year: 2024

Ung i Världen is a EU-funded non-profit organisation empowering Swedish youth to explore the development sector, the aid industry and global careers. Basically it is a platform for youth who want to be a part in making the world a better place.

Since one of the founders of Ung i Världen is a close friend of mine, I volunteered to make the website. For both the challenge and merits of making an “actual” site, and to just help out with a good cause.

The development went very much in parallel with that of Bar Total, which came to act as a lower stakes, more minimalistic, lawless testing ground for much the same tech used for Ung i Världen.

Tech

The site is built using Astro, based on the free AstroWind theme by onwidget, and deploys with Netlify. My client editors can publish through the Decap Content Management System (formerly Netlify CMS) which integrates easily with Netlify Identity for editor access. I’ve long wanted to make sites for others but couldn’t find a good way combining both total freedom to customise and an easy way for the client to update content, until I found this CMS!

New members sign up using a form on the site which is hooked up to Netlify forms and sends an email on new submissions. My novice developer friend almost had the submissions hook up straight to a google spreadsheet and if I had more time to work on the project, this would definitely be a priority.

Another priority would probably be some basic level of search engine optimisation. I don’t think the site even shows up on googling “Ung i världen” so it really needs to be added to some indexes for potential members to even find the site they are looking for. This is easy to fix however when I have the time.

Evaluation

With the help of my family members, a small amount of user experience evaluation was conducted which informed me of some caveats in the website flow as well as some confusion regarding both the nature of the organisation and the different types of member applications. Some of this boils down to the sites copy, which since testing its editors has made clearer on a few points. I also received detailed instructions from the client on how to organise the site, some of which I would have laid up differently to ease the flow of information for the user. (E.g. linking quicker to the about page)

Final notes

This project has been really valuable for me in working with an actual client with demands and producing a professional looking website. We were obviously a really small team (I developed the site in close collaboration with my founder friend who started learning to code along the way, going of design mock-ups by another founder) and didn’t have a lot of resources or experience but we managed to make something I’m proud of. In retrospect, me and the client could have cleared up some of the demands a bit earlier, as well as communicated more tightly along the way, but now I’ve done my first work as “consultant hired by an organisation to make a website“ (except I was paid 0 of the $$$ a web dev earns).

A lot of my work on this site came down to the front end design, which I find quite fun to work on. The look really went from corporate SaaS site to youthful organisation in a way I’m very happy about! I am also very particular with the details and have spent way to long fixing small CSS issues etc. Please let me know if you find any problems with the site!

Link 😸

• https://ungivarlden.se

---

Backlinks

• Bar Total

Bar Total is an all encompassing concept by my friend group which I brought into the www this summer in the form of a webpaper (read: blog). Located at https://bartotal.se, or my favourite https://bartotal.digital, the Swedish Gothenburg based journal enables me and my friends (some of which are actual journalists in training) to dabble in the written arts and engage in the cultural sphere.

I learned a lot from building the site and I think the look came out clean and focused. Since it’s been such a fun project I’ve put a lot of time not only in the website but also doing art and “”marketing”” lol. Writing about whatever in Swedish under pseudonyms and in collaboration has also been freeing!

The development went very much in parallel with that of Ung i Världen, with Bar Total acting as a lower stakes, more minimalistic, lawless testing ground for much the same tech used for Ung i Världen.

Tech

The site is built using Astro, based on the Astro Cactus theme by Chris Williams, and deploys with Netlify. My fellow editors can publish through the Decap Content Management System (formerly Netlify CMS) which integrates easily with Netlify Identity for editor access. I’ve long wanted to make sites for others but couldn’t find a good way combining both total freedom to customise and an easy way for the client to update content, until I found this CMS!

I am proud to have improved on the comment system of this site by adding easy moderation of new comments, with no need to git push from my computer. The sites static contents are updated using Netlify functions via a password protected form accessed and populated through a link in the new-comment-notification email. Thanks to GreenAsh’s amazing article detailing this kid of setup! Netlify really does all the heavy lifting but the system works like a charm and all comments gets happily stored in plain json in the repo and thus will live forever.

Next up is figuring out how to best send emails to the newsletter subscribers at every new post. Since we’re very small I am still storing the mailing-list manually and have been sending plain text emails to notify of new posts. Even though the subscriber numbers most likely will stay very manageable I want to send out good looking html-emails soon.

