my name is bruce, and these are my stories.
i'm a college student in the humanities with a digital sociology interest.
i am currently, in no particular order:
- learning systems programming, generally
i had avoided creating a website for a long time given that i had no concept of what i wanted out of the experience outside of "a place to post". i'm now learning a series of programming languages to build fluency from the ground up. part of my journey to figure out what "digital sociology" means to me.
my first program i've created by myself is a Perl script called "perl to publish", which translates YAML frontmatter, kinder on the eyes and legible by Obsidian, into the TOML frontmatter more favoured in programming.
- exploring multiplicity
recursive self propagating personal folklores
- stewing over the state of things
what's too pent-up and personal to pass off as schoolwork. though hot takes are gauche
- homelabbing and self hosting
i hate networking. i'm just here for the free stuff. this website is hosted on a mini PC homeserver named 'perch'. a porygon plushie is always sat on top of it, guarding the premises.
this website currently houses 41 minutes and 8983 words of reading material.
friends
the blogs
these posts are likely to vary in length (and quality) as i feel out my preferred communication methods. click here for a page that will populate as tags and pages are created.
- site's up, brief reflection, professing my intent to learn zig
- pangolin self-hosting : my struggle to demystify the black magic of networking
- perl to publish : perl as a first language
- it's pretty hard being mentally ill online right now
- first post
as i'm writing this, i'm just finishing up what (should be) the final bit of maitenence / upkeep tooling for my site. when i started this, i thought hosting the site at a backup sync folder on my home server would be a good idea. but it's turned out that doing it that way results in my site's public folder periodically deleting itself if it doesn't win the race condition between the Zola build command and Syncthing's sync check interval. so sometimes my site just disappears from my machine. cool stuff.
when i first purchased my small, featureless, grey mini-PC box, i had and have all these grand ambitions of all the public services i would build it to offer, whatever those services are, just to prove that i could do it. a lot of my lead-up towards moving and going to college, living on my own as an adult for the first time, has been defined by this beautiful latent now starving passion to challenge myself to learn new things about these machines that i've loved all my life.
in this maiden programming post, i test my mettle imparting the experience of gaining new knowledge without completely awashing the reader in jargon or in unearned programming confidence.
stewing, rumination, complex traumatic stress disorder, and seething. it feels now like what i've spent my entire life maladaptively escaping through this medium of the internet is now what everyone you know uses it for.
writing is not something that comes to me naturally. for most of what i feel i'm good at --- read: most of what i allow myself to do --- feels like something i have to do. anything i do, it's because i have to do it. this has amounted to little more than art and sleeping for as long as i can remember.