November 2021

Isn’t ironic when you’re busy, you yearn for free time, but when you have lots of free time, you’re bored out of your mind?

No, just me?

So, you may have noticed that my last post was in July; before that, the last post was in April. I managed to write enough to scrape by for the first four months.

It’s been a long year and I’ve forgotten most things. Like when we went into lockdown. again. The gap between July and now overlapped with intersem break where I got triggered about something, likely related to uni *ahem* COMPSCI and… two weeks later, semester 2 started.

In September, I realised that the last time I had posted was in July and not August as I thought but by that time, October was coming up. October for me was hell; all of my courses decided it would be the best time to cram in all the assignments and tests, so all I had time to do was suffer. October passed painfully but quickly and…

Now, it’s almost the end of November, and I feel like s*** and I’m bored. Hence, my preamble.

So… I would say I’ve failed my New Years Resolution. <↓>

I promise to write at least one post per fortnight, or at the bare minimum, once a month. — January, 2021

But I’m not giving up. Hence, why I’m writing this post.

[future me]: This is a long one. Sit tight.

I wouldn’t say I’m the most expressive person. I tell everyone I meet (probably not the best way to introduce oneself) that I don’t talk much. In conversations, I honestly just sit/stand and absorb the discussion, and answer in very plain but vague terms when asked about myself.

But I do see myself as creative, at least mentally. That probably made no sense. When I was younger, I had a very strong imagination and I had horrifying but intriguing (in hindsight) dreams (well, nightmares). And though the potency is no longer there, the things I think up have some merit to them.

The problem is, as I said in the introduction, that I’m not very expressive. The things I used to/often think up and dream of are too vivid and abstract for me to draw or express in words. Also, dreams are ephemeral as well.

There is a running joke (*ahem* between my parents) that when I was in early primary, I would write sentences like “I am a boy. This is a dog,” i.e. not very descriptive. And though it’s not that simple, I would say that can be true. I tend to use very literal descriptions and when I’m in a flow, it tends to become a technical breakdown of the character/object/location.

As a result, my “ideas”, “novels” and “short stories” all largely exist in my head. I have written five or so short stories but haven’t refined them yet. My “novels” don’t really exist.

Another problem is that I “live” through the important moments in my fictional worlds, the emotions of the characters that have gone through them and how it changes them, shapes their being. Once that is over, for me, that part of the story is over. It’s complete. And since I don’t write it down, or in useful detail, when it comes to writing out the event, I can’t and I don’t feel the need to. It’s done.

NB: There’s hope! I actually started writing things down, because I started to encounter (when I went back to it) slightly different versions of the same event that were hard to reconcile.

But there’s still a lot of pivotal moments in my fictional worlds that are lost, like tears in the rain.

Since I’m sure that no one’s read the post about it, a previous iteration of my site was made using a static site generator called Jekyll. Long story short, I ran into a few problems, some of them my own doing, so I later switched to Hugo which I use today.

You can read about my troubles here. The crux of the matter is:

I don’t feel it’s honest to say I built this site.

I’ve built very s**tty and basic sites for a uni course (would not recommend), and all I’ve done with Hugo AND Jekyll was learn how to set them up, select a theme, and insert my content. That doesn’t feel like “building” to me.

I’m not using Hugo to its full potential. There’s a lot of power and customisation available for both generators that are nicely wrapped up by their themes. However, they feel like magic fairy dust that somehow turns everything into something nice to look at. And I find it hard to understand the documentation for both generators.

But I want to learn.

You might’ve seen in the footer:

Copyright 2018 Sebastian Lau
Hugo with Sam theme.

That is something I did. I overrode the default footer, which you can do by creating a copy of the specific file in the theme in the right folder in your project, and changed its contents.

There’s other things. Some parts of the theme I’m using, like the blockquotes above, don’t look very nice. The blockquote specifically doesn’t extend all the whole width as I like it and I feel like there’s too much whitespace surrounding, especially if you only have one line (maybe I’m too used to GitHub Flavoured Markdown). As I said, I wasn’t too sure where to change these things.

