(This post inevitably touches on US politics. Skip it or save it for later if you need to. I love you very much.)
I am not a religious person. I was raised in a Christian household, where prayer was a ritual performed before each meal and before bed. No one told me why we did this. As a child, I supposed the obvious answer was that it was to talk to God (nevermind his omniscience). When I started making my own decisions about what to believe regarding the metaphysical, the ritual fell out of my priorities pretty quickly. I hadn't prayed in the last 15 years.

It's the Rubik's Cube. I'm a speedcuber now.

As of today, by my own choice, I'm no longer employed. I carry a lot of mixed feelings on my way out the door; there's a long story behind the making and timing of this decision. That story doesn't belong on this blog, though - not only because there are NDAs involved. Instead, I want to briefly talk about what happens next, as I enter my temporary (but extended) jobless era.

Most aspects of the ongoing culture war don't strike me as important or real, but I will pick this one side: Spotify is a morally repugnant institution, and Wrapped serves only to reinforce their stranglehold on the industry. The hyper-analytical breakdown of listening habits misses the point of music by a mile. I'm not here to consume; I'm here to feel something, to partake & celebrate in the ritual of creation. If you vibe with this adage - and if you can enjoy loud, energetic flavors of electronic music - then you might find this retrospective to be worth exploring.

Earlier this week, I had a terrible idea for a Connections puzzle. I found a lovely tool to create them and sent my monstrosity of a board to my friends for laughs. We've been bouncing silly puzzles back and forth ever since then. A 1-letter puzzle¹ led to a 2-letter puzzle,² which then begat a 3-letter puzzle. This made me wonder: what would a 4-letter puzzle that takes full advantage of its inherent symmetry with the game of Connections look like?

My song for ADOFAI's Neo Cosmos DLC is getting crossed over into Arcaea! They even used the 3D artwork I made for the SoundCloud upload, which is a nice touch. Hope Arcaea players enjoy it!

For two years, cohost was my digital home. I've been posting there for almost as long as they would let me, with topics ranging from my music & coding projects to stargazing, Mahjong, social media philosophy, sinkdog, and the joys of mutual vulnerability. I joined in on newfound traditions like CSS crimes, 140-character title posts, and wrong answers to Pictionary prompts. What cohost gave me in return: artists to follow & art to share. Old & new friends to learn more about. A snapshot into the wayward lives of queer furries I would have never met otherwise.

With cohost's shutdown on the horizon, I've been working on this blog a bit more fervently than usual. It now has an RSS feed (actually an "Atom" feed, not that it matters), so you can plug meow.garden into any feed reader and receive new posts alongside any other blogs you follow. Come along for the ride - RSS is cool and retro now!

11 years ago, I built & released my first public webapp: Washboard, an alternate Tumblr interface with built-in keyword filtering. This was long before the mobile app gained this feature, but also well after browser extensions like Tumblr Savior and XKit proved that the userbase wanted more control over their feeds. With no good option for mobile, I said, hey, let's just build an app on the Tumblr API! How hard could it be?

Jekyll has been my preferred static site generator for the last 8 years, starting with my old simfiles page. Static sites are awesome; they require virtually no maintenance and they load as fast as your Internet connection will allow. You'd think that speed would carry over to the development side, but Jekyll somehow manages to spend nearly 30 seconds building this tiny website from a cold start! According to the Internet, there are exactly two reasons why this might happen, and I've apparently discovered an elusive third reason. I want working on this site to be fun, and the long startup time was eating into that, so it was time to finally search for something new.