DIGITAL DEBUTANTE

hiyerrr

2023-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

gawd i forgot i had a tilde.town account til recently!!!

i deleted all my old blogposts because i just didn't vibe with them any more (they're archived on the github repo for this site though shhh).

i don't have anything to say here except i might (maybe?) bring this blog back? maybe?? who's to say. i do not have the attention span for it but it's fine it's fine!

gemlog

2023-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

hiya! just popping in to say this blog has a sister blog! or rather, a gemlog! because it is on gemini. that's what blogs on gemini are called. which is a cute name but like it's a bit unwieldy innit. like.. the word for blogs on gopher is "phlogs" which is FUCKIN awesome (it comes from 'gopherlogs').

anyway i digress!!!! i started a blog/gemlog over on my gemini capsule. i thought about mirroring it to this blog (or elsewhere on my web profile here) but i decided i prefer the idea of it being this exclusive little thing you need to seek out. plus i feel that it defeats the point a bit to have a gemini capsule then just make it available on the web anyway.

if you're not sure wtf gemini is or how to access it, there's some info on what it is and how to use it on the tilde town wiki (which i wrote!) if you just wanna access Geminispace the main part to pay attention to is the Clients section.

there's also web proxies avaiable - like you can click here to view my gemini capsule in your browser! if you do get a gemini client, have yourself a look at gemini://tilde.town/~slimelia/ ^_^

it begins

2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

and the ultimate bloging begins...

i can't decide what to use this blog for!! i've been using my gemlog for more detailed personal life updates and i can't be bothered to repeat myself here. maybe i'll do something fun like just spotlight cool things i find online??

FOR EXAMPLEEEE i recently found the search engine Kagi. i really like it, the results it produces are very good, the people behind it and their ethos seem really good, and i love all the extra features it contains. they also have a few fun side projects like Kagi Small Web which highlights random individual blogs and small websites across the world wide web. it's a super cute initiative!

anyway, i guess this is what i'm gonna use this web-facing blog for, at least for now! if you have a passing interest in the woman BEHIND the blog, check out the super secret gemlog oooooh

rip cohost :(

2024-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

so cohost is dying, huh! maybe i should actually use this blog LMAO
mind that i do, in fact, still post semi-regularly to my gemlog at this address. but as a result this lil weblog has been neglected. woopsie...

such a shame about cohost though. there were flaws but i love what they were trying to achieve. i hate that they - we - were unable to create a successful and sustainable social media site. when it comes to managing running costs, decentralisation really is the best bet huh? i still can't get on board with mastodon though, idk why. the fractured nature of the fediverse isn't something i enjoy i think? idk.

ANYWAY yes maybe i will post more here. maybe i will mirror some gemlog posts here - i definitely really genuinely enjoy having my gemini capsule being it's own thing that doesn't surface on the normal web. having a protocol and separate space feels pointless when it all gets mirrored to the WWW anyway. BUT!!!!! it would be nice to sometimes mirror them so you get a glimpse into what's going on over on the other side :3

didn't have much to say rn i just wanted to finally update this LOL. see yas x

atom feed

2024-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

hiiiiiiii! very small update to let you know i've added an RSS feed!! or rather, an Atom feed!! which isn't actually the same thing but everyone still calls them RSS feeds because otherwise there's too much confusion. and every rss reader in the world supports atom feeds. SO!! click here to subscribe!!

oops soz

2024-09-26T11:09:00+00:00

if you just got all my posts appear in your RSS reader im sorry LOL i fixed a bug that came up when i re-wrote the Slimeblogger code. and that bug related to the atom feed and thus some readers read ALL the posts as new posts. sowwy x

septembly

2024-10-04T14:19:00+00:00

NOTE: The following post has been manually mirrored from my Gemini gemlog. For more information, read this post

omg hiiiiiiiiii!! how we all doing? theres no comments on my blogs you can't answer that sorry

keep meaning to write a new gemlog post but i kept putting it off for various reasons (mainly due to workin on personal projects) and now i have a lot to talk about!!

