August diary

Site Tinkering

28 aug 2025

i've reached a point where i feel a bit more confident in my coding skills, don't have to look up everything anymore, and it's become a lot more fun that way to style things to my liking. once you have a layout that you like and that just works, you stop struggling so much and it enables you to experiment and slowly broaden and build on that solid center that you've built... and it's so much fun! i'm curious to see what this will look like a year or two from now.

there are still a couple of things that aren't intuitive (and obviously many things that i don't know because i've never encountered them...). flex is still a bit vague, and combining different elements still confuses me. i'm starting to understand how flexboxes behave, it really helps to put a temporary border around elements to see how they interact. i do feel like i have some redundancy or unecessary lines, so i'm trimming a lot lately.

i have finally found a streamlined way of working that i can manage. in the beginning i felt immensely overwhelmed by managing all the pages i had (and it weren't even that many) and couldn't wrap my mind around how people with 30+ pages did that, but my current system works quite well! but, i'm still curious to know how other people do it, so feel free to let me know in my guestbook :')

Mice

13 aug 2025

i hear mice in the walls aaaaaah! lately i've been hearing a lot of noises. i thought they were my paper lamp rustling in the wind but they were in fact mice gnawing their way through my wall. luckily i've only seen one inside so far, but the noises are very.......present. ah, the amsterdam experience. one has to choose, cat or mice, it is that simple. as i cannot afford a cat (money or time wise!) i'll have to live with the cacaphony of scraping and rustling in my walls for the time being. yay!!!

Blaugust2025

09 aug 2025

coincidentally i discovered that Blaugust is a thing. i don't see myself as a blogger nor do i want the pressure to blog every day. but since i've started to work on this website around the start of august and am also rambling about my daily life, i may as well feel like i'm doing it for Blaugust. but, i don't intend to post every day, and i do intend to keep doing this when august is over, so i don't know if it qualifies.

Elderberry Jam

08 aug 2025

he said he doesn't like elderberry jam. so today i went to seek out elderberry (Sambucus nigra) trees in the Flevopark. i found about 10 of them, i even wrote a little roadmap so that i would be able to find them back later. for some trees i was a little bit early. so i cycled back to my mom's place to make the jam, and there i found the motherlode... an entire row of fully grown trees right next to the road. they were on a sort of hillside, so i had to do a little bit of effort, but it was so worth it. i ended up with half a kilo of ripe berries and 4 pots of jam in the end. now that i know where the elderberry goldmine is i'm going to go back in two weeks to see if the remaining clusters have ripened.

Social Media

07 aug 2025

truthfully i don't care anymore about people being able to find me online (or my art). i used to care about it a lot, but now i just care about having my own space that contains everything i want, with tumblr, bsky, whatever else as satellites. the whole idea of having a character limit for text-based post is crazy to me. you are literally constrained in every possible way, aesthetically, visually, functionally... i hope to add a comment section here to at least give people the opportunity to shout at me, because i do like the social aspect that these sites provide. the feeling that you are 'connected' instead of on an island. but i might just start linking more to pages that i enjoy and create my own button or something. still neocities isn't perfect either, because i'm still dependent on someone else's hosting. but for now it's a much better solution than to use social media. even if it's all going into the void.

Blogging Style

06 aug 2025

thinking of making a seperate page for blog posts like these, but not sure if the short entries really warrant a designated page... will see how long this gets in time. maybe a single page with multiple entries. i also like the idea of pages not matching in style, i think it gives the illusion that you are really 'travelling' the web, instead of just constrained within the same site if that makes sense. but i don't feel the creativity flowing yet. i think i also want to keep it simple.

Wrist Pain

04 aug 2025

i really wanted to code today but i had to take a break because my wrist hurt lol. so i had coffee with a friend and had dinner with my mom. last week i had a boattrip with my 'boyfriend' and we ate wild blackberries which was the GOAT. it made me want to make elderberry jam so i went to look for trees in the park today. there were a couple but they were mostly shaded, so hopefully by the end of august they'll have enough berries to make jam.

Free Time

02 aug 2025

because i have summer vacation now, i finally had time to work on this site which i wanted for a long time. i completely overhauled it, i'll probably collect screenshots of the old layouts as i change this through time. i also started drawing again which i hadn't done for like six months, and want to pick up playing the recorder again. strangely i'm reading less than i was before my summer vacation started, maybe that's a hobby that fits my life better when i'm studying. that reminds me that i want to keep track of which book i'm reading.