Time again – the seasons cycle and I go to Japan again.

I don’t actually have much in the way of goals for this trip. It’s just like there’s pressure that builds up when I’m at home, as I get frustrated with my slow progress on various projects, with the days, weeks, months blurring past, practically unremarked. I don’t really think I’m more productive in Japan, but the novelty makes everything more memorable. The days have more salience, and so in that sense, I feel better. More present, even if not more accomplished.

(I worry about getting bored in Japan too, but honestly I don’t see it happening for a very long time. Yes, people get used to things easily, but it’s so different, and the day-to-day surprises are so intense. Plus I still can’t live there full-time, so my opportunity to get bored is limited.)

Anyway, time again to make plans and think about accomplishing things. I didn’t do terribly well on my last list, but I did. . . about as well as expected, really. I’ll copy some items over and ignore some others.

Attain a decent level of app-development skill

I’ve been doing a fair amount of work to learn Flutter, and I should aim to get that to a point where it’s actually useful. This is probably the item that I have the most accountability on, so I rate my odds as pretty good.

Misskey install

I know, I haven’t, but the need for a microblogging service hasn’t gone away. I should just get started. I did draw an emblematic image, which I genuinely like.

Website stuff

Super close now – although if anything, it seems like I want more stuff, and thus push it farther out. But the basic acceptance criteria haven’t changed, and I might have actually hit them already. I just need to make sure, and focus on them if necessary. And maybe come up with a posting schedule.

TLMC script stuff

Also hasn’t changed – although the cover art tool is basically done. I don’t think I copied all of my upstream tool patches to my laptop, so producing a unified version might not be feasible. (On the other hand, I could revamp the cuefile handling. I’m not even sure what bug I was trying to work around, so maybe this is the right frame of mind to ask whether it actually needs to be addressed.)

Buy Freiren manga

It’s not much of an acheivement, but it’s definitely on the todo list. Turns out I really like the series, and there are definitely bits I want to turn into flashcards.

The stuff from last time is still live, but I’m not planning to focus on it. Although if Fedora hasn’t gotten its act together with regard to mnemosyne, I probably will try to get my package uploaded. (I really don’t know – haven’t checked. Someone else may have solved all the problems with the package, and they probably did it more elegantly. EDIT: they did not, no progress has been made.)

Writing this on a flight to Japan, and I’ve been thinking for some time that I really should have some kind of to-do list, some set of projects and things to work on.

Because it’s me and I am incapable of commitment, this takes the form of a set of ideas for things to do more than anything else. Stuff I want to work on, and maybe I will.

Concrete goose

Well, I do have a house, and I do think a low-poly goose would look really good in front of it. Especially if it had outfits. Since I don’t have a 3d printer in Japan, I probably wouldn’t actually try to make the goose this trip, but learning to model it would be a good start.

Blog

Like, come on, it’s been practically a year. This is probably top priority. The primary blocker is the JS image gallery stuff. Comments would be nice to have. A logo would be nice, but is definitely not required at this stage. Let’s try to commit to getting the blog done this trip.

MPD music system

I am really tired of itunes. The basic thing I want is more reliability or at least debugability. A better UI would be nice, although I’m not holding my breath for that one. Ability to have a “now playing” remote display. Control from a phone app, maybe.

Misskey install

Self-explanatory. Also depends on getting a logo put together, though. My plan is to run an instance on Amazon lightsail, maybe with a forwarder using the present nginx server.

Buying a huge pile of doujinshi

Heritage art form. I seriously and non-ironically plan to go to like 3 events and also hit a bunch of shops, because of course I do. Honestly this probably shouldn’t be on the list, because it’s more like my default behavior than something I need to remind myself to do. On the other hand, shipping myself a couple of m-bags does sound at least somewhat useful.

Finishing the album cover selection tool / more TLMC script stuff

This one’s really close to being done, and I do have to process the unsorted “temp version” from the beginning of this year. And I might have some more physical albums to add.

Japanese sentence diagram TeX

Also a thing I’ve been meaning to work on for years, also simple. (I mean, not that I actually know TeX, but the principle is pretty simple and well-understood.) Incidentally, the point of that is for flashcards, and with Fedora’s dropping Anki, I should find another flashcard program. Mnemosyne?

That seems like a prety good list. Of course, the odds are that I’ll ignore it completely, opting instead to wander around and be touristy, or else work on something not in the list at all.

In some ways it’s my favorite medium, but I really am absurdly bad at blogging.

So my plan was to go to Japan, set up a quick site, blog extensively. That didn’t really happen. I have got a bunch of entries written, but my choice of Hugo as the backend has led to a few snags. (I’m not saying other choices wouldn’t have caused issues of their own. It’s fundamentally unknowable, as far as I’m concerned.)

The basic stumbling block I’ve got really revolves around integration of images. I’m just. . . not completely happy with what I’ve got, and it’s a real problem, especially since I’m not sure I can really be happy with what the web’s converged on. Like, the generally accepted JS lightbox convention. . . is to my mind a mistake, but it’s what people want, and familiarity trumps most other UI concerns.

Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. I just thought I should, like, update, if only to verify that the pipeline is still working.

It’s not much, but the moss and ferns work for me. The sliver of light, the worn concrete – it’s an aesthetic.

Second test post for hugo – this one’s using the local create, then push to production with git hook workflow.

It’s a popular workflow because it’s so obvious, so very much the sort of thing that computers should be doing to save us from toil. The fact that it’s still a surprising pain to set up is a bit of an indictment of our industry, but here we are. “It is, as people used to say, to my unending annoyance, what it is.”

As I seem to say fairly often, my approach to blogging, and in fact many things to do with computers, is frankly stone-age. My very sentence there, its implication of computers as discrete objects, feels rather old-fashioned.

Tap tap. Is this thing on?