Wyatt's Site
Greetings, traveler; I am Wyatt Ward. Welcome to my increasingly large
personal site.
Proceed with an open heart and mind, dear traveler; this site's labyrinth
grows by the day in the pursuit of the knowledge of the Ancients. Do
not be afraid of going too deep, for the exit is never far off. The
relics of the past still walk these halls, yearning for a place among
the living. But be not afraid of them, for they mean no harm to you.
Verily, they would like to acompany you.
Listen very closely, traveler; for still they do breathe, their breaths
as whispers in a breeze. Their utterances are secrets shared freely.
Keep an open heart, for encoded in these murmurings of the wind, you
will hear them weaving a tapestry of the most delicate of melodies,
crooned for any with the heart to hear them.
Yes, wayward wanderer; if you are so disposed to hear their songs,
their secrets, and their loves, you may find yourself taking their
mechanical hearts with yours when you depart from this grotto. They
will live on as a part of you. And this is as it should be.
Listener, my friend, you would do well to treasure their songs, keeping
them in your heart always. And If you should find a fellow Seeker of
the Songs, do not be afraid to share the voices of the machines. They
are not for hoarding; they belong to us all. For their songs die with
us, and our only hopes of saving them are in sharing their music while
we still are able to sing it.
Raison d'Être
To bring light to the reader's darkness. To fill the soul where there
was once void. To spark joy and in turn burn 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.
To incite; to ignite. To radicalise towards true tenderness. To spread
kindness and compassion. To bring a cold silence to a sweltering shout.
To pour the mind onto the display panel, no longer with much regard for
appearance or pretention. To be true to myself and share self-seen
truths with others. To reflect. To instruct. To explore. To conjugate.
To 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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). 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.
Contact
If you want to contact me, my e-mail address can be found on my GitLab
or 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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