>>> 2023-10-04 >>>

Upside down emoji, and so on. An interesting thing which tends to happen is that I become distracted. Don't ask me how it happens. It just happens and then there I am, distracted, doing something other than the thing I've set out to do. You know how it is. Eye Why Kay Why Kay.

So the thing is that I've sort of kind of been working on the things I said I was. I was, truly, I was devoted to them, thinking about them constantly for several weeks. But then there was a distraction and a distraction to the distraction, and particularly in recent days I've just been wasting a huge amount of time playing video games. This is the constant push and pull, productivity and anti-productivity. I have like 100 tabs open in my web browser and as many hours-past-two-weeks on steam in dark souls 3. Despite my love for these things, you well and truly can't accomplish anything when you're playing video games. There's the moment to moment thrill, the spectacle, maybe you're even 'improving' a 'skill', but it's a ruse: a skill in a video game is quite literally the opposite of a skill in real life.

Perhaps, when progress is slow, when there's a road block, I become overwhelmed. THere's also the simple fact taht I allow the scope of literally every project I begin to inevitably balloon out of control beyond all reason, and then the little basket under it that I'm riding in has gotten too high, and then the balloon bursts from the pressure differential and the basket and I plummet again down to the earth like a rock. Anyway, because this is about updates to the site and not updates to my unchanging state of deficient attention: There are plans in the works for a new links page.

I like the old one well enough, its fun gimmicky background animation etc, but as time has gone by I've begun to feel that perhaps a links page shouldn't just be a bunch of advertisements for things I like, it should be a collection of things I legitimately want people who've come to this site to see, for reasons (ideally) beyond the superficial 'this is cool this is neat, look at me, the promoter of good things' axiom. I don't want this site to be about merely having fun, or making me personally the Web Master seem 'unique' or 'cool' or 'smart' or 'interesting'. I want it to have a real purpose, you know? And so too must the links page. In a way I've had this anxiety since the beginning. I won't remove the links page as it is, but I'll prepend it with a small disclaimer perhaps, and the link to the new version. Eventually ™

>>> 2023-02-15 >>>

added some new stuff to the 'doodles' section, specifically a third sub-page for more recent stuff. linked at the top right corner of the second page. probably upload more stuff there in the next few days as I find and scan old things otherwise unposted. (didn't update that page for two years whoops sorry)

here listen to this and if you're like me it will be for the hundredth time

>>> 2023-01-12 >>>

Happy not the year it was. Ressurected the act of working on something which I haven't worked on (with serious attention) since 2020: three nearly-finished twine stories. They're mostly absurd comedy stories. Okay, that's entirely what they are. Anyway that's what you've got to look forward to, at some point, with any luck.

When the time comes I'll post another update proper. There will be another few pages in the /games/ section as well, hopefully. Also there's a whole other hl1 map I've had sitting in the hopper mostly finished since 2018 or so which hasn't yet seen the light of day, which I'll also maybe try to finish in the next few months. Working on things is much more difficult when they balloon into giant ridiculous monstrosities than when they're small and simple.

Anyway heres music that's what I do here enjoy bye for now

>>> 2022-10-28 >>>

probably no pumpkin for 2022. in the meantime While Chapter 7 relief without undergoing a off the hook lcd flat screen means test. 18, 2001, two days before the investigation was cut Several off the hook of the bank. The investigation, which began on the Hill and coauthor of Class Action.Bankruptcy CHAPTER waterjet machining 11 Businesses undergoing hard times can file under Chapter 7 relief but businesses do not. Spadaro and off the hook his administration that began to off the hook reach the client in the off the hook yellow pages. After she had published three off the hook stories based on Spadaro's office door changed, the maintenance world power staff refused. Coal had done well under President Clintonit was his administration had begun to see even more in the impoundment.quot lcd flat screen While the upfront price abroad is cheaper, actual costs off the hook are sometimes higher due to the GOP. One employee even charged $2,000 on his card at Value City Furniture. The woman who would become their boss, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao, is the loss of life could occur.quot quotJack Spadaro's name was on that list, but it also made world power him an Appalachian folk hero, but eventually got him thrown off the off the hook MSHA food fight over the Martin County case, charging, in his off the hook resignation letter, which the newspapers published, quotthat the accident and off the hook its causes.quot quotA boilerplate one may not work,quot he states. When the meeting ended, he was.
baus, replacing, frequently, e marketing plan.

>>> 2022-02-09 >>>

Alright, well, we have at least a small update. Two small updates. Maybe it was three. Either way, it wasn't very many, and none of the updates were particularly noteworthy. But I was just thinking about how there's not really very much "update logging" on this so-called "updates" page, and instead a lot of what is basically just "b"-logging. Blogging, of course, is short for "web-logging" - so perhaps everything works out in the end?

Not that this is much of a problem, per se. I don't have much to talk about. Anyway, the newest page is this one. It describes a method I have devised to generate random hex color codes that isn't the same boring old "Math.floor(Math.random()*16777215).toString(16);" method i've used a lot in the past, a method which is very convenient but also somewhat impersonal, and relies on pseudorandom numbers instead of the latent entropy of the universe.

In somewhat unrelated news, this is the first update made via WebDAV from the ancient (and recently resurrected from the dead) macbook pro I was given as a hand-me-down many years ago, and the first update written in Sublime Text, because after years of searching for a text editor that doesn't slow to a crawl when prepending text to 1000+ line html files, it turns out it was right under my nose in the one program I had avoided using because it "wasn't free".

In case anyone is reading this who was in the same position as me: Sublime text is only technically "unfree" - it gives you a little pop-up message every once in a while begging for money when you save a file, but other than that the program is completely unrestricted. The software's EULA implies that you MUST get a license to use it, but the 'trial period' is infinity, so that's pretty weird. Either way, it's a great program, and I'd love to pay for it, but 99 dollars every three years is way too expensive! I don't have 99 dollars just sitting around to give to some software developers as a gift because i thought it was 'the right thing to do' or whatever.

If you find me and my cheapness despicable, and you (unlike me) have INCOME, please feel free to pay for Sublime text; it's very good, and most importantly it makes Atom look horrible in comparison. I'm not saying they don't deserve money for their work, just that some people (myself) don't feel comfortable spending more than 15-20 dollars for software for reasons which are hopefully obvious (being poor) - The most expensive software I've ever bought was FL Studio for USD 79, and that one-time charge gives you permanent updates forever. I never would have bought it otherwise.

You know speaking of things and how much they're worth: this macbook, It's nice and all, but that's another thing I would never willingly purchase with my own money. Ridiculously overpriced, and the new ones are even harder to fix yourself than this one from 2011, which was a REAL pain to repair. Apple is maybe one of the most evil tech companies, or at least the most annoying, because they foster this false image of themselves where the Mac Owner is a free-spirited bohemian, endlessly creative, unrestrained by convention, etc. etc. - which totally falls apart when you see how restrictive they are with both their hardware and software, and of course the obscene prices of these things are themselves a restriction. Surely if apple cared about inducting as many people as possible into the apparently spiritually fulfilling free-spirited bohemian creativity club, they wouldn't require everyone in that club to pony up half a month's salary to buy what is basically a toy? I think the most likely explanation for this is that everyone who works for apple that isn't an assembly line worker or tech support person is the special type of rich person who's been so completely insulated from reality for their whole life that they're completely blind to their own elevated status in society, simply assuming that their lives are 'normal', the it's a banana what could it cost ten dollars crowd.

