Can I just have one minute to be creative please

Five more chapters of the longboi down. Braska has reached and now passed his lowest point, which I suppose is fitting given that we’re currently in the southernmost part of Spira. Auron is, er, not actually having a great time either, although if he could see ten chapters or so into the future, he’d be grateful for how things are now tbh. Meanwhile, Jecht is making friends with everyone and getting a glow up. Thank goodness for Jecht.

• Still playing the {terf wizard school} game, oh god when will it end!!! I’m actually pretty close to finishing it, I think. It’s like Rise Of The Ronin but less Japanese and with less character customisation – maybe I’ve already made that highly astute observation, but despite that meaning the “world exploration” elements are largely similar, and despite the intriguing presence of a somewhat pathetic man whom everyone hates, this one still fails to hit the spot.
• Picked up Final Fantasy Tactics A2 at CEX … I’ll play it in five years or whatever. I’m not great at tactics games, but I hear there’s Lore, and obviously my life’s mission is to become acquainted with all FF-related media.

• Saturday’s orchestra concert was mediocre in most respects other than Karłowicz’s violin concerto, which we’ve all become obsessed with.
• I can’t make the next monthly Bach event so the season is over for me, boo. I’ll also be missing @adt’s sticky toffee pudding, which is a shame, not so much in respect to the pudding itself because I would never not rather have a nice green bean or something, but just to see how others deal with the genre-defying experience of Young Bakingman.
• Listened to the full FF9 soundtrack for the first time in a while and remembered how brilliant it is. All subsequent FF soundtracks are shit actually (stay tuned for more hot takes).

• Reading Tokyo these days, really good stuff, poignant af!!
• Read the fourth volume of Chroniques de la mariée de Bretagne, so I’m caught up ready for tome cinq coming out later in the year.
• Read two books for work.
• Bought a couple of volumes of PokéSpe at Forbidden Planet seeing as they actually had the ones I was after, which wasn’t the case for any of the other manga series I’m interested in. They never seem to stock volume one of anything … is this some big brain marketing strategy that I have failed to grasp?
• Reading Extremely online by Taylor Lorenz. So far each chapter seems to be a series of interesting and entertaining anecdotes, although I haven’t yet figured out what the central narrative flow is based on, if there is one.

• Jecht fanart. Looks like he is on Besaid, appropriately for where my FFX brain is right now.
• Good article (ukpol) about what “integration” really means in the UK … in conclusion, eat the rich, etc., etc.

I’m most of the way through a significant site redesign. Thought it was time for a layout and CSS change; I’ve kept the general grey theme, but made more use of what I refer to as “the gen Z gradient”.

The general inspiration for this new style is my envy of people who do things with pretty stationery, something I have always loved even if I lack the artistic ability to make good use of it. I’ve been doing all my planner/journal stuff digitally since becoming an Emacs bro back in 2019, because it’s searchable, portable, automatically archived, it saves space, and so on. My org-agenda has a few concessions to Aesthetic in the form of icons and customised date formats, but it’s not the same as actually having a nice notebook and some nice pens. Neither is having a website, of course! But if I give my site some kind of (tentatively named) bullet journal vibe, that’s something, I guess. It also reminds me that part of the aim of this setup is to track my activities, just like a physical bullet journal would.

My aim is for all pages on the site to use this layout and CSS, apart from the fandom pages with their fandom-specific designs, and the game tracker, which is deliberately modelled on another website. I’ve now switched everything over except the fic archive, which is going to need a substantial rewrite, cripes. It’ll be a good opportunity to clean that up as the first static site generator I wrote, though, having written several more of them since.

Talking of SSGs … part of the redesign has involved writing yet another of them for my journal posts, so I can now write those (these?) in Emacs, then run a script that exports them as HTML in the format I want them on my site (with a special twist for “tumblr reblogs”), uploads them to the server, and sends a webmention to Bridgy Fed for the current day’s post. I’m planning to add some degree of RSS automation to this, because as things stand I still need to ssh into the server after posting to update the feed, which defeats the purpose of a static site generator tbh.

• Watched My Neighbours The Yamadas, right at the start of the month, and characteristically, nothing since. (– Bashō.)

(autocue voice) a stable presence, a force for positive transformation, a pioneer and a problem solver

• Going to Lisbon for work in a matter of days; I’ve been trying to see if I can test out of the entire “Portuguese for French speakers” Duolingo course in a week, mostly as a way of validating my belief that Duolingo is trash.
• Still more website work to do! I need to divide the about page into what is about “me” (inasmuch as I am not a formless blob, etc.) and what is about the site; I need to rework the fic archive into the new style, as noted; I possibly also need to think about changing the handwriting font I’m using in blockquotes etc. because it’s not the most legible thing I’ve ever seen, tbh. I also want to actually add some Content … que incrivél.
• Annual weeb con at my workplace coming up, which I’m looking forward to.