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December Adventure

December Adventure is, in part, an alternative to Advent of Code. The goal is to do a little bit of low-key, personal coding each day. I’m using it as a time to re-engage with old projects and art.

Given the laid-back purpose of the Adventure, I think some equally chill plans are in order. Instead of picking a big project or super precise endpoint for the month, I’ve got two general things in mind to work on:

  1. Fill out this site, both in content and fixing functionality. In About, I called it a “garden” - it’s time to plant more seeds
  2. Continue work on roots below. I had intended the next update to be all art and sound, but there’s plenty of code cleanup and feature improvement to do too
  3. Clean up some old projects, and expand their documentation here
  4. Engage with my art practice, working on finding joy in the process

Calendar

 
 
 
 
 
11
12
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23
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25
26
28
29
30
31

Daily Log

Day 1

  • added this(!) page
  • Implemented calendar you see above, with daily jump-ahead links 😊
  • Fixed Linkback / “Related Posts” (check the bottom of the page)

Day 2

  • started writeup on an older project called Mercury (unpublished)
  • Implemented the ability to show code blocks next to prose here whoooo! Maybe I’ll get syntax highlighting going tomorrow
; MACRO EXPANSION & M REGISTER
@REP 5
COPY @{0,2} M
@END

and a small caption!

Day 3

  • Clean up CodeBlock handling and fix up the way I embed images in posts a bit. Now the sidebar/right column is very flexible in terms of content, making it easier for me to implement things like music or video embeds
  • Trying out some font changes, eh? eh?
  • Added a Language Reference button on OpenXA’s exa-viewer and started filling out the reference (partially complete)

Days 4 & 5

  • Almost completed a fix for an issue with OpenXA’s EXA naming function. Previously it kept incrementing a letter suffix (XA, XB, XC, etc) and if you had more than 26 initial EXAs, the names would continue down the ASCII table, giving you names like X[. Soon, it’ll wrap append a third character to the name and and start over at the beginning of the alphabet ie XYA
  • Nothing else of note, adventure-wise for Days 4 & 5. A big $dayjob project is coming to a close this week, so free time has been a bit restricted. We’re also dog-sitting for a few days, so there’s a Great Dane in our basement demanding attention 😅
here’s arbitrary text in the sidebar
  • here’s a
  • small list
the beginnings of embedded language reference for OpenXA

Days 6-8

  • Between $dayjob big project aftermath and dog-sitting, the past few days are a total blur. It’s not really with the “theme” of the December Adventure I originally planned, but despite the unstable schedule lately, I’ve been making time for art and I’m proud of that.
  • Following along with the above… I’m thinking of adjusting the parameters of this whole adventure. I still want to focus on cleaning up some projects and expanding this site, but I’m also feeling much more of a connection with art lately, so I want to follow that energy!

Day 9

  • Added some custom 404 art and customized the 404 page, and got 404 redirection working on Neocities
Digital sketches of several faces
Some sketches from the past few days. I feel like they're flowing naturally and developing really quickly right now
Illustrated '404' numbers with a little banner over them that says 'Nothing's here?'
some fun new 404 art!

Day 10

  • Added a Gallery template and the beginnings of a art gallery page. Eventually this should get sorted into a couple of separate galleries (and get filled out with more content!). It was fun to implement a custom masonry gallery and required a good bit of fiddling with the overall page template.
  • Added prototype for NSFW image blurring

Day 27

  • The month got away from me 😅! My December Adventure hasn’t been the most successful or consistent, but I’m still happy with the things I did get done. Earlier in the month, I made some progress resurfacing some older projects. Throughout December, I did a lot of sketching and made some art I really like, as well as improving the tools I have on this site to show that art off.
  • On reflection, I think I went in to the month knowing that I’d feel busy and a bit burnt out from work, but I had optimistically hoped that intentionally dedicating time to personal projects would feel restorative. It turns out I really just needed a break more than anything. I’ve had more time to relax this week and after the new year I’d love to more realistically re-approach things like my plans for roots below
Digital sketches of several faces
new NSFW covering (not actually an NSFW image! requires JS)

image contains sensitive content. click to reveal

Updated: 2023-12-27