Now: Then (a history of my Now page)

Page created: 2024-04-26
Updated: 2026-01-15

This is the history of my Now page.

Entries from newer to older.

2025

Fall 2025: The Spring-Summer list below is still accurate. At the moment of this particular update:

  • A big 2.0 is coming to HTML WARDen (a wiki). I’ve teased it a little bit over on Mastodon. The last part might end up being the most challenging, but it’s going well. I’m very excited about it and can’t wait to document and release it.

I’m doing really well focusing on finishing probjects one-at-a-time with occasional interruptions and side-quests using a stack of post-it notes: project-stack.

Hello from Spring-Summer, 2025. A lot has happened. In the world and in my own life.

  • Just finished the Snobol adventure at last. What a relief!

  • Have started up a Ren’Py language examples page to which I can slowly add content.

  • Finished the tiny "Fam" friends and family social media site. I’ve been doing little additions and fixes on that.

  • Another loss.

  • The OpenBSD stuff is back-burnered, but that’s gonna be "next".

Then, I’ll get back to Hiss, but I gave myself a pretty ridiculous side-quest with the Hiss documenation - I’m planning to make an SVG editor with extremely tiny file size output as the main feature. I’ll use that to illustrate the docs. Crazy, I know. I know.

And then (or maybe concurrently), I want to start up the next "Assembly Nights" project. I’ve got the perfect thing for that, the arm compiler book by Keleshev and do it on the Pocket Reform, which runs ARM.

  • Am finishing up my Snobol adventure from last year - I’ve been working on the writeup off and on for about a month now. I’m so close!

  • Learn Snobol - DONE! but now I need to document what I did

    • Document what I learned about Snobol

    • Document/release the repo for Snobol4th - my Forth in Snobol!

    • Document what I learned about implementing another Forth

  • Working on a friends-and-family-only "social media" site

    • The login system works and is unique and I’ll write about that soon

    • The SQLite DB works great and posts have correct dates. Card: sqlite-today-date

    • Posting works, just barely

    • Replying exists in the schema but there’s no UI for it yet

    • Image uploads are the next TODO

    • I have no made the repo for this public…​yet

2024

  • Family has needed me. I’ve halted projects.

  • This is the twilight of this accursed year, 2024. I’m having to change course.

  • After a five+ month hiatus, I’ve started back up on the Hiss game builder project. I’ll probably just keep quietly working on it (and updating the dev log) until I’m done. (Update: It had to be paused again.)

  • I’ve also been learning SNOBOL - here’s a card: start-snobol

  • There have been more updates in the cards.

  • I have been playing more videogames to pass the time. I made a card with my notes on my Linux gaming setup: arch-gaming

2023

  • Near future: Assembly Nights Season 3! (Edit: Alas, nope…​)

  • Still adding repos pretty regularly :-)

  • Began the December Adventure 2023!

  • DONE! meow5 (Concludes Assembly Nights Season 2)

  • DONE! NaNoWriMo with reduced word count goal of 500 words per day.

  • DONE! NaNoWriMo with reduced word count goal of 500 words per day.

  • Finished: October’s Inktober. See art and scroll down 'til you see the image with the thumbnails.

  • Just finished RepoRat and am slowly adding repos to my new repos section of this website because.

  • In the spirit of getting this finished and closed, I’m determined to finish Meow5 one way or another. That’s my new "morning project". (It’s going well! Check out my mez repo, created to facilitate this!).

  • Finally cleared my email inbox and the big second wave of replies to my replies. :-)

  • NaNoWriMo in November? (Reduced word count goal, though. Thinking 500 words per day.) awesome.

  • My "The Year of the Microcontroller" (here) is currently on hold. :-(

  • It’s now 2023, two years after I joined the trend and I’m seeing "Now" pages on a lot of the personal websites I’m visiting. I think that’s totally awesome.

  • This page is a really nice way to brain-dump what I’m into at the moment.

  • Clearing my dang inbox. If you’ve written to me and not heard back in a while, you’re sitting in my inbox. Sorry.

  • Getting back to needle felting is a 2023 goal that I will certainly do.

  • Also a 2023 goal: finishing/updating my htmx live reference.

  • Glacially/Painfully: Working on my ray tracer (github.com) in Zig and the top-secret side-quest (very exciting in a slow way). No promises about 2023 for this one.

  • Finished RetroV - Uh, I basically lost my mind for two weeks and wrote some JavaScript and a heck of a lot of supporting material.

  • Finished my Forth talk 2023 (with a ton of drawings).

  • Finished Hoo? A solo journaling RPG for a game jam with lots of art (including an entire Tarot deck!)

  • Finished my book-guided OpenBSD tour openbsd.

  • Finished Mr. Tree Goes Down!!! (Dec 7: And the print copies just came today!)

  • DAILY and BACK ON TRACK: 2023 is my The Year of the Microcontroller! You can check my progress there, broken into "chapters".

  • BACK ON TRACK: Assembly Nights: Season Two has started creaking and groaning back to life. The big deal here is making a tool (in Zig) to help me debug my ELF output. Writing the tool is helping me walk through the ELF header more sysetmatically and hopefully I’ll find my bug.

  • Off and on: Learning to play the Irish Whistle one tiny bit most nights.

  • Just started trying out a new phone app to learn the German language. I like it so far, but I’m not gonna start praising it publicly until I’m past the first impressions stage.

  • Still "gardening" on this website regularly. Check the Updated dates on pages.

  • Currently doing Inktober over on Mastodon: https://mastodon.art/@ratfactor

(Well, this isn’t a complete history because, silly me, I didn’t think of doing this until a couple weeks ago (April 2024) for some reason. Since 2022, I had been throwing away my Now page entries as they faded out of "nowishness". But I regret throwing those entries away because they’re actually an interesting record. The 2023 entries above are all pieced together from my Vim edit history!)

2022

Oops! I didn’t think to save these!

2021

Oops! I didn’t think to save these!