Pearbosc

Life Log #5

2026-06-29T00:00:00-05:00

Still sick. Took Thursday and Friday off
I was planning to watch the WHA finale with some friends this weekend, but we had to postpone because of me getting sick. :(
I’ve been listening to the FE:3H soundtrack a lot today (here)
Still prepping for Art Fight. Finally drew some stuff
Annecy happened, but I haven’t watched any of the films from it yet
I reeeally don’t want to go to work tomorrow

Rambling about more site stuff

2026-06-28T00:00:00-05:00

I’m sick. This is another post about site updates and plans. (I’m still procrastinating on Art Fight aaaaah)

I implemented some of the steps from IndieWebify.Me (web sign in, h-card, h-entry). I got some of the stuff for receiving webmentions setup (based on the info here), but I need to see some more example implementations because I still don’t really get how this works. I’m also going to try sending myself some webmentions to test it.
I did a complete overhaul of the CSS grid layout to fix some issues that had been bothering me. The sidebar is now broken up into individual sections, and the entire layout is more mobile responsive. I used Layoutit! for this and it’s AWESOME holy shit.
Through that redesign, I removed the mobile hamburger menu that I hated. The old hamburger menu I had on my mobile layout was CSS-only, but I learned later that this isn’t very accessible and you should use JavaScript for hidden menus (icr the source for this off the top of my head). With the new design, the navigation section is flattened into a header row on mobile layouts, which requires no JavaScript and imo is more visually interesting. It’s possible this is also not mobile friendly, but I’m not sure how to check. I’ll need to look around for tools to help check accessibiltiy.
I changed the headers on the side sections to be a little more visually interesting
Did some general cleanup, reorganization, etc.
Added some extremely lazy styling for code snippets for this post. It’s hard to make code snippets for a site that’s already using a monospace font, so I’ll have to look for some examples.

Art Gallery + Feed Brainstorming

I think the next big feature I’d like to add is an art gallery. I’m lazy, and if this site gets too complex to manage I know I’ll stop using it, so I need the process for organizing and sharing the art to be simple and utilize Pelican’s existing features as much possible. I’m not sure if there are any Pelican plugins out there for this—and I will check—but I’d prefer not to use a plugin if possible.

The first thing I’m going to try is creating markdown files under content/articles/art/ for each artwork in the gallery. content/articles/ is where I normally store blog posts, and with my current config setup the subdirectory name (art/ in this case) will become the post category (another example: an uncategorized post like this one goes under content/articles/uncategorized/, and yes I had to explicitly make “uncategorized” a category).

Normally these blog posts have some yaml like this (this is the actual yaml for this post):

---
Title: "Rambling about more site stuff"
Author: Pear
Date: 6/28/26
Tags:
    - Meta
    - Tech
---

But you can basically add any metadata here. Some of the stuff you can add here will be understood by Pelican (like the “tag” entries here are turned into tag pages) but if you add custom fields here you can access and display those in the jinja template. So what I’m thinking is I could do something like this (and this may not be syntactically correct):

---
Title: Whatever the art is titled idk
Author: Pear
Date: 1/1/26
Summary: Summary??
Template: art
Thumbnail: thumbnail.png
Images:
    - file_name_1.png
    - file_name_2.png
Alt:
    - Alt text 1
    - Alt text 2
Tags:
    - Example tag
    - Another example tag
---

I could have a custom art template configured here (Template: art—Pelican will understand this is an override of the default blog post template) and that custom art template could display the images under the Images tag along with the corresponding alt text under Alt (or maybe there’s a better way of formatting this). This would let me have posts with individual images and posts with multiple images (comics, sketchbook stuff). Lastly, I could use Thumbnail to display a smaller thumbnail preview in the gallery.

If this works, the benefits of this setup are:

I can use automation to update the gallery HTML instead of manually writing changes (re: I’m lazy).
I can use Pelican’s built-in filtering for blog posts to filter and display anything under the “art” category—this would be used for the automated gallery updates, but I can use this outside of the gallery page.
I can include new art in my atom feed and have an art only feed.

Some other future changes I’m considering

Anticlimactic to put this after my art gallery idea but whatever

OC pages (I was hoping to do this for Art Fight but I think it’s too late now)
Shrine pages for media/characters I like? And maybe my cat
Guestbook?? I’m too intimidated to set one up right now but I hope to in the future once I have more stuff on here. I was looking at Atabook but now I’m wondering if I can use webmentions for this?

