onlytomorrow void

writing into the void!

"An introduction"

or: yeah i'm starting a blog in 2024

posted on 2024-08-01 by: kirby | 8 min read

In an effort to compartmentalize my incomplete thoughts and possibly share it with anyone who is cool enough to seek it out, I’ve finally settled on writing a weblog. Journaling is cool, and I’ve been doing some form of it (random dollar store memo pads, untitled np++ tabs, the iOS notes and journaling app)1 for nearly 10 years now.2 It’s a big part of why I hardly post on social media anymore, aside from reposting dumb posts I find funny. A blog, it turns out, is a great companion to journaling for me. I can write freely and easily in plaintext Markdown, track changes with Git, have Astro do all the heavy lifting with cobbling together my HTML snippets, and having it be public (unlisted?) means I’ll force myself to make it readable and presentable.

CHJ memo pad
This is the $1.25 memo pad I used while working on the Crackhead Jack 2020 Steam release. A time capsule, maybe.

Public diary

Most of the stuff I write to myself is writing on how I did a thing, or what things I learned to do another thing. You know, most of what like-minded nerds on the small web write about on their blogs.3 And maybe there’ll be a diamond in there that the gods of SEO may bestow upon a web surfing user who is looking online for oddly specific love2D code snippet or esoteric idle game knowledge.

A lot of what I’ve learned definitely cannot be attributed to me, obviously. I’ve been drawn to specific articles and small weblog posts online by how the author writes about it, and how I can follow their thought process throughout. That’s not to say my writing voice is better than theirs by starting this blog. If I ever need further context, usually these authors are gracious enough to link to their findings or further articles for reading. It’s not usually something that happens when I write scribbles on a memo pad at 3am. This is the kind of shit I love about the internet. No, you shouldn’t only read my blog. I ramble about useless and irrelevant trivial information a lot. I’ll link to other sites and stuff I read that was interesting.

A means of writing

After working on the tyju.cc homepage for the staydown.money crew and web ring, it turns out that Astro is super flexible for the type of workflow I’d like for writing blog posts. I’m writing this both on my phone in plaintext Markdown, or with neovim on my desktop.4 I could write it anywhere, as I’ve always got a copy somewhere self-hosted on my own servers. There is a lot of freedom in what and how I can write these posts. I’m not limited to some arbitrary character limit, pay-walled features, or whatever. A post can be easily taken down if I feel like it. This flexibility is what I prefer. It’s been long said on other parts of the internet that putting your thoughts in writing and having them be readable in a time-tested, conversation-like way can help with forming complete thoughts and expressing yourself. It doesn’t matter to me if you read this or not — what matters to me is that I’m no longer having weird, short-sighted thoughts being scribbled in my notes, and no longer having to meticulously re-read what I write for lack of practice in developing my writing skills. Eventually, these posts will be less verbose and more focused…

What to expect

Get rid of any expectations, this blog is mostly for myself. If you stumble upon a post that may be very slightly interesting to you or useful, then my work is done. After all, these are rough thoughts that would originally be several not-short writings in my “journal”. There are no analytics on this page and it’s simply a playground for me to mess with Astro and get as comfortable as I can with vanilla web dev stuff. Especially when it comes to computer software and keeping up with things in that space.

idlenet book
The Idlenet bible.

The blog will probably have a lot of things I discovered while I’m working on Idlenet with Löve2D. I like reading insights into game design and the idea of games as a form of art, so I’ll write about games I like, don’t like, probably including a long-winded explanation as to why. There’ll be development logs sprinkled throughout as well. With how this blog is maintained, there could be posts about how the site is run, and other self-hosting things I’ve picked up over the years. So typical nerd shit for what most consider “content”. If you’re reading this from Stay Down, hello! ;)

In summary, this blog is about:

Footnotes

  1. I have tried my hand at making long-winded threads on X (formerly Twitter) through a private account, but to me, it just felt wrong doing that shit when I know I could be writing it somewhere more meaningful. I don’t really use Twitter or anything else like that, so I always tend to quickly forget about “finstas” or private accounts or whatever. Twitter also got rid of Circles, which had me posting ever so slightly more often. However, 100-200 pg pocket sized coil-bound memo pads from the dollar store work wonders for me. Cheap, easy to get, easy to fit in a pocket, easy to toss around and write in whenever. I’ve never been one into the whole trend of bullet journaling, however I do have a cheap dot matrix notebook I got from Amazon for writing down Idlenet development-related stuff and fleeting thoughts. Hardcover, has that ribbon/bookmark thing, and decently well-made pages for writing my scratchy cursive on. ↩

  2. I deleted my personal Facebook account late 2014/early 2015? I can’t even remember at this point. I watched Citizenfour around that time. Back when deleting your FB actually deleted your FB. It’s been a while. Thanks, Snowden. I still have an FB made after that, with a false name (before they went super strict on verification) for some groups that still used FB Messenger at the time. I haven’t really touched the account for actual socializing since 2016. Now I use it for Marketplace. ↩

  3. A link to Kagi? Yeah, I pay $10 a month for unlimited Kagi searches. Shill disclaimer: Not sponsored. It’s just good. I was made aware of it after stumbling upon a thread on Tildes last year. Mind you, I had previously been using DuckDuckGo, but more recently I have been needing to use the !g bang for half-decent results, and the amount of extra keywords I had to be including made me wonder why I don’t just use an alternative search engine. After running a free trial of Kagi, it convinced me to subscribe. I first started with the “basic” plan of ~300 searches per month, but I quickly kept reaching that limit; whenever I had to go back to DDG it just wasn’t as good. So here we are — my search usage stats say I average around 1200 searches per month. You may think to yourself, “this person pays for a search engine? A subscription, even?” well, yes. Managing several, quality search sources is a legitimate service with ongoing costs, unlike the majority of iOS/macOS apps that have random “pro” “subscriptions” that just provide more features. This may be an obvious question, but how are you paying for Google search? Kagi has saved my ass so much time looking shit up that it’s more worth it than some shit like Discord Nitro.5 What other search engine lets you pin the real indie game wikis over Fandom variants in search results? The “lenses” feature, letting you filter for specific kinds of websites, makes searching for forum threads, news articles, or even cooking recipes so much easier. Completely blocking Pinterest entirely? It’s a dream come true. Also, their WebKit-based Orion browser is excellent and actually has compatibility with Chrome and Firefox extensions. uBlock Origin (the Firefox extension) works just fine on my phone. On a WebKit browser that isn’t Safari. On the iPhone and Mac, no less. (I still use Firefox on Mac though, there is nothing comparable to Firefox’s Multi-Account Container tab feature.) ↩

  4. I know I’ve mentioned in the past to some people that I used Doom Emacs, but it was getting just too goddamn slow for what I actually did on it that I finally bit the bullet and switched. I wish I did it sooner; with config possible all with Lua and a handy vim/nvim API to hook into, it was simply fun to mess around in and make a config from scratch. Works wonders on all desktop platforms. Not to mention, I can actually work on my game pretty smoothly after configuring the LSP and debug adapters. It ends up taking less RAM than both VSCode and Emacs. Did I mention it is crazy fucking fast? It’s already catching up to my Emacs numbers on WakaTime. I still open up Emacs occasionally to look at some older Org files I’ve made that don’t look correct in nvim-orgmode. And to also make sure I still remember its keybindings. ↩

  5. Which I also pay for. Talk about flushing money down the toilet. ↩

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