Hello World

Let's see if I can keep a blog going for the month of January. Here are some things I'd like to write about:

Learning Guitar

I've been teaching myself "finger-style" guitar. I put it in quotes because it's possible nobody who actually knows how to do it calls it that. But that's what I call it because you use your fingers, not a pick. Here are some songs that I've been learning:

• Don't Think Twice, It's Alright - Bob Dylan
• Eugene - Sufjan Stevens
• Carrie & Lowell - Sufjan Stevens
• The Wind - Cat Stevens
• Hearts and Bones - Paul Simon
• You Needed Love, I Needed You - Angelo De Augustine

Some of these I know front-to-back, others just a few parts. I'd like to set a goal for number of songs learned front-to-back by the end of 2023. I'm thinking a dozen is a good number, because I learned maybe 4 in 2022 and I think I could put in roughly 3x more work.

Software Development

Maybe, I dunno. I spend all day writing software so I might not be trying to sit down and write ABOUT software once I'm done.

Video games

I play kind of a lot of video games. Well actually, I play relatively few video games, but I put a lot of time into those few. Right now the big ones are Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Slay the Spire.

Smash: I don't really have a venue to play real people (playing online is too frustrating, and I don't go to locals), but I enjoy playing CPUs. I've specifically focused a lot on Shotos (Ken/Ryu), so maybe I'll write about some of their more advanced techniques.

Slay: I've gotten Ascension level 20 on all characters (effectively, beaten the game 100%). I actually don't know what I'd write about this game, other than maybe re-post some good memes from /r/slaythespire.

Movies

We got a season pass to Alamo Drafthouse, so my wife and I have been watching a lot of these things.

Speedrunning

I've been following a small community of adventure game speedrunners who play all my old favorite point-and-click adventure games. I don't really participate (although I practiced the Monkey Island 2 speedrun long enough to place 8th on the leaderboard, which has since dropped to 10th), but I watch enough to know a little bit about the techniques they use. Also some of the glitches/exploits they use are really funny to me, so I might just post some of those.

Others

I do other things I think... maybe I'll remember what they are and blog about them.

Blog rules

I need to set some expectations here to give myself the best chance of succeeding.

Minimal editing

If perfection is the goal, I will never finish even a single post. I'm already failing a little bit at this one.

Keep it short

The bar needs to be so low that even "Not today" counts as a post.

Learn no new tools

This includes things like CSS/HTML/JS and even more advanced usage of Glitch and the Eleventy blog framework I'm using to write this (both excellent tools BTW). I'm inexperienced with these things, but I know enough to get prohibitively bogged down with the details. Can't happen here or I have no chance. I will maybe change the background color, but that's it.

I guess that's all for now. Until next time!