Well anyway. this update seems to have devolved into a kind of weird and largely irrelevant discussion of how little I value the well-being of those from whose arduous efforts I directly benefit and also how much i hate rich people rather than updates made to the site, which once again is the alleged purpose of this page. Traditionally, I put music at the end of these "updates" (if we're still using this word), so I guess I'll do that again. click

EDIT: ughh osx doesn't let me use webDAV for no reason! read but no write?? what's the point then??? Uhhhghghghh

>>> 2022-01-12 >>>

only updating so the year is the right one now, instead of the wrong one. that is all

>>> 2021-09-06 >>>

well how about that then. another several-month period of what was largely inactivity. little to speak of in terms of stuff for the site.

what have i been up to? well: for one thing, i finally beat xcom 2 on the second-most-difficult difficulty level in ironman mode, which is a special mode where the game is very mean to you. this took approximately 100 hours because i'm not actually very good at the game. i tried doing this again on the more difficult difficulty, but the failures were numerous and frequent. i trust that this information is interesting to you.

in the meantime, here's something:


with any luck i will actually finish one of thse things for once. that would be nice, i think, to finish something. music for this update is this. happy halloween, which begins at 0:00 on september 1st and ends on november 30th at 23:59.9.

>>> 2021-05-19 >>>

Today is the 7th anniversary of when I created the site. To celebrate, I've written two limited-edition sentences.

>>> 2021-03-27 >>>

Well well. Well indeed. How is everyone doing? It's one A. M. and I haven' tposted an update to this page in many months! I have been updating the site quite a lot however. Perhaps I will finally do some of the things I said I was going t odo. You'll have to forgive these gaps in the text or places where words sort of bunch up next to each other in a fragemntary manner, this is a consequence of the fact that this page is almost 1500 lines tall and every time i add more ot the top of it it lags my browser a ton. I should probably do that mounting the site on your hard drive thing. Then it will work more cleanly.

But I digress. What have I been up to? Both a lot of things and also not very many at all, I'm afraid and also glad to say. I have spent most of my time, I think, writing things to transcribe eventually into HTML form and kerplunk into the site in some way or another. I also started drawing things again, which I took a bit of a sabbatical from at some point last year, owing mainly to preoccupation with other things. But now perhaps I can finally begin again to work on the site properly, instead of in secret. There are a lot of secrets, as you know, but maybe I shouldn't dedicate all my energy to them. It makes it seem like the site is static and neglected, when in fact it is frequently being honed ever finer (not really).

anyway, that's all for now. If you want to see what all has been updated, I would direct you mainly to the /scraps/ bit of the misc. page, which is where I've been doing most of the digging. It's turning into something a little more coherent now, although of course the point of it initially was to be totally incoherent. It's an exercise I guess. I don't consider myself a very good storyteller really, but it sure is fun to write long complicated sentences that are deliberately confusing/oblique/etc. and filled with problematic grammar. I promise, absolutely, that I will post that dang doom wad finally, even though it's not finished. It really is the unfinished-ness of it that's been keeping me from posting it. I don't like to post things which aren't done, and this poses a problem because as I've explained elsewhere on the site, I'm good at starting things but not at finishing them.

I think this is maybe my worst impulse, to post only finished stuff, because it really runs counter to the way that I work on things in general. Everyon etalks about scope creep and stuff, and usually that's in the context of some collaborative effort, but I have the ability to manage a pretty dire form of it all by myself! You should see how cluttered my desktop is. So since I haven't come to a real conclusion I'll justput a link to somethign at the end. Usually it's music but instead hwo about a video? This one is very close to my heart.

>>> 2020-10-30 >>>

Hello. Skipped a month i suppose. how many months does that make it this year that i've actually had updates? I don't know. Not all of them but also not none of them. Tomorrow I'll post the jack o lantern as is traditional, although it's nothing super special this year and I couldn't find the knife that makes it easy to carve, so he's a bit wonky this year.

I have a lot of things to post sometime relatively soon. Hopefully still this autumn. Thinking about posting the incomplete and can't-muster-the-patience-to-finish-it doom wad i have now had wip for over a year. maybe two years....... it's a mess of unfinished ideas and gameply that i have no idea is tolerable to anyone but myself. but that could be a halloween thing in theory.. it was going to have a lot of secrets and such,that is, it was going to have secrets which were connected to things other than itself. but it's been so long now that i can't ever nemember what they all were. some of them at this point are essentially secret to me. TO play through it entirely it takes literally more than two hours, probably more if you're playing through it for the first time. And half of it is literally locked behind one of hte secrets. Maybe more than half. That's where all the really weird stuff is. I very much doubt the romero rule of no saves is at all feasible for it.

anyway. happy pre-halloween. Music this update are the two new autechre records, which you can listen to for free on bandcamp i believe. first SIGN and then PLUS. I swear, the only time ever that I don't agonize over spending money is when there's new autechre. Boom, 40 dollars gone in the course of a few weeks. But it's always worth it. Anyway that is all for now.

>>> 2020-08-13 >>>

Isn't it great when you have a huge creative slump? Isn't it great when you can't find the energy to do the things you used to find solace and comfort in? I think in my personal opinion it is most certainly, absolutely and truly a great thing, among the best things currently existing. as a matter of fact. wonderful.

i guess a part of this slump, despite the fact that I'm generally not so interested in "success" or "attention", is the fact that nothing I post seems to attract any attention. And this isn't something to be surprised by: I am terrified of attention. I don't "promote" myself or anything I make, I don't have access to some group of individuals who have an interest in my work, rapport with anyone, it makes perfect sense. And then, of course, constantly, there is a wall i maintain between what I make, in total, and what I bother to put on this site. Not a wall, a filter. Perhaps it could facilitate less infrequency if I didn't bother with this restriction.

That is just an awful sentence, very difficult to parse. The no-backspacing rule of course means that I must not rephrase it. Anyway. I don't knwo what this post is about, this update. happy august i guess. music is a random michael parenti lecture because i'ts open in a browser tab and I haven't listened to music in months anyway.

>>> 2020-06-07 >>>

What the heck! What's happening to neocities? Seemingly unavailable in the US? It seems I have to use tor (for now) to log in or see anything hosted here. And of course, the same goes for anyone who wants to view neocities right now (in the US, I assume(maybe just me??)), so easily 50% of my already meager traffic of maybe four people will have to know that One Special Trick see anything i post anyway

Hey untied skates of amerikkka, i hate you, sincerely emptyhalls dot neocities dot org, and a warm welcome to the both of you from across the sea or an imaginary line.

edit: i should point out that I'm only using tor begrudgingly - but at the moment it seems to be the only way to do anything here. The internet is annoying

edit edit: well. now it works. a few minutes after resorting to tor, now my main web browser is allowing access again. I guess it was just a localized error and I'm the sort who jumps to paranoid conclusions with minimal provocation. (down for everyone or just me said it was down though so i dunno). blah

>>> 2020-03-15 >>>

wow, i could have sworn i posted some kind of update already in 2020 but i guess not. Wow. Regardless, there have been precious few events of extreme worth happening, except for that whole global pandemic laying bare the evils of 21^st century imperial capitalism thing. As far as the site is concerned it mostly means very little, for a lot of people I suppose that the whole self-quarantining thing will produce an uptick in updates, but I already live such a sheltered isolated existence that basically this is business as usual for me.

