What I Did in July

My final term of uni is just about wrapped up this month! (So long as I pass my courses :p) I've got one exam around the end of next month and then I'm,, kinda outta here. Very strange to be at such a transitional period in my life, sort of the last structured chunk of time dedicated to education, and what lies ahead is... the rest of my life!

That said, here's what I got up to, this month!

Self-Hosted Kanboard

I've had a lot of to-do lists throughout my life, from Google Docs to desktop sticky notes, bookmarking systems and custom little react apps, but for whatever reason, all of them have eventually fallen out of use. Not having a to-do list is stressful, though, there's so much you're always trying to remember, so many things you should get around to at some point. This month, I decided it was time for a new to-do list!

I like Kanban-style boards, I've always enjoyed having little tickets assigned to me on Jira when working in software, in group projects, internships, and the like. It kind of surprised me to learn that Atlassian has owned Trello since 2017, like, they have both of the big two options! I'm not super eager to create a new account with a big-data company for the sake of a to-do list, though, as I'm after something really simple, and I worry that an app designed as a revenue-generating product would get bloated and extractive year-over-year, as seems to the be the trend these days.

But I have a little home server on my shelf, and the power of Tailscale's MagicDNS (which is SO COOl, by the way), so I can host my own to-do list! It was super easy to spin up Kanboard as a Docker image, so, uh, that's my new to-do list!

It feels very helpful to capture "I should get around to that" thoughts into a "backlog" column on my board, and then simply close them if I find I lose interest before getting to them. Much less rattling around in my head, as a result, which has been nice!

Glammed the Site Index

The front page of this website has been pretty sparse for quite a while. I sort of focused on getting things to an MVP point early on, which was really good - once you have a website, you can put things on it, which is the point. But now that I've settled into a rhythm of monthly blog/journal posts and project landing pages, I can indulge in a little bit of prettying-up!

Ta-da! I love the dithered moon theming.

You can go check it out here, I think it looks quite lovely. Before, I had lots of text all in one page, and I've sort of split those off into subpages, with the index serving as a landing page. (Though those subpages are perhaps a bit sparse and in need of some love, as a result.)

It was very fun to create and curate some 88x31s, I think they look great at the bottom there, and I enjoy that I can navigate around a little neighbourhood of the web without using the address bar, as my custom new tab page is on this domain. (And with Vimium I can get to my site's index with two key presses :p)

The clicking on each section is a little janky - I want you to be able access the subpages by clicking anywhere in the corresponding div, while allowing you to click individual links within that div, so I'm using an onClick window.location, which means you can't open in new tab, or right click, and things like that. If you've a suggestion to improve it, please let me know!

eninepurba Piano Transcriptions

This month I played eninepurba, which was a treat. It's so richly-detailed and intricate, and the hint page (which I found out about very late) helps smooth over the friction of the delightfully evil puzzle design. I very much enjoyed making notes on it in Obsidian (my first time using it), as I ended up with a node-graph-map of its twisting hyperlinked domains. It's full of neographies and ciphers and gorgeously rendered (and dithered!) backgrounds, and notably, background music!

Parts of the game's music were kind of soaked in a strange too-recent-to-be-nostalgia feeling for me, because I'd heard snippets of it before, when its delightfully crazed creator's slipped some of its themes into her piano-playing at my place. I asked if she had some of the the piano-rolls she recorded, what, three years ago, and if she could pretty-please send them over to me. She did (yay!), and I transcribed two of them with MuseScore so I could learn to play them myself!

One of the two pieces I transcribed! I'm a big fan :p

They've been very fun to learn - they're borne from improv, so they have a very loose and playful vibe to play, compared to some of the other, more methodical stuff I've been learning. I also put together a quick landing page for them on this site, which you can check out, if you like!

What I Read this Month!

Thirteen Storeys

A couple years ago I listened to The Magnus Archives, which I loved! I'm usually really bad with horror, but only in movies, apparently, where the artists can make me uncomfortable through the shortcut of my prey instincts. Audio and written horror I'm pretty chill with, it turns out, so I very happily got through The Magnus Archives. I've always been vaguely aware that Jonathan Sims, the show's writer, had written a couple physical books, and so this month I got around to his first entry!

