A year has gone by, and not a single update. Shame! So then, what's up?
I've put my Twitch streaming endeavor on pause, but it's still on my mind. It was a sort of experiment to see how I liked it, and how long I would like to keep it up. The truth is that I love streaming, and I do have plans to continue, but there are simply too many things happening in my life these days to make it a priority. In particular (and to recap a bit), this May I finished up my Master's Thesis, and finally got my degree as a science teacher. Then, June and July were more or less spent moving across the country, in addition to job hunting. The job hunt paid off! I'm now a bona fide teacher, and it feels wonderful to finally be working! Onwards and upwards.
So things are starting to stabilize and settle down, meaning I'll have more time to focus on my hobbies. (Well, as much time as a full-time working father of two and husband can reasonably hope to get!) My priority is getting all those features and quality-of-life updates for my Books page implemented. (See the news entry for September 17, 2022 for a list.) I have in fact been working on and off on cleaning up the backend for this to be a reality for the past couple of months, but there's nothing to show for it yet.
Also, I noticed something I forgot to do, namely to add a link to the Off-site section of the navbar to my Discord server, so if you feel so inclined, head over and say "hi!"
There's been a slight change to my Twitch streaming schedule: instead of every Tuesday and Thursday, I'll now be streaming every Monday and Wednesday instead (still at 7pm CET).
I've begun experimenting with streaming on Twitch! I'm currently doing a completionist playthrough of Assassin's Creed: Origins; check out my Twitch channel for live streams and VODs, and my YouTube channel for the archived Let's Plays. My plan is to play through a bunch of my favorite games in the time to come. Naturally, these links are also in the Off-site section of the navigation bar.
My current schedule for streaming is Tuesdays and Thursdays from 7pm CET until whenever I decide to quit for the night. I usually stream for about three hours or so.
My Books page has been redesigned. Now, most of the books (or ways to browse the books) are hidden behind their own links (or "sub-pages"). This makes the page look a little small, but of course, all the real content is still there. I realize this might make browsing the books a little more cumbersome, but the page is not done yet; I just wanted to push the current (working) iteration out the door, giving myself more incentive to work on the new features, faster!
What's coming:
- Search bar with accompanying drop-down menu to specify where to search (title, author, category, etc.)
- A separate advanced search page (my hope is to make this a very sleek direct interface with the database itself)
- Lists of various custom "book shelves" (for lack of a better word)
My web site has definitely taken a back seat in my life lately, with school work and family life taking up the majority of my waking hours, although I never forget about it. I want to keep updating it and working on it for as long as I'm capable, and I'm kind of proud that I've had it running since 2003, more or less in its current state (modulo some culling of pages and rewrites of the back end). It's amazing to think that next year it'll be 20 years old!
I added a new section to the Books page, Universes and Series, where I split all the series into those that are associated with a universe, and those that aren't. I tried my best to do this correctly, using The Internet Speculative Fiction Database and various wikis for reference. Hopefully this makes everything a little more neat and structured. I also hid the list of authors, publishers, and books behind their own links, since the Books page itself became extremely long now that all the books are viewable.
I have made further changes to the Books page, most notably that all books are now viewable. I've spent a ridiculous amount of time this past year putting my entire library of books into the database (well, mostly all of my books), and I thought that it should be visible for all. When viewing multiple books, there's now an indication of whether or not I've read that particular book at the bottom of each book item. (See, for instance, the Space opera category.)
I've also added the name of the cover artist for a particular book, where I could find it. I did this mostly for the sake of the science fiction and fantasy books; they often have fantastic cover art, and I want to credit the artists!
I've read the first three books in the Dune series: Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune. Three books in 2021. Perhaps I'll finish the three last books during 2022, heh!
Life is going well for me, although it's hectic. I've only got a year and a half left of university. I'm still very motivated, and next semester I have three (count them, three) math courses: Algebra, Geometry, and Analytical Functions. I'm very much looking forward to those!
My family is doing well, and my son is a year and a half old now. He doesn't yet speak, but he knows a few words and he uses hand gestures a lot to communicate. It's wonderful to witness his progress!
It's amazing to me that this is the only news post in all of 2021, and right at the tail end of the year, at that! Oy vey...
Behold! The new Books page in its full glory! What's new:
- When viewing multiple books, you get a sleek overview of the title, front cover (if any) and the series the book is in (if any). For a demonstration of this, see e.g. the Fantasy category or the Space Odyssey series.
- When viewing a single book, you no longer get a big, ugly table; you get a slightly-less-ugly list (of sorts) with the information about a book sorted more neatly. I also decided to remove the links to various book stores from the ISBN field. For a demonstration of this, see 12 Rules for Life (my latest read).
Being a full-time father and a full-time student, I'm quickly learning to use my spare time efficiently.
There was a serious dearth of updates on my web site from 2014 to 2018, and during that time I did read a lot of books, but I mostly didn't bother to write up a synopsis or a review. I added those books to the database in addition to keeping track of them, so here, organized according to theme, are lists of books I've read from 2014 to 2018, with links:
Science fiction:
Other fiction:
Non-fiction:
With that backlog of stuff no longer hanging over me, onward!
I made a bunch of (mostly trivial) quality-of-life improvements to the design of my web site, mostly for visitors on mobile phones.
I also went through every single page, making them conform to the latest specifications of HTML and CSS (which mostly involved finding alternatives to obsolete elements, and fixing small syntax errors). Therefore, the Colophon page no longer lies when it claims that my web site conforms to these standards.
During this sort of janitorial work, I've discovered how much of the content on my site is old! I want to work on having more up-to-date content on my web site (i.e. content that more faithfully reflects my current interests and obsessions), and I don't want to cull too much old stuff, either, which means I have to expand.
I spent some time doing janitorial work on the Links page, mostly culling links, but also adding some. I culled...
- from Games section: 3D Logic, Gridlock, Shyguy's Cave of Death, and TrackMania Nations
- entire Gaming encyclopedias section
- from People section: Jean-François Im, Jeff Dee
- from Science section: Ebon Musings
- entire Collection sites section (which only consisted of Galbadia Hotel)
- from deviantART section: PolishPanties
- entire Four-days-a-week schedule web comic section (which only consisted of Drawing Board)
- from Haphazard web comic secion: Miscellanea and Nearing Zero
- from Frozen web comic secion: Concerned and Decorum
In addition, I renamed the link to Massimo Pigliucci's web site Rationally Speaking Podcast, and moved it to the Podcasts section, and renamed the Books section the Literature section, into which I put The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (which I use when researching books for my Books page) and The Pulp Magazines Project (which I mainly use for reading old science fiction).
I have a huge backlog of books to review and add to the database, but I can at least mention the latest book I read, Ralph 124C 41+. (More coming very soon!)