Title: PSA: Use VF-1 Today, For Great Justice Date: 2024-12-11 06:31 Author: zlg Hello again. It's been a while. VF-1 IS A BIG DEAL DAMNIT ========================= My first order of business here is to confirm I am a dedicated VF-1 user and am interested in testing any new features Solderpunk chooses to add. I read his recent post about it [1] and felt it pertinent to put it out there. My ability to actively contribute is inconsistent, but I enjoy VF-1 as a tool. It's replaced lynx as my primary gopher viewer. All this to say, please keep it up with VF-1! I'll add a link to the new VF-1 homepage when I get around to updating my gopherhole. LIFE ==== The latter half of the year has been "meh" for me. Ups and downs, no real progress on personal goals aside from backlog busting, which one can check on my website for now[2], until I transcribe the markdown to Gopher-suitable text. I really need to make a generator plugin for Pelican that can transform markdown into something better suited for Gopher, with accumulated links at the bottom. Largely, I just need gainful employment again. I've been getting by on side gigs and other things for the time being. It's quite frustrating for people to ask you if you're a professional (i.e. writing code or doing pixel art), and then asked "why not" when you say no. Your guess is as good as mine, though I posit it has something to do with an out-of-reach multi-thousand dollar piece of cardstock. :) If I can get the mental space and free time to devote to real projects, I want to add to my portfolio. The pixel editor I made in JS is almost finished. The LZW algorithm (from GIF) is easier than PNG to implement, but it's still an interesting nut to crack that will take me extensive testing to get correct. I have sadly fallen off the PICO-8 wagon for now. LÖVE2D looks interesting and more capable of carrying out the vision I have for games. PICO-8 isn't hands-off by any means, but I'm definitely treating it as more of a prototyping gamedev notepad for now. TWITCH...? ========== I stream on Twitch every now and then these days. It's a Big Platform and all, but I've managed to meet some people who share enthusiasm for some of the same games I do. It's not a replacement for in-person socializing, but honestly I have largely lost interest in participating in online discourse in places like Reddit, Lemmy, Pleroma/Mastodon, etc. When I participated in that stuff, I didn't leave the computer feeling good about my interactions. On Twitch, I'm in this weird group of millennial gamers that play retro games and shoot the shit, and we all have small gatherings so what little toxicity that shows up is largely handled by the automod stuff. Only one death threat so far, fairly civil for 2024 I guess, haha. I don't expect much of anything from it except some fun memories and good conversations while gaming. It has been an interesting motivator for art, though. There are things I've put together that were jokes in passing, but encouragement from others turned into funny emotes everyone could use to add to a moment. I've learned a lot about OBS and media manipulation, too. Being able to use Browser Sources unlocks my existing Web experience and gives me more reason to learn CSS3 animations. So, ironically this somewhat cringe activity (depending on who you ask) is uniting my interests in a weird way. I don't know what to think of it but I am enjoying the pixel art creation bug when it strikes. A BRO COMES THROUGH =================== My desktop rig is now a Ryzen 7-based system, with 32GB of RAM and an SSD, thanks to a long-time friend who I helped get deep into computers years ago. It was a really great gesture and it's been put to use to play beefier games and do crazier shit on the stream. When I get another drive, I wanna see what Linux-based systems can do with these specs! A new GPU is still in order, but at least the capabilities of my current card (Radeon RX580) are being met by the new machine (PCI-e 4) compared to the old one (PCI-e 2). Quite a jump. It's cool that you can disable the TPM and prevent Windows 11 from being installed. BEACH ANNIVERSARY ================= The lady and I went to the beach, as is tradition, for our anniversary. It's in November, so it's out of tourist season. Things are slow and quiet. A little cold, sometimes too cold for a comfortable stroll down the wave-beaten sands, but the crisp air and distance from the stress of home was rejuvenating for us despite the lack of sleep. When things are better, I want to take a whole week off together. But, yeah... eleven years, crazy. This year's was great. We went to an Italian restaurant that served gluten free stuff so she could eat things, and I had a GIANT tira misu, my first ever in fact. I did not know chocolate could threaten to kill you with decadence but I'd be happy to be in its clutches again. PET SITTING =========== The last thing to bring up is, I'm doing some pet sitting for someone in the near future, and I want to dedicate some time to my gopherhole and getting it back into a shape that I'm happy with. This place on the Zaibatsu won't change, but the home gopherhole needs to integrate with my blog, and have its own exclusive content that I manage somehow. Anyway, because I'll have less to do those days I'm hoping to get some technical stuff done that I normally don't have the mental bandwidth for. I'm looking forward to seeing what a hyperfocus session will do for me next. Those are my happiest moments, after all. -z ----- [1]: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/more-info-on-vf1-updates.txt [2]: https://zlg.space/blog/12-in-12-2024-edition.html