FIRSTLY! welcome any/all newcomers who are here following the shutdown of cohost! hope you're all well!
it still feels so weird to me that cohost is closed now. that website had its flaws, which many have discussed far better than i could, but i enjoyed my time there and will really miss it. godspeed young eggbug...

September was, overall, a really fuckin good month. my dear darling girlfriend Jasmine came to visit me and we spent an incredible 10 days in London!!! it was so nice to see her again and i miss her so much nowwwww :(

she was also here for my birthday which was great.. it's so nice to spend a special day like that with someone i love. we went to the V&A (one of my all-time favourite places in London) and spent time there, then made our way to a bar where we got drinks with some of my friends :3

it's weird, i live so close to London that i never bothered doing the touristy shit. it's weird to engage in tourist traps etc. when they're on your doorstep, so i've never bothered before. but y'know what, some are really good!! highlights include getting a canal boat from Little Venice to Camden Market, going to the Tower of London, and going for a cute walk through Brompton Cemetery. i had no idea the Tower of London was actually like.. worth going to and wasn't just a tourist hell-hole. if i lived in London and getting to it was slightly cheaper i'd legit consider one of those member passes because it's a very nice place to spend a day honestly!!

worst part of the trip was having to say goodbye to my wifey and going home and sleeping in an empty bed :( i miss herrr

what else happened in september? well, my mum had a big 60th birthday party at the end of the month at a crazy golf place in London and it was very good! far better than when we had a work party at the same venue LOL

and of course, the other thing that happened recently.. they locked eggbug in a glass cage. rip cohost..

following cohost's shutdown announcement i sorta threw myself into too many projects at once relating to my blog & gemlog, hence the aforementioned procrastination of writing this post. a project i successfully finished was refactoring slimeblogger & adding atom feed support, so that's fun!!! one day i may add pagination to slimeblogger but the original design choice was intentionally one long blog page, so idk if i can be arsed.

managed to finally reach a point where i felt happy posting to my blog, because the Software™ i use for the blog is now in a state i'm happy with.
BUT. the same wasn't true of the thing i wrote to generate my gemlog LOL. toying again with the idea of making my gemlog visible to the http web, but this time i'm thinking about only making the RSS feed available over http. that way it's still my secret special hidden-away blog, but you don't have to open lagrange or amfora every time you wanna read it innit.

some of you may be reading this and thinking "wtf is gemini, what's a gemlog" because.. i plan on mirroring SOME select gemlog posts to my weblog! a sort of "here's a sneak peek at the Alice lore that you're missing" type of thing.

now.. i WAS going to somewhat automate this by writing a python package to convert gemtext to html. and that's still in the works!! but i wanted to write it as a proper package and publish to PyPI so that project is taking longer than planned while i spend time being extra thorough before publishing it. this is the current project that was holding up writing this post - i've decided to just convert this one post to HTML by hand innit LOL

i've really been enjoying reading people's thoughts and posts in my RSS feed, though i must admit i do also mark some posts as read without readingggg SORRYYY ;-;
some are just very long posts that are a bit too technical for me, or they're reviews of films/games i have no interest in so i just don't feel like reading the review innit. some are also long & detailed thinkpieces and its like.. well im checking my RSS feed like i used to check cohost - at work, or while sat on the toilet, or while scrolling on my phone when i get up in the morning, etc.
some i have saved and then read later when i felt i had the time to spare! but others i do just go "oh this one isn't for me i fear"

it feels rude/wrong to mark posts in my RSS reader as read but idk why because i scroll past posts all the time on twitter, tumblr, bluesky & scrolled past plenty on cohost too. weirdly it feels more like a personal slight in my RSS reader even though literally nobody would ever know if i didn't announce it LMAO

update on personal organisation from the last post: i bloody LOVE Zim. i'm using Syncthing to sync my notebooks on all my devices, and Markor to edit & view my files on my phone. i had all our plans, important documents & notes for the London trip on one of my Zim notebooks and it honestly made it so easy to be organised on the trip. i'm a full-on Zim convert. i've also customised my zim style, GTK theme & icon set for Zim only on both Windows AND Fedora now so it looks consistent, modern and beautiful. if you struggle staying organised i would really recommend it!

