Weeknotes #8: Time enough to read
It's been a relatively quiet week, which is a good thing. I've had more time to put into all my little hobbies and I feel less like I am teetering on the edge of burnout.
That's all I need, really: time to put into all my little hobbies. SPEAKING OF,
The book is back on track
I actually wrote every day this week and it felt great. In October I wrote half a first draft, and then in November I did basically nothing, and then in the first half of December I rewrote a large amount of the first draft, and now I can get on with actually finishing it. Call it draft 1.1, I guess? Or the first one was draft 0.5? I don't know.
The Ratlands gets some TLC
I've actually done a fair bit of work on the website this week.
I use Eleventy to compile a static site from various globs of Markdown, HTML and JSON, but aside from listing a few collections, I haven't been making the most of its more dynamic features.
I've been thinking of adding some kind of microblogging bit to the site for a while. I thought about using status.cafe but heard it had some issues for free sites, and anyway I liked the idea of making my own. So yesterday I set up the brainstream. I wanted to be able to pull the latest entries onto the homepage and then list out more of them on a separate page, so rather than throwing myself into copy-and-paste hell, I decided to put each entry in a JSON file and pull them into both pages. This meant getting to grips with Eleventy's global data files and then building a custom filter so I could just get the latest entry, or the latest 3 entries, or the latest 50. It's flexible!
Once I worked this out, I just had to add a second microblog specifically for what my dog has been doing. And then I had to refactor my poor neglected earworm list and stick that on the homepage, and why not change how I load the buttons and the hot items list too while I'm at it?
All of this resulted in a bunch of restyling, most notably on the homepage. I'm letting myself play around with CSS a bit more and have also been tinkering with pseudo-elements, which is something I've never bothered to do much with in the past. I know the Ratlands definitely isn't the prettiest site, but looking at it makes me happy.
In summary: I'm having fun playing with this thing and I'm glad I made it.
Those animals ain't gonna cross themselves
I am playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons again. For a while I thought I was completely burnt out on this game (after a paltry 2,600 hours of play), but then Nintendo decided to announce DLC out of absolutely nowhere, so I figured now would be a good time to get back into it. Because there are new items coming, and I really, really love decorating. (Maybe I should make a page for my past dream islands?)
I really haven't done much gaming this year in general. I think because I tend to get very absorbed in games, they suck up a lot of my time in a way that watching a single film doesn't, and because I have been so into my writing this year I was worried that games would eat too much of my writing time. But hopefully I can just play a bit of ACNH here and there and find a good balance.
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