Mini Article Palooza

Because I've wanted to write, but can't decide on just one topic.

Written November 9th, 2024.

I've been incredibly busy with college lately. I have much more of a life than I did when I first started my website, but I still want to update this place! I've had shrine ideas, article ideas, layout ideas, cool JS ideas, but I don't really have the time or energy to execute it all. However, I have some time right this minute to write an article, but just one. I've had a ton of ideas that I can't find a way to extend to a full length piece, so what a better way to get those ideas out then condensing them into one basket?

My Yoga Broke

Life happened. I dropped my Lenovo Yoga one too many times on campus, and now it's dented to the point the hinge snapped every time I tried to open it. Thankfully, a warranty was bought with my comically high bill, so I've turned it in for repairs… but GOD do I miss it. I'm back on my Dell Latitude, in which I've gotten readjusted to at least and installed a lighter desktop environment than GNOME (it works wonderfully now!). Still, there are so many things I miss about the Yoga. How light it was, how it had drivers that were supported on Windows, how fast it was, how it could game… I'll have to cope without it for 3 weeks or so.

Also, the Geek Squad employee asked me to boot into windows and I felt like that one Linux greentext… you know the one.

Image is a post on 4chan. The image reads that anonymous posted 13 hours ago. There is a crying reaction image attached to the post. The text reads: '>using linux in front of classmates >teacher says 'Ok students, now open photoshop' >starts furiously typing away at terminal to install Wine >Errors out the ass >Everyone else has already started their classwork >I start to sweat >Install GIMP >'Umm...what the fuck is THAT anon?' a girl next to me asks >I tell her its GIMP and can do everything that photoshop does and IT'S FREE! >'Okay class, now draw use the shape tool to draw a cirlce!' the teacher says >I fucking break down and cry and run out of the class >I get beat up in the parking lot after school'

Baby's First Pride Parade

Due to being a part of my college's gender sexuality alliance (GSA), I was able to attend pride in October without tickets! We had a bake sale to cover the costs of the float, in which I baked some cookies that I hardly got to eat any of… which was unfortunate. They looked really good and the few that I did have tasted great.

An image of two confetti cookies sprinkled with M&Ms in a plastic bag.

Not only did I go for free, but I was also at one of the floats. I've always wanted to go to pride at some point as a queer person, but I never thought I would end up as one of the performers. In spite of being in quite the conservative state, there was no protesters. I got to eat some Chinese Food as well as some Sonic Ice Cream, it was quite the time.

An image of golden lomane chinese noodles. An image of a Sonic the Hedgehog ice cream popsicle. The eyes are gumballs, and the rest of the popsicle is in blue and tan colors.

Building my Python skills to make Webmastery easier

Making my website was my gateway drug to learning to code, a goal I've had for many years. Though, there are some parts of releasing website content that I feel are time wasting and exasperating… namely, writing long content in HTML and putting image upon image in an HTML document.

There's a few big goals I want to improve my website with: make my art gallery, release more shrines and release more articles. For my shrines and articles, I'd rather rip all of my hair out than write paragraphs and paragraphs of text in my IDE, VSCode. Therefore, I write everything in my word processor in Comic Sans, like I was taught growing up, then I manually convert the contents of each article to HTML. Now that I have so many other things to do in my life, I dread the very process. I've focused on my studies and practically abandoned working on anything of substance on my website.

But then it hit me. I could take everything I learned in my programming class to make every single aspect of working on my website easier! I've just wrote a personal script to convert word documents to plain jane HTML. I'm thinking about how to make a script that puts tons of images in an HTML document for my art page. It's not that I hate coding in HTML. I find working on layouts incredibly fun, and I love the many things that it's possible to do with JavaScript. I just want to put focus on delivering content of substance, yet still have more freedom over my website than with an Static Site Generator.

My Planned Re-brand

I've been working on an entirely new layout for my website because the way that I coded this iteration of my website is an absolute headache to work with. My code is spaghetti that I dread untangling. However, not only do I feel like changing my code.. but I feel like changing the name of my site.

First of all, I question myself as to why I named my site ‘The Shark Cave'. My fursona is a shark, but you can hardly see them anywhere. Not to mention, this doesn't even resemble a cave. In brainstorming for a new name for my website, I came up with the coolest website name I could've came up with: lamnidae, the scientific name of a mackerel shark.

I bought the domain lamnidae.net months ago because I thought that was so cool. It sounds not just like the name of a shark, but fits my website theming of the Xbox bios spaceship perfectly! I also want to firebrand because I've matured a lot this year and can safely say that I hate mincing my words to a broader age audience. My art is also likely not fit for a broader age audience, once I make that page. I want to say the f-word, dammit. Therefore, my site will probably become rated mature so that I can say the f-word as often as I do in my status cafe page.

I've already made quite a few assets for Lamnidae, and I already like it quite more than my current website. Hell, my current layout is reflective of the planned layout for Lamnidae, because I couldn't release Lamnidae without abandoning The Shark Cave for months. Don't try going to the URL right now, because as of this moment it is just the Neocities default.