mari's Scratchpad

Scattered July Updates

• Posted by mariteaux on July 17th, 2020 filed in Updates
• 2 Comments »

I’ve had a good run of daily scheduled posts going, and I wanna keep it going. I’ve been up to a lot of smaller shit, so for the sake of making sure it doesn’t get lost, have one of those clearinghouse update posts I do every few months:

I haven’t forgotten about Tesserae, promise

At the moment, I have Tesserae going in the background, doing a page or two at a time on days when I feel like it. It’s a nice way to slowly fill in the blanks without taking too much time away from my “main” projects. Two pages have gone up this month, one on doctypes (which is easily the most autistic thing I’ve ever written, but it’s partially for my own reference so I don’t mind), and one on IDs and classes. Likely, I’ll just try to fill out the advanced HTML section as a whole in this current “pass” and then go back and focus on getting CSS broken down.

On a more interesting note, Tesserae now has an RSS feed. It’s actually not too difficult to write one by hand, given that it’s all just XML at the end of the day. Should be easier to keep track of various little page updates now. Suppose I’ll think of doing this for all my other hand-built projects if it’s this easy, really.

I’m a lot more pleased with how the site’s structured and the pace of the tutorials this time. No one else is paying attention to it probably, but it’s a labor of love from me and I like it, so that’s what matters.

Bloody GIR

I left some of the Gopher Information Repository unfinished when I brought it back two months ago, and I think I can just about get it feature-complete within the week. Sensing a good thing with that RFC mirror, I mirrored RFC 4266 on Gopher and Gopher+’s URI schemes, and I also mirrored a document that’s in a vague RFC format but not designated as one, seemingly the canonical Gopher+ specification. Given how hard it was to find (dcb tipped me off to Floodgap’s copy) and how RFC 4266 cites it, it’s definitely one I’d like to have in the collection. It also wasn’t spell-checked, so I had to run it through Works and clean that up too.

I’ve also slowly been adding more clients to my client recommendation pages, and I got the “Hosting Considerations” page done for people looking to host their own server. At current, I just have the gophermap syntax page, server reviews, and the 3rd party Gopher hosting page to do and it’ll be complete enough for prime time. I’ll still be adding to it, but it’ll be off my to-do list officially.

See I’m not going crazy

Back in March, I mentioned my site exhibiting this problem where iOS would try to simulate boldface on fonts without bold glyphs. Couldn’t get it to trigger at the time, but finally, here’s proof that it’s a thing.

VRML is cool

Honestly, I don’t care much for 3D graphics that strive for photorealism. We have photorealism already in the real world, and seeing a computer almost get there over and over, but never really bridging the gap, has brought about diminishing returns since about 2013. I think a lot of games especially these days just kinda look overly cooked and flavorless, no style, no shortcomings, just nothing interesting to say about them.

VRML, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of flavorless. It was an open standard in the mid-90s for getting 3D graphics working on and over the web. It never much caught on, which is a damn shame because a good VRML scene still looks pretty awesome. I think the datedness is the real appeal of these old 3D graphics. Virtual reality in the 90s was all cyberpunky and weirdly optimistic, and virtual reality now is just a gimmicky toy that bugmen with too much disposable income pretend will revolutionize the world.

I always love when I find these sorts of contemporary pages colleges had up in the 90s and no one ever bothered to take down. It’s really the best way to read about VMRL, in my opinion. Actually viewing VRML worlds is a bit trickier; I don’t know if certain worlds were built for only certain modeling packages or what, but I’ve gotten a good few that just error out on open. Still, qiew has given me the best luck. If you’re looking for models, you can try here or here first or just Google around for stuff.

I still have some pictures from when I went to visit a state park a few weeks ago to post and, fittingly enough, a book on old web technologies to write about for here. And I have to get back to story stuff. And that Quake level. Let’s see if we pass 18 posts in a single month, yeah?