Title: Feelin' Ghosty
Date: 2025-10-03 06:19
Author: zlg

It's been almost a year since I've posted on the Zaibatsu.

Congrats to Solderpunk on VF-1's 1.0 release! I *did* see it, and the move to 
sr.ht, and will update things on my gopherhole when I get a chance. Also expect 
some sort of review.

There *has* been some technical work of mine, though it's been in the 
background.

The blog has a tag cloud now, and a fancier homepage that I'm changing again 
because it's not pretty enough for me. But the new colors reflect a darker vibe 
that suits me better than the bright blue and white did. I'm learning CSS3 
variables and other Better Practices these days.

OAuth is a piece of shit, for the record. I don't know how anyone consumes HTTP 
APIs with the sheer amount of bloat needed to start, and maintain, a session. I 
was hoping to implement a sort of stream game using the Javascript Canvas API, 
then hook up a basic Twitch bot backend to send/recv messages. There are a bunch 
of ways to connect to Twitch, none of which seem clear for my use case. I'm 
thinking WebSockets might be the best approach. If so, those are baked into 
Node, so I can just pick up some Node and a library or two, and be done with it. 
Nothing has worked smoothly in this department. I would rather write Perl or PHP 
than navigate this API mess.

For funsies, I put together a half-assed remake of AfterDark's flying toasters
screensaver, implemented in LOVE2D, for my girlfriend. I definitely enjoy LOVE2D
and would like to make something real with it.

I've been trying to solve the problem of writing in one place and publishing 
from there. In that journey, I made a Reader for Pelican that can read 
CommonMark files. It turns out that my Weblog uses a number of Python-Markdown 
extensions, so the project wasn't as useful as I'd hoped. The Mistletoe library 
has an AST that I figured I could repurpose in order to make a gopher writer or 
something, but I think hacking Pelican is the wrong approach.

-----
For what it's worth, I've been unemployed for about 6 months. People are
asking me if I write code or do pixel art professionally, when I'm doing it on
Twitch... and it sucks to say that I don't. I wish I understood why there was
this disconnect between what people acknowledge in me, and financial results in
labor markets. I've had 3 interviews in these six months, and all three ghosted
me. Tech firms won't consider me without a degree.

I am self-taught, but adaptable and ramp up quickly on any project I put my mind 
to. I have considered pursuing a diagnosis of some sort because I know I'm weird 
and different, but the current political atmosphere does not bode well for those 
on the spectrum... Not really sure what to do with myself these days. But 
anyways back to code crap.
-----

I'll be *copying* Pelican instead. Given some facts about Gopher, I can simplify 
the work by ensuring any text formats come out as txt, image files are handled 
correctly, etc. I can't guarantee anything will come from this curiosity, but 
it'll scratch an itch. I really just want what I write to look good no matter 
where I publish it.

Let me know what you guys have come up with to centralize where your work is 
made. I'll try to drop in here more than once or twice a year. Life is just 
really kicking my ass.

-z