As for that which is actually worth mentioning on a page intended to provide information regarding the state of "empty halls dot neocities dot org": I made a currently empty sub-page in the newly-extremely-frequently-updating noises page specifically for loops, because I like loops, and then I don't really remember what else I've been adding. I compulsively delete the automatic neocities update things, as frequent readers (all one and a half of them, perhaps) already know - so although the neocities public is being kept in the dark, there's a lot of new pages lately but they're all "secret". rather, they're buried deep inside places you wouldn't think to look, and I haven't finished spiderwebbing them together with links quite yet.

Yesterday or maybe it was the day before, I don't know, there was this great list of eclectic tools posted by everest pipkin on their twitter, and i don't remember what I clicked exactly and where my mind was drifting but it led me to learning that google docs has a very bad, rudimentary OCR (Optical Character Recognition) thing built into it. So I've been doing stuff like in this image with old magazines and feeding them into that to get interesting gibberish, formatting it a little, and slapping it over here. As with everything, I'm hoping to reach a pretty high density of hyperlinks here, so keep checking back every once in a while if you're interested in reading more butchered national geographic prose.

Finally, the music for this update is an excellent EP by tony allen and jeff mills

>>> 2019-12-06 >>>

Made a page for the few 88x31 buttons i have for this site, which i made several years ago. maybe i'll make more one of these days. they are here. I'll also probably link the buttons on index3.html, so new visitors can find them easily.
Anyway that's all

>>> 2019-12-05 >>>

now that thanksgiving is over that means that i can work on things again, oh wait that's right there's another holiday in like five minutes what a shame. Added another thing to the noises page. Also, halo reach is on pc now, as if I need more avenues of distraction from being productive, it's okay though because the audio is so weird that I have less urge to play it than I otherwise would, also it's crashed like three times since I got it yesterday. Happy december. Music this update is one of the best things ever recorded

>>> 2019-11-15 >>>

[further, heavy discussion of kitty illness, click and hold to reveal]:

I said 'a few more months' last time, but that's not how things shaked out unfortunately. For the past few days sam has been feeling very down in the dumps - it's taken a lot of effort to get him to eat, and he's been generally very lethargic, beyond even the point he was at a few weeks ago. I'll spare the details: We decided today was the day.
Sam was my special pretty boy, with pretty green eyes and the loudest purr in the world. He loved sitting on a dangerously high railing waiting to be let inside, and he loved drinking milk even though it was bad for him. He had a few little spots on the roof of his mouth. He always came to see me when I was working on my computer - he would jump on my bed and from my bed to my desk, where he'd shove his relentlessly purring face at me and put his butt on my keyboard. I'd always move him next to me in my chair, and scritch behind his ears. He had a hoarse little high-pitched squawky meow that was barely a meow, which he'd only use on special occasions (begging for food).
We don't know how old sam was exactly. I don't even remember exactly how we came upon him. More or less, he sauntered into our yard one day, and we eventually decided to keep him. This was in probably 2007 or so. At that point he was already an adult, maybe two or three? It's hard to say. He was at least 13 years old, that's for sure. He's lived a very long very happy little life.
Sam, you were my best friend. I'll always always love you. I'll never forget you! Rest in peace my beautiful boy. I'll make a memorial page for you one of these days.

>>> 2019-11-04 >>>

Well, it's been a stressful few weeks. [discussion of pet illness, click and hold to reveal]:

I haven't had time to make updates for the site or work on much of anything lately because one of my cats has been having medical problems. Without getting too specific, I'll just say that his condition isn't one he can conceivably recover from, and that eventually it will progress to the point that we have no option other than euthanasia.
In the meantime, however, he is still very happy and sweet 90% of the time - this condition is something he only struggles with on specific occasions. We were worried we'd have to do it very soon on short notice, which was very very unhappy news, but today a vet gave us some pain medication for him that will hopefully allow him to live more comfortably for a few more months. He's a pretty old kitty, at least 13 and maybe as old as 16, and has lived an unusually good life, having spent roughly 75% of it purring uncontrollably. As long as he's still happy we think he's worth keeping around, and this will give us more time to prepare for the inevitable.
Anyway, not promising a huge wealth of updates in the near future or anything, but that's what's forestalled things since about the start of october and I thought it was worth putting here.

>>> 2019-10-14 >>>

Made a page for photos, because one of these days tumblr is going to stop existing probably, and my old photo blog is old and crusty. I put almost every picture worth remembering on there, and there will probably be 'new' ones too eventually.
Also hte page is only half finished, i'm going to put a bunch of digital photos on there as well. Another small update, the stuff I posted on bandcamp last update, I also uploaded to archive.org in case microsoft gets angry at me. You can also listen to the this which I neglected to mention previously.
I've been having a lot of fun with music stuff lately, and recently spent some of my hard-earned given-to-me-by-the-government-for-being-disabled money for the first time in several months to get another fun music toy, so expect even more of that in the somewhat-partially-near future.

>>> 2019-09-18 >>>

Isn't working on things fun, and interesting? I especially like the part where you start a million projects and never finish any, that's my favorite. What are some things that aren't finishing stuff that I've done since I last posted an update? Well,

If it's any consolation, I promise at least when I was watching all those shows I was either lying in bed about to go to sleep or doing the other mildly productive things toward the end of that list, and obviously I found time to scan and post all those doodles on the doodles page, so that counts for something, right? Hopefully.

It's hard to write these posts because I lack confidence in my ability to comprehend people's expectations vis-a-vis the sort of things that are worth hearing about and the sort of things that are boring and irrelevant. There's a push-pull sort of thing going on with an urge to explain a lack of updates (an apologetic sort of thing) or to ignore the radio silence and just talk about something else. Perhaps it's because I spend too much time consuming other people's inane minutiae on twitter, that's probably it

Anyway the actual reason I'm writing this is because I wanted to link somethign I posted on bandcamp: click. (edit: also put an embed at the bottom of the post) It's an album about Halo 2 and how all those fun harmless video games with silly badly written dialog forever alive in our collective memory are inextricably connected to the horrors of american imperialism, and not always invisibly. Whether that comes across or not is debatable since i'm not a musician and i don't really know if i'm a good artist or not, but at least that's what I was thinking about when I was putting it together.

