what i mean:

toolchain bloat is everywhere in so-called modern development. while it's fun to laugh about node_modules being huge or rust taking a while to compile, isn't it a problem? not an inconvenience, a problem.

the personal computer was supposed to be the great machine that would empower humanity—and it has, just not in the way we thought. the dream of the personal computer was that anyone could have access to the most powerful force multiplication technology ever devised. and while massive corporations reap the harvest of their digital empowerment, the tools for true individual empowerment are locked away, hidden behind the incantations of a special few.

microsoft windows was, originally, designed to let you use your work's computer, not your own computer. the dominant way to access computation wasn't built for its user to control it. if what one owns boots up to BASIC, they might pick up a little bit of programming. they might even master it. if what they own boots to some friendly GUI, if the keys to programming are made obscure, hidden behind a second purchase that a layperson would never think to make, there's a good chance they never will.

of course, in the modern era, we've seen the endpoint of this. far from an instrument to universal empowerment, the smartphone is a computer bound and gagged. it is a machine for consumption and (ostensibly) communication, nigh-impossible to use for anything not dictated by someone else, by an "app". it is a machine opposed, fundamentally, to individual empowerment. it is a thing which its buyers cannot own.

of course, it is better on the more traditional computer. the internet overflows with guides for the installation of a linux distribution, and countless nerds would be happy to help someone who knows not the mystic rites of the computer, to learn them and bask in newfound power. though one still needs to seek out digital empowerment, the resources one finds are plentiful and free.

but what resources? what might a newbie flock to? there are many lightweight ways to build software. but The Future is being built in rust. The Future is being built in typescript. The Future is being built on expensive, powerful computers, with hefty toolchains only tamed by high core counts and swathes of ram. The Future is being built by people whose work supplies them with machines that make the bloat of their code invisible to them.

in $current_year a smartphone, a decent one, will run you at least maybe $500. a laptop, a nice one, will run you at least maybe $1000. it is impossible, in this world to live without a phone. it is possible to live without a computer. if the choice is between a cheap phone and nice laptop, or nice phone and cheap laptop—or no laptop at all—what choice do you think someone strapped for cash would make?

what might it feel like, for the novice, to want to learn the tools with which The Future is made, and find that they run painfully slow. what might it feel like, to realize that the tools of The Future aren't for you?

I do not know. I am not a novice, nor am I particularly deprived of speedy computing hardware. but I have spent the last few months on a limited machine, a modified chromebook with a celeron-class chip and 4GB of RAM, and in that time I have come to resent rust.

I resent the arrogance with which it forces its bloated toolchain on me, and I resent the code which forces me to run it. I resent the obscenely long compiles for even simple things. I have had no real issues with writing code in C, in python, in dlang, in perl, in tcl, even in java. but I feel, overwhelmingly, like the language in which The Future will be built, and in which the past will be rewritten, is not for me. not like this, anyway.

the classism of it all is striking. but I suppose this is typical of the march of "progress".

so, on Oct. 8, I broke my right wrist. happened 1 week to-the-day after my laptop crapped out (she's back, by the way). I am right dominant, so this put me out of commission for a bit! I have most of my fine motor skills back now (thumb is still pretty tight but eh), but it is non-weight-bearing atm.

the mandatory hiatus has caused a lot of problems, and for reasons I may be busier than usual (they said it couldn't be done!) for a bit.

anyways!

Recent Things

I wrote some fanfiction that I am actually proud of. it's short, for ducktales 2017, and very angsty. find it on my ao3.

I participated some in the fandom_empire mahjong event this year, and will probably participate in more as time goes on. despite my complete lack of EF recently, I have had a lot of fun writing stuff for it.

I have completely fallen in love with the Tcl programming language! I haven't discussed it here but a few of my recent projects have been written in it. I have several drafts of a post discussing why I think its design is as good as it is, so look forward to that when I can put some brainpower to it!

bluesky is huge now! I have some thoughts on that that I will probably be posting sometime, but I think on a protocol level it blows activitypub out of the water in a few ways (...and falls short in others). anyways, as an exercise in both writing more Tcl and learning atproto, I wrote a bluesky feed in tcl! currently the websocket implementation is a bit broken, but the problem only appears once every N hours, so I have yet to source the cause. other than that, it is a solid reimplementation of the official bluesky template (typescript) in Tcl, with additional moderation tooling. if you play with it, let me know!

mk.aleteoryx.me died.

this was preventable, but I was recovering from a broken wrist and my VPS provider nuked things the day I finally had it in me to try and pay for shit. I had the money the whole time, my bank are just assholes about foreign transactions.
I have come to terms with it.