Final notes

This project has been and continues to be great fun! It’s great to work creatively with others and so nice to have our own little platform! We are still finding our footing regarding what exactly to write about and really what Bar Total even “is” — a process I am throughly enjoying. As uni is starting I am however grateful the site is working without hassle. Stickers are coming soon!

Links 😸

• https://bartotal.digital
• https://bartotal.se

We also have a Twitter/X and an Instagram which you can find on the site.

---

Backlinks

• Ung i Världen

The site now has backlinks! This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but couldn’t quite figure out how to. I was already writing my posts in Obsidian which supports backlinks internally – but the backlinks are not saved within the markdown file itself. With a few Obsidian plugins I’ve now got the backlinks to render to the document and work on the published website!

Table of contents

Open Table of contents

• Tech
  • Obsidian plugins
• Step by step
  • Dataview query
  • Github Publisher setup
  • Templating
  • Publishing
• Using it!
• Backlinks

Tech

• The site is built with Astro, a static site generator, which generates html pages from blogposts written in markdown. (There are many great free themes available with Astro. My site is originally based on the Astro paper theme. There are also other static site generators like Jekyll , Hugo, Gatsby, 11ty etc., which would work just as well for this purpose.)

• Since the blog posts are just plain markdown, I use Obsidian to edit them. Obsidian supports backlinks between your ‘notes’ and has a myriad of great community plugins easily installable from inside the app/program-settings.

• I publish the site to Github.

• And it is then deployed via Netlify. Netlify picks up on changes in the Github repo so everything that’s pushed is automatically live in a few minutes (if nothing breaks).

Obsidian plugins

• Dataview is a popular plugin for creating data queries within your vault. This is used to generate a table of the backlinks.

• Github Publisher is used to publish the notes straight to Github. This was the key to actually get the backlinks inside the document, since it can render Dataview queries as plain markdown.

Step by step

I copied my ‘content’ (containing all my markdown posts) folder out of the site repo and made it a new Obsidian vault. In the vault I installed Dataview and Github Publisher.

Dataview query

To generate a table of backlinks with Dataview, I use this code at the end of all my posts:

```dataview
table without id link(file.link, title) as Backlinks
where contains(this.file.inlinks, file.link)
sort date desc
```

Or a list version which would need a header above it: (Used at the end of this document)

```dataview
list without id link(file.link, title)
where contains(this.file.inlinks, file.link)
sort date desc
```

This one generates a table with both backlinks and outgoing links (does not work well if the vault contains files with identical names):

```dataview
table without id link(file.inlinks, file.inlinks.title) as Backlinks, link(file.outlinks, file.outlinks.title) as "Links to"
where file.name = this.file.name
```

Github Publisher setup

In the settings of the Github Publisher plugin, I set it up with the name of my repository on Github and an access token under the tab ‘GitHub config’.

Under ‘File paths’ I selected to use the Obsidian Path as file tree (since the folders in my vault are named the same as in the repository) and specified the root folder as the content folder in my repo.

Under ‘Content’ i checked [Wikilinks](Wikilinks.md) to [MDlinks](links) and in Text Replacer I put the following:

• Replace /\(/posts// with (/posts/
• Replace /now/.*\)/ with /now)
• Replace .md.md with nothing, since it was adding a double file extension to my Dataview links for some reason.

Disclaimer: These configurations are very specific for my setup and file structure and there is probably a better way for you to do this. Github Publisher has an option to use ‘Test mode’ which renders the output to a specified folder. I had to fiddle a lot to get all the links to work as they should.

Templating

In the Obsidian settings for Templates, under Core plugins, I specified a folder for my templates and added the Dataview backlink query to a file. This can now be added easily to any file.

Publishing

All files that should be published by Github Publisher should contain the key share: true in the YAML frontmatter. You could change this key or choose to publish all notes in the plugin options. Like so:

---
share: true
---

To publish a note marked as shared, open the Command palette all the way to the left in Obsidian and choose GitHub Publisher: Upload single current active note from within the note.

You can also choose to publish all shared notes at once.

Using it!

