I’ve covered all kinds of media on this blog—books, movies, TV shows, music—but there’s one form of entertainment that I’ve never written about: video games. Ironically, games are probably the hobby that I’ve spent the most time on… and that’s also part of the reason why I haven’t written about them. The truth is, I’ve always been a bit ashamed to be a gamer.
Video games are one of the more geeky realms of geek culture, and I grew up in a time before the geeks inherited the earth. As a kid in school, I learned to avoid revealing parts of myself that would invite mockery: being good at math and computers, enjoying Star (Trek|Wars), still watching cartoons well into my teenage years, and yes, playing video games. You had to make an effort to find people, other geeks, that you could safely be yourself around, because the self that you wanted to be was not the socially accepted norm. For the most part, I did fall in with a group of friends with the same interests, but we would only talk about nerdy stuff when we were at our cafeteria table, away from the “regular” kids.
I’ve also shied away from writing about games because I’ve always had the sense that I play them “too much.” Nobody wants to admit their bad habits in a public forum. Even though I don’t know how to clearly define what amount of play is acceptable, I know that I often feel guilty, that I should be doing something better with my time than gaming.
In case you couldn’t tell, I enjoy reading a lot. I also like to record my experiences, for example, by tracking the books I read on The Storygraph, and tracking the movies I watch on Letterboxd.
There’s an app called Readwise which is great for readers like myself. In the app, you can point your phone’s camera at the text on a page, and it will use OCR to save it as a quote. The app also allows you to review the quotes that you’ve saved in the past. It’s fun to revisit the favourite bits from books that I’ve read. The Readwise app implemented well, and I found it useful enough to pay for a subscription.
Having said that, I’m a firm believer in owning one’s data, so I decided to try to create my own solution. Introducing… “Quoteshelf”! This new section of the website contains all of the quotes that I’ve exported from Readwise. On the main page, I can swipe through a random selection of quotes, and I can browse the author index to find specific books.
To accompany my recent post reviewing the book One Day, I attempted to use DALL-E to generate an image of a calendar. The book is about events that occurred on a single day in history (December 28, 1986), and so I “engineered” the simplest prompt I could think of:
a drawing of a calendar with the date December 28, 1986 circled
I was building the 404 page for this site and a random idea occurred to me. I know that from a 404 message, you should always link back a valid page, usually the home page, but then I thought it’d be fun to link to a random blog post also.
I came up with a component that scrolls through a random selection of items with an animation like a slot machine. Svelte has some pretty cool features for supporting transitions and animations, so I wanted to learn more about that.
I’m introducing a new type of blog post under the label of quick reviews. My goal is to write down brief thoughts about the media that I consume, short enough that the entire contents of each post can appear on the main blog page. Keeping it short incentivizes me to do it more often, because I don’t have the pressure to write a lot.
The contents are what I would post on my Storygraph and Letterboxd profiles, but as I become increasingly disillusioned against the world of tech capitalism, I’m trying to own my data as much as I can. I’ll still use those platforms, but I want my words to belong to me and not live on someone else’s servers.
It’s kind of embarassing, looking back at this previous post. It sounded like I was arriving somewhere, where in fact, those “big changes in my life” just kept rolling. I got married, got a dog, moved house, changed jobs (twice). Where I’ve landed is a place where I’ve seen my creative output trail off, enough to miss it, enough to want to return to it.
I’ll start off by describing the journey that my online presence has taken. I started this blog in 2004, publishing on a Blogger.com site called “A Logical Waste of Space,” which was shared with friend of mine. (His stuff is still there.)
Over time, the kinds of things that we wanted to write about diverged, and it made sense for me to split off. For archival purposes, I’ll keep that site around, even though I’m not too proud of some of the dumb stuff I used to write.
Then, I hosted this site on Squarespace for a while. I like the templates and WYSIWYG design tools that they provide, but felt like my data was trapped. I’m the type of person who likes to work in non-proprietary environments, so I started to look for alternatives.
The current iteration of this site is built using Jekyll, which is a geek’s dream. I’m writing this in a Markdown text file, and Jekyll takes care of compiling it into HTML. I have a DigitalOcean app pointed at a GitHub repo where these text files live, and it updates the site whenever I make changes. Sure, it takes some coding to customize the look of the site, but hey, I know how to do that stuff! It doesn’t even cost anything (unless I get an unexpected uptick in fame).
So, here I am again.
About Me
Hi! Albert here. Canadian. Chinese.
Writing software since 2001. “Blogging” since 2004. Reading since forever.
You can find me on socials with the links below, or contact me here.
