Skip to content
BLEAT | DOE - Digital Organization Environment
weeklybleats3.md

Weekly Bleats 3: Hourly Comic Day!

(Sorry, no comic this week. I've been drawing all day!)

Hi! Lena here. These keep straying later and later into the week, huh?

It hasn't been that remarkable of a week, really? I'm officially in "summer break" until the end of February, so I'll finally have some more time and energy soon! Right now I mostly just want to use it to rest a little, though... But I'm trying to do at least one creative thing every day, like, in an attempt to keep the momentum going. It's gone pretty alright! It's not EASY yet, but I think I'm building the habit pretty nicely.

The summer heat is absolutely kicking my ass. I'm a bit worried about how I'll fare in future years, with global warming getting progressively worse and everything... I should learn more about efficient ways to cool down and stuff, but idk, escaping the heat always felt more futile than warming up during winter.

I'm typing this during Hourly Comic Day! It's this... tradition? challenge? where artists draw a small comic for each hour they are awake during February 1st. I have always enjoyed reading people's comics, and I FINALLY remembered in time this year. It's been EXHAUSTING and quality has really suffered, but I'm holdin' on~ I'll definitely do it digitally (and be more prepared) next year.

Updates

It's been a productive week, I think!

I've been trying to learn more fancy-but-useless CSS tricks. I learn way better if I have self-imposed projects to motivate me, so I made a demos page to test some of these things out. So far I made what's essentially a clone of a TIC-80 demo and a quick project to teach myself 3D transforms. It's gone pretty well, and I have some ideas for future projects, but I still gotta learn a bit more about 3D before executing it; I think I will be the first person to actually do that demo in CSS if I succeed, so that's exciting!

Work on my comic is picking up again! I recruited my wife as an editor, and we've been cruising through some of the tasks I had been putting off for literal months. We should be ready to start thumbnailing pages in a couple weeks, and the comic itself will be available to y'all sometime this year if everything goes well. I'm aiming for ~100 pages at one page a week, so it should take about 2 years to publish I think? It will be the longest, most ambitious project I've ever taken on, so I'm equally excited and terrified about it.

Also, like, today was Hourly Comic Day! So that's also going on! The comics are on my tumblr under the #hourly comics day, if you're interested~ I've also been doing some small pixelart assets here and there, but not many finished pieces... I'm a bit more motivated to do code than to do art right now, I guess?

Media Log Additions

  • ALBUM: Soda Stereo - Dynamo
  • ALBUM: Vylet Pony - CUTIEMARKS (And the Things That Bind Us)
  • ALBUM: Remusuki - SCORCH
  • ALBUM: Knife Girl - CUM
  • ALBUM: My Bunny Valentine - lvlss
  • BOOK: Edward Snowden - Permanent Record

Linkdump

  • [ARTICLE: Compound pejoratives on Reddit] Article about the way redditors combine words to create insults. It's a pretty fun read, and it managed to surface the VERY few positive memories I have of studying linguistics at uni.
  • [ARTICLE: We can do better than Duck Duck Go] I've been very frustrated at Duck Duck Go (and the general search engine landscape) lately. This article outlines why, and how hard it would be to actually make a good search engine alternative, pretty well. I'll stay in ddg for now, but god damn I hope Drew actually makes the search engine design he proposes in this article. We desperately need it.
  • [ESSAY: A Mathematician's Lament] In case you're one of today's lucky 10,000, this essay talks about how badly the education system fucked up Math education. I enjoy math (especially geometry and statistics), but I know WAY less about it than I would like thanks to my awful —often abusive— teachers and the system they worked for. I revisit this essay every so often and tell myself I'll make a concentrated effort to learn math; maybe this time I'll actually do it!
  • [ARTICLE: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany] Experimenting with the limits of the PDF file format. I strongly dislike PDF on principle, but it's always fun to see the kinds of fucked up shit you can convince computers to do.
  • [VIDEO: How I built my own 16-Bit CPU in Excel] I fucking love Excel. I can't believe no one had done this yet? Watching this and going through its process motivated me to learn more about computer science and how things work on a hardware level.
  • [LINK: Strawberry Jam 8] It's February, so that means Strawberry Jam is live! Strawberry jam is a game jam about horny (in an EXTREMELY broad sense) videogames. I've been having some fun playing the last couple years' finalists and trying to think of ideas to mmmmaybe participate next year?