welcome to remblanc 1.1

returning home on a bus right now. bus rides feel quite weird to me when it comes to passing time: it seems like there’s a whole lot of downtime you can spend while commuting, but focus on something specific for too much, and you already missed your stop. that’s why i usually don’t do much during said downtime, besides listening to music and watching some youtube videos.

right now i’m listening to BEEF by evaboy for god knows what time. really solid record tho, goes quite hard and i want to write about it in detail at some point.

[may 11th, 2024, 2:30. recording excerpt, edited for clarity]

this is the first time I am not actually writing a status, but recording it with my voice instead. It is not a voice memo, just voice dictation being put into my notes app, but it’s an interesting experience nonetheless. I wanted to try it for a while, but I had a bit of discomfort thinking about trying it, because, you know, if I do this in public, people around me can hear what I say.

maybe it’s not worth worrying about it all that much, not like people care that much about me, and I am generally not voicing any private details, so I might as well play around with this concept.

[below are some voice memos that were written/recorded in the same manner, as I did have quite a bit of fun with the format]

writing is kind of a lengthy process ngl

[2:30am recording continued]

I had this realisation that writing is very time consuming, and I think I’m growing more and more towards actually accepting that fact the more I consciously write things.

when I first started writing statuses, I had an idea for it to be just short stuff, it would be a bit of an icebreaker, the tool for me to write more and not get overwhelmed by thoughts of writing big things. but the way the format evolved, my statuses became longer and longer, and then I made a bunch of behind-the-scenes changes that led to my ideas basically simmering in my head and, despite being constantly developed, not really leaving my drafts. I tried to remedy that by dedicating some more time for finishing my thoughts, but the more effort I threw onto it, the more it felt justified for me to actually think more about the topics at hand. And now it feels fine for me to let things take some time.

It endlessly fascinates me how writing is a rather paradoxical activity: you spend hours and hours and hours on end to produce at most 5-15 minutes worth of text. that’s genuinely crazy ngl, but it also makes me admire writing as art more than if I didn’t actually consciously write things.

severing links

[may 11, 19:30]

I feel kinda shitty because I had to distance myself from someone I consider a very good person. Someone who’s fun to interact with, talk about interesting things, but also a rather emotionally vulnerable person who I really wanted to help. But their clinginess felt so incredibly overpowering to me that I feel like I cannot coexist with them. It feels really cruel to reject them the way I am doing it now: ghosting them, blocking all my communications… but it feels like it’s something I have to do, because I genuinely find them tough to handle, and it is tearing me apart. I feel like an asshole, but I can’t see any other solutions that don’t compromise my well-being, which itself feels kind of fragile at this point.

the posting trinity

disclaimer: this part mentions consumption of alcohol. drink responsibly and do not seek out alcohol if you’re under 18, as substances like that can be quite seriously damaging to minors. they can even screw up adults big time, heard some stories, had live examples, it’s horrifying. please take care of yourself and reach out if you do need help with substance abuse

[may 12, 22:40]

I am recording this note while getting slowly intoxicated by a 0.5 L glass of beer. t’s a craft American pale ale brewed in Poland that has 5.6% alcohol levels or smth like that. frankly idk what these percentages mean. you can def tell i’m not an avid drinker given that i don’t even know what that means besides the general number being higher than usual lol

anyway, this note is being recorded because I feel obligated to fill space. for some reason it feels kind of wrong for me to end these notes on anything but the number three. I’m not sure if it’s either my human instinct getting me to do this sort of symmetry in my statuses, or it may be that I am influenced by orthodox Christianity, and all these eastern European traditions that I have internalized that much.

ofc for anyone familiar with christianity it’s obvious what the number three represents, but outside that context it’s really interesting how we as humans sometimes give sacred meanings to the numbers practically based on our vibes. I still haven’t broken the cycle of threes when it comes to the topics I cover in these statuses at least, and I’m not sure if I’m ever gonna let go of that. Maybe if I do it’s gonna be five topics, because I do seem to have an affinity for odd numbers.

closing notes

To be clear, all of these notes are heavily edited. Not just because voice dictation is not entirely reliable (although it is surprisingly effective), but because the way I write, coupled with my writing senses, actually greatly differs from the way I speak.

I can’t help but notice that I am much more of a writing person than a talking person. I am not particularly great at forming the arguments in speech, for instance, but I am much more able to properly articulate them when I write.

Both means of communication have some interesting tradeoffs: speaking feels more like a stream of thought, while writing is more eloquent and to-the-point, but also something I keep thinking about and constantly rewriting to meet a certain imagined standard that I can’t quite reach, seemingly ever.

This experiment is definitely an interesting way to generate thoughts, though, so I will definitely do more of it.

holy shit y’all, we made it!!!!!! welcome to the other side!!!!!!!!1

remblanc 1.1 is here, and it appears to be working.

ngl, the rollout for this was actually kind of dumb, and i definitely should not ever do it the way i did it in this case (deleting everything in the folder and plopping the new stuff into it). at least i was wise enough to make a git branch so i can still access the original working version of this site, but i did keep some untracked things in a separate folder that are now completely gone xd

whatever, as far as i see, the site did not catch fire, everything works as planned, and a new feat in the history of remblanc has been achieved. kinda dope ngl.

i def need to explain in greater detail why this is lowkey exciting, but got way past my sleep schedule getting all this to work, so i am in serious need of resting rn. gn y’all

this is an urgent announcement!!!!!1

this site is in the process of being migrated to astro framework.

expect a bunch of turbulence or something, bet i will forget smth and at least one thing might fall apart, but the finishing line is approaching and i am super determined to cross it.

i am very poor at talking about the site updates, and i still haven’t explained the conception of versioning that i have here ever since i shadow-dropped 1.0 (yep, 1.0 has been here for a while now), but i am quite excited about astro due to the possibilities it opens for site and content management in the future. zonelets is being ditched for good, everything will be statically pre-generated, and posting is going to be as easy as plopping a markdown file into the right folder.

got no time to waste as i am currently in the midst of a sprint to get this up asap. see you on the other side.

gave myself 10 minutes to write this for not much good reason.

i’m feeling alright right now. quite refreshed, rather fulfilled, ready to go to bed and see a doctor tomorrow for plenty of things health.

i dedicated myself to writing a bit today, even though i was not particularly enthusiastic about it. i did manage to add some words to one of my more personal writeups. i sorted things around in my drafts folder to correspond more to the plans i have for this site (i intend to elaborate on those in one of my future statuses, also in drafts, where i will explain a bunch of site changes).

i kind of stumbled once more with doing anything of worth. my initial burst of energy that came from trying to help my mom dwindled, and i didn’t feel particularly energized to do organized work again.

i have no idea what else to write right now. time is running out anyway. feeling kinda mid upon finishing this.