I also lost my bookwyrm, peertube, and owncast instances.
I have come to terms with it.

I don't have an easy way to send gravestones for any of this, and I don't plan to for now.

there's not much else to say here, it just sucks. I think I have a spare backup of mk.aleteoryx.me's database somewhere, but not the uploaded files. ultimately the lesson is to never use VPS hosts that can't autobill (like the last one), nor ones that can't bill without 15 minutes on hold with the bank. I will not be saying which company it was, as I do not want to shame them for what was ultimately more problems on my end.

still, I wish they had sent me something other than "we might delete stuff :)" followed by me having a panic attack at the login panel.

I got a rugged laptop! a Dell Latitude 5404 Something Something Something. they are cheap as shit on eBay and with a bit extra in spare parts I will have a laptop that can take a sledgehammer for ~$200. I am currently considering elementaryOS as the operating-system-of-choice for it.

( politics :) )

that's about it. I'm going to sleep now, and then I have stuff to get done tomorrow.

I've been ~aleteoryx, g'night.

I did some cool stuff to the site the last while.

fix /downloads2/ icons

so, being that I stopped using mod_autoindex, but wanted to keep the aesthetic, I knew I was gonna have to port the icon functionality. for funsies, I decided to make it as fast as possible, and I did that with a small compiler.

I've written a simple config format that has rules for all the ways you might wanna match on a filename, with added support for MIME magic sniffing. this gets transpiled into a PHP script, stored with a name of the MD5 hash of the path to the icon file, and that PHP script just returns a function that will perform the various checks on a file. this is pretty fast!

this also emits roughly identical HTML to mod_autoindex, but with some spice in it to make it fit visually with the monospace. I should probably convert the buttload of style= attributes to proper CSS, but too lazy lol.

fix formatting

for the longest time, I'd had code to convert \n to a <br/>, but also css setup to not convert newlines to spaces, and it was basically just causing problems for formatting. to make life easier, I now have some cool formatting preprocessing rules in place to make stuff nicer to write for me. I haven't checked in on certain downloads pages to make sure they're alright, but ehhh it's a later problem.

the main thing is that I should be more easily able to guarantee parity between the current theme and other future themes.

future plans

that's the main thing I wanted to talk about, but I thought I'd also mention future plans for the site.

I'm going to be building, like I said in an earlier post, a nicer main frontend. the current system is going to become a cute little downloads+whatever else page. I've added stuff to the code to let me enable the index view on any directory, and am planning on moving stuff to a second place soon, probably the www subdomain.

I really want to use the old styling of the website for something artsy, but I'm not sure what yet. I still have it kicking around on my laptop, and it'll probably make a return under a different domain. I have a few domains that would do well with the eye theme, most of which under the .observer TLD.

that's all, folks

I finally fixed the downloads page!!!

I had been really, really lazy in first making it, and called to a mod_autoindex local endpoint. At a certain point, config refactoring broke this very very badly, and I disabled the downloads page altogether. It's back up now, with a table thrown together in PHP like the rest of the site. I'm going to re-add the icons at some point, I just haven't had the energy to yet.

New download!

Part of the motivation for fixing up the downloads code was the release of a """plugin""" for wpren. wpren's design means you can swap out files in wallpaper directories under its nose, and it will just keep chugging, which means wallpapers that can react and change themselves are trivial to implement.

It's a tool for randomly selecting a wallpaper from a pool of options, with support for tagging them by a value. This will only update a given wallpaper directory, and I mainly set it up this way as having 5 new wallpapers seemed a tad excessive in terms of probability distribution.

I've started putting static wallpapers in circulation on my system, and this reflects that, as it currently only supports static wallpapers. I may release an animated version later down the line.

That's all.

I'll post again sometime soon, expect something morbid if I can work up writing energy!

Just 2 things today.

Revamped comics.marigold.town buttons!

I finally added buttons for negative tags to the UI. I also moved some stuff around so that the add button is separate from the tag name itself.

Also just stopped using the buttonborder color in things, and swapped it for #767676, as that's what it is on dark mode Vivaldi. Should've done that earlier as it's nonstandard and vendor-specific.

In general I just really like how it looks now. It's very much so inspired by e.x. Danbooru but the massive cloud of tags makes it look super chaotic and I'm really happy with the general feel of the interface.

On that note, I also added the webcomic Byoe & Nemu. It's really goddamn weird?? I really like it.