The best thing I got out of this except from the backlinks is that I can publish straight from my phone. Earlier I had to git push from my computer every time I updated the blog but thanks to Github Publisher enabled in my phone app I can publish straight from there. With the plugin Remotely save I also started to save my files to Dropbox back and forth between my computer and phone. Hello blogging on the bus!!:-)

---

Backlinks

• Internet free week

I’m doing 1 week with no online entertainment.

The goal is to not get stuck in consumer mode, the internet monkeymind, and rather do stuff I actually like, as well putting time into school work. I hope this will make space for more creativity and peacefulness by slowing down.

Table of contents

Open Table of contents

• Rules:
• Results
  • 3 days in
  • 1 week in
• Continuation
  • Updated rules:
• Backlinks

Rules:

• Offline entertainment is fine for now…
• Movies (streaming) have been fine as well…
• Playing music is fine
• I can read max one article from my rss feed a day
• Max three news stories in my news app a day
• I can use the internet for schoolwork and project related stuff (like googling a problem)
• But NOT for entertainment
• Messaging is ok (I don’t do it alot)
• Checking my email minimally is ok

I can still publish to the blog.

Results

3 days in

• After three days it’s not really much of a difference. I’ve not been that strict but I haven’t been watching youtube or anything. When I’m using online services I try to not spend too long using them – like im not looking up artists on spotify but just quickly favouriting the song. I also try to avoid my phone as much as possible.

  I would like to actually slow down more and for instance take time to read or draw during the day. Projects like adding backlinks are an easy draw of my time, and I’m thinking of restraining more of my technological use. However, I will keep these rules for 1 week and then evaluate.

1 week in

• After a week, I can safely say I enjoyed it. I have still not been very strict and for instance remember scrolling a bit on instagram yesterday, but overall I’ve stayed away from loosing myself in content. I’ve had some small slip ups but have not excessively binged anything.

  What I wanted has kind of happened – I’ve slowed down and become a bit more bored, a bit more ok with being bored and in effect a bit more present. Of course the week may just have coincided with a low workload from uni, and as we have it: spring time and better weather, but I think the lowered internet usage have had its benefits.

  Still, a lot of my “free” time, I gladly spend by my computer, but this week I’ve done it more for writing and working on projects of mine. The next step will be to actually pick up a pencil or book when I have some spare time, which I rarely do during the day. I think I would benefit from actually scheduling some activities for myself. Like when to spend time drawing or when to write at my notes. That would also open up some room for portion sized internet usage, like reading a few blogs for a bit of inspiration once in a while.

Continuation

I will continue the experiment for another week. To increase activities not involving technology, I will add a rule of at least one hour of non-technological activities per day. I am hoping to use this time when at home to indulge in the plastic arts, reading or some physical outdoors activity. I am not counting for instance going climbing as a non-technology hour since I don’t have access to technology in the climbing gym anyways. It is supposed to be one hour of a conscious decision not to use technology. I am prepared to find it quite difficult actually. A main concern is also timing it and deciding what counts as a non-technology hour. I don’t want to just loophole it.

Updated rules:

Updated rules marked in bold cursive:

• Offline entertainment is fine.

• Movies (even streaming) & playing (streaming) music is fine.

• Internet for schoolwork and project related stuff is ok. (like googling a problem)

• Checking my email minimally is ok.

• Messaging is ok. (I don’t do it a lot anyways)

• Max seven online blog articles a week. And preferably not more than three a day.

• Max three news stories in my news app a day.

• At least one continuous hour a day of technology-free activity, when I’m also not preoccupied with anything else.

• No unnecessary phone usage. And do what has to be done on the phone mindfully.

• NO internet for entertainment.

I can still still publish to the blog. Let’s see how this goes!

---

Backlinks

Exploring graffiti helped me find more joy in art. Large, fast, colourful, permanent brushstrokes. To be confident rather than careful and better my muscle memory of fundamental shapes. I’m due for expressing some love for graffiti and providing my view on it!

What’s funny with graffiti is the great contradiction of its rule breaking nature vs. the many rules of graff. A Throw up goes over a tag, a piece goes over a throw up, a burner over a piece etc. You need to practice letter structure and study the history, work your way through the different styles, always practice your tags, throwies and pieces in parallell for decades until you can finally develop a style of your own. And at the same time, there are no rules to graffiti—breaking the rules are at its core.