Okay that’s it I’M SO TIRED OF COUGHING AND SNEEZING

I styled my web feed (while I still can)

2026-06-24T00:00:00-05:00

This is my first UNCATEGORIZED blog post! Not one of my weekly update posts!

A couple of days ago, I stumbled upon this post by Cassidy Williams (cassidoo.co) explaining how you can style an RSS/Atom feed using XSL (eXtensible Stylesheet Language) and was immediately intrigued. Since I’m procrastinating on Art Fight (whoops) I decided to take some time to style my web feed and wanted to make a blog post about the process and results.

I started by copying the XSL that Cassidy uses for her blog into my theme directory. Since she uses Astro and I use Pelican, I wasn’t able to copy her instructions for applying the XSL to my feed; fortunately, I found another Pelican user, Daniel, who’d already gone through this process, created a Pelican plugin, and made a blog post about how to use it. I installed the plugin and quickly got things working.

Except! The XSL I’d copied from Cassidy didn’t work right out of the box. The HTML elements and CSS from the XSL were displaying correctly, but the template wasn’t displaying any of my feed items. I compared her template with the template in Daniel’s blog post and realized it was because the syntax for selecting the feed attributes is different between Atom and RSS, which makes sense. I was able to copy Daniel’s example to get my feed items to display. Now it was time to add STYLING!

While brainstorming ideas for my site’s design (which is pretty basic right now and will hopefully evolve over time) I had taken inspiration from the works of William Morris. I like how the Arts and Crafts style feels elegant, cozy, grounded, and organic all at the same time, and I love the colors and natural elements in Morris’s work specifically. (I have some peel and stick wallpaper of one of his patterns in my apartment! Which I paid way too much money for but god it looks so fucking good in my entryway.) His art is in the public domain, so I had the idea to take the leafy frame from this art of his and change it up a little to make a frame for the explanatory text for my feed. I was worried the asymmetry of it would look weird, but I dunno, I like it!

Once this was done, I decided to make a “feeds” page to display the available feeds for my blog and replaced the “subscribe” link with a link to this new page. And that’s it! You can see it and the links to my feeds here.

But this blog post isn’t over yet. I noticed after doing all of this work that Mozilla is planning to remove XSLT support from Firefox (and Google is doing the same for Chrome), so this styling will abruptly stop working in the near future. :( When that happens, I may try out some alternatives. Or just go back to un-styled XML. Who knows. For now though, I really like it!

Life Log #4

2026-06-22T00:00:00-05:00

I’m going to remove the dates from the titles of these kinds of posts going forward and just increment a counter on them instead.

Happy Juneteenth!!
This last week was kind of a blur. I should start keeping better notes on what I did during the week for these posts. Whenever I’m documenting the things that I do in some way (either through a blog format like this or in a journal) I feel like I remember more of my day-to-day activities. It makes the week feel a little less routine and a little more special.
I’m still playing Shadow of the Colossus. I’m on the 12th colossus right now. This game is really cool, and I’m going to finish it, but the controls can be pretty frustrating at times. The 11th colossus was annoying.
Saturday was a good day. My girlfriend and I went to a gathering at a friend’s house; this friend had baked a (delicious) chocolate cheesecake and was celebrating her recent engagement. After that, we hung out with some other friends and watched the 2017 Wonder Woman movie (because we’ve been going through all of the DC movies in chronological order). It was worse than we remembered.
I’m doing Art Fight after all and working on some last minute refs and updates, hehehee. I’m on Team Tragedy.

