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.
"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 โ
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.
I was introduced to Alexander Panos' Nascent
earlier this month.
Trying to describe a project of this magnitude
in a way that captures its essential details
without being reductive might be impossible.
Here's what I can tell you up-front:
no other album has taught me more about music.
I think you should listen to it in solitude
when you have a moment to spare.
The rest of this article
is my best effort to pinpoint those essential details.
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: