Microblog
This is my “microblog”, where I post things that aren’t sophisticated, long, or refined enough to be a post on the main blog. It’s my personal Twitter equivalent, you could say.
If you want to comment on one of these, reach out in a channel through which I already know you. If no such channel exists, then it’s intentional that you can’t comment on here :).
2025-12-21 02:49
2AM emo time. Don’t really want to elaborate here but yeah :')
On a brighter note, went to see Zootopia 2 last week. It was alright, but only just so.
Also on another completely unrelated note, it just hit me how Musescore.com has gone down the rabbit hole of monetization, dangerously close to enshittifaction. I remember when you uploaded stuff from the editor to MuseScore.com and anyone could download the mscz/pdf for free, now you gotta pay lmao.
And of course, it’s a source of vendor lock-in now. In the old days, people would offer PDFs of their scores on their own website, or at least give you a mediafire link or something, but now you only get the vendor lock-in paywalled site.
At least there’s pirate tools to download the PDFs anyways, so it’s presumably a soft paywall, but such tools don’t work for “Official Scores”, i.e. scores that the official owner of a piece of music has provided to MuseScore. Because big corps are involved, the paywall there is a hard paywall.
Onwards to the death and monopolization of the open web, I guess. Tempted to make a FOSS (also free as in beer) alternative just for them to have a competitor but that’s a lot of work and I already have enough not-started project ideas lol, so that’ll probably just stay an idea.
2025-12-07 23:18
Nice weekend unwinding after returning to Seattle after Thanksgiving travel. I think I got a mini-cold from Thursday through Saturday because my throat was hurting a bit and my nose was being very leaky, but feeling much better today.
Watched Zootopia 1 today for the fun of it, might go see the second one in theaters next week.
2025-10-20 23:52
I’m participating in a project where we interview Touhou fangame creators, and one of my interviewees is basically the prime example that curiosity, boredom, and determination make you do great things. They had lots of time daydreaming, read lots of books, and learned everything from scratch.
It seriously has me contemplating just disappearing from social media for a year to lock in on my hobbies and the real world. I still need to think about the precise rules here, and I’ll probably make a full post when I start, but here’s what I’m thinking so far:
Facebook, Instagram, and RedNote will be banned, for certain. I’ve already stopped using Facebook, while IG and RedNote are by far the worst offenders of time sink and chronic onlineness.
For YouTube and Bilibili, it’s a bit more ambiguous. I’m going to allow myself to continue to upload any videos of gameplay or music covers, but anything I watch has to be from subscriptions. I cannot watch anything from suggestions or the non-subscription feed, no matter how interesting it looks. This will be easier for YouTube, which has RSS feeds to serve you only the videos from specific channels. That way I can rely solely on RSS + mpv + youtube-dlp to watch videos without opening the website at all. I’ll probably remove the app from my phone as well to enforce this.
I will allow chat platforms like Discord and IRC, but they are not to be persistently idled in. I will log in when I feel like chatting, and log off when I go do something else.
Reddit will be banned. This might seem pretty heavyhanded since a lot of people consider Reddit an older forum-like platform from the pre-social media age, but I often find the discourse bandwagon-like. I’ll try hard to add any useful sites from /r/Seattle and other programming subreddits I follow to my RSS reader.
In a similar vein, I will minimize usage of Hacker News and Lobste.rs. Interesting articles often show up on both, but I can do without the discourse that often goes on in the comments, especially on Hacker News. Lobste.rs has RSS feeds for each of the tags so it should be easy to migrate over to my RSS reader.
Speaking of which, reading articles in RSS will be a time-bound, once every 1-2 days sort of thing. Similar to YouTube, no jumping to other “suggested” media is permitted.
The two small, independent forums I frequent will still be allowed. Currently, I already limit myself to visiting them at most once a day, which isn’t hard due to the low volume of posts.
2025-09-23 16:17
Came back from a 3-week-long trip on Sunday and finally settled back in. Still have about a week of vacation left before going back to work so I’m taking lots of time to relax at home. Unfortunately, my heater’s been having problems so some of time is going to go to juggling contractors. I should probably get my COVID and Flu shots too while I’m at it.
2025-07-16 22:22
My friends visited me a couple weeks ago. Having time off work to accompany them around was really fun (ask me about how we almost got stranded at Hurricane Ridge…).
Otherwise, things are going well as I ease myself back into the usual routine.
I ordered a new NAS as I had asked my dad to bring to me the data drives of the old NAS at home. Not having it near me physically made administration pretty difficult sometimes.
Originally, I was planning to just mirror the boot drive onto the NAS’s builtin SSD boot drive, but in classical Unix fashion I swapped the arguments to cp(1) and destroyed the original boot drive with all of my configuration files. So I’ve been having to rebuild that from scratch. Luckily all the data drives are safe, and I didn’t have too much configuration in the first place. We should be done in a week at most.
