Posted Apr 26, 2023
Aside from not really knowing what kind of content to create or share, I also grapple with the typical web developer problem of always wanting to rebuild or refactor my personal site and never finding a stopping point where I feel it’s good enough to be released into the world. It would probably behoove me to make an actual design first sometime, instead of just rebuilding it and hoping that inspiration will strike and I’ll suddenly know how to make it look beautiful and fun and cool. You know, that skill that actual designers spend years learning and honing? Yeah. I really shouldn’t hold my breath here.2
But content-wise, I find myself inspired by my friends Clara and Robin, who write beautifully about the various happenings of their lives rather than centering their pages around one specific topic or niche.
Lately, I’ve been turning to, of all things, Neopets when I am looking for a mindless game to play when I need a break from focusing on work. Specifically, a game called Destruct-o-match, which (in Classic mode) is a simple block-matching game that gets progressively more challenging. I don’t really understand why, but I find playing games like these can be really calming, almost meditative in a weird way. Sometimes I need that.
In terms of content I’m consuming, I have been slowly watching my way through the many seasons of the TTRPG actual-play show, Dimension 20. My introduction to this was with their Fantasy High seasons, in which the players are high school students learning to be adventurers, which leads to a lot of hilarity and of course, cool fights and magic shenanigans. Most recently I’ve been watching The Unsleeping City, in which the players are residents of a New York City which has a magical side that is hidden from the vast majority of its residents. The New York/New Jersey accents, the embracing of the city’s filthy rats and cockroaches, and the ever-shifting constellations of the characters’ relationships to each other and to non-player characters (NPCs) have drawn me in and kept me on the edge of my seat. Generally speaking, there’s just something very special about the type of group storytelling that is facilitated by game systems like D&D that you don’t find in other media. I feel more emotionally involved than I do with most TV shows or films; I also find them funnier and less predictable.
As I’m writing this paragraph, I’m in a region of France called Ardèche, visiting Robin and Clara. This is the second time we’ve been here, and it’s a joy to return to this beautiful place, to buy produce and bread and cheese from the local sellers, to smell all the flowers in the garden and eat fresh salads grown by our friends. We’ve also been lucky enough to get to go climbing on some of the absolutely gorgeous rock in the area. It was a great refresher on lead climbing, as well as a lovely reintroduction to climbing after taking more than a month off while waiting for my dislocated finger to heal. Not to mention it’s just a really pleasant way to spend some time outdoors with friends! My only “complaint” (and frankly, “complaint” is too strong a word) is that as this is a quite rural area of France, everyone speaks — you guessed it! — French. I’ve been spoiled a bit by living in Barcelona and Berlin, two relatively international cities where it’s usually easy to find a language in common with anyone. Despite French being theoretically similar-ish to Spanish, there are precious few things I can understand by listening. So, I feel a little like a housepet, following my people around, watching interactions cluelessly, unable to assist or even grasp what is occurring in front of me, with full confidence that noone will lead me astray. It’s really not the worst thing, but it does make me feel a little helpless and painfully aware of how much I need my friends around if I need to communicate anything. Not sure if I’ll address this by spending my next 900 Duolingo days on French, or if I’m content with the 3 languages that I sort of speak already. The idea of trying to learn another language is pretty daunting, and French seems hard.
Today, I’m just working on scraping my blog design to basics and putting it out in the world. Perfect is the enemy of done, or something like that.3 I’ve already repurchased my domain so that now I have no excuse not to put something up, even if it’s just a simple page with a handful of collected thought scraps. I think next time I work on this project, I’ll try to add a “now” section (again, inspired by Clara) so I have a place to snapshot in time the things I’m reading, watching, listening to, thinking about. Or maybe I’m wrong and I’ll redesign the whole site again.
How do I end a blog post?