAsia is selling said physical release (for the Nintendo Switch) at $70. With standard shipping to the US, the total price is $77.90... cheaper than the digital release.

Guess me being a weirdo who likes collecting physical Switch games wasn't dumb after all.

Also, I have a bunch of shit lined up for the sharefeed. Going to be spreading them out over the weekend. Happy reading!

2023-06-01

First of all, happy pride month. Be gay. Do crime.

Second, you may notice my blog is now Evil PewDiePie flavored. Figured it would be a cool way to spice up the visual design. If there are any elements that still look messed up with this change, let me know.

Finally, link emebeds now work. I may pretty up the embed image at some point for articles, but for now, I'm pretty excited!

2023-05-19

I follow a Hacker News bot on Telegram. Whenever I see something interesting, I forward the post to my "Saved Messages" to read later... which I never do.

I had an idea to turn this pipeline into something that is actually useful for not just me but for anyone else who is as much of a fucking nerd as I am. Basically, it would be a webpage filled with links to blog posts or articles or other websites that I find interesting (note: interesting != good) that can also be viewed as an Atom feed. I would attach summaries/notes to each link (which would be stuffed under the <summary> tag on the Atom feed) so I can give some more detials of what I think about it and possibly what I might do with it in the future (e. make a response to it on my blog, use the project for my own purposes, etc).

I'm sure there's already solutions for "read later" feeds like what I wanna do, but I wanna roll my own because I think it would be pretty simple to make a basic rendition of this (especially in Jekyll thanks to Liquid markup allowing you to literally roll your own custom Atom feed if you wanna). Plus... if this kicks off, maybe I can develop it further! Comments, a framework to make something like it for your own site... maybe even ActivityPub support.

Now, for something completely different... Listen to this right the fuck now.

2023-05-02

I just updated the theme of this blog from Minima to Chirpy. Find this a lot better than I had before! Gonna make a blog post on it once I finalize some shit.

I also need to fix up this journal to actually work as an HTML journal. Right now, there's some elements missing, and I need to make a jekyll plugin to parse through this page's content and put in the proper elements for each entry. Might do that as a warm up to jekyll-to-gemini.

oh also pro tip that i just learned: adding two or more spaces to a line and then inserting a newline lets you insert a line break. donno why it doesn't just format it the right way in the first place but I didn't make Markdown.

2023-03-28

Gonna try to use this as a space to put stuff that doesn't feel "big enough" for a blog post. Hopefully this encourages me to actually use this site more lol