Since graffiti is all about “getting up”, and staying up; staying relevant, it’s a full time job. Graff needs to be your lifestyle or what you’re doing don’t matter. It’s astounding to think about how much time have gone into the names you recognise, and how fast a legacy will disappear without diligent maintenance.

Not unlike this blog, graffiti is free from the pressures and expectations many other endeavours entail. Because 1. Almost no one cares or even notices it except other graffiti writers, and 2. It’s anonymous and not tied to your personal identity, free of self censorship. Which is fucking refreshing today. Doing something not for personal gain but for the joy of it.

That’s also why graffiti crews are so one of a kind. They’re working together just for the process and get no personal reward except each others company. Crews like 1UP are absolutely sick in their coordination, like a well oiled machine for screwing the man. Really a great testament of the power of the people.

“Ask not what your crew can do for you, ask what you can do for your crew.”

Whether graffiti is art or vandalism is a polarising subject. I have in the latest years become a bit fed up with (boring) art, or the art world. In my opinion art should really push the envelope, and today there are many fields other than ‘art’ which do this better. (What could possibly threaten my world view inside an exhibition?) Graffiti takes the creative elements of art and applies to the real world, where I would argue all the interesting movements take place.

I think this is the same reason I went into coding. It effectively manipulates/interacts with the real world instead of being frozen in time, read only. To me as a child stop motion animation was cooler than simply drawing, and making games was even cooler than animation. The closer an art form is to ‘real life’ the cooler I deem it. (See the works of Nathan Fielder for some funky shit. Fellow Lainion on Nathan)

Graffiti is the artists way of interacting with each other and society. I love finding a tag in some weird spot, like a little hidden message or moss that just grows everywhere. When every day life is so devoid of opportunities for self expression, the art simply can’t help but spill out on the square and concrete monuments of our conformity.

At the same time a lot of graff falls into the exact same styles and conventions. You probably recognise the squarey letter tag or the usual bubble throwie. Maybe the likeness makes graffiti a more powerful movement but I rather think its power lies in bringing out the plurality of the city. Showing some inner life of the anonymous urban inhabitants.

I love to see artist like “sluto” that keep graffiti on the move without getting stuck in the regular tropes and styles, or even worse: selling themselves to the art world. He shows a funny view on the whole thing in this great interview:

“museums do to art what taxidermy does to nature.”

“God gave you infinite canvases, and you couldn’t find anything better do than write your fucking name.”

— sluto (you should really read the interview)

Great graffiti reminds me that there is nothing holding you back. Your existence is not for someone else to define, it’s for you to exercise. By writing your name over and over lol. And any boundaries posed in art or other spheres are artificial. Let’s continue breaking all the rules in our own very special way.

Backlinks

Part of this months (march 2024) Lainchan Web Festival on the topic of nature.

This article is inspired and best accompanied by webcage’s no plan:

🤷 No plan

First of all, let’s just admit that we have no idea what we’re all doing. We are like a massive group of children left without supervision with the globe as our playground. No one really knows what direction to travel or the limits (if there are any) to what is possible. Anyone who says otherwise is swindling themselves or trying to swindle you. You are either exploring blindly, striving towards some made up goal, or stuck doing things you don’t even like for whatever reason.

Compared to the vastness of nature we are tiny and insignificant. We are plunged into a strange universe, one whose laws we can’t figure out even over several human generations. Yet, we are a part of our world. The interplay between our minds and reality seem incredibly fine. What happens in one is reflected in the other. Keeping a limited worldview means living in a limited world. But most of us are far far away from ever lifting these restrictive goggles. Our world is enclosed tightly around our beings, almost like a cradle of nature. But it is not it that is limiting us, rather the other way around. How can we relate to living in a world we experience as through thick fog?

🗺️ The plan

Working toward some goals inside of our world seem pretty noble, even rational when examining certain parts of it. Like ending world hunger and wars, stopping global warming or getting everyone above a basic income. (I should really educate myself more on these topics.) For some it might be the most fulfilling path to take, but these goals can also be guilt traps or lead to a never ending struggle against the darkest side of nature. A side we might never be able to eradicate entirely.

