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BLEAT | DOE - Digital Organization Environment
Blog | Bleats Newsletter 6

Not that kind of serverless

Hi! Lena here.

It's been significantly longer than I would have liked. I originally planed to write this on early May at the latest, but between the frustration of my (thankfully in remission!) carpal tunnel and the exhaustion of having had to work around 40% more than usual that month I legitimately could not have. Plus my server recently died, which really hurt my productivity in a milieu of ways I would struggle to properly get onto words. It feels like a huge part of my brain is missing! Plus I had pack-bonded HARD with that laptop, as it was my first not-pre-owned computer all the way back in 2013... I miss it dearly.

I am now, almost at the end of June, just recovering from whatever the fuck May was, and holy shit I'm trying my hardest to get back into all my creative projects, but it's been hard. I originally wanted to drop this as a part of a huge site update: refactoring a lot of the CSS, adding multiple new demos, a new page for the solutions section and multiple full-length articles I've been writing, but I now realize that would only serve to delay my updates even further, and I really don't want it to look like I have fully forgotten this website, so here I am making myself write this lil' update in yet another attempt to get the ball rolling.

Updates

I may have been extremely tired since the last update, but enough time has passed that I do have a couple of things to talk about.

First of all, I recreated the Amiga "Boing!" demo in pure CSS here. I am EXTREMELY proud of it! No Canvas, no Javascript, no anything. Just more trig than I had ever done in my life and a fuckton of 3D transforms. It's sadly not compatible with ~~inferior~~ Chrome-based browsers, as you may notice if you try to open it in one, but it looks gorgeous on Firefox and it's just the start of my experiments with 3D in CSS. I think it will be a while until I can properly execute my next 3D CSS project, but it's 100% going.

I'm writing two articles I'm very happy with/excited about. One will be a critical review of Barbie (2023), and the other will be a deep dive into my relationship with chess, heuristics, Ocarina of Time, and autism. I'm trying my best to make them properly stack up to what I have planned out for them, but at least one of them should hopefully come out before the end of July.

It has also been almost a full year since this website's 1.0 release! I have a lot of thoughts about it and how my view on the vaguely geocities web 1.0 nostalgia aesthetic has been going since then, so I will definitely write about my motivations to start this website and all my thoughts about it as someone who actually experienced late 90s internet at the same time it was happening.

In a less shareable front, I have been working on irl projects around my apartment. I brought my desk to the living room, across from my wife's desk, in an effort to separate the space I sleep in from the space I work and play in; this, naturally, meant that I spend more time "out and about" in the apartment, and I have been slowly picking at little details of the decoration/furniture distribution to make it into a nicer space. I won't share pictures out of a basic sense of privacy + as an anti-doxxing measure, but I'm very happy with how it's going!

AutoSite's manual went down at some point since I last checked it, and it's been down for at least a month. I don't mean to panic quite yet, but it did make me deeply aware of the fragility of this website's infrastructure, so I've been toying with the idea of writing my own Static Site Generator so I don't have to rely on someone else's work on fucking PyPi of all places.

All of these projects have been, at least partially, in an effort to unlock "Rush Hour" puzzle of a brain and finally get the time/spoons to work on my webcomic project. Should get the ball rolling again sometime during August, hopefully! Just gotta get myself to a point where I'm able to focus on art, and I feel that moment coming nearer every day.

Media Log Additions

  • ALBUM: Madvillain - Madvillainy
  • ALBUM: netcat - Cycles Per Instruction
  • ALBUM: Switch To Black - Switch To Black
  • ALBUM: Ceschi / Pat The Bunny - Ceschi / Pat The Bunny Split
  • ALBUM: Wingnut Dishwashers Union - Burn The Earth Leave It Behind
  • ALBUM: K² - Unrealistic Project Roadmap
  • ALBUM: Laura Jane Grace - Hole In My Head
  • ALBUM: Autechre - Confield
  • BOOK: Alison Bechdel - Are You My Mother?
  • BOOK: Alison Bechdel - The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For
  • BOOK: Alison Bechdel - The Secret To Superhuman Strength
  • BOOK: Jonathan Gilmour - Kids on Bikes
  • GAME: Rain World

Linkdump

  • [VIDEO: RoadTrip, MathsJam 2023] A fascinating fun lil' project about taking a roadtrip across Europe and taking pictures next to streets named after every day of the year.
  • [ARTICLE: Tracker Beeper] A geiger counter for internet privacy and security.
  • [VIDEO: Building a Bimetallic Tea Monitoring Mechanism] An adorable bimetallic strip-based "is my hot beverage at an appropriate drinking temperature yet?" alarm made out of machined brass.
  • [GAME: OoT Randomizer Sudoku] A fascinating, extremely fun mix of Sudoku rules and the item progression-based logic puzzlesolving of an Ocarina of Time Randomizer. I've been inspired to try making my own sudoku variation thanks to this, but I still need to learn way more before I can tackle that project.
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