An Actual Post
Tf do I need a description for
What words do I even use. Eep? EEEEEEEEP?! I was gonna go with "Yo" but it kinda didn't really feel like... me? And wasn't that the whole dang point. I'll tell you fuckin what... It's weird as shit doing my ye olde journaling in a... vscode tab. Seriously. I guess I have evolved. Devolved, more like, eesh. I wanted to make like a semi-real post because I'm excited. This whole thing has taken me two days. Which, let's be real, if I actually gave more of my day than a single hour each day, this would've been done in one shot on day one. But alas. I registered the domain on day one when I was like, yknow fkn what, I just need to pull the trigger on this. The crippling depression and what not snapped. And unlike what my therapist seems to think, me at me furthest at the edge doesn't look like someone who needs a "crisis plan" it looks like someone who is a little too trigger happy on whatever bad idea will drop some dopamine into this broken ass brain of mine. Broken ass-brain. I'm adorable. I let the domain sit for a few days because I don't quite remember. Did I do this on Friday and then it was just a weekend? Who even knows. But, I'll say this for AI... It sure as shit is helping me have a sounding board and giving me a wonderful opportunity to offload my mental space (of which I have basically *none*, so yknow, kind of the biggest win is just that). I feel like years and years ago, this all was so much easier. I knew one thing and one thing only. The internet provideth a single solution. I learned how to get hosting from the place I got my domain registered. I learned how to use an SSH client. I even went oh-so-far as to learn the ever-complicated ways of php instead of just rawdogging html like an absolute psycho. Granted, the absolute biggest win was when a guy just outright made me cool shit for my website, which was like a huge learning opportunity for me and I got to modify, manipulate, adjust, but overall just USE a working thing. I'll keep my shitty salty thoughts to myself, but yknow, let's have a single positive moment of appreciation for where that pushed me. But since I properly and truly learned how to work as an engineer... suddenly the world got way too big way too fast. Was it that suddenly the internet was so much more involved and every company wanted to make a tool? Was it that it had actually grown really slowly and because my interest was never actually webdev, I didn't bother to learn and stay apprised of new tech so it felt "sudden" just because my mind was elsewhere? Or maybe it really was that there was this boom in tools and tech. So every time I've tried to revisit the idea of starting this back up... It's like... How can I even digest the planning part? I'd be an absolute pyscho to NOT use everything I've learned. To not make a page fully in JS, or let's be so real... typescript these days. How could I not make interactive pages, proper authentication systems (my god, I used to encode actual user data in a db WITHOUT a salt, with me just having straight up access through a single layer of security... and that security was MY OWN PASSWORD THAT I USED ON EVERY ACCOUNT SINCE I WAS TEN DUDE WTF), tagging, searching, a deployment system with builds and a production build vs a dev build and my god I used to just keep the files on my macbook without any version control???? But now that's like... okay, which version control system? Should I get an engine or lightweight framework to do rendering if I'm gonna do any kind of pretty visual? Is that overkill?? Should I get a tool to handle authentication, and what tools even exist, and is THAT overkill too? It's just like too much info and my brain is so already overwhelmed with all the... yknow... life stuff? it already does. I just kinda can't process all these choices. I rant. What's new, tho. Point is, AI feels like a kind of godsend (ugh I hate myself for saying this) on this specific thing. As much as I fucking hate how the world is leaning on this tool and it's making everyone dumber and worse at shit... I was able to drown out the noise of making these choices just by presenting to chatgpt what I wanted to make, the context I'm approaching this with, and a desire to spend no money. It outlined a single solution. And I've been just pushing forward with that. I really just didn't need to think much about it. The few moments of noise have been when I've excitedly told the spouse (oof, that feels weird, I'll figure it out eventually) about it and the questions I get actively make me need to think and learn, which I just kinda really don't wanna. SO LONG STORY LONG. Day two, I set up the tools side of things. Which was annoying as fuck and reminded me why I hate this tools-heavy world we live in. I miss the simplicity of SSHing my shit. AI told me to get nodejs, which like yeah yeah, sure okay, but then it's like SO USE CHOCOLATEY and I'm like dude what the fuckityfuck, am I at work and have just hallucinated the last x months of my life?? Absolutely no. Give me a god damn installer and treat me like a toddler, I am NOT getting technical today. (She says, writing a 2009-era-esque blog post in vscode before pushing it to git so cloudflare can deploy the production build, fknlol) I got stuck on the dumbest shit. And because I am NOT fucking paying for AI, and didn't wanna run out of the good model, I googled my way through the garbage