The thing with Thirteen Storeys, though, is that it's basically just The Magnus Archives - it's a collection of short stories that slowly weave together into a bigger picture. I love Sims' particular fascination with peoples' way of life, the start of each story where you settle into the narrator's niche in the world is a joy to read. I also liked the way that I'd spot background characters as obvious protagonists of other stories in the anthology, particular the way that once I was halfway through the book, I'd start recognising more characters than not.

I did find the book a bit, hm, "clawless". Each horror story culminated in a bit of an anticlimactic ending, and the book's dramatic final ending was a bit cheesy, it felt. I did really like, though, how the ending's big reveal was an explanation of how all the book's horrors were strung along a cohesive theme. Also loved the growing sense of dread throughout most of the stories, like in the first chapter, when she kept mentioning her calloused, soil-stained hands, I got so freaked out!

I'm excited to try out his other books, to see what he does in a non-anthological format - like I say, I enjoy how he writes his characters, so I'm curious what a Jonathan Sims character with a full novel's worth of depth is like!

Twig Arc 17: Gut Feeling

Really good arc, though we're in the endgame so my thoughts here are gonna be pretty spoilery, hey! The, uh, arc of this arc feels like an inversion of Arc 15 in a lot of ways. Where that arc led with a rambunctious fun time before tumbling down when Jessie drops a memory, here we're overwhelmed on the return of The Lambs by how bad of a shape they're in. Only at the very end when Sy kisses Jessie do we feel like anything might be alright. It's nice to be surprised with a bit of hope like that, even though all else remains ever dire. Like, oh my goodness, the part where the chapter opens with Sy having a full conversation with Helen and Gordon Two, before realising they're not real and he doesn't quite remember how he got where he is! Really effective use of the discontinuity of the chapter boundary to portray dissociation, super scary and gut-dropping , really good stuff.

I'm in a time in my life where, like, the central metaphor the piece is exploring in this arc is really hitting me, that equation of 'growing up into an adult' == 'dying slowly and horribly, because you weren't built to survive in this world'. Hopefully the (fast-approaching) ending provides some closure! But who knows, Wildbow endings can be quite a toss-up, it seems.

Like, on that note, I was remarking elsewhere that Twig feels like it loses a bit of steam in the back third, because its strongest attribute is the lovely, rich characters, and it keeps killing them off and isolating them, and I was thankful that The Lambs had kinda reunited, what with Helen joining Sy and Jessie, and then literally in the next chapter I read, Helen gets riddled with bullets! I ate my words immediately, dude. Good stuff.

Howl's Moving Castle

Blitzed this little guy on a whim. I'm quite familiar with the film, so initially this was a bizarre experience of my brain refusing to engage with the slightly distinct imagery of the book while the events were so familiar. Once the plot started to divert a bit from the path of my nostalgia, though, I started seeing Calcifer as blue, and Michael as gangly, and Howl as a right Welsh rogue.

There was a lot of cute stuff in here, I was delighted by all the things that were new to me (though the Welsh stuff seemed a WILD choice bahaha). I probably won't check out the rest of the series - I have read some YA this year, but I could for sure feel, reading this, that I've aged out of the target audience of Howl's Moving Castle.

War and Peace Book 1: 1805

I'm a big fan of the musical Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, which is adapted from (and hews close to) book eight of this vast work, and so my pre-existing attachment to the characters and writing (of the Maudes' translation, in particular) has kept me eager to give this book a try. It's a big big book, with 365 (mostly short) chapters, and I'm reading it a-chapter-a-day with some friends (akesi Samanta and ijo Sipu), discussing as we go, which has thus far proved quite fun!

So far, I'm loving the contradiction at the core of what's going on - these Russian aristocrats professing their love for French culture while they're at war with Napoleon. They profess a love for the freshly-toppled French culture, hey. Chandeliers and caviar, baby.

I love the way Tolstoy seems to really deeply care about and understand his characters, he brings them to life in ways that feel super relatable and human to me. His characters are clumsy, awkward, naive, with imperfections of appearance that make them beautiful, and I'm excited to spend more time with them!

And That's It!

Like I seem to say every month, I've got one or three cool things close to the end of the pipeline, so hopefully they'll be complete enough to talk about next month.

Chat to you at the end of August!