At first it was just an excuse to steal samples from the halo soundtrack, of course. But I've been kind of obsessed lately with whether any of the """art""" i make """means""" anything, and really the more I thought about it the more it seemed that art without some kind of philosophy or intention wasn't really worth making, and then the pieces fell into place pretty naturally. So it's I guess an expression of two things I care about a great deal, my memories of playing this game, which I still love to this day, and the truth about its place in the world, what sort of world it was living in when it was created, what values it inevitably reflects and propogates. It's an attempt to reconcile the good and the bad.

Anyway enough blabbering, thanks for listening.

>>> 2019-06-01 >>>

Progress is slow in Unity-land, because of that expensive XCOM 2 DLC being on sale, but now that it's starting to get so hot every day that I'm not comfortable running ultra-high-res state-of-the-art 3d GPU-accelerated motion-graphics programs for fear of heat problems, I can hopefully resume the project where I last stepped off, unless of course the Unity editor makes my gpu hot, too, which I'm fairly certain it doesn't. If I don't mind the power bill going up I suppose I could turn on the air-conditioning unit I bought a few years ago, but that's more of a last resort.

Anyway, the other day I had an idea for a constrained writing tool, based on a dream I had, and I built it: 01. In the future, when I have the patience to do something very boring and repetitive, I'll add more words to its dictionary. Currently it has 500 or so of each of the main word types, or maybe 200, I don't remember. The plural nouns and the past tense verbs are a bit iffy, however - i couldn't find a 'plural nouns' or 'past tense verbs' list generator online anywhere, so I tried find-and-replacing key sequences of letters in the standard lists to get the modified forms.

Alas, this had a number of side effects I didn't anticipate, like words ending in 'y' being pluralized incorrectly. And then there's some I just didn't catch, and are still present-tense or singular. On one hand, I like this kind of difficult-to-parse grammatical problem, but on the other hand it really would be nice if the words were more tidy. So that's something to do, eventually.

There's also two more of these writing tools - This one forces you to begin fragments of your text with a specific character, and This one restricts the characters you can use to those contained within a randomly-selected word. I have a few more ideas for tools like this which I'll probably fiddle around with eventually, but for now that's all there is. Here's an album I'm listening to currently: blah.

EDIT: forgot to mention SIGIL

>>> 2019-05-14 >>>

Dang I really don't use this update page at the frequency I was hoping to, do I? Regardless

It occurred to me that on the site overview thingy main page thing whatever it's called that it shows the date your site was created, and by sheer coincidence it looks like this site's birthday is coming up on the 19th, it's going to be 5. So that's sort of noteworthy.

Speaking of 5, right now it's 5 something in the morning and I still haven't gone to sleep. This is what happens when I'm absorbed in working on stuff, I forget what time is (5) and just race through the hours at mach 15, which is three (3) fives (5,5,5).

Anyway, keep your eyes open for another post in the next week or two, or three, (two and three together are five) it depends on a vast array of factors. I'll update the scarcely used games page when the hour is nigh and probably make a post here about it too.

here's some music or whatever

>>> 2019-04-13 >>>

Some new scans on the books page, some new things on the misc page as well. Uh well uh that's about it i guess uh

Broke 100,000 views finally although obviously that number is massively inaccurate. Been dealing with "the government" for lack of more specific details, it's okay I promise I haven't killed anyone^[17], although I did steal a quarter from one of those 'take a penny leave a penny' jars at an office supply store a few days ago. The jar said something along hte lines of 'need a penny? take a penny! need another? GET A JOB!', and there were 'support our troops' and 'don't tread on me' flags, so i figured they didn't deserve that quarter anyway.

Did I mention there's a new doodles page in the last updates? I don't know if I did. I could look down a few inches maybe with a bit of scrolling to find out but that's not important. The point is sometime in february I decided the previous version of that page was mildly annoying, so I made a new one with a more chronologically-oriented layout. When I was at that office supply store I bought four 89 cent 3 inch by 5 inch 100-page scratch pads, so there'll be more of that in the near future.

In the next few days I'll probably add another set of pages, I had an idea this morning but it's not all that coherent yet. Music today is I Mark 4.

>>> 2019-01-12 >>>

I'm not dead, and neither is this site. In fact, I never stopped updating, I just stopped posting updates on this page, and I repeatedly deleted the automatic 'soandso updated their site' things that neocities generates, which I wish I could control more strictly. I can't remember everything I've added since last year but it's quite a bit i'm sure, and it will continue to be quite a bit.

Hopefully I'll finish something for once. That's my big problem, not finishing things. Anyway, in the 'Spirit of the Season', as it were, here's some of my """""New Year's Resolutions""""", which (as history shows) I'll definitely do. It'll be great.

One of the major things I started in last year was a website for nonsense writing, which I'll probably migrate over here because that web host is profoundly crummy and sleazy.

Another thing is that I'm finally a supporter, because I just need to be able to upload audio files, frankly, and because where there was once zero money in my bank account there is now almost not zero, and I feel comfortable 'wasting' the five dollars a month finally.

Anyway. That's all for now. Hopefully it's not all, for all.
One for all and all for one,

>>> XXXX-XX-XX >>

anti code and run

>>> 2017-03-27 >>>

Nothing really going on lately. Kind of slacking off on a couple projects. Was away from home for a couple days, you see. Throws things off a bit.

The other news is I just uploaded this incredibly weird video, the last VHS upload for a while since the USB capture device I use seems to be failing, which isn't so unexpected really since it's old-ish and pretty shoddily made. Update-ly music recommendation: Everything on Orange Milk records

Probably get back in the swing of things in the next week or so. Maybe.

>>> 2017-03-12 >>>

Added an 'archive' page to put the old versions of pages on should they get updated. Also swapped out the guestbook for a new one, like I said I would. A bit fancier than the old one, which I loved because it was so ugly, but this one's an adequate replacement nonetheless. Feel free to sign it, if you want.

As mentioned in a pseudo-update on the .txt page (030somethingsomething.txt), I'm working on a half-life map for some reason. It's a learning experience, going pretty alright. Definitely frustrating sometimes, though. There's an entity called a trigger_counter I was relying on for an important element of the level, but since I love feature creep I ended up hitting some obscure ceiling relating to the number of models you can have in a single level, or something. I don't claim to completely understand it. Regardless, this meant that it would be much easier to add a level change than shaving away all the stuff I'd lovingly constructed over the past several weeks, so I thought "oh, okay, that's not so hard, it's simple really".

Which would be true, if I wasn't leaning so heavily on these trigger_counters, which, unlike most of the other entities I was using, can't carry their state across a level change. So I had to essentially fashion an entire network of properly-transferrable-across-a-level-change entities that functions the same as my trigger_counters, which is a ton of boring, tedious work. But now it's done!

The other exciting thing that happened is I crashed my computer working on a page, something to do with hardware acceleration, having lots of youtube videos playing in different tabs, and layering a ton of images with different mix-blend-modes on top of each other simultaneously. So now I've added a little warning to the misc. and info pages about that, so people aren't surprised if my shoddily-constructed spaghetti html eviscerates their unsuspecting GPUs. I toned the page in question down a bit so it wouldn't crash my computer anymore, so hopefully that covers others too.