Links

Also shared on Tumblr: I discovered yesterday that the FE fan site Fire Emblem Wars of Dragons has a full scan of The Art of Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I’ve seen scans of individual pages around, but never a full scan of the entire book in one place. For non-FE:3H fans: this is a big deal to me because it’s difficult to get a copy of this book, and it has a lot of cool concept art for the game that you can’t find anywhere else.
I linked a review of the manga Cocoon last week. It’s also getting an anime adaptation.
Please, Steal My Culture by baraho from Manifesto Jam 2026. A very blunt essay about how you should get over your fear of accidentally appropriating someone’s culture, and instead embrace cultural exchange to reduce white western homogeneity in media. I enjoyed reading this, but I’d be interested in hearing what people from different cultures think of it.
Obscurity is a Curation Problem by Kastel, also for Manifesto Jam 2026. An essay about how “obscurity” is a side effect of the mainstream’s failure to curate (and in 2026, “the mainstream” is basically “the algorithm”). I’m not sure if I understood the entire essay, but I agree that a) we’re too dependent on algorithms to pick the media we engage with, and I think this is a problem because these algorithms aren’t intended to foster discussion or community and instead prioritize engagement with the platform for engagement’s sake; b) there is a learned helplessness in this (everyone complains about how we only use the same, like, 5 websites, but they don’t want to branch out) and we need to go out and find more curators ourselves.
In the comments of the above, Farfama linked his site Exhibit Play, which groups games into niche topics (Lesbian Bullet Hell, for example, which I will be checking out)
The Wii’s Horrifying Stalker: (CW body horror, jumpscares, blood) a video I enjoyed about the Nintendo Wii game Calling, and how it uses the Wii Message Board system to send creepy messages to the player. I love stuff like this that’s totally unique to the medium or platform. The crumpled, dirty letters from the horror game on the sterile Wii UI made me uneasy.
Two Van Gogh sunflower paintings and the events that transpired between them (CW for self-harm; it’s Van Gogh)
the girly wellness aesthetic as a white supremacist dog whistle
Chile turned to China for an undersea cable. The U.S. said no
A Juneteenth Treatise: or, Thoughts on Isekai’s Slavery Problem (content warnings at the top of the article). I haven’t read/watched enough isekai to be aware that it often included chattel slavery, so this was enlightening to read. I’m not sure how to feel about JK Haru, but this made me interested in at least reading the first volume to see how it approaches the relevant topics.
Ditch the term “wholesome” and consider using “nurturing” instead. I liked this for two reasons: first, I agree that “nurturing” is a better term because it’s describing the relationship the player character has to things in the game; and second, this reframing of the nurturing game as a kind of power fantasy is really insightful:

Nurturing describes the relationship that the player has with things, people, communities, and creatures in many different cozy or “wholesome” games. It also illuminates the power fantas[ies] that a lot of these games are actually fulfilling […] which are gendered and socially bounded in a way that makes them permissible for femme people to pursue. The fantasy of being a family head whom everyone relies on, the person who can solve everyone’s problems and is rewarded obediently every time with gratitude and love… that is a form of power that many, many people desire!

6/15/2026 Log

2026-06-15T00:00:00-05:00

I watched I am Frankelda on Saturday!! I love Frankelda!!!! And I especially love Cinema Fantasma and want to give them one billion dollars.
I saw Obsession on Sunday and… I really did not like it.
I installed a PS2 emulator on a whim and started playing Shadow of the Colossus. I love the game and have watched a couple of playthroughs, but this is my first time actually playing it.
Sounds like my upstairs neighbors are enjoying the World Cup (they can be a little annoying with the noise at times but hearing them yell GOOOOAAAALL is pretty funny)
My girlfriend made these black bean borgers. They were good. I recommend having them with pimiento cheese
My mouse has been missing some clicks and it’s driving me crazy.
Art Fight has 3 teams this year???

Manifestos I like from Manifesto Jam 2026 (so far)

There’ve been a lot more posted since I first checked out the submissions, so there are a lot I haven’t read. You can read them all here.

I Hate Your Cozy Game. What it sounds like.
Against Gratitude: Dialectics of Refusal. Fuck being thankful for the status quo.
Real Pride. A good one if you need some motivation to create.
Annafesto: a manifesto for one-page role-playing games by Anna Anthropy. I stopped playing TTRPGs in part because they always felt too complicated, so I think I need to give one-page games a try.

6/10/2026 Log

2026-06-10T00:00:00-05:00

I didn’t think I’d post again so soon, but it’s been a busy week and I want to ramble about things.

I really liked Backrooms! I’m going to make a separate post at some point with my thoughts.
At the beginning of the year, I had a small goal to make my first risograph print. I went into the city in late January for a risography workshop where I got a lot of helpful info and… I still haven’t actually done the damn thing. I’m a little worried about wasting money on it or being unhappy with the results, but I’ve got to start somewhere. The local printer I’m interested in only does CMYK printing, which is a little disappointing, but their pricing is good and it’s the most environmentally friendly option.
- Look at all these riso ink colors
I was working on an article with my thoughts on Deathloop (I loved it), but then I was reminded that Arkane Studios is owned by ZeniMax, which is owned by Xbox, which is owned by Microsoft, making it part of the BDS boycott, so sadly I will not be posting any more about it until the boycott is over. It was nice to see that Arkane’s union spoke up about the boycott, though.
Idk maybe I will do Art Fight……… I don’t kneeoww. If I do want to do it I need to get my shit together
Fortune’s Weave announcement on Tuesday (more thoughts below). I have really mixed feelings on it. I’m interested in seeing what they do with it, but I won’t be buying it. I think the way Nintendo treated and continues to treat Gary Bowser is unnecessarily cruel and I do not want to give them any more of my money. If it ends up being a good game, I may watch someone else play it or play it an alternative way.
June 12th…… Frankelda day is coming……