troubleshooting that's the actual least favorite part of my career. WHY DOES THIS THING NOT DO THING. What is error code mean. WHY FAIL BUILD WHAT EVEN FUCKING IS THIS RANDOM NAME. Oh, funny aside. I wish I could include a link to a meme. Makes me think of that thing my old manager liked on insta. Lives rent free in my head. "We put fake tech ads up at the subway" or whatever. Absolute gold. Truly. When I get the markdown files to more accurately reflect what I want this to one day be, I'll also figure out inline linking or embedding visual content in a pretty way. It'll be a thing (she says on week1 of the thing that gives dopamine, lol) So. Anywho. I couldn't put my laptop down. It felt SO good. I swear, this last week or two... emotionally devestating as they've been... the one upside has been that the teeniest tiniest bits of mental load that have fallen off me... have manifested into my brain just finally being able to be creative again. I've got like four app ideas I wanna make, two games I'm wanting to try and build... this whole thing is actually coming to life?? I even started my bedtime fantasies back up and am wondering if I should turn them into words and write a "book". My mirror world one even has a plot now. Oh and... my favorite. I made a game dev layoff version of Life of a Showgirl. Because offuckingcourse that's how I processed the layoff. I'll post it eventually-ish. So here I am. Writing. Actually writing. About my day, my world, my feelings. Actually processing. Because that's what you fucking get when you process verbally but also apparently are awkward as fuck and introverted and have no fucking social life at all. Because the truth is, I can't take up the air in every conversation I have with the spouse. I can't take up this much time in therapy. I can't be trauma dumping on my friends left and right. This is good. This is actually healthy for me. I'm so dang excited to have this up. Well. "Up". The dev version is. Astro is fucking... a lot. I got a blank page up and on github I've got like a whole fucking buttload of nonsense that I don't know what it is, what it does, how it behaves, and honestly this is the mental load problem of it all. It's not digestible. Obviously I can read two pages of code and understand the stupidly simple setup. But I like... don't wanna. So I just deleted it all on my end. The chatgpt setup I was recommended was having nodejs to do astro to get a template going then to push that to github and publish/build using cloudflare. And while github is a perfect comfort zone (I actually wound up getting the desktop tool, which I already fucking hate, lol, and am today back to the CLI) and cloudflare feels like a ridiculously fancy tool that I def don't need (but value the security shit it has and will definitely leverage that more in the future) and am only really using for the "free" part of the hosting problem... Astro just feels like a lot. I don't know that I want a lot? I don't know that I need a lot? I don't actually even really know how to manage the content portion yet. That deliciously fine line between "well the risk is what gives dopamine" and "but I don't want my brain just like ON THE INTERNET" is one I've never quite figured out how to walk. I think for now, knowing that no one knows I do this, no one is out there googling me, this isn't linked anywhere, and people have busy, full lives kinda leads me to think I've got complete and total privacy. So yknow, what a perfect solution for processing me deepest traumas and wounds RIGHT?! But hey, lookie me, writing ACTUAL content. Thinks I'm thinking. Things I'm thinging. I made dis. I made it in two hours basically. Is that something to brag about after a decade of being a software engineer? No. But like. I feel proud of me. I'm excited for me. And that's something. I'm not sure what I want to do next now that I've got the content portion figured out, since I so absolutely don't care about traditional pages of content, but don't yet feel inspired (visually) for a layout and am mentally still stuck on "but how do I ensure layers of privacy exist so if people WANT to read about my private details they can, but like only select people?!". I'm still oh-so-comedically leaning into the idea of making a 2000s-era quiz with questions about me and depending on how well people score whitelisting that IP/device with a tag to see certain posts. Like a captcha but the question is "which of these images are songs I like" and it's just pictures of different Taylor Swift moments from the Eras tour (because let's be real, if you haven't memorized each moment of that show, should you even get access to HALF my thoughts??) Anywho. I don't wanna stop writing because I'm excited. But I should. Because dog needs to go out. I want a celebratory FFAS (also dinner sucked, so like... I need the tacobell pick me up). And... in the truest most honest-est reason why I should stop writing... I want to work on the website more (and not by making boring ass-content for it). It's cute how vscode thinks this is 48 lines. Lol. The tiniest of files. Such smol entry. PS: hahaha.... there's no paragraphs. Dev has a WALL of text. Because of course. Because that's not how formatting works. I'll figure out formatting soon. And the time param. They're in this file. So future (aw, I can't say my name?) me is gonna deal with it because I've somewhat made it future-proof in that regard.