and now, dear readers, we're here once again: at the end of a gemlog, with me having no idea how to end it. i'm going to put some links down below relating to stuff from this post. click them or don't idk it's your choice <3
anyway: THX 4 READING BYE XOXO

h-entry support

2024-10-08T10:08:00+00:00

hiiii! very brief post to say that slimeblogger (and, by extension, this blog) now have h-entry support!

a big thank you to natalie whose blog post on the topic made me aware this was a thing that existed lol

i don't have anything to add here uhhhhhhhhh bye.

emails! emails!

2024-10-08T16:38:00+00:00

i just wrote a little script to check a special mailbox i created for new plaintext emails every hour & turn them into blogposts. its not perfect LOL but hey it works.

now i can post on my phone ooooooh

new age of posting

2024-10-08T20:30:00+00:00

a new age of posting begins.... being able to post whenever i want easily from my phone is gonna be insane

i'm gonna start posting blog posts while in Tesco. i'm gonna post them while sat on a train. blogging has never been so advanced

sorry in advance (but like not THAT sorry)

second new age of posting

2024-10-08T22:12:00+00:00

sorry if you saw the last post in your feed reader as a garbled mess lmao. the desktop email client i was using during testing does NOT encode plaintext emails as quoted-printable. the email client on my phone, however, DOES. and i had not accounted for decoding that because, frankly, i only just learned quoted-printable exists

BUT IT IS FIXED NOW. SO LET THE NEW NEW AGE OF POSTING COMMENCE

comments

2024-10-15T15:27:00+00:00

i keep debating whether or not to add comments to this blog!!

problem is that slimeblogger, and my presence on tilde.town generally, was focused on minimalism and simplicity. that's why there's no categories, no tags and no pagination. i wanted my blog to be able to exist as a single page. it's the philosophy of a lot of members of the town, and one i'm keen to stick to! i decided long ago that comments were simply outside the scope of this blog & slimeblogger.

BUT! this place is now my eggbug-away-from-eggbug; this is where i'm posting more now that cohost is gone and its community has moved to RSS feeds and blogs. and one thing cohost taught me to love is the comments section. i have left comments on many blog posts that appear in my RSS reader's feed, and sometimes i want to enable that level of interaction to my blog as well. honestly, sometimes it's just nice to know people have read your writings, your thoughts put to paper, and acknowledge that you exist LOL

idk. it's more work, i'd need to find a suitable comment platform, and i can't decide if it works with the design principles i have imposed upon myself and my own blog. not adding them for now, but watch this space...?

maybe i'll add a means to comment on blog posts that is SEPARATE from my blog itself - comments and comment threads could exist, but not clutter the blog and exist on their own Comment Site. another design principle i am extremely keen to stick to is that this blog will function with NO javascript (pop open your browser dev tools - there's no javascript here at all!). it seems like any means of delivering comments embedded into the page WILL require javascript, especially when i can't do any server-side scripting here on the town (and nor would i want to use their resources like that!)

actually i suppose i could use iframes but fuck that those are ugly and annoying LOL

what do you think, reader? oh wait shit you can't comment uhhhhhhhhh send an email to slimeblog@slimelia.uk for now i guess. ive set that up as a dedicated mailbox for this blog only (actually its just a forwarder but whatever). maybe i should just do that instead of commenting: bring back email. love an email, me

look upon him

2024-11-20T14:27:00+00:00

look upon him.. and know.

my boy,

testing images

2024-11-21T10:22:00+00:00

so for some reason the image in my last post did not show up in my RSS reader. they did when i forced miniflux to fetch original content, but i'd rather people not have to do that, especially in RSS readers without that feature! weirdly the image is present when i use the Feed Preview firefox extension so i guess maybe it is my RSS reader being weird??

i think it may be a weird thing happening with inline styling on the image tag. so: below is a shite selfie i took yesterday on me lunch break. if it shows up in feeds: yay! if it doesn't: i can't be bothered to diagnose the issue further right now. soz

testing images.. two!

