welcome to remblanc 1.1

these are side notes to my previous status, which is a recovered entry from a certain dead personal website.

the means by which i backed this entry up along with many written works from the website (without using internet archive) is going to be quite an interesting story for another day, but i really wanted to shout out the brilliancy of certain design decisions on biko’s site, which i’m awed by the more i explore the wrecks i managed to salvage.

this particular entry was based in the site’s “garden” section. i’m awed by this page because its navigation, informed by pure-html authoring workflow, was ingeniously low-tech, relying purely on id-based linking and plaintext hashtags, which encouraged the users to ctrl+f a given entry or category. the plain-sight visibility of metadata makes the browsing rather joyful even in the face of reference link rot this backup is infested with, and i am very delighted by that.

[the preview below is unstyled/does not represent how it looked originally]

fun fact, every status on this site has an attached id, which i intentionally added for easy cross-referencing for whenever i need to do that. i already showcased it above by linking to the status where i originally mentioned the entry i am talking about, but it is in fact a direct inspiration from biko’s garden that i just didn’t bother to visibly expose for now as it was on that page. i’m thinking of making it even more alike by bringing in the hashtag functionality, which is probably gonna have more of a dynamic flair due to me being able to supercharge it with an SSG.

on 11th of march, 2024, i wrote a response to a remark posted by bikobatanari on why they preferred not to show their age on their site (you can read it here). since they seemingly left the internet for good a while ago, i figure that as the means of my personal opposition to link rot, i’d republish it for the sake of maintaining a living reference/context to what exactly i was even responding to. i originally left it vague to encourage some thoughtful exploration of biko’s site, but since it’s dead, i don’t think i have any other option to preserve the reference in the first place.

it’s quite an admirable way of looking at one’s age relative to online presence, i’d say. also, now that i think more about it, my original response makes me look even more like a doofus for not fully understanding what they were getting at.

I used to have my age plastered somewhere in my About page a few years back, but I removed it since it doesn’t add anything to my work other than satiating people’s curiosity.

I suppose I removed it as a way to reduce initial judgment and expectations regarding who I am and what I say. My age is not particularly important to the context of my writing anyway.

People can be somewhat quick to judge someone based on their age. It’s a decent heuristic, but there are always some exceptions—I’ve seen teenagers more mature than some 30-year-olds out there. They’re not common, but they do exist (though, given how things are shaping up right now, I think that such a thing will become exceedingly rare—if it’s not already).

If you were to read a large majority of my writings, you’ll inevitably see some hints about where I’m at in life, so you could deduce (or even find) what age range I’m in. Shouldn’t be too hard.

i feel like it is necessary for me to take focus away from my website and to heal up, partly mentally, partly physically.

for quite some time i’d been trying to make myself more productive, set up systems just to be able to do more things more consistently. i finally more-or-less got myself a working idea for such system, and i am kind of proud of myself for actually doing things i want to do now. this past month i feel like i have done more things than i was able to just a month prior, and i should give myself all the credit for coming up with a system that finally works for me without serious hiccups. it is still being constantly iterated upon, and i will probably be sharing it for the productivity nerds out there sometime in the future.

my problem with having a well-oiled productivity system is that working is something i feel like i need to be doing less of. for the past few, idk, years i felt like a constant failure in terms of being able to do things. that put me in a constant mindset where i judged my self-worth by my output, by the work i do. and being able to do work better does not solve the core issue at hand.

to put it simply, i forgot how to rest. everything feels like work now. the time for work is work. the time outside work is the time not spent doing work. even resting in my mind needs to be a productive activity of some kind, while the rest i do have is not something i feel satisfied with. i feel like a drone doing it, and it doesn’t feel refreshing at all to me.

worst thing of all, trying to fix this state also feels like work. and that sucks. it really sucks.

i will still be doing some journaling for 280, as well as maintaining comms and peeping on retrospring along with my guestbook. anything serious is gonna be on hold, though, and i’m sorry for not even properly talking about what i am actually working on.

gtg bye for now.

i have a guestbook now. come sign off in my guestbook.

also, i gained a new presence. don’t bother much with it, though.

=> gemini://remblanc.cities.yesterweb.org