General Update Log No. 17

Hey, remember when I said last December that “you’ll be hearing from me no later than late January”? Well, guess I was about half a year off on that prediction, then. But in my defense, this year so far has been kicking my ass, and the summer heat that’s been robbing me of the energy to do much of anything is only the tip of the iceberg.

In any case, let’s go through things one at a time, since, despite that, a lot has happened this year so far.

First things first, I’m making the (very late) announcement that, as of 4 April 2024, the 500-million-point bounty on chain of lucidity was finally claimed! Congratulations to Sins, who is now the lucky owner of one of the only 25 physical copies of COL in existence! It was quite interesting, seeing various people over the years express intent in – and even put some effort towards – achieving this kind of milestone, and all I can say to that is: Thank you all for still enjoying my game, even almost six full years after its release. I see all of you, and your enthusiasm and fascination mean the world to me.

You may also recall me talking about my Sokoban clone. Well, in a rare case of me being able to (more or less) meet a deadline I set for myself, I did actually get the update done and published right at the start of February. Check out the game page here in order to download it, and do please take the time to read the new HTML manual in order to get an overview of all the things that were added.

If you remember the order of priority I’d listed for my other projects, you’ll know that productivity streams were going to be the next thing I’d set up. Except... that never really happened in the end. I’m not entirely sure why, either, but I guess I just ended up not feeling the need for them, particularly since work on the Sokoban clone had already given me my momentum back at the time. Of course, that’s not to say they’re completely off the table, but at the moment, getting them factored into my schedule isn’t quite the no-brainer it used to be. If I feel the need, I’ll start doing them. If not, then not.

Which brings us to the next item down the list, and the proverbial elephant in the room: the website relaunch. It’s... actually kind of the main reason behind why this update is coming in so late (although the aforementioned ass-kicking by life still played a significant role, don’t you worry): See, at this point, with all the professional experience I’ve gained from my job, the website in its current state is such a spaghettified mess that I didn’t actually want to touch it any more. The idea was that I’d leave it as-is until the new website is ready, then write a comprehensive blog post about everything that transpired. But then a few months turned into the better part of half a year, and it was still nowhere near done, which kind of forced my hand.

So let’s talk about how that’s going. I’ve basically been reconstructing the entire framework from the ground up, switching from procedural to object-oriented code in order to make things as streamlined and modular for me as possible, thereby improving maintainability. That’s a lot of jargon to say that I’m starting from scratch with new experience to make it easier for me to add to and tweak the website once it’s live.

Once the basic framework was done, I reconstructed each page, one at a time. Done so far are the Index, History, About and Games pages, with the Music page being the one I’m currently working on. Since Soundcloud and YouTube embeds are a nightmare for consent management, I’ve decided to replace them all with a custom audio player. Actually, I’d been wanting to create one of those for several years now, but felt like my skillset was too lacking at the time. Well, now I’m a professional web developer (in training)... and it’s still really hard and time-consuming, but at least it’s doable. It’s just that it’s still what I’m stuck on, not helped by the fact that I haven’t been able to find the time to make much progress in the past several weeks, which I’ll get into in a bit.

The original idea was that the relaunch would be live by the end of May. Then I changed it to having the audio player done by then. And now? Honestly, it’d be lucky if the whole thing got done within the year at all. For how much time and headache it’s supposed to be saving me in the long run, it sure is being a pain in the ass to write all the code for right now. But at least the frontend will go through some much-needed improvements, too. Mostly minor visual adjustments, but also some much-needed tweaks for accessibility. Probably not a huge deal for most of you, but certainly important for my standards.

Just bear with me a little while longer... or however damn long it’s gonna take still.

Aside from that, I have indeed been able to find time recently to do a little bit for the second Mukai game. Mostly just some small-scale planning and writing, though. I can’t fully commit myself to it yet, since I want to keep my priorities in check, but it at least helps keep me mentally stimulated enough to prevent burning out on doing nothing but website work (both as my job and as my hobby) for months on end.

So much to my projects, at least. This is the point where I tell you all about what else I’ve been up to all this time, starting with... me getting sick. A lot. Ever since I released that update to my Sokoban clone, I would wake up with a cold at least once every couple of weeks – or, in the worst case, every other week. I was taking days off from work left and right because of it, and while my performance didn’t suffer, I was still feeling pretty damn ashamed of myself. I tried changes to my workout routine as well as my workload, but none of it helped. It wasn’t until just a few weeks ago that I decided to try taking daily vitamin supplements that my health started improving again. Needless to say, though, that really threw me out of whack, and I’m still trying to find my groove again to this day. Of course, the physical and mental stress that the summer heat is exerting on my body isn’t helping much, either, so it might not be until at least September or October that I’ll be truly able to fire on all cylinders again.

On the bright side, though, I got me some nice things to put into my room, such as a second lava lamp and a small CD rack. The lava lamp has orange wax to complement the blue one I’ve had for years, but it also happens to provide a much brighter, more vibrant light, and I can keep it running for much longer before needing to turn it off to let it cool down again; in fact, I can leave it running nearly 8-10 consecutive hours, more than twice as long as my blue one!

As for the CD rack, I’ve just always wanted to have one, since I do have a few CDs to put on display – music albums, physical copies of Touhou games, and, of course, my own personal physical copy of COL – and, up until it arrived, they had to be kept in a cardboard box in my wardrobe. Now they’re within arm’s reach, and I can use the top of the CD rack as a surface to put items on, such as...

...potted plants! I’ve opted to go for artificial flowers, since those obviously don’t require any maintenance, and live flowers have never survived for very long in my care, but whether they’re real or not, that extra pop of color in my room sounds like just the thing I need. They haven’t arrived yet, but they should over the next couple days.

Other than that, I’ve actually purchased a new set of dumbbells with variable weights: Each dumbbell can go up to 20kg (in 5kg increments), and they can also be combined into a barbell, which not only expands the variety of exercises I can do at home, but also means I’ve got a lot more room upwards now before heavier weights become necessary. Unfortunately, again, I’ve been severely erratic with my workouts due to first my recurring colds and now the unbearable weather. Did I already mention I hate summer? I did? Well, now I did again.

What I have been able to stay consistent with, though, is the touch typing practice I started doing a few weeks back. I found this old DOS program on a Windows 95 laptop my dad let me have a long time ago, and this year I started practicing with it earnestly for the first time (as opposed to just doing it for a while until the novelty wears off). Now I’m by no means a slow typist, but I figured that, hey, maybe if I master this typing style, I’ll be able to break through my wpm ceiling more consistently. Guess we’ll see how it goes, though ironically, I’m writing this blog post with the typing style I’ve been using all my life.

And that’s... pretty much all I can think of. Not much else to say, and there probably won’t be much else to report until at least a couple months from now. I wanted these to be a monthly thing, but that’s kind of hard when you lack the energy to get enough things done that are worth talking about.

Oh well, hopefully by the next update log, I’ll have finally relaunched the website.