January 22

Hey again, sorry to all my fan for completely dropping off the face of the earth recently.

I'm not going to go too far into why, but part of it is that I got entangled with a little project called the Civilization Battle Royale.

You should go check it out, it's a long-form writeup of 61 Civilization V AIs fighting each other on a gigantic Earth map. We have a bunch of great narrators, and the power rankers do great work, and... oh just go take a look. This go-round (our fifth overall) is just hitting its stride and there's plenty to read.

Anyway, the mario wii world 7 footage has just been sitting on my hard drive since August, so expect to see that this week. Other than that, most of my energy is elsewhere so don't expect to see much else that isn't 99% text.

September 1

Once again, ton of life shit went down

Unfortunately I live in interesting times.

But I'm going to get to see my dad again soon, which is nice.

Recently started a thing where I get at least a little accomplished every day, because honestly I've been doing far more nothing than I'd like.

This usually takes the form of writing because that's what comes most naturally for me.

So expect to see a lot of text-based stuff go up here over the next while.

Wait I should talk about the appeal I see in things being more text-based. I just realized I never explained that.

Like maybe it's just because writing is my preferred creative outlet but there's something there in text.

Something always drew me in about someone having written things down in a digital format. Like I was obsessed with gamefaqs text guides when those were big.

I think this guy really has the right idea. (also that whole site is really great, go check it out) On the internet, images and video (and short-form text) are given the focus. There's nothing really too wrong with that, they're flashier, easier to find and digest, and generally do a better job explaining the culture as a whole. But I think long-form text does a better job of explaining the people, and to someone who already understands the culture pretty well, that's far more interesting.

You can understand someone's taste and sense of humor from the types of images and video they produce and share, but you only really get a sense of personality through their writing. (That is, unless they're actively and intentionally making some form of art)

Again, maybe this is just the writer in me ascribing too much importance to my preferred medium, but there's a sense that a lot more goes into it when someone writes anything longer than a paragraph or two, whether they intend it or not.

It's the sense of unintentional art that you don't really get anywhere else quite so easily. You're not going to have someone just start drawing something beautiful by accident, but you can absolutely find something very expressive in a couple paragraphs of text that someone wrote for some non-artistic purpose.

When it's someone explaining something they made, you get a lot out of it even if you already understand whatever it is they've done.

Here's an explanation in terms of a field I'm familiar with: The thought process is often way more important to me when I'm reading a writeup of some technical feat. I can get a pretty good idea of what's been done from the title, and an understanding of how from just a short blurb. But reading a complete write-up, especially from the creator themself, you not only get a sense of how, but of why. If you're lucky, they might even give you their thoughts on various related things, too. In addition, no matter how humble they try to be, there's a very real sense of pride in their work there, and if the author is any good, it's truly infectious. Really makes you want to go over to that bin of old parts and open up a few terminal windows and get going.

Hey, I wonder if i should put together a list of neat explanations like that I find. Not sure what the interested overlap is with the neocities demographic, but given the techy nature of it all I'm sure there's a few future engineers in the crowd who are autistic enough to think it's as cool as I do.

So yeah that's the basics of my thought on text in an internet context. I have way more to say about it, but I don't really want to drop the inevitable dissertation about it here.

July 5

so i had a ton of life stuff go down in the past couple weeks

and long story short i haven't had a ton of time

doesn't help that i got back into civ 6

so i was thinking i could probably make something out of that bc i spend a lot of time on it and cool stuff happens

but a full game narration might be a bit dry yknow?

there's a reason no one does that type of thing, like dwarf fortress is a way deepr game so it makes sense

they do let you access stats for each game you've completed though. maybe once i have 10 or 20 more i could do a little analysis

break out pandas and make some neat little graphs and charts

wait hold on let me check if civ 5 has the same thing because i have 3000 hours in that

okay no it doesn't

why do i have 3000 hours in civ 5 you ask? well i had no friends in middle school and averaged 5 hours a day through 7th and 8th grade

I can only imagine the carnage if 6 was out back then.

June 25

okay so i'm going to talk about some various stuff i'm doing, some of which might end up actually on here.

so new super mario bros wii right? childhood game for me, i know every inch of it

and then i saw some "coinless" runs and thought "hey i wonder how few coins you need to 100% the game"

anyway world 1 and half of world 2 are done i just need to edit the video a bit and upload it and i can throw my writeup on here. So look out for that.

oh oh oh another thing so basically

one day a few years ago i woke up and everything was deleted off my hard drive except a single minecraft world (no idea why i did this)

and since then i use a file organization style that works like this:

if i see a thing i like on the internet i download it

and then i never organize any of it

it's like doing an archaeological dig anytime i need to find those psp firmware files from 2007 it slaps

so basically i've accumulated a bunch of random homebrew and old software this way

and i was thinking maybe i could do a little showcase thing

anyways see you guys later