Table of Contents
I am inspired by this blog. The author has maintained near daily posts for about 20 years, starting in 2004. If you go back to her first posts, you see she was a nervous transfer student that started blogging with Emacs as part of her university classes. I bet that's really helped her.
As for myself, I have already been journaling daily for a year and a half now. I have all sorts of handcrafted notes and tutorials saved on my hard drive.
What will be on this blog?
- AI Art Tutorials
- Technology Opinions
- Software Guides and Tutorials
- Reflections on Life and Literature
- Anime, Book, and Movie Reviews
- Political Opinions (when I'm feeling spicy 🤪)
- Essays
- Short Stories (!)
- A Portfolio of My Tech/Game Projects
- Anything else I see fit
My Personal Goal
I do a lot of interesting things and I cannot possibly my best insights with one person. 1) I like sharing my ideas too much and 2) it's not like my thoughts can fit on a note card or casual conversation.
My personal goal is to build a lot of traffic to my thoughts and projects.
I'm shooting for 10,000 daily page views by 2028.
My Technical Goal
My technical goal is quite sexy, but only if you're a big nerd programmer that wears big nerdy programmer pants.
Last week, I started learning Emacs in earnest. Frusturation mounts as my in-house application to generate AI clipart bundles gets harder and harder to manage. I have all sorts of different UIs, command line tools, and repos juggled inside of VSCode. It's a beast to manage.
My professional temptation is to simply design all of my troubles away and immerse myself into the one! The unicorn! The all in one software! Yeah right. The spaghetti code alone took 2-3 weeks to develop, and I barely understood what I wanted going into it. I am becoming a domain expert while I'm writing my code. So how am I supposed to keep up? I keep daily development notes in my journal, but they always ended up scattered and disorganized. Searching is great, but the connection between my ideas and the code is tenuous.
Enter org babel. Very alluring. Using it, I can combine my code ideas with my word ideas – something that always falls out of sync for a fast-tempo guy like me. The sexiest idea of all occured to me last week.
My technical goal is to generate and publish my AI art entirely within Emacs org-mode.
Org mode is the software I use to write and publish this blog.
Being able to generate AI images inside of the same tool, complete with notes and observations. That's my dream.
I have already experimented with creating tools that automate the many variations of AI images that I want to create. My tool of choice is ComfyUI and I already maintain an open source repo to help me with this aspect. Codifying my ideas into lisp looks very appealing.
What the hell is Lisp?
Lisp is a computer language designed in the 60s and its unique mathematical superpowers make it prime Hackernews clickbait.
Importantly, Lisp is pitched as a language that handles change very well. The concept of macros, or programs that write programs, means a designer can be confident that any valid lisp code can be transformed into any other valid lisp code he can think of.
The power of this is not obvious to a programmer with commercial instincts like mine. When I first approached Lisp, I thought macros were this crazy powerful giga-feature that will make my code simple and beautiful. I've been conditioned to think that way after years of using feature-rich packages like Django and Vue.
But upon learning how pedestrian and general they are, macros seemed pointless to me. If it's just code that returns code, why not return a lambda in Python? In 1995, functions that returned functions were not possible in C, but modern programming languages have no issue with that. I will expand on my experience here in a future post.
For now, I'm stuck with shiny new package syndrome, and the deep simplicity of Emacs and Lisp seems like my best cure. The lisp ecosystem is healthy, but lean. This seems to be for good reason as powerful packages are not difficult to write and import once you know the basics (something I wish was easier with python).
My Other Blog
My previous blog is called HALKONY UNCUT. I started it around the time that I began journaling, but I never used it much because I find writing in Wordpress to be a huge pain in my ass.
I use Logseq to journal my notes, which I only recently learned had a web publishing feature. Logseq is actually an offshoot of Emacs org mode.
My aim is to publish to this blog every day with notes from my journal.