SUP? SUP? SUUUP?
SUP
import { YouTube } from “astro-embed”;
Wow, finally a blog post where I’m not just whining! Isn’t that unexpected? Also, TWO POSTS IN THE SAME DAY? WHAT IS THIS, EASTER? Nope, that’s tomorrow. Today is simply a very productive day. I moved some stuff from the top of the microwave to the cupboard. That means I can now be lazy, eat pizza and get drunk while playing Cyberpunk. Exactly the life I always dreamed of! Meaningful relationships? HAHAHA you so funny.
What’s happening to my day to day life apart from me dealing with being a well adjusted teenager in the (pretty lean and muscular) body of a 34-year-old bro? Not much.
Still in lockdown. Still isolated. Still writing letters in my head. Pretty excited about what’s coming up, after last week’s blows. But my boring d2d life is not the reason why I’m writing this. I want to talk about something more practical. It’s about the near future.
The blog/site
I created this blog last year, I thought I’d write about my day to day life back home. I wanted it to be a place where to go and write my thoughts at first, then expand it to be this “all about me” presence on the web. I gave up on updating it daily, that was dumb of me. I am not the kind of person who shares if I’m not asked, it doesn’t come natural to me to go online and write stuff about me. Also, it’s not that interesting anyway. Although this is not a blog I’m writing for people to read, the last thing I want to do is write about boring stuff. It’d be boring for me in the first place and I need some excitement in my life. Since I’m writing a lot about it, here’s what I’m thinking of working on in the near future.
I will defend to death you’re right to insult me
Since I went full JAM stack with a Gatsby template to do things quickly, I thought I’d skip everything that would make maintaining the blog too complex, including comments. Although I’m afraid of spam, I think it’d be great to give people a way to properly insult me and I’m currently investigating ways of adding a third party service for comments. As long as it’s something that doesn’t require me to maintain any kind of back-end, I’m interested. My experience with the JAM stack is inadequate, after all. Playing with a similar APIs sounds like the best way to make up for that insufficient knowledge.
Moving pictures
You know that placeholder on top where the community clip should go? I wanted to put a YouTube video there, but currently the editor doesn’t have any way to do that and I refuse to add the code manually. Mainly because that would set a bad precedent. Luckily, that should be simple and straightforward. All I need to do is dig into Netlilfy CMS documentation and add the custom widget. If you see the video instead of a placeholder, feel free to congratulate me.
The online presence
The couple of people who checked out this site have probably noticed that on first load it redirects to the blog. That happens because the homepage should be my portfolio, and it’s currently not there. There are several reasons why I never built a portfolio:
- I suck at design and I am forced to copy something I saw somewhere else
- I don’t need it to find a job
- I have always grand ideas on which technology to use and how it should look, but I can’t be bothered to actually implement any of those. In short, lack of motivation
I still suck at design, I still don’t need a portfolio and I’m constrained with the technologies I can use, but I have a plan.
Since learning something new easily motivates me, I decided to use Tailwind CSS, a CSS library that should simplify the process of styling UIs. Something like that might come useful not only for the blog, but in general for prototyping. I am a big fan of CSS in JS and would always prefer being able to fine tune down to the pixel when it comes to the style, but for my own projects I’d rather use any tool that allows me to deliver fast, in a way that is visually pleasant. I can’t really do that on my own, so libraries like Tailwind could come in handy.
I REALLY wanted to implement a micro front-end, but unfortunately it seems hard to do that with Gatsby and I can’t be bothered to find a way to do so. It’s not impossible, but I think if I really feel in the future that the portfolio should be a completely different application, I could just use routing to redirect uses to the homepage and use /blog for the blog. I haven’t given up experimenting with a micro front-end, it’s probably the first thing I’ll do once I’m done with the things I mentioned here.
I’M A MAN, I PLAY GAMES!
Another thing I’d like to do is write my opinion on games, maybe some mini-reviews. I would love to do videos as well, but I doubt that’s going to be feasible. I don’t have the equipment nor I have the motivation to spend time editing, but we’ll see.
I’M A MAN, I MAKE GAMES!
Yes, yes, I tried to pick up game development 20 times in the last 2 years. I’ll eventually do it for real, after I’m done with everything else. Even that has to do with motivation. Although I would love to do that for a living, I think I’m too old for it. And that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be able to do anything decent with the life I have left (Life®: Painfully long and short at the same time), just that I only have that much free time and I’m currently (always) prioritizing stuff that can be useful to my job. I am confident I can do it, though I might have to say no to some other stuff. My current problem is probably having too many resources and not knowing where to start. Yuck.
Oh you read books? You must be smart!
I’ve been reading a lot of books in the last few months. After the protests broke out in the US in June 2020 (and a cute girl broke my heart), I decided I needed to burst my bubble and understand what it was that made me feel uncomfortable with the current state of politics. I have read a large number of books, both on paper and on my kindle, and listened to several audio-books. I’d like to write a list with a comment for each one of those. It might be too much to do it in a single post, but I’d like to try. I’ll probably start with a list.
In conclusion
Phew. This was supposed to be the short one. Well, luckily no one is reading!