now

here’s what i’m up to at the moment (inspired by loads of other web pages doing the same thing)

2026-10-09

since starting this website, i’ve been wanting to do something cooler than just plain colours for the background, and literally the day after my last now post, i finally got to work on making an animated twinkling star shader for the background of this page (which you’re seeing right now if you’re on desktop!)

i won’t lie, i haven’t touched GLSL in a long, LONG while, and when you’ve spent over a decade in the OOP mines and getting used to that process, trying to write a shader which is (for all intents and purposes) fully procedural and stateless is a pretty massive paradigm shift; instead of being able to tell a star object “okay draw here pls” you just get a pixel and say “okay by my calculations you are this part of this star, so be this colour” and that took… quite some time to get used to again.

on the plus side, i discovered a new (to me) mathematical way to express this kind of star, so that’s cool ig!

so all that said, after having been through probably one of the busiest weeks in my recent life i love recording day :’), i FINALLY had enough time to sit down and hook all that up today aaaaand… honestly it doesn’t look as good as i had originally imaged (and mobile is a lost cause rn), but i still like the look so i’ll keep it :p

otherwise my homelab has also stalled due to work and uni stuff, but it’s in a good enough place so like i’m not pressed about it, just uh. remember how i said i “might” just set up jellyfin “today” three weeks ago?

SPEAKING OF unfulfilled promises, i signed up to the B1.1 japanese course after all because why not, so i have a LOT of catching up to do over the weekend. time to put my disdain for anki flash cards to the ultimate test: CRUNCH.

goals

• catch up on japanese so i don’t look like a buffoon the first week
• take some time off work to play shit with friends (i managed to convince my best friend irl to play deadlock somehow??)
• balance my studies with my job a bit better
• remember to do hand exercises so i hopefully don’t develop RSI my hands have been tingly for a while now

media

videos

not much going on here this month ngl, but shoutouts to second brain cringelords for reminding me that not everything some guy says online has “helped them keep track of everything” is even REMOTELY worth my time

music

• ヨエコ – 沈める街 cheesy michael open up the door~
• Ninajirachi & Porter Robison – WannaCry kind of becoming an all-timer ngl
• Skybreak – STREET GARDEN
• nicopatty – Komodo Dragon roblox soundtracks do kinda go hard tho

text

• How NAT Traversal Works – Tailscale

also do people keep around an archive of these, or are they meant to be fleeting