Hi there! I haven’t posted here or changed anything in forever! In fact it’s been so long that WordPress threw all the text through some updater thing and messed everything up so now there’s random “”s and “’”s everywhere. It’s like the text equivalent of moss growing or something. That’s what I get for not maintaining this blog I guess. I’m sorry. I can’t maintain everything I build all the time.
[EDIT: Ok at first I thought the original base theme, Blue Kino, was corrupted and not allowing me to make edits…but thinking about it, the new blocks editor for WordPress might be overriding some of the styling code editable on my side. Darnit. Well, sometimes you gotta abandon things >_< You did well, old friend.]
That said, I want to revive this thing. That means a full redesign and updates…but I may not be cleaning up all the text weirdness on the posts. I’ll definitely clean up the About page, 404 page, etc…but for everything else, you’ll have to deal with all of this.  I’m very sorry 🙂 . Maybe it’ll clean itself up automatically sometime, and maybe this paragraph will no longer make any sense. IDK.
After I redesign the blog, I will be trying to open this up a little to members of my family. This blog was originally supposed to be a family blog actually, but…I was the only one who posted, and…nobody else got to it, and I wanted to post a lot so…thats what ended up happening. Yes, nobody else has posted except for one person. Isn’t that funny. >_<
Now for quick reviews of everything that’s been happening…
It looks like the last time I posted here, Donald Trump was screwing everything up. Thankfully he’s gone now, and Biden is slowly putting the pieces back together. If DT ever gets elected again, I am going to laugh. While crying.
The discovery of AI large language models! They’re basically complex language/word databases with the natural ability to programmatically extract data from itself and respond to any input (these databases and similar ones are termed “neural networks”), and are usually conditioned (trained, with almost no human input), by feeding it a huge amount of text from the internet, to predict the next word in a piece of text. But magic happens when you condition them to follow instructions, because now you have an assistant that does not rely on manually programmed rules, and you can have it do anything, by just chatting to it in natural language! You just have to tell it to respond in a format normal computers can understand (like telling it to respond in JSON or Python), and then another component can read it and run the code! It’s kind of amazing, and I’m definitely going to be using these networks to help me with the redesign I’m doing. The progress in developing these things has been super fast, and is only going to get faster as these networks get better and start to be used in developing even better networks!
I’ve really been getting into VRChat. It’s a really neat social platform that you can access via desktop or VR! It’s really been helpful for me…it gets me over my introversion actually…
BUT, I have to admit I haven’t been playing it recently very often. It’s probably because VRChat decided mods were horrible, and so sliced the community in half by adding a wrapper that destroyed compatibility with mods without really giving a warning. I stopped playing much after that, expecting VRChat to slowly die a painful death (although I had confidence in the team, the more I looked at the freaking world news…). But nothing really seemed to be spiraling (further) out of control…so I’m trying to get back into it. But my brain got fogged up in the meantime. Don’t read the news blindly. Please >_<
So that’s what’s been going on! Kind of a lot. Again, sorry for not posting here in a while, and sorry for allowing WordPress to do whatever the heck it did to the text, I think it was a database format change. Probably.
The redesign I’m going for will be a skeuomorphic design, referencing real-world objects. It will be as light as possible to avoid overloading browsers. I think flat design is a little bad…it doesn’t allow the brain to use the tricks it’s learned in the real world to recognize the things it wants to do. It doesn’t feel as comfortable (to me anyway) to navigate flat UIs…of course you can color different elements easier so that they jump out…but your brain is almost forced to recognize them. It’s not what the brain was designed for…
It’s hard to articulate what feels wrong about flat design for me. I know that Steve Jobs had to work hard to get people to understand what he wanted. The previous design of this blog tried to do a lot with moving-when-hovered-over elements to kind of create a forced skeuomorphic approach while still using flat design (is that close to neumorphism?)…but I now think it was the wrong approach. It still forced the brain to consciously search for what it wanted to do, everything had basically the same style.
I know why flat design is so common…it’s easy: The background is white, buttons are black, don’t even mess with rounded corners that much, lines are dividers, some basic 4 or 5-color palette like you’re designing for a Game Boy system or whatever. Of course sometimes it’s more complex than that, but the overall style is still really simple, and sometimes it’s not even done well, so you have to really search the page to find what you’re looking for.
I don’t outright hate flat design. It’s a UI, it has functionality, so it works. Apple handles flat design the best (although the buttons without borders are um…) But skeuomorphism is better for the brain, in my opinion.
That’s it for now. See you guys later!