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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  4d ago (text post)   248 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for March 04, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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So I've been alternating between animals, garden, house repair, and my "learn to code just for the fun of watching AI do it better" project.

Finally started using chatgpt to explain concepts to me, and it's miles better than my old "open 50 tabs from a Google search, try to pick through the bullshit stack exchange spam and asinine reddit begging." Things that I used to be unable to do in hours now take me only minutes to fail, which is great progress!

One thing I could use advice on is a decent coding course to explain basic concepts and best practices, before I end up creating some Terry Davis level outsider art.
So far I've just been nodding along to a few "learn JavaScript in 50 days!" type courses, but they're not great for real learning.

In solar project news, I'm finally up to the point where I can run my modem & chest freezers off-grid all year round. It's the best way I could come up with to make the backup system pay for itself.
Any more integration into my regular household usage would take a much bigger investment (off-grid AiO and transfer switch between my main and subpanel, with at least 5kwh of batts and 12kw solar to make it worthwhile). There's a time to call a starter project quits, and this is probably it.

How have you been doing @Southkraut?

Sick, taking care of sick people, and sick again.

I tried setting up a github repo for the Unreal project, but so far failed because many files are too large. For most of those files, I'm not even sure what they do or whether I can safely gitignore them. Git suggests using Git Large File Storage, and I suppose I should look into that, but so far I'm not even sure what it is.

Also did a little more worldbuilding, but as always it's dangerously close to outright trash.

Thanks for asking.

For most of those files, I'm not even sure what they do or whether I can safely gitignore them

Are there any other Unreal projects on github? Might be worth checking what they commit, and what they leave out.

Week two of sorta rewriting Nitter+Miniflux. I'm more self-conscious on this one for some reason, hence no githib link yet. I've been wrecking my brain on how to write it generic enough to cover all forseable scenarios (entries of tweets, Substacks, YouTube videos, and arbitrary web pages), but to also not get too carried and away and paralysis-by-analysis myself.

I settled on a solution that should cover Twitter's peculiarities (quotes, retweets, links), now I'm working on displaying media, and optionally storing them.

I'm up to 75,000 words on my NaNoWriMo project.

During November, I wrote that I found myself feeling legitimately guilty about the fate which was soon to befall one of the characters in my book. Last week I was writing the chapter in which the fate in question befalls them, and it was a punishing experience. For a solid hour my heart was pounding in nervous anticipation, as the dreaded event drew closer and closer. Once I got to the end of the chapter I had to get up and pace around my apartment for a bit to calm down.

I've repeatedly argued in this space that you shouldn't use an artist's degree of passion and personal investment in their art as a proxy for how good it is. Many of the best novels, films etc. ever made were tossed off by their creators for a paycheck, while probably no one is more emotionally invested in their art than a shut-in composing Sonic the Hedgehog fanfic. But for whatever it's worth, it is indisputable that I've become intensely emotionally invested in this novel. In the event that I get it published, if an artist having a personal stake in their art is important to you, I hope I can count on you picking up a copy.

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