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Rounding out my Chicago photos (finally) are photos that kinda didn't fit anywhere else. Lots of shots over Lake Michigan and also the illustrious Shit Fountain.… read more

Hey look, neat murals (and a couple mushrooms from what is apparently an old Rainforest Cafe)! I took these on various days around the trip, but most of them come from around The 606/Bloomingdale Trail.… read more

2024 is almost over. I've been back from Chicago for 2 months. And still I haven't finished posting pictures. Oops.

(content warning for taxidermy bugs and animals)

This is a visit to a lil place called The Insect Asylum. It's a small space that has a ton of animals and animal skins packed into a small space. Most of the animals were lizards and bugs in terrariums (including a sassy iguana named Rosie), but there were also two birds, and an Opossum!

The poss was sleepy and behind some fabric but the handler graciously gave it a piece of apple so we could see it for a short moment before she trundled back to sleep. Relatable.… read more

Continuing from my Chicago Trip (not that I'm posting these in chronological order), I spent the one rainy day of the trip at the Field Museum! The main highlight was getting to see SUE, the Nonbinary T-Rex, but there was plenty of other neat things (particularly the meteorites!) that I really enjoyed. I wish I could have stayed longer, but I was pretty tired after a couple hours of slow walking… read more

Earlier in October I visited Chicago for a few weeks. Expect a few more posts with more pictures over the next few days/weeks.

This set is from the Chicago Architecture Tour from a boat riding along the Chicago River.

No, I don't remember every detail from the tour. Oops.… read more

Post by @trashcataria@critter.cafe

View on Mastodon

My plan, upon waking up this morning:

• Get a haircut

What I actually did:

• Get a haircut
• Run to Best Buy to get a new screen protector for my phone, and maybe the new Zelda if they have it (they didn't)
• Run to Home Depot cause oh yeah our blinds broke a day or so ago (had to message wife to ask her to measure the window cause I forgot to)
• Decide to go to Gamestop a couple towns over to get the new Zelda… read more

• Changed post CSS to line up more with the rest of the site's design, maybe
• Two column home-page layout
  • 1 column on mobile. that's responsive, baby!
• Messed with some spacing to make it make more sense
• Changed a few colors to get at least AA WGAC compliance (and at or close to AAA in most cases)
• (just for me) Added a post template file that has some dummy frontmatter so I can create a post without using a script or having to double check an existing post.
• Made not every list on the site use "✨" as its bullet icon.
  • It was nice for the list of things on the homepage, but distracting everywhere else I think

"cohost was a place where i posted, which is more than i can say for any other social media"

My cohost wake post yielded this line, which is something that rattled in my head all day yesterday, but it's true.

I don't remember when it happened, maybe the early 2010s, but I started hearing stories of people getting yelled at, harassed, and all sorts of bad shit on social media (not that it wasn't happening earlier, but that's when I remember being conscious of it). Still happens today (even worse, I'm sure), and my response to that was to shut up.

Essentially, every social media was in "read-only" mode already for me. If I don't interact, the harassers won't find me. I'll just look at cool posts and art and news stories and keep my ability to dive as deep into a point of discourse as I want, without feeling the need to dive deeper, since i wasn't interacting. I never actually had troubles on other social media that people have. cause I just didn't talk. Or, what little I did talk was so small as to be unnoticeable (carefully crafted tumblr tag commentary, mostly).

Having a place where I felt safe to post was new. In a way, cohost was the first social network I actually used since Facebook replaced the "wall" with the "timeline" and statuses were no longer prefaced with "I'm feeling..." (or something like that). Turns out I have thoughts! And like doing creative things! And the bits of feedback I got here helped push me in the right direction! Or at least a direction.

I'm kind of still afraid to lose that space, since nothing else quite fills that niche, mainly by virtue of places being established and existing social media culture already spreading over there. I tried to get more talkative on bluesky, but there's always the specter of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, or the much more likely feeling of just shouting into the void. Twitter's a no-go (except for some porn), and I still haven't gotten Mastodon cause of instance decision paralysis (thanks folks that suggested stuff on my post about it though!).

I'm gonna try to remember what I learned here and get a bit more bold about putting myself out there, even if I'll have to deal with the new experience of feeling like I'm putting a target on my chest when I do. And that's one thing I liked about cohost, I didn't ever really feel like that.

Like most things that end, it happened too soon. I would have liked to get even more confident in myself. I would have liked to work on and post more of my random creative endeavors (it's much easier when you have people cheering you on). But. that's the kind of spirit I'm hoping to take forward, and keeping up some connections in various places (mostly discord right now) will help with motivation, maybe?

Things are kind of a question mark once October 1st hits. Scary. But perhaps doable.

this was originally on cohost, and hopefully the archive.org thingy works after things go offline later this year.

this was originally on cohost. It's also technically 3 posts hence the random breaks in the middle.

cohost was a place where i posted, which is more than i can say for any other social media, in any real sense. i'm going to try to keep it up. helps get my head out of me, you know?

boston cohost wake was very nice to come to. many good people on this site, glad to have found a few of them locally… read more

just summoned a bowl of tortellini and spinach. hope it isn't. like. cursed or anything.

just finished up a bunch of site updates, mainly around making a feed page that was more like something you can scroll through, and bunch of other random stuff.

A few weeks ago, I went on a walk after work to a nearby cemetery. It was at the perfect time to catch a beautiful cotton-candy sunset… read more

took a nights sleep for it to hit, but. I'm really sad to lose this place, scared of backsliding into old antisocial habits, and not looking forward to losing a place of rest… read more

so i've been using the newfangled Arc Browser on my work laptop and been enjoying it, but since my personal computer is windows, i can't use it everywhere… read more

In creating the explorer format, I wanted to have easy support for doing 2D, Super Metroid-style maps.… read more

First. Twine. Twine is a piece of software that let's you write nonlinear stories. It keeps track of chunks of story (so-called "passages") and the links between them (well, not really, but we'll get there maybe). Basically it keeps track of a graph of nodes.… read more