hamilton.likes.to.draw...

I have been unemployed for over a year. It has not been a good time. Being unemployed this long is something that you dream about when you're employed. Except you dream about it as a vacation. You think you'll get all the work done that you never have time for. You think you'll try new things and go places.

And maybe if it had been a planned sabbatical, then you might have. But when you're let go, and you can't find work, it's pretty much a constant stream of depression and stress. You ebb in and out of wanting to try some days, and wanting to play games and eat ice cream and sleep until 2 the rest. It's very difficult to stay motivated when stress keeps adding up over and over without major relief.

Relief comes in small doses. Short days spent with friends without worrying about bigger things. Small victories when you learn something new and manage to apply it effectively.

I've been learning a lot about new and upcoming things in web development. There's a lot. I started learning about color systems and the new css color functions, and then color-scheme. I then started going over old webpages and beginning to design them back up from the ground.

While writing up this new Popover Tutorial on my tutsos site, I ended up starting to completely overhaul its style system. And then I started updating a lot of the php that runs things underneath. Adding in iframes seems like something I wouldn't have ever been able to effectively make happen in years past, but with a little agentic help, I managed to make some tools that are not only intuitive for myself, but make the site more useful than it ever was before.

For the last few months, I've been practicing my Japanese diligently. I have a goal to be able to travel to Japan and be able to communicate. I've always wanted to. I am now at the place where I can more or less recognize all of the Hiragana. This is a big thing for any learner of a new alphabet. I can read Japanese. I can't understand 90% of it, but I can read it. And that is so cool.

I am now learning the katakana, and God help me, I will soon have to learn the kanji. But that day still seems far off. I've begun trying to read conversationally, and it is... very difficult. Manga is way too far off for me. Don't get me wrong, I'm trying. I bought some of the manga I loved like Naruto, One Piece and Dragonball, but even trying to get three pages into any of these is an absolute struggle. Mainly because as soon as you learn the hiragana you feel incredibly accomplished, but as soon as you get into the real world of Japanese, katakana and kanji are EVERYWHERE. Katakana feels like at least 50% of what you'll read.

And this has been mildly disheartening, but also has bolstered my resolve to learn even harder.

I sat down to make myself a reference sheet for the kana, and I am now sharing it with you, dear reader. https://hdraws.com/kana. This is a work in progress, and currently it's mostly useless on mobile. But it is, at the writing of this blog post, only 2 days of work in javascript, react, and css. I did some big work in css grids. I'm learning a lot about keyboard layouts as well.

Anyways. Thats been the last few days for me.

Was having a real interesting css problem today, and had a sitdown with a programming group I'm part of and my buddy Doug ended up putting me on the right road toward a great solution.

I love tarot, for a number of reasons. I like the art, I collect tarot sets. I like the rules and improv. It's the same reason I like DnD. And I like compendiums. Set pieces of knowledge that can be sorted and searched. I don't particularly cotton to the magical aspect of the process, and if I ever give you a reading, expect to be thoroughly pushed toward the fun of it, not the mysticism.

I have put together a site called Pulp Arcana. https://pulparcana.com I'd like to hear some feedback on it. If you're interested in tarot, I'd like to know if you find it useful. If you're not interested in tarot, I'd like to hear your thoughts on the ux of it.

I have some more things to work on obviously, a dev's job is never done. Right now I'm using the Rider Waites deck, since it's public domain, but I'd love to make my own. I'd like to make more table layouts, and i'd like to animate and gamify the actual card dealing. I'd also like to push the dataset and filtering further. Please let me know your opinions on this.

Some of you may have seen this thing when it made the rounds this last week. I made a little app website called eXHALeR. It's a breathing exercise app, and I'm kind of proud of it. There's a facebook page now for discussing breathing patterns and such. If you have any ideas, definitely share them with me.