# Inane ramblings

## Late May Updates

### 2022-05-21

It's getting dangerously close to a month since my last post, which is upsetting to me. Time is supposed to pass slower than this. As they are wont to do, some things have happened since then, and as your reward for finding your way here, you get to read about them.

#### Coming out

Most notably, I've come to the understanding that I'm aroace Aromantic-asexual; Defined simply as experiencing little to no romantic or sexual attraction.. I'm still a bit caught up on the minutae, but I'm fairly certain I lie on that spectrum somewhere.

The main issue for me at the moment is I'm trying to derive these labels by comparing my experiences with what's normal, but I've grown up believing my experiences were normal and my next most reliable frame of reference is how I see other people reacting to and depicting those emotions, and I kind of have to take it on faith that I'm not feeling them exactly the same way and just responding differently, or something. Thinking about it, it's actually pretty similar to finding out I'm autistic, having to figure out that most people don't engage with the world this way.

I could go into way more detail - I've been thinking about this a lot lately - but I've already shared rather a lot more than is remotely necessary. I probably could have stopped at the pride buttons at the bottom of the homepage, but it's nice to get these thoughts out.

#### Patch notes

You may notice I've made some changes to the website since my last post, too. I've added a couple new themes, as well as a little guy chilling on the bottom. His name is Charles, and you can click him to visit his house! There's also some new pages: a links page to other websites I think are cool, and a stat table. Also, freegb.net seems to have abruptly and tragically dropped off the face of the earth mere days after I set up the guestbook, so I've replaced it with a cbox channel off to the right of the page.

#### Miscellaneous updates

I've upgraded the CPU cooler in my PC. I noticed it was thermal throttling pretty bad with the stock one, so I bought a fancy Noctua aftermarket one, but as I was installing it I noticed that one of the screws on the stock heatsink wasn't screwed in all the way. It was probably overheating because I hadn't installed the damn cooler correctly! Well, at any rate, it does run significantly cooler now, and it doesn't throttle anymore, so mission accomplished I suppose. Inb4 I find out I installed the new one wrong too.

I've been accumulating a CD collection. Turns out they're super cheap used on Ebay. It's mostly Foo Fighters at the moment; I'm considering just outright buying their entire discography at this point. I rather like having a copy of all the music I enjoy lest I lose it forever at the whim of some shitass rightsholder, and it's nice to actually substantively support the artist when I buy them new. I make a point to rip all the CDs too; it's very convenient to have a digital copy and it's not like my phone has an optical drive. My ripping program of choice is Asunder, though it's only available for Linux so I can't help you if you're on Windows.

I tried pilk recently. One part Pepsi, one part milk. It was wack.

There's a dead pixel on my monitor. It's in the bottom left and only lights up blue. Annoying.

I've been messing around with my Firefox configuration lately. I've got a real sleek setup going that condenses all the top bar stuff into one line and an extension that matches the top bar color to the color of whatever page I'm on. It's like it's not even there! If y'all want I can write another post or something going into more detail about my setup. Let me know if you'd be interested in that.

I've been noticing a lot of my fellow free software likers are big into cryptocurrency. I can understand the appeal for someone with that set of principles, but it shows kind of a flagrant disregard for the environment and a seemingly willful ignorance of crypto's many obvious inherent flaws. Are these really the kind of people I want to associate with? Am I going to have to spend the rest of my life publically denouncing their ilk in order to avoid appearing to be one of them?

I'm considering buying a Raspberry Pi (once they become available again) to experiment with web hosting and other such things. Perhaps I could have some fun with that GPIO array. Maybe I could host my own guestbook on there. Could be fun.

That's all I've got for now. To close out this post, have this photo of a skink I found on iNaturalist:

## Second

### 2022-04-25

After 12 days I have become well and truly sick of seeing my blog page with its poor, lonely one post on it, so you get to read more of what should probably be my private thoughts now. Since the, as of now, only other post, I have implemented most of the stuff I said I was going to then, including but not limited to eating breakfast. I think I had a bowl of original Special K that day. As of writing, I have added four new CSS themes to choose from, a page of albums I like, a link to a freegb.net guestbook that currently has one entry, and a "misc" page for small things that wouldn't fit on social media but don't warrant their own page. There's also a fancy URL hash system like Wikipedia has so I can link people to different sections of the page like this. I've yet to get that custom 404 page up and running, though. I don't really have any ideas for it. I also haven't slept.