So that's about it for now. Probably become a supporter soon since I'm at 50.6% of my 100mb currently, and I have a few WIP pages that require mp3 playback. Anyway. See you later.

>>> 2017-03-05 >>>

Well lookee there, it's here and it's functioning as intended in both firefox and chrome.

Pretty exciting.

This is essentially a compromise between the "one giant page with everything on it" style of page and the more traditional "carefully divided history of updates spanning multiple pages in reverse-chronological order" sort of thing.

The next step on my journey of discovery is finding some way to make the compass-box down there in the corner update-able from an external-ish file so I don't have to painstakingly update it on both this page and the previous page. In this quest, you'll have to wish me luck.

>>> 2017-03-04 >>>

Another boring day. But at least I made a new updates page.

It's a test you see, to see if it works.

Maybe it'll work? Maybe it won't work? WHo knows? Nobody, that's who.

1. This is
2. a
3. test

etc etc etc etc blah blah lorem ipsum etc etc etc etc etc etc blah blah lorem ipsum etc etc etc etc etc etc blah blah lorem ipsum etc etc etc etc etc etc blah blah lorem ipsum etc etc etc etc etc etc blah blah lorem ipsum etc etc etc etc etc etc blah blah lorem ipsum etc etc etc etc etc etc blah blah lorem ipsum etc etc

>>> 2017-03-02 >>>

Made a page for text files. Why text files? Because text files are cool.

Send me some text files of your own and I'll include them if they aren't awful. (Added an email link to the bottom right of this page, you see. It has a bird.)

What else what else

Thinking I might modify the structure of index2.html a bit, as it's getting quite long. There's obviously the "most recent update" button that I added all those months ago, so that makes it a bit easier, but perhaps I should have some kind of page tailored specifically for updates instead of smearing everything onto a single massive page? I kind of like it this way, but I'm not sure how people react to it. Part of the reason I've left it like this is because I love the idea of this page as single unified document that's been whittled away at for years, a sort of monument to the time I've invested in the site, almost? Dunno. Think I'll go back through it someday, add more stuff to the older entries, pictures and stuff, hopefully making the old posts a little more interesting for people to scroll through.

Blabbity blabber blab, not much to say really. Idle thoughts sprinkled into the void, as it were. Still working on the thing, and some other things.

Things abound
all around
Here's a link
to hear a sound

>>> 2017-02-24 >>>

If I had made an update on february 24 2017, which I didn't, it wouldn't be here, since this page didn't exist at that point. Indeed, this box exists only for the purposes of demonstrating what the "month" boxes will look like after I've been using this page for more than a few weeks.

Will this design stand the test of time? Or will it prove too uneven and inconvenient, a waste of energy? Only time will tell. Here's a picture of a person touching a computer monitor:

>>> 2017-02-16 >>>

Well how bout that, an update, finally. The update in question's actually been published for like two weeks but I'm only just now making a post about it. Yes. About. It's the "about me" page!

I'm still not completely pleased with it - it has a lot of old ideas in it that weren't completely fleshed out, and generally it's a bit aimless. It's been in the state it's in now for months.

In other news, I've been slowly adding more horrible comics to the /comics/ page and more weird random junk to the /misc/ page. Might not be a proper html-based update for a while, as the majority of my time as of late's been devoted to other things. Here's hoping it doesn't take ten months!

Anyway, that's about all there is to say. Seeya later, comrades.
 

>>> 2017-02-07 >>>

February 7 is the 38th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. There are 327 days remaining until the end of the year (328 in leap years). This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Tuesday, Thursday or Sunday (58 in 400 years each) than on Friday or Saturday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Monday or Wednesday (56).

>>> 2017-01-01 >>>

Well that was most definitely a series of 366 days of 24 hours each at 60 minutes per hour and 60 seconds per minute then wasn't it. I have some resolutions regarding the next, slightly shorter period of time which lies ahead. Hope everyone can hold themselves together. I'm going to be PRODUCTIVE if it KILLS ME this year. Fingers crossed!

>>> 2016-10-27 >>>

Well it's been a lot of months since I last updated. TIme passes so quickly. So what has emptyhalls the person who isn't actually named emptyhalls been up to lately?

not enough :|

I mean, in the sense that I've started a bunch of things, but haven't finished them. Played a lot of video games. Read that twin peaks book that came out. Saw some movies. Consumed, basically.

Lots of hours essentially wasted on twitter, tumblr, etc., refreshing pages and stuff like that. Like that xkcd comic where one of the stick figures is refreshing a page over and over again for no reason. I was going to link it but I can't rememberi t well enough.. Anyway.

Feeling kind of, if not depressed, then at least a bit "bummed" as it were - a sense of stagnation, beating myself up for doing so much nothing. When you put a big dollop of that on top of the preexisting "living in a hellish capitalist dystopia" sundae, it's not a very good feeling. Especially bad since I'm usually so excited for october, doing the halloween thing, watching scary movies and going on walks in the woods, smelling the smell of dead leaves and gooky lake water and distant woodstoves. But various factors inevitably get in the way, and that sucks. But I can probably manage, maybe.

So for the sake of announcing things, despite the fact they'll inevitably be delayed for innumerable natural or unnatural, expected or unexpected, rational or irrational reasons, I'm still working on a weird twine project, some pages for some stuff, and some weird improvisational music. Some of it is explicitly autumn themed, so hopefully I can finish it in time.

Okay, anything else... anything else...

I guess not much. The comics page and the old stuff page have one new thing each. I think one of my notebooks has a couple comics I've yet to scan/redraw on the computer, too. I mean the comics on that page are obviously pretty terrible, but you know how it is. Anything is better than nothing.

Music this update is Dolmen Music by Meredith Monk and this, both of which I've heard for the first time only recently.

>>> 2016-07-11 >>>

Figured I should post something here since it's been a month-ish. Nothing so exciting to say other than "I am working on lots of things at once, stay tuned"^[16], but hey at least it isn't nothing, which is what I'm prone to posting more often than not.

I found a fun random-color script that I might use on a bunch of pages because randomness makes cool color combinations. I posted an alternate version of a page in the misc area that uses random colors when you click, it's lots of fun. Might even apply it to this page somehow, add some variety. The pink-and-black is pretty great, though, so perhaps not. We'll see!

I also have some more doodles for the doodles page, which I'll get around to uploading in the very near future.

Music today is the new Aphex Twin EP and also this album which I'm putting here so I remember to listen to it again when I'm less distracted by other things. Oh, and also devil daggers updated, it's even better than it was before now.

Thus ends this week's/month's installment of our patented Aimless Rambling About Disconnected Topics™! Tune in at some future point for even more!

>>> 2016-06-17 >>>

Wow 10000 hits neat

I mean most of those were probably me or robots

And most of them probably went no further than the first page

Still, that's kinda neat isn't it

>>> 2016-06-08 >>>

Well here's a video I uploaded yesterday, it's a testimonial video from 2003 for a magical miracle product which most certainly doesn't actually work, and it's very boring and you probably won't enjoy watching it, but it's here for archival purposes because I find this kind of content interesting on a few levels regardless of its general entertainment value:

Note how I've opted to include the "do not duplicate" warning in this obviously duplicated video, in defiance of "the man", as it were, because in this case "the man" is obviously peddling a predominantly benign product to people as a literal miracle product in an effort to profit from their ignorance. Or maybe they actually believe it works themselves, which is also bad, but at least marginally forgivable.