2024-11-21T10:43:00+00:00

ok that also didnt work BUT i've just looked at other people's RSS feeds and they wrap their images in figure tags. so lets see if that does anything. please enjoy the below image: a fake youtube thumbnail i made for a tweet

oh im fucking stupid

2024-11-21T11:44:00+00:00

tell me how i repeatedly typed the <img> tag as <image> every fucking time. and did not notice once. im SO dumb

look at him again. as an apology

sorry!!!

2024-11-21T12:44:00+00:00

OKAY LAST FUCKING POST ON THE MATTER I PROMMY!!!

there was a SECOND issue with images that i didn't notice til now: i compose blogposts via plaintext emails sent to a mailbox. plaintext emails typically have a line length imposed by the editor, after which a line break is inserted. my fucking image url had a line break in the middle of it in my last post FML. not a problem for web browsers as they handle that kind of shit very well! but a potential problem for RSS readers. (side note: browsers are so clever. did not notice my image tag typo discussed in my last post for ages because, guess what? the browser noticed it and just guessed what tag i ACTUALLY wanted and showed that instead. nice!)

i added a little bit of regex to hopefully fix this now?? i email from two different clients and idk if they handle newlines differently but this definitely works for betterbird which is what i usually write posts in LMAO

anyway so sorry everything should work now hopefully fingers crossed thanks byee <3

webmentions

2024-11-22T12:36:00+00:00

hiiii! quick post to say i've added support for webmentions to my blog now! i actually added support yesterday but i made too many posts yesterday and didn't want to bombard your poor RSS readers.

i also have a new post coming soon - been working on a draft for a little while now. i'm excited to get that finished and posted! :D

snowflake

2024-12-11T10:38:00+00:00

"hey alice didnt you say you were working on a new post where is that" I GOT DISTRACTED AND/OR BORED!!!!!

old school runescape's raging echoes league started and i've been way more into it than i expected honestly. i've always quit leagues fairly quickly before but this time i'm way more invested - mainly because i've been playing it with my girlfriend <3

the other thing occupying my time has been: more crochet projects! when winter rolls around all my coding projects seem to fall by wayside and i pick up balls of yarn and start crocheting instead. there's one crochet project i shan't share here quite yet because it's going to be a christmas present and there's a slim chance the recipient may see it here. BUT look at this snowflake i made last night!!

for those curious, the pattern was designed by Katherine Eng and is available entirely free from yarnspirations!

i do really want to finish that post i was working on AND the coding project i started for my gemlog. BUT i suspect they're gonna be things that occur in the new year nowwwww whoopsie

twenny twenny five

2025-01-22T11:47:00+00:00

NOTE: The following post has been manually mirrored from my Gemini gemlog. For more information, read this post

hiyerrrrr y'alright! been a while since i posted a gemlog!! i've been slightly more active on my weblog but also not really woops. as consolation i'll be mirroring this post to my blog. so if you're on the web reading this and wondering wtf i'm talking about: don't worry about it babe (okay ❤️ yay ❤️)

i don't really have anything to say on here but i've not posted for a lil bit and wanted to say hiii i'm still alive! everyone did retrospectives of 2024 around the new year and i thought about doing that but i had nothing to really say about last year and now it is the 22nd of january which is a bit late for that LOL

thought about doing a round-up of my crochet projects from last year but the one i was happiest with (my second attempt at the gnome boy i posted on this blog) i never actually photographed. and i no longer have it because it was a gift LMAO. and i have many other things to show BUT they're christmas gifts i never actually gave to the person in question because of busy schedules and emergencies coming up meaning we never got to hang out. SO! no crochet project roundup. soz

i got lots of lovely crochet-related gifts for christmas though which was super lovely! currently slowly working on a crochet tote bag, but i've not done any work on it for a short while now just because i've spent my little free time doing other things like gaming :3

that big post i was planning to make is still in draft limbo. if i ever admit to myself that i probably have ADHD and get medicated it's SO over for you bitches. but until then the post is in Blog Limbo... although honestly i kind of changed my mind on the topic it was about and drifted from the original idea? and idk how much i agree with what i was trying to articulate, much less remember how to articulate it.

