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BLEAT | DOE - Digital Organization Environment
bleats4.md

What schedule?

Uhm. So.

Hi! Lena here. I felt like shit two weeks ago and I wasn't home last week, so I'm posting the 4th installment of my weekly newsletter on the 9th week of the year ^^; I'm honestly fineish with it, as I'm doing this for fun and getting too caught up on the guilt from missing my self-assigned deadline would be counterproductive to actually sticking with this as a habit. I'm dropping the "weekly" title to stay honest, and I hope I'll be better on future months/years tbh.

I have also decided to, at least for the time being, cut out the little comic portion of the newsletter, as I felt it was the "weakest" part and a huge chunk of why I often ended up missing the "every sunday" self assigned deadline. I do intend to bring it back in another form in the future (currently trying to get into PETSCII art, and this would be a great place for small weekly illustrations!), but it will have to go for now.

So... Yeah! All of February just went by! It was significantly less productive than I expected and would have liked, sadly, but I think this slower-paced time was necessary at the end of the day. I did get to practice and learn a couple skills, it was just a bit hard to turn that into actual finished projects. I returned to work today, which fucking sucks, but ironically I feel even more motivated/energized to do creative work? Something something limitation breeds creativity?

Updates

Unproductive month! But there's still some stuff to be said.

I've been working on more CSS demos. The one I'm actively working on right now is, to my knowledge, significantly more original than the ones I have already posted, and that's exciting! It's something I assumed people would have done instantly when CSS 3D transforms got proper cross-browser compatibility about 12 years ago, but apparently no one has gotten around to it, so I'm excited to apparently be the first to get that ball (haha) rolling. I'm figuring out how to clean up some polygons' shapes and make the code a little bit more elegant and efficient, so it will hopefully be done by next week.

Speaking of demos, I tried to recreate the DOOM PSX Fire effect in Excel. It was done as a quick de-stressing/grounding exercise, but I'm pretty satisfied with the result as a proof of concept for achieving framebuffer-like effects on Excel. I might recreate a couple more classic demo effects in Excel in the future; it was a fun process and I need to have Excel open for work anyways, so might as well have these side projects as a way to stay sane.

I've been doing some CSS work for a friend's web app project. The project is still in closed beta for our Discord server, but I'm very happy with how it looks so far! It also forced me to learn some React, so that's mmmmaybe a good thing? It feels computationally wasteful to me, but I have to admit it expands your options by a LOT.

My wife and I are going to start having daily short work sessions for a couple weeks until her uni starts, by which point my comic should be at a point where it's ready for me to start drawing actual pages. I'll try to build a small backlog before I begin publishing it (I have to do some backend work to set up a publishing system for it anyways!), but it's actually looking like I might be able to squeeze the first page into the tail end of Q1 2024 and I am, as usual, equally excited and terrified about it.

Media Log Additions

  • ALBUM: Too Percent Milk - November Dog
  • ALBUM: F0x3r - Define Love
  • ALBUM: LINE - Sleepwalkers in a Cold Circus
  • ALBUM: SPRINTS - Letter To Self
  • ALBUM: GOJII - BLISS IN THE MIDST OF UNCERTAIN TIDES

Linkdump

  • [WEBSITE: CommodoreZ.com] Web 1.0-styled (and actually compliant!) personal website of a vintage computers enthusiast. Lots of extremely interesting content about old computers and other related topics. I originally found them through their tumblr blog, and I've been enjoying looking around their website and seeing their posts~

  • [VIDEO: Solving the "Lights Out" Problem] Math education video about matrix inverses, modular arithmetics and some cryptography. Physics For The Birds is a super interesting YouTube channel; my math education was mediocre at best and traumatizing at worst, so this sort of videos have been super useful in my goal to demistify math and hopefully get better at it in the process. I'm casually looking for a decent course plan to Get Good At Math now, so hey!

  • [WEB EXPERIENCE: lyra.horse - ANTONYMPH] An incredible hand-coded browser-based "music video" for Vylet Pony's ANTONYMPH. This blew my FUCKING mind and really expanded my understanding of what you can even do with Javascript and a web browser. I haven't had the time to fully read through its sourcecode (WHICH IS PUBLIC BTW????), but I feel like finding this was literally life-changing for me: I'm going to make so much shit using these concepts, like, holy fuck. If you only ever open a single thing I share here, let it be this one.

  • [RESEARCH PAPER: PrintListener] Recently published paper about, in simple terms, the possibility of recording someone with their smartphone mic while they use their phone and then using the sound of their fingers scraping against the phone's screen to generate an image of a fingerprint you can use to unlock their phone. It's a fascinating concept for a side-channel attack! There have been proofs of concept of getting information out of a computer using the CPU or drive activity LEDs but, strangely, those seemed a bit more far-fetched than this? This one feels like an actual vector that could be used by attackers other than someone with a state's budget, and that's fascinating. The paper is dense, but if you Google PrintListener you will definitely find a bunch of articles talking about it.