Even if we do all the above, then overthrow the governments and mega-corps and form strong supporting grass roots community bonds over the whole world, to live ecologically and use our resources and energy wisely, what would we do (after taking care of the daily maintenance) the next day, week or year?

Personally, I mostly fumble my way through the path of life, in between different hobbies, expectations, interests and a sprinkle of social constellations. Sometimes I have thought about creating a long term plan, because that is what I think smart people do. A while ago I landed in a very vague idea about getting a computer science degree and eventually working some job in the field, all while simultaneously developing my personal projects to a point where they can somewhat support me financially. But it is a very shallow plan about keeping an income while getting time to do what I really want. So what is that then??

🕴️ Pushing the limits of nature

There are clearly not a shortage of great projects to undertake. And the world could really benefit from some great initiatives. Whatever your leaning into, let’s do it! There are so many enticing projects and we probably can’t even nearly conceive of the greatest possibilities out there. The very best projects tend to revolve around some hidden aspect that no one had though of before, to then seemingly spring out of nowhere.

Think about what’s happening at the moment just before a new idea is discovered. Often someone with sufficient expertise is puzzled about something. Which means that originality consists partly of puzzlement — of confusion! You have to be comfortable enough with the world being full of puzzles that you’re willing to see them, but not so comfortable that you don’t want to solve them.

— Paul Graham

Who knows what lies under our noses or how far we can go? It is delightfully thrilling but also overwhelming.

Here and now however, we are products of our time and environment, limited by our preconceptions and perspectives. The hyperreality of the internet certainly does not make coming to terms with our limitations easier, and trying too hard to bring about overly far-out stuff may also be way undesirable in actuality (See the risks of magic, or simply going crazy).

”Careful what you ask for, you just might get it.”

— Billy Woods & Kenny Segal - Houthi (The song I was currently listening to.)

👯 The friends along the way

Some wise old people may argue that walking towards love and forming meaningful bonds with others are the most important things one can do. This is a hard task but the statement is probably true. However, I find it difficult combining this one with my other interests and personal explorations. (This site is likely my attempt to do this.) What’s truly important is not always the most exciting until some real insight is gained. At least for my part, I need to see all the steps to a truth before accepting it, so better keep this one in the back pocket for a little while.

👣 the way along the way

Maybe not what we do but just the way in which we do things that matter, and the rest will just fit into place nicely. When not caught up in a makeshift plan it’s just a matter of sitting tightly and wait to seize the opportunity as it presents itself. “Sitting tightly” not in the sense of doing nothing, but rather being present in your current situation. Do the little deeds and your own thing. Spend time with your close ones. The act of planning can be left to the universe. It only takes courage and commitment:

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.”

— Terence McKenna

I guess I am still in search of formulating my own impossible dream, and garnering strength for the commitment. I would love to have a clear direction in my life but am a hopeless dreamer. Most of what I would want to strive for is elusive and only a sweeping glimpse even to me.

🌬️ Embracing the spirit

I love the saying ”dig where you stand”. We can dream big and strange but all that happens happens from here. You can’t skip any step of the way. To live in the spirit of the dream, with Terence’s commitment, even if it is unclear, might just reveal all the right steps just as they’re happening.

That might be what it means to live in accordance with nature. To watch it unfold as you do. To never give up but also not try too much haha😉. Sounds like a fine balance, but it’s really only to live truthfully to oneself! Do the dancy dance with nature and see it’s not limiting but doing the moves with you.

Backlinks
now2024-03-18

Welcome!

Take a seat. Rest for a moment.

This is a third place. Neither workplace or home.

Enjoy a drink and have a chat with some lovely people:

Backlinks
crying-out

I joined the Lainchan webring! Webrings are pretty cool and I had seen some of them before, wanting to join one, but I hadn’t found my match until now. It was foreverliketh.is’s site, with a terrific collection of webrings, that lead me to Lainchan.

The lainring is decentralized so there is no “master” copy or ultimate directory with every site. I mainly got my sites from sizeof.cat, but yukinu for example has a different set of sites. Would be fun to scrape up everyone some time.

The ring is joined from this thread on Lainchan which is the 12th webring thread. Older archived threads: 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1.