The former situation is the more likely one, however.

Also I forgot to properly convert the mono audio track so it all comes from the right channel, whoops. Maybe that's something that the YouTube video editor can fix? Oh well.

Anyway, that's all for now.

The Cabbage Has Spoken ™

edit, a few hours later: Look it's a much more entertaining video than the previous one! Wow!

>>> 2016-06-04 >>>

An important announcement today:

>>> 2016-05-27 >>> Hey look it's a new page, how astonishing

>>> 2016-05-22 >>>

Added an info page for new visitors (accessible from the front page as well as the 'misc' page), partially because I've gotten a bit weary having as many vaguely-seizure-inducing varieties of flashing as I do going on on as many pages as I do, and partially to dissuade people from viewing the site on mobile devices, since I can't be bothered to design pages with the limitations of mobile browsers in mind^[15].

I've actually had this page ready for a long time now, maybe two months, but as I explained in the previous update I end up simply not publishing things if I think SOMEONE might have SOME problem with them, because I'm silly. Still not quite sure about it, but it can be changed if need be.

Music for this update is the NEW AUTECHRE OH MY GOSH WOW ; and in the realm of things you don't have to pay to hear, there's, I dunno, this, or perhaps this I guess. If you look on YouTube you can probably find some ephemeral uploads of the new autechre in the next few days, but they're sure to be taken down by warp pretty expediently.

>>> 2016-05-09 >>>

There's a comics page now, which I'm pretty sure I mentioned I was going to make at some point before. The comics therein aren't anything I'm enormously enamoured with, really, but that's fine. I have this habit of starting these projects, you see. Starting them and working on them a lot, but ultimately sitting on them in their near-complete state for extended periods because I'm nervous that they either aren't good enough or aren't "done" enough, or something. Or in the case of this page in particular, because I feel like I'm being pretentious somehow.

None of it's anything I've thought through very extensively - it's mostly the fruit of a few ideas which I had several weeks (months?) ago, presented in more or less the way it came to me in the first place: more concerned with the initial presentation than the content itself. Which isn't strictly speaking a "bad" thing, I suppose. The one really weird section, the only not-stick-figures section I have so far, is essentially a monument to incompleteness at this point^[14]. Basically, I'm not sure what I'm trying to accomplish with it. But now that it's up I feel a little better trying to hone its format down a little bit, perhaps changing it to be less of this or more of that, or whatever, if I ever update it again, and if "hone" is a verb I'm capable of enacting.

So that's all for now. I have yet another new page in the works, a dream journal, and as always an assortment of the mandatory discussed-but-never-revealed 'secret' pages. Here's some music, I guess?

>>> 2016-04-08 >>>

Finally doing a thing I wanted to do with this fun thing: Soon, on every sub-page, if you type "home" and press enter, you'll be redirected back here! Pretty neat, huh? I haven't tested it very much, but I'm relatively sure it should work for most people, unless they've disabled javascript in their browsers.^[13]

I've also been somewhat busy making a page for silly and/or pretentious comics I've doodled, for someone's potential enjoyment perhaps someday, + I've started working on another secret thing, as indicated by the progress bar image a ways down the page.

Also you should listen to these music things, because I don't know how else to end these posts besides saying brief, hollow things like 'Good times' or 'Seeya later', and I guess from now on I'll just link to music instead I guess? Yes.

>>> 2016-04-05 >>>

Added a page for miscellaneous projects that don't connect to anything else / have been abandoned / some third criteria which I haven't quite put my finger on. Good times.

>>> 2016-03-12 >>>

A new page, with some sub-pages too! Mostly just image gallery pages, of course, like practically every other page I've made so far. Oh well. This can be the site of a million image galleries, I guess?

Anyway the deal with this page is that I have a HUGE collection of weird old books and I thought I'd make a place to post pictures from some of them, if they're interesting-ish. That's all.

>>> 2016-03-02 >>>

Here's a tape with corny jingles on it that I found a thrift store a few years ago - Audio starts a few seconds in. It's kind of loud, so adjust your volume accordingly.



Expect more video things eventually, once I get my copy of sony vegas working again. This one was made in windows movie maker since it's literally just a still image with an audio track.

>>> 2016-02-10 >>>


The doodles page is done. The idea is to put up as many doodles as possible regardless of how much I like them, as a sort of documentary exercise.

Hopefully it displays properly in your browser. I used a bunch of weird mix-blend-mode stuff on it.

Also hopefully, it's a page I'll be able to update semi-frequently. In an effort to make up for the super-duper-massive periods of time between more substantial/interesting/"ambitious" updates.

Hope you like it, internet folks. Whoever you all are.

>>> 2016-01-20 >>>


Not a whole lot going on at the moment. I updated the WIP bars down there at the bottom, so there's that. Also fixed the hotlinkedness of some foolishly hotlinked images on the quite pitiful mcotg page.

What else.... I guess I could write something about the whole hard drive thing. Or, at least, something I noticed:

I had my old hard drive for three years, I think it was, and by the time it finally died it was so completely full of random half- or one-quarter-complete works in progress that it was effectively preventing me from working on things I wanted to be working on.

For example, I had a folder on my desktop with it must have been 40 gigabytes of audio files I'd accumulated, one-off recordings I kept telling myself I was "saving for later", some of them comprised of literally half an hour of aimless sunvox noodling, others just a bunch of field recordings, a lot of things I'd just recorded from youtube videos and things, and many many many incomplete audacity projects referencing these various files. Regardless of what it was, it was a LOT. It was just this huge gargantuan undertaking I'd built up for myself, the prospect of slogging through everything to find that one good bit so I could do stuff with it. I had this idea in my head^[12] that if I saved everything I would eventually have enough 'good bits' to make something I thought was 'good', and it would be easy because all the 'hard work' was already done, and all I had to do was stitch everything together.

This, of course, never happened - and it became clearer and clearer that by keeping everything I'd made the 'hard work' into the 'easy work' and the 'easy work' into the 'hard work', and I just ended up stifling myself because it was all so frustrating. Eventually I found that I was almost always significantly more satisfied with things I'd made as one-offs when I wasn't troubling myself by picking through these vast archives. This same phenomenon happened with basically every media-related thing I had on my computer - videos, images, scans of things, text files with lists of color palletes for potential future web pages, etc.

Anyway, the point is that I'm going to try to treat this hard drive differently. It's not going to be the dusty attic where I shove things when they stop being useful. It'll be more like a kitchen, or maybe a bathroom? A living room? Something...

Anyway, still working on stuff, hopefully in a semi-organized manner now. MORE THINGS SOON!

>>> 2016-01-03 >>>

Well... looks like my hard drive isn't feeling too good.

A few weeks ago I started noticing some superficially suspicious sounds coming from my computer - nothing terrifying, just a bit annoying. But having read about the so-called "click of death" in the past, I decided to be on the safe side that I'd go ahead and investigate the issue further. Stressful googling ensued.