and yes, my silly little python library is also in limbo too because i am lazy. well that's not true i just have limited free time and no deadline on this project LOL. i'm busy gaming right now!! and watching The Traitors (UK) series 3 with my darling gf! it's a good show but this series really isn't hitting like the last one i fear. i saw a critic say the contestants are spending this series thinking too much like producers instead of players and i'm inclined to agree. like the whole "we voted off a doctor who was a Faithful because it'd make sense that the guy who heals people in the day is killing at night". like, fuck off. silly cunt

video games.. i played The Longing recently! that's that game that takes 400 hours to complete (except not really coz you can speed things up). i really fell in love with the game and the vibes and world it was trying to communicate. i also like that the ending does have a reset button but encourages you not to reset because it is better as a one-off experience. which i: 1. don't disagree with 2. totally disregarded see i had ALL achievements except one. and i have a save backup. so i did restore that save to get that final achievement because just having ONE achievement left to go was pissing me OFF!!!

i've also started playing Dread Delusion. and god, if i liked the vibes being communicated and the world being built in The Longing, i fucking adore those being communicated and built in Dread Delusion. i've still got plenty to do in the game, but the world and backstory feels so developed and interesting. i think pulling off a "the world was decimated in a cataclysmic event that erased all historical records" can be difficult in any game, especially an indie game with a small team, because there's the risk it'll feel like a shortcut being taken to avoid having to properly flesh out the world and deeper lore. Dread Delusion sort of sidesteps that by managing to flesh out the mysteries of this lost civilisation effectively and building up plenty of post-cataclysm lore so the world feels alive. i've still got so much of this game to explore and i can't wait :3

funny how i said "i don't really have anything to say on here" and yet here i am going on about anything that pops into my mind LOL. anyways thankies for reading. if you have any comments/thoughts or just want a chat honestly, shoot me an email at slimeblog@slimelia.uk <3

byee

journal games

2025-02-17T11:58:00+00:00

i've been looking at singleplayer ttrpg games lately because it turns out i own a fair few as a result of various itch.io bundles i've bought throughout the years!

i've yet to play any, but i must admit the "solo journaling rpgs" have piqued my interest. it's just not something i knew even existed and i feel like it might be a fun creative writing exercise

i own the alone on a journey zine which contains 3 games in it, and i printed the printable booklet version a good few months back now and never touched it.

i keep toying with the idea of playing one of these journaling rpgs and posting the journals here - either one post every day or just one post a week. but i also.. don't know if i'm willing to be that vulnerable in a public setting. i suppose i could write the journals to my gemlog, which is still public but feels more private because of how it is accessed.

i dunno. do you think it'd be interesting? should i bite the bullet and be publicly vulnerable or hide my shame in geminispace? have you heard of solo journaling rpgs, or played one yourself? i'd love to hear what you think! thoughts on a postcard to slimeblog@slimelia.uk

that paragraph made me sound like a blue peter presenter lmfao

88x31

2025-04-01T14:54:00+00:00

waow... whats that floating in the bottom right corner of my blog... is it.. an 88x31 button for my blog? it IS!!

here she is in all her glory:

that is all :3

social bookmarking enquiry

2025-04-02T10:53:00+00:00

hii! i already asked this exact same thing over on bluesky, but i figured i'd ask here too since the folks using rss readers probably have opinions on this!

question for those of you who use "read later"/social bookmarking services like pocket/instapaper/pinboard/wallabag etc. - do you actually find them useful? i've thought about setting up a self-hosted one before and then decided my probably-has-adhd brain will save articles and never read them.

