NEW SITE INNIT

Thought I’d give an actual, substantive update post to mark the new site layout. I just want to write something so this’ll be a bit of a loose post.

Moving from Hugo/Kayal to Astro/astro-erudite

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t satisfied with Kayal the longer I saw my website using it. It just didn’t look right for me. As my site stagnated I grew out of it, but I didn’t know where to go next.

I decided to look elsewhere, and landed on Astro, with the astro-erudite theme. What kinda made me pull the trigger on astro-erudite is this post from the developer of it, lamenting the state of static blogs and honestly, I cannot say I disagree with him on a lot of this. I also wanted something that was basic, but not too basic that it was boring. Something nice and stylish out of the box, but also simple enough to iterate over if I wanted. And this theme fits that criteria very nicely.

Customising this blog at the most basic levels has been piss easy compared to other templates, and I’ve also turned the theme’s about page into a hub for my projects. I feel that with this theme, when I get the urge I can make this more of my own in the future. Right now I’m focused on other projects so, for now I’m just doing basic things to differentiate it for myself personally.

Moving from Mastodon (and Bluesky, sorta) to Wafrn

I’ve decided to move my main ActivityPub/fediverse and ATProto presences to Wafrn. I’ve got a longer post about this in the works but it boils down to using Wafrn a lot more than Bluesky and Mastodon, the latter of which I’ve basically abandoned at this point due to bouncing off of its UX and culture. Despite its jank, Wafrn has made its way into an essential app for me, thanks to its already solid integrations with both protocols.

If you’re not happy with Bluesky’s recent decisions, but you’re trying your hardest not to touch Mastodon again due to how serious and hostile the users were towards you, Wafrn might be worth a shot. I’ve already got a few on the main instance because of the Bluesky integration. Their official website is at wafrn.net, the three instances I can recommend right off the bat are app.wafrn.net (flagship instance, use this if you’re unsure), homestuck.fr (for Homestuck fans) and bark.wolp.chat (for furries).

I’m working on an app!

If you know me from Rate Your Music, you know I make the MusicBee tag hierarchy template based on the site’s genre and scenes & movements trees. What you may not know is that I’m writing that tree manually, using a cludgy app written in Python to manage that. While Python is a cromulent language, I’m not sure if it was right for me, and the app itself was not built with best practises, making the code a fucking mess.

I’ve since brushed up on C#, another language I knew a bit about, a few months ago. Since then I’ve enjoyed how strongly object-oriented it is, and I’ve been comfortable enough that I’m now working on a remake of this app with C#. I’m intending to start with a console version first and foremost, then a GUI app based on Avalonia (and eventually, Qt/QML once their .NET bridge is out). Both of these will allow me to target both Linux - my main OS of choice - as well as Windows and Mac, but I don’t own a Mac so I couldn’t feasibly build for it at the moment.

Various media I’ve checked out recently

I might make more frequent posts talking about this, just to have something light to write here sometimes.

Music

I listen to way too much music. Just go check my RYM. But right now I’m going through as much as I can of Eluvium’s discography. I think Eluvium is one of those artists that randomly came up on Spotify for me while I was studying at university, and then I checked the album later on (specifically, Nightmare Ending). It’s a solid mix of classical and ambient that I’m digging so far.

I’ve also listened to Mirrors by EDM artist Anki, it’s got its ups and downs but it’s such a well mixed album with great melodies and some nice grit to match. Another album of this sort to check out is The Death of Music by dj galen though it’s more on the experimental side in comparison.

Books

Right now I’m collecting all of the Beastars manga. I’ve watched seasons 1 and 2 on Netflix after watching Maneskin’s music video collab with Beastars that used excerpts from the manga. I loved the expressiveness and toon-iness of the manga and even though I liked the anime I felt that was lost in the adaptation. Buying the manga has been a consistently great decision, and revisiting the world of Beastars through the manga has been much more thrilling this time around.

YouTube

I love me some Eurovision, hell I’ve been hyperfixated on it for a while, but at the moment it’s been in a bit of a slump due to political controversies. “Eurovision is dying, it can only blame itself” by Stuart MacLean is a very chilling documentary video on the actions of the Israeli broadcaster and the EBU’s inaction in response to it while punishing others for daring to speak out about it.

I’ve also been catching up on ESC Gabe, a Eurovision YouTuber who also has some good insights into the contest. Some good entry videos include one where he looks at the United Kingdom’s past history in Eurovision, following Olly Alexander’s middling result in Malmö 2024, as well as how Finland got so good at Eurovision in the 2020s.

Games

it’s literally been Fortnite at the moment lmao. I started getting into it when Fortnite dropped Peabody, an anthropomorphic pea-pod. Absolutely Flaky-core design.

Though, since I’ve been doing a lot of programming I haven’t really got in the mood to play games as much, and Fortnite scratches that itch of a game that’s just easy to casually play at any time. Hell I wasn’t playing it as regularly until I set up my PS5 for it (turns out having to wait for Windows sucks) My favourite modes - and you won’t be surprised - have basically been the Festival modes, I don’t think I would’ve cared as much about Fortnite outside of Peabody and left my account rotting, otherwise.