2025-06-16 22:47
I was drafting a reply to a penpal and touched on the topic of texting anxiety and general social anxiety and it kinda hit me that I just suck at messaging now?
Like I remember it being a lot more natural from when I first got an FB account, and got a phone, through high school. Sure, I didn’t message that many people at that time either, but it was a lot less intimidating and effortless to just hit the new chat button and hit someone up back then.
Recently, one of my friends introduced another friend to me, and I was just like uh. How do I even message someone and strike up a text conversation. I felt really stilted and anxious about being judged even if that wasn’t the case.
I’m not sure what happened since then and now it’s a bit puzzling to me. Usually, when something like this happens, it’s the result of some traumatic experience, but I don’t know if I really had one of those? Or I’m not willing to admit it, lol.
2025-04-21 14:59
Finished Noctuary. It took me about 40 hours to finish in total and I thought it was pretty good. I kind of rushed the end though (played for like 5 hours per day over the last few days), though I did end up 100%-ing the game.
The character designs are still so beautiful, and the theming around Dreams and Reality gives me an ethereal Touhouish vibe. It’s like a more serious cyberpunk but also still fantastical Touhou?
The music is ok, but Mildia’s (夢燈彼夜) motif and theme stand out as the most emotional to me and stuck out quite a bit above the others. I’m quite fond of Mildia in general, I think the “kind older sister” trope works really well on me (I wonder why, haha). It might be fun to set her to a danmaku fight in the future, maybe.
I said I would go back to AA Investigations 2 after finishing this game, but I think I need some time to cool off after taking too much time on this, lol. In fact, I’m actually thinking of taking a big break from playing games after achieving Touhou 12 Lunatic clear, which will hopefully happen soon. The plan is to use what was formerly gaming time do something creative every single day, whether that be freewriting, sketching, full drawing, planning or executing a music cover, or working on a game.
Part of the contemplativeness that always comes over me whenever I finish these indie games is I think about how much care the developers must have taken to make sure everything was as polished as they could muster, the feeling of working as a team towards a creative end goal. It’s something I think about a lot and feel is missing in my life.
2025-04-08 23:55
Recently been playing a game called Noctuary. I found out about it because of a mini-documentary on Bilibili about an incredibly piece of famous Touhou fan art, Starry Moonlit Night, where some of the commenters mentioned that the artist also served on the staff for this game.
It’s pretty good, the character designs and CG’s are beautiful, the combat is good enough, and the premise seems pretty interesting. I’m about a third of the way through.
Also, it has Cantonese dub <3, always happy to support Chinese games and extra bonus points for having Cantonese!
I can’t really focus on more than one story game at once so it’s going to be a straight shot to the end, before I go back to the game that this one interrupted (Ace Attorney Investigations 2).
2025-03-04 18:14
Finally pushing out a new batch of Botania CD’s today and tomorrow. There’s only about ~30 of them left so I’m starting to wind things down, knowing that I’ll have to keep a few spares for the shipments that might get lost.
As a bonus, if you are reading this microblog, mention this update to me and I’ll send you one for a discounted $5 price.
2025-02-28 22:50
This might be a bit too personal, but I was idly on Hinge, the dating app, before meeting up with a friend yesterday. Someone popped up that was probably the most interesting person I’ve ever seen on any dating app. They had a link to their website, which I, being the careful cybersecurity professional I was (I literally thought to myself, gotta protect myself from CSRF exploits, go use an incognito tab…), opened in an incognito tab to find her photography collection as well as a collection of poems she’d composed.
There was a poem about love written in prosaic Chinese that I thought was especially raw and beautiful.
So anyways, I had to go meet up with my friend so I closed the app without interacting, since I usually spend time to think of a good message to send with my likes. After I came home, no matter how far I swipped left in the app, she wouldn’t pop back up again. And because her domain was kind of long and I viewed it in incognito mode, I don’t have browser history to find it again.
This person whose website I can’t even remember and appearance I only vaguely remember has been lingering in my mind for an oddly persistent time. It irritates me so, because I’m willing to bet that Hinge’s algorithm purposefully does things like this, by which I mean it shows you someone you would be really attracted to, then buries them so you have to do a ton more swiping (=engagement, and potential money if you’re desperate enough) to find them again.
My cope is to tell myself “it’s up to fate whether she appears again or not”, ignoring the fact that she’d have to be interested in me in the first place too lol.
I really hate modern ranking algorithms and swipe-based dating apps.
2025-01-20 20:17
I did so well in avoiding inauguration day “news” until dinner today, then…oh man. I’ll just leave it at that.
