Yeah, it’s not spring yet, but I feel like my brain could use a good spring cleaning. Lately, I’ve been coming up empty for writing and drawing. Is it the time of year? Is it lack of sleep? Is it some other unpleasant thing in my life, like mismatched socks?
I don’t know.
So consider this post a cry for help.
But also, here’s an amusing cat image:
I asked ChatGPT to generate ten exciting blog topics because I didn’t even write anything yesterday and felt bad. It came up with a list that’s way too ambitious compared to the kind of mindless frippery I usually post here. So I’m just going to paste its list instead and call this a success.
10 Exciting Blog Topics
After getting nothing but spam accounts endlessly registering on this site (but unable to post because the first post any account makes must be manually approved by me before it can post freely afterwards), I shut off registrations altogether. My blog–this site–officially became me shouting into the void, with people unable to directly comment or cajole.
Today, I ran an experiment: I once again allowed user registrations.
Within moments, a new user had registered: clintonvanderpoo
Yeah.
I mean, I kind of like how the name is sort of a portmanteau as imagined by a spambot, but still, having a poo name show up within seconds of opening registrations, while unsurprising, was a tiny bit depressing. I’m not exactly lamenting the old days of Internet Explorer 6 circa 2001, but the web has certainly changed since then. In most ways, for the better.
But not quite in every way.
I use a WordPress plugin called Modern Footnotes1You can check it here: Modern Footnotes plugin to make pop-up balloons for posts. Yes, not actual footnotes, because this isn’t a Grade 8 Social Studies paper2I still have some of the essays I wrote in high school and college. Toward the end I think I was getting bored, because my focus seemed to be more on wordplay and being funny than extensive research and nuanced arguments, but pop-ups that appear when you click on the footnote number, allowing you to keep your place while reading about funny cats3Cats are funny people, my runs4Officially up to 735!, my weight5Treading water at the moment or my latest excuses for not taking part in National Novel Writing Month6Too many to fit into a footnote or pop-up.
Today I spent some time modifying the CSS of the footnotes and almost have them the way I want them. Almost. They’re more round and bigger and a little sexier.
This concludes my programming FOR THE ENTIRE YEAR.
This is the 60th post I’ve written this month. I don’t know why I felt compelled to make sure I had an average of two posts per day for the month, but here they are!
And now a Bitmoji of me eating a birthday cake:
Yesterday (Saturday, August 27, 2022, for the record) I was curiously unmotivated to post. I was up late and as I watched the time tick by, and it got closer to midnight, I thought, “I should at least post something, even just a haiku.” and yet I did not. I watched some videos, I had a nice shower, I did some reading. I slept.
I regret none of these things. Sometimes you just need to let everything slip away and get lost in your own head for a while. Which I did.
Now that that’s done, here’s a haiku and a cat:
Enjoying nothing Is no easy thing to do Brains don't shut down nice
Cat:
Back in this post I wrote the following:
Draw a line every day. Don’t try to do more, don’t try to be perfect, just do a line, every day (or write a sentence every day or throw some clay, or whatever your creative pursuit happens to be). Emphasize quantity over quality and develop your skills without pressure to produce great art every time you sit down (or stand at your fancy sit/stand desk).
Some guy on the internet who looks just like me
I have done a few drawings since then. One every day? No. I have failed. I am bad and should feel bad.
I feel bad.
It’s such a simple premise, but I got caught up in the quest for perfection again. “I can’t just draw junk, it has to be something,” I’d think. And then it would be time for bed, and off to sleep I’d go! Repeat multiple times.
So here I am confessing on the interweb and trying to atone. Will I draw a line today? A mad veggie? I don’t know, but I will draw something, even if it’s junk. I promise!
To be accurate, the emoji are not actually 3D, they’re just shaded to give a 3D appearance. Microsoft recently made them open source via Github for anyone to use. And I want to use them (okay, maybe not all of them) because they’re just so adorable, odd or both.
Admittedly, some of them veer toward nightmare-inducing. Observe the pseudo-3D clown:
But this cow face is so dang cute!
Someone in the comments of the Ars story said the surprised face emoji “looks like someone got kicked in the nuts” and I can’t really argue otherwise:
I wonder how easy it would be to add these to WordPress? I wonder how much I would abuse them if I did?
Just making sure the site is working after today’s MySQL maintenance and such. If it is, you get a picture of a tugboat on the Fraser River. If it isn’t, then I get to use some colorful metaphors directed at the hosting service.
Yes, playing around with website colors again. The blue was too blue. It is now red. Is it too red? Find out tomorrow!
Yes, it’s come to this. I mistype the word “humidity” so often, and I’m now talking about it so much, that I’m now using the Mac’s built-in text replacement tool to fix my persistent misspelling of the word:
I will always regret not taking that typing class in high school. With real typewriters and everything. I wonder if schools expect kids to start Grade 1 as advanced typists now. “Todd, you can’t take recess break until you hit at least 75 wpm!”
Current humidity is 55%
UPDATE: It’s not working! Apparently the text expander doesn’t work in Firefox or browsers or something. I am sad. And full of typos.
I tinkered with the color of links last night and went for some kind of blue, but it’s just temporary as I mull The Great Blog Redesign of 2022. Yes, I’m committing to doing it this year, which means I have just under five months to keep to my self-imposed schedule.
We’ll see how it goes!