Welcome!

I thought I could do a little celebration for my 19th birthday, and since that's today and I don't like birthday parties or gifts, I thought that maybe setting up a blog would be cool. Blog posts are written in Markdown and converted with a script to Nostr events of kind 30023 (long-form content) as per NIP-23. If you're viewing this on my website, welcome! If you're viewing this as a note from Nostr, also welcome, and I plan to add a comments system Soon™, so any replies written to this post should appear on the website in future. At the time of writing this post I haven't actually tested the publication to Nostr relays. I hope it works. If I a link to another of my blog posts in a blog post, it'll link to the website version rather than the Nostr version for any nerds that don't have a Nostr client installed.

Previously, I posted any long-form content I wanted to make public on my GitHub Gists profile. Given that this exists now I likely won't put any more posts there, and it wouldn't make much sense to put this post there either. I've ported all of the posts I've made there over to this blog, which in total is 40 monthly updates and the Bootstrap considered harmful post (which I think is still true though rather idiosyncratic. It ought to be updated with a context disclaimer at the beginning).

As usual, there will be typos since I don't usually have a spellchecker installed on whatever IDE I have open at the time I want to write a post. Posts will be written in Markdown because (1) it's supported by Nostr in NIP-23 and (2) it's what all my existing posts are written in. Why not AsciiDoc? I wish.

Also, the word "blog" never felt right to me for reasons I can't identify. The section holding these posts on my website is called 'Posts', however I suppose I could call it a 'weblog' or similar. Porting over the monthly updates is nice because that means it definitely isn't empty to start with. It's nice unless you're looking for something else, so a way to filter them based on their tags could be cool. In the first ever monthly update 42 months ago, I mentioned that having a blog for long-form posts was something I was considering, and with the Dex Display font finally working for the post titles (now including numbers, better kerning, and more punctuation!) I was able to finally get around to it.

By my rambling, you may have gleaned something else, which is that sometimes I just like to write. A lot of my posts are published in the early hours of the morning, which is typically peak thinking time for me. Like a lot of arrogant teenagers I have big ideas about programming and philosophy and politics etc. as well as just fun discoveries I'd like to share. Writing is a good way for me to add structure to my thoughts as an intermediary between the completely unstructured world of neural activity and the completely structured world of code. It's also a good way to log and look back to remember details which otherwise would have disappeared from my mind. The monthly updates work really well for that. Years are cool and all, though my brain seems to work in months.

Another place I write is the Mercury docs, however that serves a very specific purpose to be useful to Mercury Suite users. Sometimes it's nice to write without purpose at all or requirements. I hope to use this space to teach myself a bit more about the writing process as well as to give a little bit of a deeper view into my mind, even if the only reader is a future me.

Have a good rest of your May.