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.
"On Being Trans and the Importance of Passing" by @ninecoffees has been swirling around my head since I read it earlier this week. It's a brutal interview piece that touches on transphobia, violence, and mental health. The article's central question launched a self-interrogation in my head that took me a long time to find an answer for; I would write something down, and the next morning it would sound to me like it was written by someone else. This post is my attempt to find my own voice — to speak for myself and actually believe what comes out.
Back in June, I wrote "The software I want doesn't exist", lamenting the gap in open-source desktop software revealed by Notion. Well, I'm making it myself, and in doing so I've thought a lot harder about why I find platforms like Notion so frustrating. It goes deeper than UX, interoperability, and any conviction about "local vs. cloud" or similar debates. The problem lies within the very incentive structures that fund software into existence.
I've spent a dizzying portion of my online life trying my hardest to have one name for everything. While I mostly succeeded on my own terms, my preferred name does still vary slightly across different contexts. I wish I wasn't so picky about the details, but since I am, I suppose it would be best to be explicit about it.
Alexander Panos' Nascent caught my attention earlier this month; it's one of the most unique, enrapturing listening experiences I've had in my life, and now I owe it to the world to pass it forward.
Today, I released my new song relentless future (feat. EZGi) and simultaneously announced my "album in progress" Light & Matter. There's a lot I want to leave up to interpretation or otherwise unspoken, but equally as much that I want to say about it all. So, here are my thoughts, organized roughly by subject:
Recurring dates have held an almost superstitious position in my life for as long as I can remember. I'll give some examples: for a few of my teenage years, the 2nd day of a quarter (e.g. April 2, October 2, etc.) had a reputation for being emotionally turbulent in some way. A majority of my published simfile packs were released on either January 1 or April 20 (try to contain your laughter); little traditions etched into the calendar. But there's one big recurrence in my life: a comet, invisible to everyone but me, that appears in the night sky every six years. It's a deadline, and it arrives in 10 days.
At the time of writing, we're about 10 minutes into pride month, and I just published a long post about computers. Whoops! I want something gayer on the front page of my website, so here's a quick infodump about my particular brand of queerness.
The first time I used Notion databases, I knew that they were the closest realization of my vision for the perfect personal data authoring tool. They're such an obvious incremental improvement over spreadsheets that I struggle to understand why nothing like them was available to consumers a decade ago. But, alas, Notion is funded by venture capital, the devil's mark that ensures their product will only get worse over time. The only way I'll resolve my grievances with this software is if I replace it. But... with what, exactly?