Sunday

It's 8:15pm, a little less than 4 hours before the NewlyDev Jam starts. Time for some housekeeping.

What's a Jam?

According to Wikipedia: similar to musical jam sessions, game jams are short events (typically 48 - 72 hours) where people create games, typically centered around a theme. I'm stretching the idea here to include other sorts of digital projects--like web development!

Theme

As the name suggests, the theme of the NewlyDevs Jam is to practice a New skill related to Development.

Schedule

Monday (4/28), Tuesday (4/29), Wednesday (4/30), all day!

Location

Virtual--I'll be streaming on my Discord server of friends to stay accountable.

Game Plan

I NEED to stay out of my apartment as much as possible. Can't sleep in either. Bring emergency snacks (perhaps a large container of taquitos). Canned coffee. So much canned coffee.

Monday

It's 2:20pm. I just want the links on my DAMN SITE to WORK.

David Byrne mocks me from the Zingermann's speakers. "Letting the days go by!" I sure am, buddy! It's sunny and beautiful out and I'm glaring at HTML code trying to figure out why my links aren't working. Same as it ever was, indeed.

Here's the really dumb thing: the links are working fine on this page! Just not on the homepage! For some reason! I swapped out the relative links for the absolute links, which did a whole lot of NOTHING.

Well! Would you look at that! When I check the page source, my links aren't there. What the heck??

Reddit to the rescue: apparently Neocities has trouble with cache? Reloading all of my pages via ctrl+F5 fixed everything. Weird. Whatever, thank you kind netizens! This would be such a nightmare to figure out on my own.

Come to think of it, this is a good example of why I want to get better at web development through a time-limited jam. Normally I'd see an error like this and exlaim "that's bullshit!" before giving up.

3:00pm

Ohhh I have to make a GitHub account to sync my VSCode settings??? Gross! Maybe I will give up.

9:17pm

To keep myself entertained while I code, I'm also listening to internet-appropriate music. Right now I'm listening to The 1975's "A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships". I'm fond of this album. 8/10.

11:37pm

By the way--I had to fill out a rental application form (to the place I live at now) to renew my current place with a new tenant moving in (my friend, Lindsay). Problem: she sent a PDF (.pdf) of an image for me to fill out. The image was a scanned version of a blank rental application form. I was presumably supposed to print this out, but I don't have a printer, and I was too tired to venture onto campus to print out this form.

So I opened the image in Google Slides (with the slide set to paper dimensions) and proceeded to fill out the form by pasting text boxes on top of the appropriate blank spots left on the image.

God, I wish there were an easier way to do this.

After doing the tedious work of filling in all of the boxes--including one that inquired about my "current landlord's phone number", which felt ridiculous, given that I would be sending this form to her--I exported it back as a PDF and mailed it off.

In the meantime, Lindsay was losing her mind. An unexpected bill wiped 500$ from her savings. Between her parents borrowing money, therapy bills, the application fee for the aparment, and the cold indifference of our financial system, she was suddenly flat broke one month ahead of a major move.

In just a month, we'll be three public service workers-in-training and a cat living under one roof.

I'm far from the first person to point out how expensive it is to be an adult. I'm also far from the first to point out that Gen Z is terribly pessimistic about the future. What are we looking forward to? What better futures are we building? I'm in an adversarial relationship with the person who supplies the place I live, my school (and employer) is in an adversarial relationship with the federal government, and the people running the federal government want the public and civil service class to vanish.

Tuesday

4:40pm

I'm outta steam.

Speaking of a Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships--some of mine are imploding.

I have a pet theory that all friend groups (n = 5 or more) will inevitably have an blowup or shakeup of some kind. The timing of implosion depends on many things, but I think 1) group size and 2) group proximity are the greatest deciding factors.

Our friend group (moreso an open cluster of friends) imploded over the careless actions of (mostly) one person. You know how it goes--one person says and does a lot of tiny hurtful things, someone speaks up, people take sides, and a narrative about what happened and who-did-what solidifies.

Here's the weird thing about friend clusters on the internet: they can be huge. They can be spread out--we all met each other in undergrad, but many of us are in grad school and spread out across the country. Yet we can still have constant proximity. Our collective Discord server allowed me to chat the cluster at any time in any place. Even when I left our Discord server (nothing personal, I just can't handle that much interaction), I was still close to the cluster, interacting only with my closest friends and the friends who I play Pathfinder with.

Anyways--it's hard to split my focus between coding this project, and reading screenshots as they roll into my DMs.

How did friendship work before the digital age?

Wednesday

8:04pm

WHY DID MY BACKGROUND BREAK FUCK FUCK FICK FUCK FICK FUCK