North of Polaris

Hello again readers, this is the first time a blog will be posted as the website is live! Much excitement in that, and I hope you enjoy the general layout of things. I could spend this blogpost talking more about updates (like the unfinished hobbies tab), but I think that I will save that topic for a larger update post.

As for this, I really just wanted to write down a few thoughts that have been on my mind as of late. I, like many people I assume, would like to live my life being the best person I can be. My latest moral quandry has been on the topic of diet. I care deeply about the environment and protecting it, so the most logical thing for me to do, in my understanding, is to graduate to a plant-based diet. Yes, I have all of the usual arguments against it. I like the taste of meat! A lot of my cultural dishes revolve around a meat base! There are other, larger contributers to climate change, so why should the onus fall on me?! And some of these arguments are more important to people than others, but I had to sit down and deliberate what truly was more important to me.

I sat bargaining with myself for a while. I've had plenty of satisfactory meat replacements before, and in my head I can imagine them satisfying the chewiness, the saltiness I crave. Could a bowl of haleem be as good without goat meat? Could dahi vada taste as good with plant-based yogurt? Could I go the rest of my life without a perfect gulab jamun? Well I think I could use soy curls to replace the tender meat in haleem, and I think that an oat yogurt could be disguised by the many chutneys used to top a dahi vada. The gulab jamun...the rasmalai...I think that any other version would be insulting, to be honest. I am very particular about those sweets, but I don't have them all too often, so should they really be driving my overall decision?

I don't think that this diet demands perfectionism. I feel a sort of guilt about it - I'm not really choosing it specifically for animal welfare, though I believe that the current farming system is inherently abusive to animals. Maybe if I was a better person, I'd be vegan. But I'm not, or at least I'm not there yet, and I have a few selfishnesses I'd like to satisfy. So I grappled with these thoughts as follow. Well, milk is bad for me in general, given I'm lactose-intolerant and all, so this category of food should be eliminated anyways. Red meat is carcinogenic due to its high content of heme iron, so I can reason that this is okay to cut out. And I had recently learned some pretty sad facts about how chickens are kept, for both meat and egg-laying purposes, so I suppose chicken and eggs can go as well. I guess I've arrived at a plant-based diet anyways. I would still like to go fishing every once in a while, and I would still like to have a gulab jamun or kulfi should it be offered to me. I think that this is satisfactory in regards to harm-reduction.

Speaking more about the argument that individual harm-reduction is futile in comparison to corporate harm-reduction, I have actually felt pretty frustrated by this talking point for a good time now. I think that it's nihilistic to just...give up. Yes, the vast majority of pollution is caused by a few fossil fuel and cement companies at the top of the chain. Yes, the average individual could never be the primary driver of climate change as we are seeing it occur. But I don't think that these, albeit logical, arguments absolve us of the responsibility we have to simply try. I think the individual should worry about consumption reduction, ethical consumerism, and animal welfare. Apathy is not an appropriate response to despair! This being said, these topics should also never be approached from an angle of puritanism. I believe first and foremost in harm reduction, and nobody ought to be shamed for circumstances outside of their control.

My conclusion to this stream of thoughts: I hope that I am able to keep to my semi-pescatarianism and that apathy goes out of vogue.

gootbye for meow,

v ⋆｡°✩

Hi again, it's your disfunctional webmaster. It has come to my attention that programming is a skill that decays very quickly, and also that working in html is fairly limiting. There were a few things I set out to do this week, and while I knew that they would be difficult to accomplish for someone of my skill level, I had no idea that the most frustrating thing would be learning that ... I need to relearn an entirely new language to accomplish most items on my to-do list. Yes, yes, that language is javascript, and it unfortunately seems like it holds the key for the elements I wish to implement. My husband is quite excited to be able to teach me something new. I am quite daunted with the scope of this website. But hey, little steps, right?

Being optimistic, there are a few things that I did end up accomplishing:

a) I found out how to call a short list of most recent blogs to my homepage! I had been trying to figure it out for a few days. This process involved messing around with a few filters, realizing the filters didn't work the way I wanted them to, raging about the fact that the filters did not work the way I wanted them to, briefly contemplating if using liquid as a template file was worth it, looking at nunjucks as an alternative, then finally realizing that filters can't fix everything. An if statement was all that was necessary. [This has re-established my understanding of how long it will take to actually have a fully working website].

b) I wanted to organize my archives page by year, and I'll call this one like 75% of a success. I really wanted to make use of the "details" tag in html to have small dropdowns of blogs by year. I could not accomplish this. My husband told me that it was a limitation of html itself, and my ego is choosing to believe him. If you haven't figured it out yet, this is where I realized that I could not avoid relearning JS.

c) I found out why my dates were fucky. I'm using a built-in object in javascript called Intl.DateTimeFormat, which essentially takes the dates as I noted them in my markdown files and displays them nicely on all of my posts. Allegedly. The problem I was running into involved the browser putting the day before's date instead of the actual posted date. Why? Blahblahblah some browser assumptions about the actual time I was posting at, which reverted the date value to the previous day or something. I fixed it by brute forcing it and adding "T12:00:00Z" to the end of all my date tags so that the browser reads it as the correct date. Is this actually solving the problem? My laziness says yes for the moment. Maybe I'll form a more sophisticated solution later on.

Some things I want to accomplish in the future:

• a css stylesheet!
• making my own font!
• programming cool interactables like draggable windows
• and uh...more stuff idk

Anyways, I'm gonna go to bed.

gootbye for meow,

v ⋆｡°✩

ps: here's where we're at with the blog [mayhaps I'll make a full update timeline somewhere when I'm done]

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hoi and welcome to my blog!

I am pretty excited to finally get this thing running, even though I have literally the most basic format ever right meow. I got the idea to start up this blog from my good friends TaxidermyCactus and kekley, who both, like me, have become increasingly disillusioned by bigtechTM and the "new internet" in general. We share a love of creativity - both physical and digital - and I am very grateful for their guidance on this project I have undertaken.

First things first, the original skeleton of this blogsite was made following this very helpful guide. I briefly learned some very basic html and css in my senior of highschool - which also happens to have been almost eight years ago at this point in time. So, while the coding itself is not entirely unfamiliar to me, I guess you could pretty accurately call me rusty (and unc (and chopped (chunc))).

I have a few visions in mind for what I want this blog to eventually look like. There are a few neocities blogs I browsed and found some inspiration from. Here they are listed below:

i-land

two-wheeler

bearsjunkjournal

I would like to have a nice journalistic feel to the blog eventually, but I understand that this will probably take some time to figure out. As such, it's fairly likely that you, dear reader, will see this post much after its initial creation. I'll eventually like to have some tabs that showcase a large range of creations: music, art (3d and 2d), videogames. I'll also like to keep a general log of my education journey (maybe some other nontraditional student will find comfort in all my failures and eventual successes).

Right now, I'm listening to Welcome to Nightvale. If you haven't given it a listen yet, please do.

gootbye for meow,

v ⋆｡°✩

ps: here's how the blog looks at this moment in time!

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