spooky season begins.
sunday, october 1st, 2023.
Today is the first day of October, the month of spooky things, Halloween, horror movies, fall weather, and getting into the mood for all things cozy. The weather has been phenomenal the last few weeks, and I pass by a lot of houses that have already decorated with skeletons, pumpkins, and scarecrows on my bike ride to work. I can't say that I have a favorite season, per se— but I really do enjoy autumn here in Georgia.
Tonight, we'll be watching Ridley Scott's 1979 film, Alien. Pretty excited to see that one as neither my partner nor I have seen it yet. Last year we got through a lot of the Halloween movie staples, so now we're getting into the wider horror movie universe. We still have a bunch of classics to get through, too. Here's a list of some of the best horror movie films for inspiration if we can't think of anything to watch.
chores & errata.
It's been a quiet weekend thus far. We went to one of the little one's classmate's birthday parties yesterday and got the grocery shopping done before the shelves are all cleared on Sunday afternoon. Today, it's a few loads of laundry, grilling in the back yard, and perhaps degreasing my bike chain if I'm feeling particularly zesty. Next weekend is the little one's birthday party and the other girls will be here, making it a full house. It probably behooves me to clean up a bit, but relaxing is good, too.
I've been getting used to the Kagi search engine this weekend. Dang, it's good. I used to use DuckDuckGo as my main search engine, but the underlying search results were often subpar which caused me to Google things more than I care to admit. Google's search results have slowly been getting less and less relevant and advertisements have been taking up a significant chunk of the first part of the search results. Overall, it's apparent that Kagi is a tool worth paying for.
I've been having fun going through my gaming back catalog. I recently installed Grand Theft Auto IV, which I hadn't played in probably a dozen years. It's really fun. Diablo III is also in the rotation, along with Monster Train on my phone.
I've only read 9 books so far this year! I suppose it's a bit much to expect to hit the reading pace I sustained in 2020, with the pandemic and all. I'm currently reading Tom Hodgkinson's How to Be Idle and it's really been getting my brain gears turning. A lot of the alcohol, drugs, and hedonism that Hodgkinson advocates for run counter to Buddhist philosophy, but mixes with it in a moderate, middle-ground sort of way in my mind. In a fashion, the book is releasing me from a self-flagellating state of mind and I'm really enjoying it a lot.
Speaking of self-flagellating, my partner and I have been doing 16:8 intermittent fasting lately. We still get pangs where we're incredibly hungry, but I think on the whole things are getting easier as we stay the course. I haven't stepped on a scale in years, so I've no idea how all the fasting and bicycling is affecting my weight. I don't particularly have an interest in doing that, either— I'd rather just do things that make my body feel good without keeping score.
website changes.
For a good long while, I'd been using the system font stacks for the text on my website. I still use the "System UI" stack for the main body text, but I've swapped the headers to Roboto Slab and included the font's woff2 file here on my website. The border-bottom CSS element I'm using for a full-width underline was all over the place depending on which system I was browsing the website with. Now that I'm delivering the font file on my website, it appears uniform across my devices with a lovely aesthetic gap in the underline around the descenders that makes me happy.
It still looks OK on NetSurf, too!
I keep changing the background tile image. I think this is my website background's fourth iteration, but now I've got this sort of grey and white marbled image and it looks pretty good to me! It's a little more subdued than the other ones I've played around with and doesn't visibly repeat unless you look really closely at it.
Finally, I removed the crisp-edges scaling on dithered images I added in my fun with dithering post. The dithered images were a bit jarring when the browser would pick just a few columns to double-size, which made some of the Floyd-Steinberg dithering artifacts really stand out.
Well, the first load of laundry has finished in the wash and I've reached the bottom of my coffee mug, so I suppose that's all for today's writing. I'm off to enjoy the rest of my relaxing weekend!
Until next time, be well! :)