As I said in July, I trialled updating the theme and it felt like my site was upgrading from low quality into HD. The whole design was sharper, especially the font. But when I came back a while later, I couldn’t really tell the difference anymore. What stopped me from updating anyway was that there were a bunch of posts I thought about writing and I didn’t want to make any breaking changes.

I’ll have a look and see if it’s needed.

Here’s just a small list of things I’d like to change:

  • have post titles appear in the title bar instead of just the site name
  • modify the design of some elements, e.g. blockquotes, line rules
  • add a automatic “return to top” button if the post is too long (I did test this out)
  • make the tags page more informative, right now it’s just a list
  • make lists in general show more detail and be better structured
  • auto generate a nice table of contents for longer posts
  • allow the user/me to change fonts (the theme hardcodes the font atm)

I’ll update you on how I go with them.

Oh jeez, where do I start?

So when people ask me what I do, I often tell them about my projects, mostly New Horizons the writing project, and say I “write stories”. What a lie. I spend more time imbibing random facts tangential to my projects, i.e. binging Wikipedia. But anyways, I wanted to talk about my projects, transparently.

Whenever people ask why I decided to study computer science, I tell them it’s because I wanted to write an operating system. The long version of the story is long so I won’t elaborate here. I’ve told some people that one of my projects is an operating system; that’s both true and not true at the same time.

I’m not writing an operating system. I haven’t exactly decided what I’m trying to do and I don’t have the confidence that my programming skills are up to the task. I did, however, recently resume planning it out. But don’t expect to see anything remotely like Windows or macOS for even the next decade. This is a long term pipe dream.

It’s also been a while since I worked on any project, such as New Horizons or Indigo. My go to excuse for this is uni, especially in October when all I did was survive.

Right here in this post, I originally wrote three giant paragraphs explaining how I basically absorb themes and ideas from whatever game, movie, or tv series that I’m interested in at the time and how this leaks into and jumbles up my projects. Since my memory is shot, I didn’t realise I already touched on that in Indecision and Imitation.

I really don’t know how to turn that off. Indigo was originally about politics and religion set in a Middle Ages setting and the fantastical magical elements weren’t important to the story. But under the influence of Magic the Gathering with its multiverse and high-powered mages, magic and supernatural creatures seem to want to leak into Indigo.

And as a consequence, my neat little narrative is being pulled left and right by strong forces to expand. The world threatens to get bigger.

This reflection iswas a confession: I’m a liar. I don’t write. My projects don’t progress. It’s a problem that I haven’t figured out how to solve yet.

Now it’s not. Anyways…

In the interest of wow, full transparency!, I will be modifying the following articles:

  • “New Horizons” deleted [Thurs Dec 12, 2019]
  • “Maintenance 2021” renamed to “April 2021” (*)

“New Horizons” is really vague because I don’t want to reveal important plot points of the novel(s) I haven’t written, and also because the project itself is quite complicated and hard to explain. Since the post doesn’t feel right, I’m getting rid of it. Yay revisionism!

I’m renaming “Maintenance” to “April” to fall in line with the other ‘update’ type posts I’ve written. (*): You’ll still be able to access it with the existing link.

Just for kicks, here’s a list of the projects I came up with or worked on this year (or in 2020, can’t remember) and how they’re going.

Projects

  • New Horizons [backburner; should be writing]
  • Redacted (operating system) [re-invigorated; design phase]
  • Indigo [backburner; should be writing]
  • Yellow Indium (card game) [kinda dead]
  • new Quirinus/“The Department” [dead; some ideas may stay]
  • old Quirinus (video game) [dead; some ideas will stay]

NB: Useless information but new Quirinus/“The Department” and old Quirinus exist in the New Horizons universe.

Promises. Promises. I’ve made a few of them in this post and since I’ve broken the resolution, who knows if I’m going to keep them. But I’ll try. Sorry Master Yoda, for me, there is try, not just do.

One last thing, I’ve been watching Cowboy Bebop, both the original anime and the new live-action Netflix show. I’ve been striping them (one ‘p’), watching a few episodes of each at a time, and whilst its still early days, the new one is a bit too comedic. The anime has humour but I would say it’s more melancholic and pensive. So… I might write a review on them, we’ll see. (Also, Arcane is awesome!)

Anyways, thanks for reading folks. I know it was a long one. Come back soon!