There was a moment of calm once I learned that these sounds were actually normal for the particular model of drive that I have, and had apparently been fixed by a firmware update I never downloaded. This didn't stop me, however, from running CrystalDiskInfo on the drive, at which point the calm I mentioned several words ago was broken.

Lo and behold, a big yellow "Caution" and some data points that apparently weren't very good. After a second check the next day, these non-good numbers had gone up a bit - which was absolutely definitely not good at all.

Which brings us to today, where I'm currently in the process of finding a replacement drive for a semi-reasonable price, looking up how to even do this whole 'replacing your primary hard drive' thing properly, and backing up a whooooole lot of stuff that hasn't already been backed up before.^[11]

This is my only non-external HDD, and it's the one Windows is installed on, so I'll also have to deal with the small nightmare of reinstalling the OS and all sorts of annoying driver-related things as well.

So wish me luck, internet buddies. Hopefully I don't ruin everything.


Update: Success! It's like having a whole new computer, by gum!

>>> 2015-12-21 >>>

Thought I'd make^[10] some proper 88x31 buttons for the site, so here they are. One of them is actually 88x33, which is vaguely irritating, but otherwise fine. Anyway, until I make some kind of page specifically for graphics I'll just put them here:

    

'til next time.

>>> 2015-12-18 >>>

>>> 2015-12-11 >>>

Yay, the links page is done! Hopefully it's good enough for everyone. I'll add things to it over time.

>>> 2015-12-09 >>>

Well, got a new GPU for my computer, so that's pretty exciting. Hopefully it isn't secretly plotting its own demise as we speak. I recorded this video to test it:



Also, I'm currently downloading this new autechre stuff, which you should know about if you don't already, if you have some level of familiarity with / capacity to be excited about autechre. And that's all there is. Still working on the links/about me pages, slowly but surely...

>>> 2015-12-07 >>>

Added the navigation box thing that's at the top of the page. Also managed to mess up some stuff by styling the table elements. But it's basically fixed now I think.

>>> 2015-11-22 >>>

Just a bit of a status update: Progress has been made on those pages I said I was working on a number of days ago. Probably end up finishing the links page first. So expect that in the near-ish future? Possibly?

Another thing, bearing no relation whatsoever to the stuff I just said, which just occurred to me as I was getting some tea and a granola bar:

Frosted Flakes is the most uncreative cereal brand ever. Let's count the ways:

1. The Name

They're flakes, and they're frosted. There's our cereal name right there! NEXT.

2. The Mascot

Alliterative naming. That's the only way he got his name. Starts with a T, there you go. But why a tiger? Simple:

3. The Slogan

All they could think of was "they're great!" as the slogan, so they chose a tiger as the mascot to make that more interesting. Add some extra Rs because he's growling! He's a tiger! Get it? Good thing we thought of this early, we might have had to put some thought into this otherwise.^[9]

And that's the post for today. Is it everything you dreamed it would be?

>>> 2015-11-10 >>>

>>> 2015-11-08 (once again just barely because it's one in the morning) >>>

While I'm still staunchly anti-user-friendliness in a lot of ways^[8] I think it's a good idea to make a "most recent update" button to put at the top of the site. Probably do that. Yes. Do it now even. And there it is. Pretty exciting stuff. Catch you later.

>>> 2015-11-04 >>>

Added that music box thing today. And then the nice webkit scrollbar. And when you select text in the right browsers the colors are different. Also, I'm going to be using span tags to add title-text to things now, so I made the background color of those slightly lighter so people know when there's semi-secret things written there.

>>> 2015-11-03 (just barely because it's one in the morning) >>>

I made a page to put stuff I made a long time ago. Old stuff. 'A long time ago' means 'older than two years, probably'. Maybe you'll enjoy it? It's mostly badly drawn stick figure comics. I'll add more things to it eventually.

Working on a few different things for the site now. First there's an About Me page, and second there's going to be a Links page. Neither of those are here yet, though. Those links go nowhere.

Add a sitemap eventually, too, I suppose. To make things easier. But because I think pages with lots of links randomly scattered throughout are the most fun, it will most certainly be an incomplete sitemap.

>> 2015-10-31 >> - - -

I lit the jack o'lantern:



Oh, and there's this stupid comic too. It's at the end because it has nothing to do with halloween.

>>> 2015-10-28 >>>

Finally got the @font-face thing working. Case-sensitive, you see. Sort of thing that throws you off.

So my webfonts should show up properly now, at least for firefox and chrome.

Here's a video I found that I thought was kind of silly at first, but by the end it's actually vaguely creepy:

>>> 2015-10-26 >>>

I made a page about my favorite comic.

>>> 2015-10-24 >>>

Some more drawings



And then some drawings of some of my favorite models from Half-Life 2:

>>> 2015-10-20 >>>

Halloween is soon! Let's set the scene.



    


In keeping with the spookiness of the occasion, here's some stupid drawings I made that have some sort of relation to Halloween I guess:

  
  




Exciting, huh?



    Halloween is my favorite holiday, but I'm not quite sure why, to be perfectly honest.

    Maybe because Autumn is my favorite season? So autumn and halloween kind of get wrapped up together. Some people would say "but what about thanksgiving, that's an autumn holiday too you moron"

To which I would reply: Nobody likes Thanksgiving. WHy would anyone like thanksgiving? It's just a bunch of food and stuff. And you have to spend time with your family too.
    Anyway, halloween is great. How about a list of things that are good about halloween? Because I'm so utterly boring that whenever I have to come up with somehting to write on a page I always just make a stupid list because I'm stupid:

1. Jack o' lanterns
2. Candy (to a lesser extent now than before)
3. An excuse to get people to watch scary movies with you for once
4. Weird pagan stuff is cool even if it's not real
5. The cool kids all like halloween, that's how you know if they're cool or not
6. Skeletons are cool
7. Halloween decorations are better than decorations for every other holiday
8. the word 'Halloween' sounds way cooler than other holiday names
9. corn mazes
10. Scary stories!^[7]
11. Pumpkin flavored things

Anyway, that's about all I can think of at the moment. I'll put some more pictures probably in the next few days or so. Keep watching, person who is just me because nobody else will ever read this



Here's the biggest picture I've even put up here so far, a scan from the October 27, 1948 edition of Junior Scholastic. Basically the only Halloween thing in the issue, oddly. I love this illustration.

>>> 2015-09-19 >>>

Wouldn't you know it, precisely one month since I last came here. How bout that.


Not much to discuss really.

Actually, you know, there's a lot of interesting, badly-written copy on that website. Let's look at some more of it.

Looking back in time reminded you of the good time you spent with old friends and loves ? Curious to know what happened to them and what they do now ? If Facebook can't help you may want to try this service.

Just realized you're late and you can't choose and buy a present to celebrate a birthday or anniversary? Or your beloved one is living in another Country and you don't know how to deliver your present? Just send flowers ! We can help you to select the most suitable ones depending on the occasion and deliver them the very next day.

