Miscellany, Vol. 6

I’ll get to my hidden agenda in a moment, but first, a few minor improvements the last instalment:

• I simplified the Content-Security-Policy header and added shivjm.dev.
• I fixed an issue with social media images not being generated correctly.
• Not that it matters to visitors, but the site is now being built with Node v18 instead of v14 or v16, much to my joy, and I’m back to using pnpm.
• There are a few new language labels as required for code snippets.
• Elements in the head are now sorted according to capo.js’s recommendations.
• Nested code-like elements now have the correct size, and small kbd elements no longer resemble circles.
• All pre elements have a bit more space above them where necessary, and output blocks are labelled as such, like code snippets.
• Conversely, floated elements directly following h2s no longer introduce extra space above the next element.
• After living with the tighter version for a while, I’ve returned to a larger line-height and more space before headings. I also removed the fractional nudge on the left side of h2s, which seems unnecessary with my new permalink indicators.
• I added a downloads directory for a recent article.
• Played dates are formatted like Finished dates where possible.
• Good riddance, GPTBot. I wish I had done this long ago.

Now, my true purpose here is to offer excuses for why, after such a promising beginning earlier this year, I was silent for four months. I had an unusually busy summer. Apart from a great deal of work, three bouts of illness—two of them consecutive, leaving me recovering my strength even after three weeks—that mar an otherwise regular record of exercise & physiotherapy, and three separate trips, I also set up a Linux laptop, adopted Nix, started maintaining books of accounts, upgraded all my storage before reinstalling Windows, and developed a process for archiving documents.

We needn’t dwell on the time I whiled away on the most important tasks: the days spent falling in love with the stellar Cassette Beasts; the full evening it took to complete a single challenge in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge; the surreal period of illness where Dredge’s atmosphere of dread bled into reality; or my most recent diversion, Baldur’s Gate 3.^[1] The point is, I’ve been fully occupied with one thing or another, and I can’t complain about that. Well, other than the sickness. I’ve never aspired to spend a night in the hospital.

I do wish there were more hours in a day so I could have continued writing here all the while instead of taking this unwelcome hiatus. Nevertheless, here I was and here I remain. I hope I can quickly catch up on… what’s this now?

One year of Thoughts & Spoilers? Again?