It’s cool to see that some of the sites are hidden services on the Tor network, I2P, freenet, yggdrasil & ipfs—most of which I had never even heard of! Lainions are nifty!

You can also subscribe to the members feeds (like rss), which I haven’t yet added to my index.

My webring page can currently be reached on turpelurpeluren.online by typing webring, but I probably want to add it here as well since this is where i ‘live’ rn :3

Backlinks
now2024-03-18

I like ideas,

and often have many (potential) project ideas, thoughts, insights etc. spinning around my head.

All these ideas are very exciting, but focusing only on a few things at a time is the only way to ever get somewhere with these things.

So to not let new ideas distract me right away, or so that I can remember to focus on them, eventually at some point…

…I write ideas down.

For the most part I have used the notes app on my iphone. The ‘ideas’ notes are very fun to read through after a couple of years, but it is no way to organize thoughts, or thinking.

Recently, I have started using Obsidian to write down ideas in a blogish format like this, and Trello to try to organize snippets of thoughts and projects in categories.

Todo-list/queue/set

Today, as I felt rather energized, I got thinking about what’s on my todo-list. Not only my boring day-to-day list of chores but the list of things I want to do. That list is not exactly a list but exists mostly in my head, and pieces of it are scattered around my Trello ‘Ideas’ board. What is not really working is when a new idea joins in, it kinda just gets added to the top of the queue, since I am usually most excited about the latest idea or project. It is however rare that I take something out of the queue.

So, today I felt the “queue” (really it’s just a large set) was getting a tad too large. After all, I can’t even remember all the stuff that’s in the queue---They just sometimes show up and I think: “Hey, that’s also a thing I am doing/have been wanting to do!”

If I try to think of some examples of “current” projects and ideas I have popping through my head semi-regularly right now there is (in kinda this order of excitement/deadline dread):

• Get started with my new drawing tablet.
• Booktrips to Berlin and Stockholm.
• Output my thoughts. < psst,.. doing this one right now!
• Usually something to study for uni.
• Find tracks and practice Dj:ing.
• Read about/start to practice some spirituality.
• Continue development on the blog.
• Bleach and draw on some T-shirts.
• Catch up on stabilizing my picture of the day.
• Continue development of my Rave simulator game.
• Get a password manager.
• Apply for a job during the summer.
• Continue development on my terminal website.
• Find a driving school and get my drivers license.
• Eventually get new screen printing gear.
• Eventually get a new tattooing machine.
• Maintain randomantagning.se.
• Finish the last part of a web development course.
• Do some business of websites for other people.

Fuck! That was way more than I initially remembered. As you can guess, my investment in each point drastically dwindles after the first few. (But they’re still naggning my mind.)

Focus!

The latest idea was to implement some kind of focus. I was thinking a Trello board with only a few, nicely hand picked, areas to work on. That would mean I could actually put everything else on the shelf instead of having to worry about it once in a while, and maybe get some actual work done on the items in focus.

Another idea is to allocate time for all the items I cant scrap. So that I can work on several things but keep them from conflicting. But that sounds like a biig step for me---I am not a planner. Maybe I would need a calendar of some sort. I have heard about Notion and believe it could be everything that Obsidian, Trello and a calendar is at once. (Just realized Obsidian also has “Canvases”.) I also heard it is a bit too bloated with features and has a bit of a learning curve. I should probably put it in the todo…

Maybe I will implement the focus board, maybe I will learn to plan. Maybe I will do neither of those. At least writing this out has helped me some of the way. Since I am into the hole thing of digital gardening this piece on Organizing ideas can continue to grow here on the site, as my understanding of the topic deepens.

How do you organize your thoughts?

Backlinks
now2024-03-18

Background

During the autumn I stumpled upon the existence of the VRChat rave scene through an epic Dj set by woodgraves. The aesthetics and the total internetness of the scene mesmerized me, especially that of big VR club SHELTER, whose posters I adored. Their website, is in terminal format and I thought it was the coolest! I looked through the source code (they even have a little easter egg there) and found that the site was just copied and re-skinned from Sat Naing who in turn was inspired by m4tt72 and Forrest. There are probably plenty more terminal pages out there, feel free to send them to me! It was also through Sat Naing and his Astro Paper theme for Astro that I eventually got working on this blog!