I’m considering also leaving behind all social media (besides Mastodon and YouTube, the latter of which I’m going to try weaning myself off of). Not sure how I want to replace yet, but more and more I no longer wish to use any of these platforms.
On a less depressing note, I bought a Framework 16 Laptop to replace my desktop with. It was really cool to assemble all the parts together and the result is pretty nice. I haven’t switched over from my desktop yet because I’m waiting for a stand and docking station to arrive.
I’ll probably make a full blog post about it once I get settled in.
2025-01-15 20:27
Ended up finishing I hope this doesn’t find you pretty quickly. It’s a short and cute little young adult romcom, with a enemies-to-lovers scenario and two main characters that have no chill lol. I like Liang’s setting, both this and her previous work, because the cast is mostly Chinese so I feel more connection to the background of the characters and why they might have no chill :P But even disregarding that I think I’m kind of a sucker for cute little romcoms lol. Tell me if you have any particularly outstanding recs!
2025-01-12 23:00
Starting a couple new books from the library, I hope this doesn’t find you by Ann Liang, and The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. Quite the contrasting combo, huh?
There’s something satisfying about cracking open pristine, sparkling-new library books. The former is a 2024 release so that’s sort of a given, but the latter’s latest edition was published in 2011. The library stamp seems to indicate they just purchased this copy last month!
2025-01-10 19:27
Rough week to be working here. Not gonna say much more publicly but email or message me if you want to discuss more.
Thinking of this post from Drew Devault https://drewdevault.com/2020/05/05/We-are-complicit-in-our-employers-deeds.html
2025-01-07 22:08
Back at the usual place after visiting family for the holidays. Time always slows down a lot when I go back, in both good and bad ways. It’s a nice time to unwind, do less at work, and spend time around my parents. I also miss the comforts of having my full desktop working setup, all my books, games, etc., and not being in a car-dependent hellscape.
I bought an 8bitdo arcade fightstick that I’m gonna try learning to play shmups with, because apparently there’s a STG scene (somewhat underground) here and I can’t embarrass myself if I ever go to a meetup :P
2024-12-03 20:02
Giving Tuesday! Some of the organizations I supported:
- OpenBSD Foundation
- Wing Luke Museum
- Seattle Neighborhood Greenways
- Transit Riders Union
- The Urbanist
2024-11-30 23:43
I just wanna go home.
This time of year is always such a lovely one because of the festivity and reconnecting with friends near and far, but it can also be quite lonely, isolating, and tiring.
Black Friday was nice, relaxed at home then went out shopping, then dropped by Westlake Center for the tree lighting ceremony. The mayor talks in a really annoying way lol.
Not looking forward to this week of work, it’s just going to be waiting room mode.
No concrete plans for tomorrow, but probably will try to force myself to get out of the house and go somewhere. Maybe just another park.
2024-11-28 21:42
Had a nice, relaxing Thanksgiving. Had lunch with some relatives, practiced my flute, called my parents and sisters.
As an aside, I’ve been playing Sonic Origins on Switch, and the last game I’m at is Sonic CD, the only one of the four bundled games that I didn’t play when I was younger.
This game sucks, and I’m glad looking around on the internet this isn’t an uncommon opinion. It’s mechanically the worst parts of Sonic 1 amplified; the polish and pleasure of 2 and 3 are just not there. Level design is haphazard, roundabout, slow, and full of “screw you” moments such as red springs that launch you directly into spikes. I’m probably going to drop it; glad Sonic 2 and 3k were my childhood and not this hunk of junk.
EDIT 2024-11-29: Turns out I was stuck on the last level of Sonic CD so I sucked it up, looked up a tutorial, and beat it. Happy to never touch it again.
2024-11-27 10:22
Lazy wfh Wednesday today. Spending Thanksgiving lunch with some relatives, but no plans for dinner yet.
Black Friday probably will go shopping since there’s some things I want to get for people.
Saturday and Sunday have plans as well.
Next week don’t have anything planned, but looking forward to seeing my family for the holidays soon.
2024-11-26 16:33
on the shuttle home and had a brief mild panic of whether it was Monday or Tuesday 😩 At work there’s code freeze for the holiday so no landing code or changing any configs, so things have been light. Probably won’t do too much tomorrow.
2024-11-25 23:46
Finished the drawing. It turned out alright but obviously there’s places that could have gone better too. Check out my Instagram if you want to see it!
2024-11-25 18:54 Made an emacs command to insert the date for me every time I do one of these :D
2024-11-25
Working on my next drawing exercise right now. It’s a really cute reference drawing, and body proportions were easier than I thought it would be, but the long flowy hair is going to make or break the drawing, and I SUCK at drawing hair.
