BLOBBYSPURPLESITE

Welp, I've done it again. If I keep up with this horribly inconsistent and infrequent update schedule I might just earn an award for it. That being said there's quite a number of reasons why I haven't updated the site in another THREE GODDAMN MONTHS (as well as the web server going down unexpectedly for two weeks), each of which I'll try to explain in this hastily and probably clumsily written blog post that I'm working on at 20 past 4 in the fucking morning.

For the most part, I've not updated the site due to a lack of motivation to update the site... or anything else at that matter. I've been a bit of a wreck in terms of mental health for quite some time, but the past year has really gone to exacerbate that I feel. I'd rather not get into it too much because the topics at hand can get rather grim, but the crux of the issue is that I'm nearly an adult and I feel like I've already fucked my life up before it's even begun - I felt as though I've been going down the wrong path entirely the past couple of years and have scrambled to try and learn something new and be somewhat decent at it, but nothing came of it. So I've kind of just been looking at all of my prior projects like this website and have simply not given them the time of day because I thought I'd mess that up too. I attempted making updates to this blog in those three months but nothing interesting really happened to warrant those.

Literally nothing noteworthy has happened. Well, aside from going on a short break with my Dad elsewhere as well as going to a counsellor to try and get my shit together a little, but nothing really worth sharing here, at least nothing I felt comfortable sharing at the time. I mean, I wasn't really taking many photos because there was nothing to photograph, because I've been more or less everywhere in the local area, and I had nothing to do either because I didn't have the energy nor the temperment to do anything. It's quite poetic to think that my life has been as stagnant as this site really - I suppose that's something to chuckle about...

Thankfully I'm in a better spot, and with things to show for it as well. I've got a few projects I can write about here, as well as some sort of idea as to how to structure the articles I've been trying to write since this site's inception. One of those projects just so happens to be a new PC, half the components of which should be arriving within a day or two of writing this. It won't be completely finalised but It'll be complete enough for me to do some funny shinanegans on there, and by that I only really mean play a bit of Elden Ring and BeamNG with a few friends of mine. Because I either crack my games or get them DRM-free (as well as all of us having wildly different interests), I find it rather hard to play something with them, and the hardware of my shitty Vivobook certainly wasn't helping.

Speaking of hardware, this new PC of mine will contain the following:

• MOTHERBOARD: Gigabyte Aorus B550M Elite AM4
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5700X Octa-Core @ 3.4GHz
• GPU: Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600 Eagle
• RAM: 16GB Kingston Fury DDR4 @ 3200MT
• STORAGE: 1TB Kingston Fury Renegade PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD (Planned to also get a 4TB HDD later on down the line)
• COOLING: be quiet! Pure Rock 2 Air Cooler & Arctic 120mm PWM case fans
• PSU: Gigabyte P650G Gold-rated
• OS: Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 (was considering Qubes, too much compute required :( )

I've also got a rig planned for the Original Xbox, seeing as I enjoy their catalogue as well as the fact that I could also probably hitch a few games on Halo 2 online through Xbox Live's community-driven revival by an organisation called Insignia. That and I'm also looking into how to run a better server, seeing as whatever I was doing prior was nothing short of archaic. My friend moved me over to Alpine Linux and got me some basic automation going, that and they've given me a few pointers on containerisation, which is something I probably should have known before I even attempted running a website. They're a fucking godsend - go send some love their way.

Aside from these few projects though, I've just been trying to find ways to enjoy my time and make each day less monotonous. I'm still recovering from some medical procedures (probably should have mentioned that prior - it's nothing too serious) so going out the house is out of the question for a little while, but at the very least I have all the PC parts coming round soon. That and I'm in the thick of another Dark Souls obsession, so I have that to occupy myself among other things. Things seem to be going up and up and up, and I can only hope they continue to do so in the future. I don't have hope I'll post another blog entry any time soon though X)

Here's my current New Game Plus save - Twatface, Usurper of Havel. Heavy classes are really funny to play.

The site went up officially on the 1st April 2024 if memory serves me well, meaning as of writing this post it's been FOUR FUCKING MONTHS since I've updated this site. There is an explanation for this, but that would also involve explaining a bunch of messy shit that I'd rather not seeing as it's ludicrously personal and immediately makes me feel miserable talking about - put it simply, things are better, I'm out of college with a qualification pending and, most importantly, I'm back to working on this former shambling husk of a website.

As you can probably see, the rest of the pages are finally finished - the About Me page still needs a LOT of sprucing up but I kind-of just wanted to get something out the gate so I can do all the fun web-dev stuff, like responding to emails and applying to join webrings and all that (Plus I'm also tired of correcting all the drunk wording choices I wrote on various nights at 4am). That and it also means I can stop worrying about this site having 90% of it's core still be non-existent while I work on further improvements, alongside learning new skills and doing things in my spare time - notably learning C++, learning more sophisticated server config, as well as how to maintain a vaguely healthy sleep schedule.

Moving that aside however I do have some plans in store for this site, most notably moving it to upgraded hardware and a new daemon. This would've been done by now IF I wasn't conned for a corroded motherboard on Ebay for £30 ("full working order" my ass) but it is what it is. My friends are getting a CPU and HDD out the new board that's still currently in transit so there's something to smile about I suppose. In any case, the result will be the same, that being I have significantly more compute to conduct some clownish experiments on, PLUS I'll have a spare Raspberry Pi 3 to use for a different server project.

The specifications for this new server will be as follows:

• CPU: Intel Core i3-8100T Quad-Core @ 3.1GHz
• RAM: 16GB LPDDR4 STD @ 2400MHz
• STORAGE: Western Digital Blue 320GB 2.5" HDD
• OS: Debian 12.6 "Bookworm"
• WEB DAEMON: nginx
• IRC DAEMON: InspiRCD

Alongside that, I also have some technical improvements for the site - notably a guestbook script from scarecat that I hope to deploy with the next iteration. I'm making this change because as much as Neocities webmasters love to use this, I'm of the opinion that CBox is shit - it only saves up to 100 messages at a time, it has very little customisation on the free plan, and most importantly, uses Google telemetry domains such as fonts.googleapis.com for visitors (unless the admin sets the "Use browser default" font option) and analytics.google.com in the admin panel. I don't like CBox.

I've also got some articles planned for the next iteration of the site, so hopefully this site will be more than just a photo gallery and a directory to MUCH MUCH cooler sites with MUCH MUCH MUCH cooler people running them. That being said, I also have things I'd still like to improve upon - notably CSS inconsistencies and more drunk wording that I might have left in my plethora of photo footnotes or even in this post.

It's been a rocky road getting to this point, and I'm still yet to deal with a lot of issues that plague this shell of a site, but I'm really happy to simply be working on it again - hopefully the next update doesn't take nearly as long as this - sorry to keep you all waiting, if anyone was waiting at all...