Obviously I had to create my own terminal page. I didn’t do anything fancy, just went with what I knew and html’d and JS’d it with minimal CSS. It is currently the index page of the turpelurpeluren.online domain.

Commands

I am no pro when it comes to the command line and have probably not stuck to conventions when it comes to the commands and arguments etc. These are the commands implemented so far and the list you see when typing help.

about                   - about me and the page  
cat [file]              - prints contents of a file as text  
cathtml [file]          - prints contents of a file as a webpage  
clear                   - clears the screen  
goto [subpath]          - follows the URL path (from turpelurpeluren.online/)  
help                    - displays information about builtin commands  
history                 - view command history  
index                   - indexes site pages  
links                   - lists my external links  
message [name] [cont... - sends me a message  
welcome                 - displays the boot message

The most interesting (and messy and weird) command is probably cathtml which prints an iframe with the contents of a sub page. I like recursion so of course you can print out the terminal page multiple times and use the terminal in multiple layers of itself.

Link 😸

• https://turpelurpeluren.online

Backlinks
organizing-ideas crying-out

table without id file.inlinks as Backlinks
where file.name = this.file.name

Something I tend to forget, while spending hours fiddling with the details of styling or sketching out a new layout every day, is that creating this blog is not a major goal in and of itself. Creating the blog is a goal of mine, of course, but it is only a step on the way towards truer goals: Self expression and connection.

The thrill of the blog

My reason for creating this blog in the first place is to have a medium that quickly lets me output (dump) some thoughts. I do not find a diary particularly exciting or compelling to write, except in times of extreme anguish or mania. An online blog however, where there is a, however slim, chance that someone like you might read the entries, is thrilling. As someone who have always thought of myself as creative, but in recent years have gotten confused as to what actually constitutes my preferred medium of expression, finding a point from which I am excited to deep dive creatively is monumental. It is also safe to say that at my current point in life, I am overdue to empty myself of many quanderings by writing them out.

Weaving multidiciplinary expressions

Since my previous modes of expression really never have been writing, but rather visual (in one way or another), I would like to reduce the friction, not only of outputting writing, but of weaving my own bytes of expression with materials from different disciplines. The plan for this is not yet complete, but I don’t think it needs to be overly complicated. A blog post can already include pictures and links (oh how I love hyperlinks) and for something more interactive there is JavaScript. This should really be enough to weave interesting expressions, but in case a better concept comes up it is welcome.

Keep it simple …?

What could be the hardest part of this endeavor is to keep it simple. The blog is only the white cube where my work should be presented. Yet, something in me is strongly opposed to that idea. That something wants not only a cold, hard, ruthless shell, but a living, breathing, cozy embrace enfolding the presented material. Between these two poles I must find a balance. I know that making the blog a jungle would not facilitate the ease of my expression but only worsen it as the forest grew dense. But on the contrary, the white cube would become inhospitable without nutrition or comfort, with a tiny chance of acting as my funnel into transcendence, but most likely sucking out the joy of creating. My challenge lies in making the blog minimalistic enough for me to be motivated to fill it with posts, while still giving room to experiment and add weird hidden spaces, while still again not letting this take over the main focus. For this vision to work out I need to walk a narrow edge without falling.

Let it take time

I work in bursts of energy. When motivated - I attack the most interesting part of the problem, when unmotivated - I don’t do anything. This “””method””” can work well for small tasks, but on larger projects I lose focus, add new features and fiddle around, until the project becomes unstable and collapses in on itself, flinging my interest to the next thing.

This time, I noticed, I actually have a minimal working example up and running. No last detail just needs to be completed before I can “actually” start. The project is up and running, it is alive, and there is no need for me to mess with it. A good example is the newly constructed park: They might put down some nice paved paths, connecting the major points of interest. But people’s behavior is notoriously difficult to predict and they will, in addition to using the laid paths, cut corners and find their own ways that are better suited for their needs. Eventually new paths will emerge, maybe across a field of grass, and a good and patient park constructor can now pave this path to keep the visitors’ shoes clean from mud on a rainy day. In this spirit, I will sit on my hands in order not to pave too many paths from the get go, but instead stroll around the park at my own leisure. In time, after a short inquiry, I will know what parts work well, need modification, deletion or a better connection to another part.