Reorganized and added to downloads.

I reorganized the Downloads folder on my site some. I sorted out some htaccess issues and moved some of the stuff into a utils/ subdirectory. I also added the script that I use to sync data between soft serve and cgit.

I also added general licensing and copyright notices, both to the folder and to the scripts contained within.

Coming soon: I'll probably write some code around melon's BBSS standard, cause why not.

The first big update:

The new content system is up!!

This is a completely different system to the old SHTML-based one. For all the charm of SHTML, it's far too verbose for my continued use of it. The new system is written in PHP, and can accept multiple formats, as well as supporting theming. I'm not sure if/when I'm going to get around to making the code for this public, as it's kinda a rat's nest implementation-wise. You'd need to have identical Apache VHost conf for it to work because of how it handles the downloads page, among other things.

That all being said, I'll briefly document the rough design here, for anyone who wishes to copy me(please don't this thing is so janky).

Entrypoint

The entire system is served through handler.php, a script which manages the theming, formatting, and whatever else.

When it loads, it first initializes Parsedown, Mustache, and imports simplehtmldom. These libraries get used at various stages in the game later on. After that, it checks the cookies for theming and JavaScript opt-in data. These will be user settable down the line. Once it's located the theme the user has configured(or fallen back to a default), it loads

The Content

This is one of 3 things. For static pages, it supports Markdown and HTML, and in the case where I need to be more dynamic, it supports PHP.

Once the source file has been found(I let Apache handle the filename resolution for the most part), the system checks for a .nh file. NH for No-Handle. If the system finds one of these, it will stop everything, set the MIME type for the file, dump it over the wire, and exit. What happens next is up to the file extension, which can be one of

.html / .md

Markdown and HTML are handled almost identically. First, the aforementioned Mustache library is used to provide them with limited templating facilities. I don't register many handlers, as it stands, but this will likely change down the line. The crucial things here are the ability to query whether JavaScript and cookies are enabled. Not in the browser, mind you. One of the core things I want for this site is the ability for a user to opt-in to those things. This will end up leading to disabled links and pages, down the line, I'm sure. That's not a bad thing.

If it was a Markdown file, at this point Parsedown gets run over the resulting contents of the file, and the templating process is done.

Almost done, anyways. Because files only have page contents, and can't control the HTML <head>, I need an out-of-band way to set the title, and it would be nice to have a system for disabling theming per-page, without disabling the templating or markdown system altogether. This comes in the form of a simple directive system. It strips lines prefixed with $! and does stuff based on them. The following directives are supported:

• $!title <title> - Uses the rest of the line as the page title.
• $!notheme - Disables the theme completely, only outputting the result of the templating/markdown steps.
• $!noextras - Disables headers/footers, while keeping around the theme's HTML scaffold.

PHP

PHP scripts are simply executed. The Output Buffering library is used to take the stdout of the PHP script. Early on, the script was expected to return the title, but with the addition of notheme and noextras, the script is now passed a set of functions with which it can set the 3 main properties.

Themes

Once that's all finished up, the theme gets run. Themes consist of the following files, which are processed in the following order:

1. /manifest.yml - Currently, this just stores if a theme requires JavaScript to function or not. If a user has their theme set to one that requires JavaScript, but has yet to opt-in, they will be given a fallback theme.
2. /preprocess.php - Allows the script to make modifications to the HTML content. In the current system this is primarily used to generate the ASCII-art <h1>; tags. This is the main source of jank.
3. /extra_ctx.php - This allows the theme to generate data to include in the markdown for the theme's template. The current theme uses it to generate the optionally disabled links in the header, although I'd like to move that to mustache later on.
4. /template.mustache - The actual mustache template! It gets given the extra context and the processed content, as well as the global helpers and some request metadata. The output of this will get sent back to the requester.

That's it!

That's the basic flow of the system, although I've left out some stuff. The downloads page is implemented by forcing all requests to a downloads.php file that does... a lot... of stuff! I delegate to mod_autoindex in there. Figure it out!

Fediring join pending!

My first(second) webring! Technically I'm in the Melonking Surf Club ring too, but I have yet to figure out how to incorporate it into the current design. I've sent in the Fediring join request, though, so that's fun. The buttons are on the hompage, awaiting activation, and when they're up, I'll be properly in! It's fun!

That's all from me!

College has been busy, and I have other things I should be working on than my website, but this has been clawing at my brain for days and I needed to get it all done. Be sure to email me with any issues!