2024-11-25
爲你心疼啊……you deserve so much better. It’s not that I still want anything for myself specifically, it’s that you’re someone I care about a lot, so seeing this happen to you makes me sad.
2024-11-25
Decided to revive this page. Nothing fits the bill for what I want for microblogging, which is:
- Fully public access
- But no algorithms distributing my posts
- And no commenting. If you have thoughts on something I’m posting, reach out to me directly, I would love to hear from you. If we’re not already connected through one of the many social media services out there, then it’s intentional that you can’t comment.
My Mastodon account is the nearest equivalent, but it already has too many randoms following it for my taste, and it allows replies from followers.
So I’m back here. The UX isn’t too great but I’ll probably just queue stuff up on my phone and then dump it here at the end of the day.
2022-06-29: Just finished playing through all three games of another similar series, Hello Charlotte. The story really flew over my head though, so I’m not sure I really liked it that much. I did some reading briefly about the game and apparently there’s a lot of symbolism related to the author’s real life? In either case I can applaud them for something they obviously put a lot of time into. In other news, I helped someone in a major way two weekends ago, probably the biggest “good deed” I’ve ever done. I’d rather protect the privacy of the person but if I trust you, you can ask me privately about it. The flute recital mentioned last time went really well, I’m really proud of what I was able to put out there. Click here to watch the recording! Otherwise, life is fine. I’m looking forward to the Product Security org’s summit in July, which is an excuse to travel to Menlo Park and just get out of home a bit more. The weather is finally starting to warm up, as well.
2022-05-22: Finished OneShot, though it was kind of disappointing coming after Omori, lol. Flute is going well. Two weeks till the recital, and I actually got most of the stress out of my system (for now). Work is kind of shitty recently, trying to migrate a system to another system and the new solution is too slow and I don’t know how to optimize it. Taking some time off this coming week to unwind. I’ve also been trying to sketch recently. You can follow me on Instagram @williewillus to keep up.
2022-05-05: Started playing OneShot, another indie RPG-ish game, but this one is a lot shorter at only 3 hours. I’m currently about 1/3 of the way through. On the flute front, the next recital is coming in a month and I’m starting to get stressed about it, lol. I guess this is a good time to start stressing so I can get it all out of my system by the time June rolls around. Mentally again not feeling fully up :/
2022-04-19: Finished Omori last weekend. I’m proud to say I correctly guessed the plot twist thanks to my thorough notes which helped me process and think about what was going on. The ending was major knives though lol. What depressed me more is the fact that making something like this seems so out of reach for me. I don’t feel creative at all. My hobbies consist of code-monkeying for modding and consuming content other people have created. Can there be a day where I can make something of my own?
2022-04-16: Been grinding pretty hard on Omori. I love these heavy story-driven games a lot. One thing I’ve been guilty of in the past is speeding through things too quickly and not taking time to enjoy the game to its fullest, so this time I’ve been deliberately slowing down and keeping a notes document of my thoughts and observations. It also helps me remember the story since I have the memory of a goldfish. I think the emotional atmosphere the author creates in the present-day chapters is exemplary, and it contrasts so well with the naive and innocent relationships the characters have in the headspace chapters.
2022-04-07: Got lazy with these again, oops. I finished porting Botania to 1.18.2, and will be speaking at BlanketCon 2022 about our experience supporting both Forge and Fabric in a single codebase. Game wise, I finished the main story of Pokemon Legends: Arceus. It got a bit cliche, but overall I appreciate the game for trying something new. I also started playing Omori, at my friend’s behest. I’ve gotten quite drawn-in to the story, and I love this genre of games, so I’m excited to see what happens next.
2022-02-15: Recently my fingers have been hurting a bit at the end of the day. It might be because I’ve started practicing flute pretty intensely again after several years of light playing. Also, it might be the shitty rubber-dome keyboards they have at work. I already ordered another Ducky keyboard for my own use at home, so hopefully I can take my current keyboard to work and use it there. I’ve also been playing less Touhou, as it tends to strain my fingers a lot. Sucks that pretty much all of my hobbies involves use of my hands (except reading, I guess).
2022-02-14: Link Click released their Valentine’s Day PV, and Qiao Ling is so hot oml. I think they changed her makeup or shading slightly but it’s fire. Also her little giggle is so cute lol. This also launched me back into a cycle of listening to Link Click’s beautiful OST and music. The insert song “What Time Taught Me” is quintessential graduation music and makes me ultra nostalgic lol.
2021-12-23: Made the mistake of doing /list on irc.esper.net and looking through the channels. Oddly bittersweet seeing so many dead modding channels still held alive there by random people idling, but mostly sad for the abandonment of IRC for a closed-source, proprietary, centralized service.
2021-12-23: Created this section of the site, inspired by my older sister’s equivalent page.