like.. i have articles ive been saving to read, and one of them had a bunch of CSS break so i do now have an archived version of it bookmarked. but i've had that for ages and i suspect i shan't ever actually read them.

do you find that using these sort of link organisers and article/page savers help you to manage and read things? answers on a postcard to slimeblog@slimelia.uk thank youuuuuuu x

crochet photodump

2025-06-06T12:41:00+00:00

crochet photodump time!! gifts have been dished out so now i can post all these!! look at my boys

christmas looms

2025-12-03T10:01:00+00:00

ahh, hello dear readers. been a while since i posted to my blog, and even LONGER since i posted to my gemlog, so this is a two-for-one deal where i'm manually crossposting this to both feeds. why update my blog AND gemlog when i can be a lazy cow and just post the same thing in both places?

weblog readers may be wondering if there are any crochet project updates. to which i say: shh shhhhh don't fucking ask me thattt ?? started a project in SEPTEMBER for my bestie's birthday. never finished it in time, figured i'd have to send it to her in october. didn't finish it in october. did not finish in november. it is still unfinished now. at this rate idek if it'll be finished in time to be a christmas present.. ?? IT IS A LARGE PIECE OKAY! with a lot of little fiddly extras to crochet! and also i was sick back in sept/oct and i am currently sick AGAIN fml

went to cambridge in september for a few days with my friend joe, which was fun and cute! just sort of an excuse to meet in a location that was easy to get to for both of us and nice enough to spend a few days. there's so many museums in Cambridge and we went to like, most of them? but definitely not all of them

OH i forgot it's been so long since i wrote on my gemlog that it was before i went to Scotland too. went to Scotland at the beginning of August to see the bestieeee it was fun and cute and slay even if her (then) new kitten is the devil incarnate

i got really into edibles. which is a hilarious turn of events. hello geminispace hello smallnet im a stoner now ?? loveee to get a little bit fuckt uppp on da weekends teehee

i'm struggling to think of anything meaningful to say coz im sick and also it was a long day at work so my brain is frazzled. many coding projects are still on the backburner, of course. i do want to finish writing my gemtext to html python library but i also really feel no urgency when there's so many things that already achieve that. been lurking in the tilde.town IRC from time to time, so any townies feel free to say hi if you see me!

i'm once again in the skyrim mines, which seems to happen every winter. the evenings get dark and the weather gets cold and i say "ooh why not replay todd's most mediocre masterpiece again" like a CHUMP!!!

one of the coolest things to happen in my life was sort of accidentally stumbling into a local trans community?? wplace, an r/place clone that takes place on a world map, burst into the zeigest briefly around the end of July and one important feature is that it let you list your discord username. this ended up with me adding all the other local folks who joined me in drawing massive fuckoff trans flags in our area and us forming a server. everyone eventually stopped playing wplace, but the server remains. now i just have a cool fun server of trans people in the local area who im good friends with. turns out you can in fact just sort of sit around and find friends in your area by doing nothing ??

was actually meant to meet the server owner yesterday because we somehow STILL have not met, despite me having met like basically every other regular in that server. but i called it off because i didn't want to get her sick. thank god too, i was SO out of it yesterday that my grasp on reality was like... all over the place. i was scrolling twitter unable to discern fact from fiction in my virus-addled mind. really embarrassing stuff, but i WAS sick so like. yknow. happens, i guess

i'm typing this on the evening tuesday the 2nd of december, but i'm also typing it on my phone while laying on my bed. and i WAS going to post it tonight but i am feeling particularly unwell again and kiiind of can't be arsed to turn my pc on and post this in all the places i wanna post it. so if you're reading this and the date it was posted is NOT tuesday 2nd december 2025, you know i ended up laying down and having a rest instead of uploading a blog post LMAO

well, whenever i post this, happy december and happy Me Finally Making A New Post, Ending The Post Drought. have fun darlings xoxo etc. and such as