#### Something fun on the computer

This is a weblog, not a changelog, so this post needs some more content. I'm thinking I talk about a videogame you've never heard of. Sound good? Great, 'cause this is my website and I don't care what you think.

I've been playing a game recently called Neon Boost. It's a first-person platformer based around rocket-jumping to navigate the levels. If that sounds like a cool concept to you, I'm not alone. However, this is probably one of the worst games in its genre. It's horribly unpolished, buggy, and the level design is criminally bad. It's so broken that it wraps back around to being god damn addicting to play. Neon Boost is a game best enjoyed by utterly ignoring the intent of its designers. If that description somehow sold you on this experience and you'd rather not be spoiled, go play it now. It's free on Steam for Windows and runs great in Proton.

So anyway, the fun in this game is in doing everything in your power to completely circumvent the intended path of the level, and there is a shocking amount that is in your power. Your moveset in this game consists of running, jumping, and shooting rockets. If you're caught in the blast of a rocket, it applies a set upward force to you. This presents all sorts of fun exploits. Chiefly, if you jump normally and then shoot a rocket at your feet a split second later, it launches you way higher than either normal jumping or rocket jumping on their own. Combine this with moving diagonally in the airMovement vectors in this game are weird. They're, like, mostly normalized, so running diagonally on the ground doesn't seem to do anything, but in the air, you do go noticeably faster diagonally than just moving straight forward. and you can almost completely skip a few levels.

A lot of levels have even funnier exploits, though. In certain spots, you can exploit-jump and then use another rocket to gain even more height. A couple levels in world 1 have train tracks above the level that you can reach this way from the starting platform and walk on to complete the level with a time of 0. See, the in-game timer only starts once you get close enough to something that's part of the stage, and while all of these train tracks have collision, none of them trigger the timer to start because they're not part of the intended route, so you can traverse them for as long as you please without starting the timer. In a couple other levels, the scenery has collision that creates shortcuts over top of it. Two levels in worlds 1 and 3 respectively have shafts you're supposed to drop down that you can ignore if you just exploit-jump around them. My favourite out of all of these, though, is the last level of the second world. This level places you inside a moving cage made of lasers that you're supposed to remain inside until the end of the level, but... just look at this shit.

I don't want to spoil the entire game, nor do I want to take up any more space rambling about it. I didn't even talk about the horrible wall-running that seems to only work properly when you're bypassing the level, or the fucked up "lights off" mode that makes you play with something akin to Minecraft's blindness effect. In summary, Neon Boost is the worst first-person platformer ever and you should play it.Try and beat my times. The soundtrack's alright, too.

## First

### 2022-04-13

As I write this it is six in the morning and I have been up all night coding the page switching on me.deeptwisty.com v2. The system I built takes a URL parameter and loads HTML from a corresponding file into a section on the main page. It would most assuredly have been easier to just hyperlink a bunch of static pages together, but that’s for pussies and also I didn’t want to have to update the navbars and webfont links and such on every single one individually.

This is me.deeptwisty.com v2, by the way. I completely rebuilt the entire website from scratch. I don't know if I was just getting bored of the old look of the place or if I was, like, mad at it for what happened with deeptwisty.com proper, but I wanted a change.

For context there, here's the story: this place used to be located at deeptwisty.com/me. I felt like moving it to me.deeptwisty.com, because that would look nicer. Now, Neocities requires you to create an entirely new profile in order to hook it up to a subdomain like that. This was fine by me, because deeptwisty.com and /me were functionally two entirely separate sites to begin with, but in the process of transferring the files from /me to the new site, I accidentally uploaded a bunch of them to the wrong profile and overwrote the main homepage and the main CSS file for the entire site. So those are gone now. I took that turn of events as an excuse to rebuild that site from the ground up, because it was incredibly boring, and when I had finished with that I realized I was having fun. So now we're here.

If you're reading this post the minute it goes up, this place isn't anywhere near done. It's pretty sleek as it is, but I want to add way more stuff, now that I've got room in my design for it. I intend to add some kind of guestbook or comment box, a theme switcher to load the site with entirely different styling, and pages upon pages of oversharing, among other things. I also want to make a fancy custom 404 page. Maybe put a game on there. You name it, really. Right now, though, I need to eat breakfast and then go to bed. Hopefully I don't forget about this blog immmediately after posting this.