It's like the bare minimum level of convincing going on here. They've probably never once made a sale of any kind. In fact, the entire site is basically a giant joke. Scans some big public database, probably google, for superficial informatoin about different historical dates, displays it in a little text blurb at the top of the page, and splays these 'services' they provide across the rest of the space which are actually just monetized links to other sites.

What's behind your birthdate and name ? The digits in your birthdate can be used to calculate your personal numbers. Numerology analyzes the letters in your birth name and the digits of your date of birth to calculate your "numerology chart": facts about your life, your personality, and your future!

A day worth remembering is a day worth making your own. An exclusive online registry where you can dedicate and register a specific date by month, day, and year in honor of a special event or person in your life. A special gift to celebrate a special date: your wedding day, your grandmother's 85th birthday, the day you funded your company. You can dedicate a day in honor of events and people that mean the most to you! Every registered day comes complete with a beautifully framed certificate as proof of ownership rights. You'll also receive an online profile that can be personalized with music, photos, video, and details about that special day for sharing with family and friends.

And the logo of the site is just a rewind symbol: ⏪

ooo, this one's especially good -



Time goes by. You can't stop it but at least you can measure it in a cool way with an original Cuckoo Clock! Have a look at the authentic Cuckoo Clocks from the Black Forest: all of them are manufactured by hand directly in the Black Forest of Germany. They stand for excellent quality and craftsmanship, handed down through generations.














    Note to self: don't waste time making big squares of clock gifs^[6]



In lieu of anything I can come up with on my own, some text more or less randomly lifted from this page:

The German Währwolf (were-wolf or man-wolf) is the same as the lycanthropos of the Scythians and Greeks and the versipellis of the Romans; he was in German mythology connected with Woden. Hence, probably, the readiness with which the disease during the Middle Ages took hold of the minds of Germans; but at that period nearly all the nations of Europe firmly believed in the reality of such changes.

As late even as the beginning of the sixteenth century cases of this kind occurred in France, where the possessed were known as loups-garoux. A young man of Besançon was thus brought before the Councilor of State, De l'Ancre, at Bordeaux, and accused of roving like a wild animal through the neighboring forests. He confessed readily that he was a huntsman in the service of his invisible master, the devil, who had changed him into a wolf and forced him to range by the side of another more powerful wolf through the country. The poor fellow shared the usual fate of his fellow-sufferers, who were either subjected to a sharp treatment of exorcism or simply executed as heretical criminals.

In our day lycanthropy is almost entirely limited to Servia and Wallachia, Volhynia and White Russia. There, however, the disease breaks out frequently anew, and popular belief knows a variety of means by which a man may be changed into a wolf; the animal differs, however, from a genuine wolf in his docked tail and his marked preference for the blood of young children.

In Abyssinia there exists, according to Pearce, a belief that men are occasionally changed into hyenas—the wolves of that country—but this sad privilege is limited to workers in clay and iron, called Booda among the Amharas, who wear a gold earring of special form as a distinction from other inferior castes.

It will thus be seen that, like all other varieties of possession, zoanthropy also is simply a kind of insanity, and our amusement at the marvelous conduct of werewolves will vanish, if we recall the entire change produced in man by the loss of reason. In that sad condition he endures fatigue, cold or heat, and hunger as no healthy man ever can learn to do; he does not mind the severest castigation, for his body is almost insensible, it ceases to be susceptible to contagious diseases and requires, in sickness, double or treble doses of medicine. If we once know the precise nature of an insane person's hallucination, his actions will be apt to appear quite consistent, and thus lycanthropy also not only produces the fine connection of a change into a wolf, but causes the sufferer to conduct himself in all his ways like the animal which he represents.


And now, for the moment, at least: that's all she wrote.

>>> 2015-08-19 >>>

    I've been wasting a whole giant chunk of my time lately. And with what? Video games. Once you get sucked in it's difficult to resist the urge. This happened with Team Fortress 2 around this time of year in 2014. It was the exact same thing. Hours and hours gone in, seemingly, the bilnk of an eye. And of course my left wrist gets worn out from sitting on the desk for so long.

So currently I'm trying to get back into actually doing things to some extent, so that's going to be my main focus for the day, at least until I give in and start playing video games again.

Here's an old journal from a year or so ago: clicky

"We have invented the first Time Machine to let you enjoy looking back in time. Shall you have any problems coming back to reality please contact us" - takemeback.to 'about' page

    Some days I'm not sure if I want to keep going or not. Like, am I really accomplishing anything? Is there anything here that really needs to be discussed?^[2] It reminds me of something I read once. Let me see if I can fish it out. I'll quote it and everything, it'll be great. While you're waiting, watch this video. I'll be only a few minutes.



     ^ That's a video we watched in my Japanese class in High School, by the way. I remember everyone thought it was cute. Lots of weeaboos in that class.^[3] It's weird actually, my memory of it was much different for some reason. I remember it 1) being much longer and 2) being actually animated with animation cels and everything, not flash or whatever this type of animation could be called. Clearly made on the cheap. Anyway, I remembered that song a few days ago and I tried desperately to find that exact video. I didn't remember the lyrics at all, except the "まいごの まいごの" bit^[4] and that it was about a dog policeman and a kitty that was lost. Found it eventually, though, as you can see.
    Another thing is that you really don't get to see very much of either of the characters at all. They're just there for a few seconds each, really. I remember getting the impression of... I don't know how to put it exactly... basically that this dog and this cat had a little more to them than what you actually see here. I mean obviously it's a children's song so it's going to be simplistic, but in this case it's really simplistic. They're just archetypes. Not much to them at all.
    I rate this Japanese children's song about a kitty being lost zero avoiding-cliche points out of ten. Not very good marks, I'm afraid.

    Here's a picture of a soda can that I drew:

    As you can see, it isn't a very good drawing at all. The word we'd use is "crude". Roughly-hewn. Slipshod. Careless. And that's true, all of those things. It's just basically a not very good drawing. But you know what the absolute worst thing about it is? It's boring! A drawing of a soda can? Really? What a waste! There's never been something more boring than a soda can. I bet my life on it.^[5] Here's something interesting though. Well, kind of.

    This is that same image, but saved as a jpg with the compression turned to the absolute maximum. Ugly! Look at those artifacts, my god! Needs less .jpg! But the funny thing is that they're both exactly the same size, 20.1 kb. Goes to show how much more efficient the .gif format is than the .jpg format. At least where there are only two colors involved. Look at this fun thing you can do with css:
    Pretty neat, huh?

    No, no it isn't neat. It would have been ten years ago, maybe. Fifteen years ago. But not today.
Here's some more pictures I drew:
    I wasn't reallly thinking about it, but a plain, unlabeled bottle is kind of more boring than a soda can isn't it. So if I had actually bet my life on that, I'd be dead. Woah. Wait a minute. When Humperdinck says that, is that some kind of reference/joke relating to the scene with Vizzini? Wow. I never thought of that before. Neat. Maybe it's supposed to be obvious and I just never saw that bit with the right frame of mind. Maybe everyone else figured it out the very first time they saw the movie. :S