❤️👾

This was not intended to be this lengthy but it was good to get a thinker about the underlying goals, driving factors and development principles of the blog. As an endnote I would like to invite you, the reader, to participate. Take a stroll in the park. And don’t be shy to leave your two cents, a recommendation, tell me I’m all wrong or instill me with wisdom of which you believe I am still unaware. For this is the beauty of the internet. It is a moving conversation piece. This is not a diary tucked away in my closet but a node in the expansive network of the internet, and nothing would make me happier right now than to interact with some other nodes!

I still don’t know enough about servers to host comments here, but I do have this nifty form that hooks up directly to a private discord channel thanks to Sadness:

Update: Thanks to Rach Smith the form now also hooks up to the netlify api from which I can fetch comments and add them as static html! More on static site comments.

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now2024-02-06

Back in 2021 while I was “studing” Spanish in Barcelona, me and my friend were looking for what courses to apply for next semester. For context, all university corses and programs are free in Sweden and you apply to them through a central website called Antagning.se. They have many filters and tools to find what’s right for you, but me and my friend were not ready to commit to our lifes true path quite yet. What we really wanted was a button that would generate a totally random course from the tens of thousand avaliable.

Back then we didn’t know how an implementation of this was possible, but around a year later, I hacked together Randomantagning.se with the little Javascript I had managed to learn and a python package called Selenium.

The solution is really sub-optimal and I need to scrape the site every semester (which takes a whole night, and works like a snapshot of the current state of antagning.se) to keep the site updated. At least it has it’s own domain and people think its funny. In the future maybe I can find a way to update it dynamically.

As of 2024-03-18: I did an update to the scraper script.

Below are some of the best courses I found from spring 2024:

Translates to:

The horse’s senses and behaviors

Pain in children and youths

The surface of the eye and dry eyes

Vampire fiction

Corruption in politics and management

Persian percussion tradition

Link 😸

• https://randomantagning.se

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random-rewrite organizing-ideas now2024-03-18

This post retroactivly became part of February’s Indie web carnival hosted by Manu on digital relationships.

I have a confession to make that’s long overdue. Something that’s been building up inside of me and is slowly tearing my soul apart. It’s time for me to come out. I am a chronic internet lurker.

But it wasn’t always like this. I used to have online friends back in the day when I played Minecraft every waking hour. We used to talk on Teamspeak, play together and we were actually a part of the server community as a whole. At that time I also had a (very) active YouTube channel where I… did um😅… daily Minecraft videos. Me and my friend even made memes about and kik:ed other bigger YouTubers (yes, in a creepy stalky way). I engaged in the forums and there are many old embarrassing tweets on my account from 2015 and before. Safe to say I was not a lurker but rather an active member of my little online community.

Maybe it was the onset of teenage angst, the changing nature of the internet or I just drifted away from the community, but my level of online engagement has drastically dropped. These days I only leave fragments, the occasional Instagram picture, an update to my website that no one notices, or a weird POV cooking video with Have a Nice Life music. My being is no longer present in cyberspace but my ghost still lingers, drifting through obscure internet niches without ever stopping long enough to materialize. I am desperately craving a missing community but am never satisfied.

What I am slowly coming to realize is that there is a mismatch in pace between my conceptions of real life vs. internet. Everything online seems to be moving at incredible speeds, everyone eerily productive with aesthetics that ensnare and overload my mind’s processor around every corner. But that is only the top of humanity’s iceberg and the poison that mainstream apps like Instagram uses to numb their victims.

Truth is all of this elusive aetherly content comes from a reeal slow cooking pot. People are only doing their own thing, at their own pace. After joining a couple discords of online creators I like, it is apparent that their creations do not come out of nowhere. A third place, breeding ground for ideas and experiments, where not only the shiniest trinkets are presented, but the mud and grit of regular human life, is probably the ingredient my online body is missing.

So I will try this, starting here, to put myself out there. Express myself and endure the cringe of it, speaking my mind even if I am not sure about what it will say. Maybe if I cry out into the nothingness, the fog will disappear.

Sincerely thank you for reading. I really appreciate it and I would also love to hear what you have to say!

To message me, use the message command (type help message) in my terminal page, or simply:

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cradled-by-nature now2024-03-18