vivian lim ⭐

oh that's a hard one. uhhh

i think i have to say this entire month. it's been intense af as everyone's been scrambling to figure out what they're doing next, but the pressure of an impending deadline just like, activates my brain in such a way that i can get a ridiculous amount of stuff done.

it also forced me to reflect on my time on cohost and how a majority of the time i spent on the site i was pretty passively enjoying and sharing other peoples' work without putting much of my own out there. there were definitely exceptions to that (everything we did with @hell-labs!) but i think that was kind of my default mode.

so.. with those factors combined, i really did... a lot this month. looking back:

• at the end of august i set up a wordpress blog and seeded it with a handful of things. this became relevant immediately as we entered the "talking about rss zone"
• i posted some drafts i was sitting on for a long time! the gluten-free gyoza recipe! the thing about the wasm gif streamer!
• in like 12 hours i put together my first ever procedurally generated music thing and submitted something to COMPOST #6
• i wrote some feed (de)serialization code for RuSShdown
• revisited a bunch of the gif plays pokemon infrastructure and refactored a bunch of nix so i could stand it up on a different machine
• i contributed to the post-cohost forum project (mostly by having an unused Discourse laying around for folks to try, and Forum Opinions)
• i did a bunch of stuff as a steward of Website League.
  • including standing up my own node at https://beam.phosphor.buzz that i felt comfortable hosting others on
• i started pillbug and got far enough that i could authenticate and have screenshots to post in an announcement, in a framework i didn't know at all

dang.

ok, it's been 20 years, i'm going to try to learn one more vim motion: a" for the quoted string the cursor is inside of.

e.g. if i'm here

hello "world"...
         ^

da" will remove "world", leaving hello...

i've been doing this with F"df". can i get an f in chat

if you post a lot on cohost it’s almost certainly because you have it saved on your home screen and the work needed to make a new post is open the app and tap the compose button. you gotta make it just as easy to post on your own site! you’re not gonna use it as much if you don’t! it’s okay to spend way too much work up front ensuring the actual posting process is as seamless as possible, but it’s gotta be easy in the moment for you to go from dumb joke to posted dumb joke

personally, I wrote almost no blog posts between 2017-2024 because I was trying to keep it simple and lightweight, and use a static site generator.
I found that in exchange for the site itself being simple, I ended up taking the complexity on myself. having to elaborately overthink how to insert an image or draft a post from my phone is just like ... not compatible with me actually doing anything.

the first post on my wordpress is literally about this: https://wp.vivl.im/2024/08/iiits-wordpress/

I have a bunch of short drafts sitting on it because I had a few minutes waiting at a food court and was able to quickly jot some things down from my phone.

Every next picture feels like slipping further into a fever dream of an alternate dimension where architecture is just different than it is in our reality.

This feels like one of those gifs of turning a sphere inside out.

this is a very "3 textures Doom mapping challenge" kinda house. not gonna lie i half expected the garage to be wallpapered in FIREBLU.

Started hyperventilating at the curtains followed by the haunted rocking chair. Claridryl house

this is so cursed. i think the worst thing is that I can totally imagine my parents building this if they had unlimited time and space, so many things feel like "we got a good deal on siding and 30 ceiling fans at a liquidation auction".

that was kinda my parents' entire thing while i was growing up, getting way too much of something ostensibly useful but also extremely specific and finding as many creative ways as possible to make use of it - like huge rolls of polar fleece fabric, or sheets of tempered glass, the latter of which my dad constructed an outdoor pond with