Fortune’s Weave Thoughts

I’m nervous that IntSys is going to ignore some of the lore they’ve already established for the sake of making a more marketable game. There’s been a lot of debate around the timeline since this reveal, and whether this game is a prequel, a sequel, or something else (like an alternate timeline). This was seemingly settled when the game was revealed to take place 300ish years after the events of Three Houses, but other fans were also quick to point out that Fódlan and Dagda may have different calendars (Fódlan canonically had a calendar reset in the past). There also may be some time travel involved? It’s all still very ambiguous at this point.

Oh yeah, the game was also revealed to take place in Dagda?? I don’t have any qualms with that and I think it will be a net positive for the lore to have a game set outside of Fódlan for the first time, but it was still unexpected to me. I’d reeeeally been hoping to see pre-Adrestia Fódlan, and I thought that the city the game takes place in had some resemblance to Enbarr. Anyway, I just hope they don’t contradict anything they’ve already established in the lore. So far, the Fódlan canon (I guess it doesn’t make sense to call it that any more, since Dagda is a separate country/continent) has been contained to just two games about the same characters and time period, and fans don’t even agree on the canon between those two games.

6/7/2026 Log

2026-06-07T00:00:00-05:00

Hello! This is my first blog entry on my new website! Happy pride month and Black music month!

I hope to make semi-regular blog posts with general life updates, links to things that interest me, stuff I’m looking forward to, etc. I would love to do this weekly, but that might be difficult to keep up with. We’ll see!

This website doesn’t feel quite ready to share yet. There’s a lot I’d like to add in the future—an art archive, OC pages—and I’d like to style the website more, but I wanted to start small. I can be a perfectionist, and this site will be in a WIP state forever, so I can’t let that hold me back.
This week started off rough but ended well. I avoid talking about my job online because, all things considered, my job is fine; I am employed, I have disposable income, and life could be a lot worse, so I just don’t think work is something worth complaining about in my online life. BUT, at the same time, my job can be dogshit most of the time (because I’m over-tasked and my boss’s boss has unrealistic expectations) and it’s been especially dogshit for the last month. It’s a relief to be done with what I was working on.
My gf and I’s cat went to the vet this past Thursday to get some teeth extracted. :’( He has a recurring problem with tooth resorption that the vet thinks is genetic. He only has one bottom canine now!! ;-; I mourn his little fangs.
He’s recovering well from his procedure! He was still high off his pain meds on Friday and spent most of the day lying down and staring out the window. On Saturday, he was back to his usual self and had a lot of energy!
I’m going to see Backrooms today!! I saw I Love Boosters last week and really enjoyed that. Lots of amazing movies coming out right now!
I switched from Windows 10 to CachyOS last weekend, so I’ve been using it for about a week now. Aside from some minor issues I’ve run into, it’s been great! I might make a separate post about it at some point.

Links

Something I’d like to do in these life log posts is share links to things from my RSS feed. I recently got back into using an RSS reader (which I’ll probably make a post about) and it’s rekindled my love for online magazines and blogging. In the future, and depending on how often I posted, I probably will not link so many. I have a backlog at the moment. ^^’

Excited to see something new from the Scavenger’s Reign studio.
ANIMATED WARRIOR CATS ADAPTATION!! Little me is screaming, this is the stuff of her dreams.
I enjoyed More Artists Could Stand To Be Normal About Their Black Music Influences—great article about what it looks like to appreciate or appropriate your influences.
Check out this Famicase exhibition
It was posted like 2 years ago so I’m late to the party, but I discovered the EVE Online Down the Rabbit Hole episode. I’m speechless.
I haven’t played it yet, but all of the Subnautica 2 news was interesting. I liked this article about how people really want weapons in the game, and audience expectations around exploration and conquest in games.
The Insidious World of Lolcows
Did you know that one in four cars sold in 2025 was electric? Electric cars are also becoming more affordable globally—except in the US. Sigh.
The Strange Melancholy of Slaying Monsters
You may have noticed I have some interest in game journalism. If you also have an interest in it: I stumbled upon this article by Steven Santana where he links to a MASSIVE games writing archive that he started, containing hundreds of articles. It’s a treasure trove, I highly recommend browsing.
And finally, The Perfect Toyhouse—an article from Inner Spiral about how the Animal Crossing experience has evolved over time, and lost the friction that made it fun. Kind of similar to this article about how challenging it is to make NPC villages feel like a real society.