Wyatt's Site
Greetings, traveler; I am Wyatt Ward. Welcome to my ever-larger
personal site.
Treasure the songs of the machines, my
wayward vagabond.
And if you should find a fellow Seeker of the Songs, do not be
afraid to share their stories as well. They are not for hoarding;
they belong to us all. Their songs die with us, and our only hopes
of saving them are in sharing their music while we still can sing.
If you're somebody I know and you have a button for your own web
presence that you'd like to be here, no promises, but you know how to
reach me.
Raison d'Être
To spark joy and in turn fan burning passions. To wax poetic into the
dark doldrums of a dreary day until the day begins to shine. To express
love for the living, the dead, and the
somewhere
in-betweens. Inciting and radicalising towards true tenderness.
Spreading kindness and compassion, bringing a cold silence to a
sweltering shout. To be true to myself and share self-seen truths with
others. To reflect, listen, and instruct. To explore, conjugate, and
enlighten.
The Above, but In English
To put that in a somewhat less pretentious way, I aim to share my
discoveries and thoughts here. There is much I have found or thought
that I have wanted some way to share, and this site, especially
the blog, is a way for me to do this.
The domain name (megatokyo.moe) is derived from the setting of
Bubblegum Crisis, a 1987 Japanese Original Video Animation that
I fell in love with. I've
written about it
and what it means to me a bit on my blog.
This site will mostly contain my writings on whatever attracts my
interest. I make no guarantees as to the completion of any of my blog
posts, but I will guarantee that they were one hundred percent
hand-crafted (by me) with no computer intervention (or AI generation).
I bring this up as a source of pride. I do not wish to dilute
my site with stuff I couldn't be bothered to write. Why should you
bother to read something no one could be bothered to make? There's
enough pollution out there as it is without me adding more fuel to
the dumpster fire.
Occasionally, there will also be philosophical musings and other
reflections as I find fit to write them. But for now, it is mostly a
technical site in nature. My deepest apologies for this, but that is
what many of my particular fixations tend to involve. I still hope
you can enjoy it. If you are a kindred spirit, maybe you can even find
instruction in it. I think I am a librarian at heart.
As long as it is under my control, my site shall remain a genuine and
heartfelt place, where I can hopefully share my thoughts with others
and assure them of my authenticity.
Of course, you'll have to trust me on that - but hopefully you'll be
able to put that trust in me as you come to know more about me while
exploring the site.
On this Site's Design
This site is written so that it will display adequately on many devices
and browsers while requiring minimal processing power or RAM. Sure, I
could have used Bootstrap and Vue or any number of other CSS or
Javascript frameworks, but performance would suffer and the page would
also stand out less. I have tried to keep the site's CSS and HTML as
pragmatic as possible, while also attempting to achieve acceptable
results on a wide variety of rendering engines.
If using a graphical browser with CSS, the site is best viewed at 800
pixels wide or wider, but can be viewed on smaller screens without many
major issues. Text mode browsers should also render reasonably well.
Graphical browsers without CSS will also work fine. To simulate the
non-CSS experience in annoying browsers like Chromium/Chrome that don't
let you turn off CSS, the "print view" button is a close approximation
(with only one or two rules applied for the navigation links and
fitting "wide" (like, 800 pixel) embedded images on small screens).
Compatibility with this 800×600 laptop from 1996 was not a goal, but a natural result of the choices I made while designing this website.
It likewise does not force HTTPS encryption (although it does support
it), such that software that cannot use newer TLS versions can still
connect.
The site has been tested in browsers including Lynx, Internet Explorer
5, Firefox 2.0 (in Solaris 8), Opera 10, Dillo, NetSurf, and Links2 -
which all work. I've also tried IBM WebExplorer for OS/2 Warp 3 as well
as NCSA Mosaic (which mostly work, but unicode and PNG images present
issues; the worst rendition of the last two is by WebExplorer). This is
good news for all of the three people who still use IE5 or IE6 for
anything.
So, regardless of how you feel about "Web 1.0," please keep in mind
my goals when designing this site. Remember that my priority was to
make this site fast, lightweight, readable, and compatible. If you
have suggestions on how I can improve readability or usability, do not
hesitate to let me know.
On Javascript
I sometimes can like using Javascript, mostly in the form of user
scripts. but I'd much rather have a page that's easily accessible to
everyone, regardless of their computing power and living situation.
Since there is no reason my site should need Javascript, I see
no reason to introduce it as a requirement or even as a recommendation.
As of this writing, there is none at all, in fact.
I have added a "light" and "dark" theme, as well as several other
stylings, implemented entirely using symbolic links. No need for
Javascript, cookies, or server side page processing! The only
difference is which CSS file is symlinked to. The light CSS hides the
light mode button, the dark CSS hides the dark mode button, and so on.
For the curious, the original styling of this site is the "light" mode,
which has changed little since I first launched this site as a "github
pages" thing in around 2019 or 2020.
I still consider it the most legible for most readers. "E-Ink" is a
nearly identical styling with minor tweaks for reflective "electronic
paper" type displays. The background is pure white and the typeface is
a serif instead of a sans serif.
My favourite stylings are "Rose" and "Megatokyo," although I am also
fond of "Velvet." If you don't see one of those options in the buttons
in the top corner, it is because you are currently using one of those
stylings.
Contact
If you want to contact me, my e-mail address can be found on my
Codeberg, GitLab and GitHub account pages and in this site's git commit
history. It's not listed here because of spambots; sorry. If you have
questions, comments, or even want to hire me, don't hesitate to get in
touch!
RSS Feed
I have had to add additional clutter to this page to inform you that
there is now an RSS feed available for
my blog, should you wish to be notified when I post something.
Of course, should you use
https://www.seamonkey-project.org/ as your web
browser (like I do), you can find my RSS feed like you always have via
the RSS auto-discovery feature, via the orange RSS icon in your URL
bar.
This clutter is necessary because Mozilla, Google et al. no longer seem
to care about blog post discovery/notifications. Nor do they seem to
care about helping individuals to self-publish outside of their
centralized infrastructure and software-as-service sites/"apps." They
do not even appear to care for user freedoms; they would rather you read
whatever Google's search algorithm (formerly, Google Plus), Twitter's
post feed, Facebook's "wall", or Mozilla's own Pocket might deem more
fit to shove under your nose for your obedient consumption.
Because algorithm-based media discovery has never not worked out.
No, sir. You shouldn't read
this article, nor
this Pew research writeup.
Certainly,
critiques of echo chambers are right out, too. You
should learn to stop worrying and love being told what to think.
Except you should listen to me, of course. You should believe me 100%
because I am never wrong or biased about anything, ever. Anyone who may
say otherwise is probably a dirty, rotten, filthy anarchist or
something. Maybe even a
socialist!
Thank God there are corporations out there to protect us from these
vile monsters, whom you should absolutely never give a fair chance to
explain themselves. And you certainly should never consider their
sentimental merits, either. Just keep clicking your Youtube
recommendations. Keep your head down, do your patriotic duty, consume,
like, and subscribe.
Oh, and I guess Mozilla will probably also claim RSS was such a huge
maintenance burden, or something. And cite telemetry data showing
no one used it, despite the people who know about RSS being smart
enoughto turn that off for the sake of their "privacy" that Mozilla
claims to care so deeply about. Maintenance burden is usually what
Mozilla employees cite whenever they remove or lobotomize one of the
ever-fewer remaining functionalities I may have liked in Mozilla's
product that distinguished it from Chrome and all of the Chrome-clones
out there.
No idea what RSS is? Not to worry. Wikipedia has
a decent explanation.
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