2023-09-03

I didn’t paint today.

Sunday was a quiet day. I hung laundry, I tidied. I sat around experimenting with my website. I’ve added a background image now, and it was a lot of work. I think it looks good, hyper-modern maybe something akin to what I like from the Cari Institute.

In adding the background image I started looking into web image formats. The background image JPEG is 4.7mb making it load slowly on slow networks. As an HEIF it is 700kb, but is unsupported by all major browsers except safari (recently). As it’s a CSS background-image I can’t use Astro’s new image optimisation afaik.

View transitions are slow when browsing and I’m wondering if it’s because of lambda functions on Vercel. It’s bad UX, because the page shows nothing to show it’s loading for a few seconds. It seems to go away after browsing more but I’m not sure why.

I didn’t do any work on usedteslas today, because I was bored of it. I have been thinking about Chroma and what I want it to do. I think fundamentally it’s the storing of components with their data using SQL trees, to allow for… something. Still working on it. It’s changed so much in such a long period of time, and I’ve learned so much since. I’m starting to use my current webdev brain to question why I’m doing things, and it is demoralising.

I might get some stuff done before I go to bed on usedteslas I don’t know. Maybe tomorrow will bring some more inspiration.

Finally today I’ve mostly been happy thinking about On The Road by Kerouac:

The go Kerouac speaks of in on the road doesn’t exist anymore. You can’t travel the way he did. Any people like to think it’s because times have changed. Society is different. You just can’t do that anymore. You can’t do it anymore because Kerouac killed it. And I believe he killed it knowingly too, murdered even. In writing the book in the excruciating detail that it is, he created something that society can recognise and associate with the go. He made it so that when someone is drifting seemingly aimlessly and intently simultaneously, people look and say “that guy is beat” wryly knowing the books they’ve read. He made it uncool and he knows cool. He preserved his road effortlessly in what appears as a time capsule, but is really a capsule of hip. You can’t move like Kerouac anymore, because it’s too transparent.