life updates

I've been pretty busy recently. A semester of classes is winding down and final exams are coming up. There are a bunch of things I would like to work on right now, mostly this site, but I just don't have the time.

My partner celebrated her birthday recently which was fun. I took her out for sushi and we had dinner with friends. Sadly, I have no pictures of either of these because I keep forgetting to take any.

Speaking of my partner, she really likes cooking. Due to a work event and my moral obligation to not waste food, I recently came into the possession of way too many apples so she made a delicious tart tatin.

I was offered a summer research position that will pretty much double my expected income over the next few months which is nice. I am also registered for my next (and last full) semester of classes. It is going to be a lot more full compared to what I had originally planned which is making me nervous. My last two semesters have felt pretty tough due to me having absolutely no free time, but my next is going to be even busier. Thinking ahead I really don't know how I'll handle it.

new games

Recently the new Tomodachi Life came out and I have been playing it a lot. I loved the one on the 3DS and generally am a fan of Miis so I was really excited for it. Right now my island hosts me and some people close to me, Hatsune Miku and Kasane Teto, and the main cast of Watanare. I typically obsess over making Miis that look exactly right but towards the end of making my first batch I kind of gave up so Kaho looks pretty off but we are living with it.

A new Splatoon game is coming out, how exciting! I used to be a massive Splatoon fan but stopped playing partway through three's update cycle. For the first year or so I played every single Salmon Run shift, like it was a real job. The new game seems to just be more Salmon Run which isn't disappointing, though I do hope they actually explain and expand on salmonid lore in-game. It is pretty clear that they aren't ok, and at the end of Splatoon Two's lifecycle there was art posted explicitly saying "save our salmonids" but nothing happened with that for the entirety of three. I am in the camp of being disappointed by Three's story so I hope Raiders can pick up some of that slack. Since the new trailer I have been playing and thinking about Splatoon Three a lot more and my opinions on the story have risen slightly, but mainly due to me filling in the gaps with my own ideas or assumptions and I don't think that necessarily makes me want to give points back to the game itself.

Here is a picture of my character. I love them. They wear the goggles, rain boots, and heavy jacket because they don't like getting dirty what with the ink all over the ground and being shot at them.

this website

I want to completely redo my formatting here. After finishing up this draft earlier in the month I started looking at JavaScript tutorials but soon saw a bunch of other sites that really inspired me and now I want to make this look pretty. I have drawn up a few plans and have been working on a new style sheet for a few weeks now but it's slow going. It can be really frustrating when you have an idea in your head but don't have the skills or knowledge to actually implement it. I understand that I need to study a lot more to implement something like a comment system but even just small changes to the format I have been struggling with. I have spent the last week trying to make a horizontal navigation bar and have no idea why the width and spacing aren't working like I want them too. What I have now feels duct-taped together, like if someone which actual knowledge in HTML/CSS looked at it they would cry.

The thought of a web developing expert looking over my site has been on my mind a fair bit lately. I would like not only the front end of my writing to be neat but the backend as well and I am not really sure how to best do so. Right now I am writing pretty much all my main CSS in one style sheet but it seems like some sites I like have a separate style element for each file. I keep having to ask myself questions like "where do I put this" and "how do I do this" and smaller things like "what order should these go in" while having absolutely no frame of reference as to what is considered the norm. I think I should probably put a lot more thought into my own desires for my own method of organization before I continue developing this thing.

The main site I am drawing inspiration from for my current formatting tests is sweetfish.site. I think it looks so beautiful and its content is pretty much exactly what I had in mind when I started this project. I also really like evy.garden as an example of the minimalist nature I want to capture and I think that style is more like how I prefer things of mine to be. Right now my brain keeps switching between which one of the two styles I like most. I hope to one day have a site I like as much as I like these...now that I am sitting down and thinking about it, it is probably best to go the minimal route...time to redo a few weeks worth of work...

conclusion

Things have been busy but there is a lot of stuff I look forward to, like new games coming out and being able to work on personal projects again.