Reviewing a few things that happened this year.

Politically#

It quite sucks ass. Not much more to say about it. The law my last post was about was suspended by this mess but is still to be watched over.

My resolution is to keep fighting to the best of my ability, and I hope you do too.

This blog#

The way this blog looks still annoys me. The background grid is too tight. Everything’s too saturated. When I reload the page, a “Menu” link blinks by. I don’t have time to spend changing any of that before the end of the year (in 9 hours).

Another indie blog I saw had a way larger, diagonal grid as a background. It was dark gray on black, nice and undistracting. I’m considering making the whole place grayscale.

Seirdy’s article Best practices for inclusive textual websites is really appealing. I’m phone-bound a lot of the time, or on really bad wifi. Ultimately my main production here is text, not web design. If I want to make a maximalist, 2000s style website, it’ll be separated out from this blog, if it ever happens.

Previously, I considered using freezeframe.js, only stopping because I hate JavaScript really bad. But really, I don’t want autoplaying GIFs more than I want my blog to be accessible on a sub-500kbps connection or on a text-only browser. I also wish freezeframe.js’ functionality was included in browsers as a user-customizable feature.

I want to better consider how I incorporate media in my blog. For instance, at the end of my first article, I included an animated WEBP of the opening animation of Pokémon Crystal running in my emulator. This 4.85MB file is undescribed and, on usual browser configurations, autoplays with no controls. I introduce it in the sentence above it but do not describe it further, even though it includes several graphical glitches which could be relevant to convey the state of my emulator.

My resolutions for this blog are:

  • Change the design to something appealing to me. Remove any JavaScript.
  • Be more verbose when writing. I do not have to fit everything in the damn world in a single sentence.

Media#

I played Off-Peak this month. It was fun and pretty, though short.

I’m excited for Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector’s release in january. I really, really liked the original, and the demo too.

For my favorite album, I would pick PPPPPINK QWERTY est un·e skateureuse de guitare by Rrrrrose Azerty, especially the “/Briser la peine/” track.

Ache’s video essays analyze the narratives video games carry in their very structure in a way that’s clear to me. She also writes a blog.

In english, I follow Critical Distance, which rounds up articles on video games each week. Confusingly, the RSS feed linked on their home page is outdated, but https://feeds.feedburner.com/cd-posts works. I found it on their cohost page, a website which stated it will shut down “at the end of 2024”.

As for tools, I set Miniflux and Shiori servers for myself. Both very nice, though I wish Shiori was more polished. I’ll work on that.

My content resolution is to stop keeping so many tabs open and save them in Shiori instead.

Conclusion#

I have quite a lot of resolutions here:

  • Keep fighting to the best of my ability, and hope you do too.
  • Change the design of this blog to something appealing to me.
  • Be more verbose when writing this blog.
  • Stop keeping so many browser tabs open.

Hopefully I can keep up with all that!