What Are You Workin' On? - April 1st Edition

Surprisingly not a prank.

Posted on April 01, 2021.

Welocme to my blog that I promised I would run! It’s half-finished but I want to do literally anything productive today, so I did this.

“Hey, it isn’t April 1st anymore!”

Sorry! It’s actually May 27th. I had this written and I didn’t upload it for some reason.

“What Are You Workin’ On?” ^{_{Fun little tagline}}

Markov Chain Utility

I made a small Markov Chain utility in Rust a bit ago, and today I improved its performance! It now builds the Markov tree without copying any strings, which greatly speeds it up probably. I dunno, I’m really only here for the strange output it yields when I feed it my journal.

Some examples:

• hell you're trapped in while listening to die.
• me: *hank hill voice* hey, i'm vibing
• Gonna purchase� the gender.
• Have I have no I have to.

It’s entertaining to have my words vomited back to me in strange combinations!

VieWS

This is gonna be a long section because I wanna talk about the history of this thing first.

VieWS is an idea that’s been rattling around in my brain for over 2 years now. It began as a tech-demo text editor to show off the window-rattling screenshake feature of my “Love2D Template” framework, (read: one really really big god object that managed all the Love2D stuff in a way I liked) and that served as the basis for another project I worked on.

funny bug

The next project that more directly preceded VieWS was ui_test, which I’ll add screenshots of later. I did this project without internet, and because of that I was surprisingly focused! I implemented a few simple widgets, moved the text editor into one of those widgets, and I even added tab focus! I’m still kinda proud of this, even though it honestly looked terrible. It was back in the era where #4080FF was my favorite color.

I kinda had an Amiga inspiration back then, too. You can see in the text editor Twitter microblog video that my cursor was a little red arrow, not unlike the iconic Workbench cursor.

Finally, I realized I’d created too much technical debt, and I finally started work on VieWS. I came up with the name nearly immediately!

It also adopted my garish RGB palette, at least until I saw how cute the Macintosh looked, and I used a shader I wrote to constrain the colors to a lo-fi eye-strain-inducing 4-color CGA palette.

a screenshot from late 2020

I’ve mainly stuck with that for now, but recently I made a desktop pattern editor! Really proud of this, and it might be the last thing I make for Love2D VieWS. Of course, I also accumulated a lot of technical debt with this, and I’m not satisfied with the performance (like FPS, draw calls, etc.) I’ve seen from it.

a screenshot of the desktop pattern editor, from early 2021

What’s the future of VieWS? I’m trying to rewrite it in software-rendered Rust, with a Lua runtime for building basic apps! So far it’s going well!

I kinda want to dip into more retro computing aesthetics for the look and feel of VieWS. Mentioning the Amiga here makes me want to pull more from it…

Writing

We don’t talk about my writing. Next thing please.

Jokes aside, it’s fun to write for myself and no one else. I feel like writing is some of the most fun I’ve had creatively recently. Alongside drawing Pokémon really badly.

Drawing

Oh yeah, I also draw furries really badly in Flipnote! I’m proud of how far I’ve come since stick people on the DSi, but I do have a long way to go…

Kinda Coming-out

Also, I decided to quietly come out as transfeminine and nonbinary on trans visibility day! I haven’t done much with presentation yet, but it feels nice to

That’s it for the first “What Are You Workin’ On?”! I’m gonna go sleep now.