I did some more work on the site today! It's starting to look cool. I think I'm going crazy though--way back in college, I took an HTML/Java course and I could have sworn there was a way to streamline headers and footers by just linking to an external file on your server. So instead of having to edit the footer on like 50 HTML files, you just edit "footer.html" and then all 50 pages that call on this footer file will display that updated content or whatever. Every site I google insists that you gotta use PHP or something. Maybe the thing I'm thinking of got deprecated? Or knowing programmers, it's named something that makes lots of cultural sense but zero practical sense. Like mipmapping. Or codec. Or beziér curves.
I bet it was iframes. I remember those being kind of a Frankenstenian pain in the ass but I think they accomplish exactly what I'm describing. I'll have to look into that.
No recent Xgram developments. Maybe later this weekend though. I'm going kind of stir crazy and it's affecting my ability to be productive.
For context, I rent a room in the backwoods. It's a small room, so for space purposes my TV is also my monitor, and I have a lapdesk with a mouse and 65% keyboard. My bed is my chair. I have a back pillow to try and maintain something resembling decent spinal structure, but overall, it's not a productive setup; rather, it's the very definition of "shitting where you eat."
I'm gonna start looking at a studio or something a bit more spacious, with a kitchen. I used to live in the city, but after COVID I got priced out of most markets and had to scale everything way back. Saving up has been hard. I don't anticipate I'll be able to afford anything nice right now, but I live in a relatively safe area. I just need to make sure I have an insurance company that I can easily tackle and pin down if I need to file a theft claim or something.
I guess I'll talk a little about Xgram since I don't have a project page up just yet. It's basically Picross. Use the numbers to fill in spaces on a grid and make a picture. There's no big gimmicks or anything, unless you consider "better UI and also the only non-Flash one on Newgrounds" to be good selling points. That said, I'm using Xgram to dip my feet into making nonogram puzzles, because it directly leads into another project I've been working on for much longer.
Xgram itself has been in the works for quite some time now: about a year to this day, give or take a few months' break in February. The game has just left alpha and I'm now working on lots of QOL stuff. The game has a solid core gameplay loop (i.e. it's Picross and feels like Picross), a fairly deep puzzle creator with a custom painter, and a streamlined compression method for sending puzzles to your friends via text. The first Beta release will be largely feature complete, barring maybe some API integration, a minutae of accessibility and QOL tweaks, and compatibility with HTML5. That's right, we're deploying on Windows first for the Beta release.
That said, this game is designed to be as portable as possible, with lots of accessibility and control options. No ads, no microtransactions, no EULA. I want it to be one of the best free Picross games you can get, but I have a secret weapon that I think could make this game stand head and shoulders above anything else. It won't be in this Beta version that's coming, but it is the primary target of the following Beta build. I haven't seen any other picross game do this before and it will set my game apart by a country mile.
That's about all I have to say for now. Next time? Maybe I'll talk about microtasks. Or Windows. Or government conspiracies. Alright, I'm gonna go learn how to cook a Manwich.
Bodycam footage is weird. I want to write an article about cops later this week. I think there's room for nuanced criticism despite the fact everybody hates each other over this topic.
I did some more work on Xgram today. Just some OOP stuff.
Oh, I also made this site, hehe. I was inspired by an NG user who was using Neocities, and I remembered this video by You've Got Kat about the resurgence of "rinky dink" personal webpages and I wanted one for myself. Because yeah, Twitter and Facebook suck. It all sucks and I want to go back to monkey Internet where we were all just wide-eyed little dorks with a thick-ass HTML book on the desk and a hex color chart in our bookmarks. Long long ago as a little boy I dabbled with an Idiot's Guide to HTML but I didn't actually have a host to upload web pages to, let alone a personal Internet connection, let alone a working grasp of what the Internet actually was aside from that thing that let me download Nick clickables to my parents' computer and argue with strangers about the dubious sexuality of SpongeBob SquarePants. I'm barely a few hours into this whole ordeal, but it already feels loads more intellectually fulfilling than the modern social media experience of uploading a banner jpeg, linking to my socials and my OnlyFans, and then calling it a day.
I'm gonna stop here because I could probably type forever. It's getting late and I gotta get to bed.