2026-03-17 00:20:32
I launched my first blog over 20 years ago. It was in Swedish and powered by Movable Type.
Since then, I’ve had many different blogs. Both in Swedish and English, covering topics from gadgets to mindfulness, and on a variety of platforms.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Blogs are alive, I’ve been terrible at keeping them alive. I’ve built them up and torn them down (with a couple of exceptions, which were sold).
So yeah, at least I’ve been consistent...
But there’s another habit, a positive one, that’s been a constant sidekick over the years. No matter the content or language: posting regularly.
It’s never been a strict routine or a strategy. It’s just been a part of daily life, like going to the gym. And just like working out, writing blog posts gets a lot easier if you do it regularly.
It becomes natural, even though there are ups and downs, like everything in life. It becomes easier and more joyful. It becomes part of life.
In the end, it’s not so much about blogging. It’s about living.
2026-03-16 18:09:10
You will probably want to read re: chunk of coal's re: Your Score, Please to understand what I am on about.
...
Stares confused at screen for several seconds
Sorry what? People use the discovery feed and the trending page? What am I on about of course they do. But I don't. I think I have opened the trending page about 3 times this year - and the recent posts page even less. I discover most of the blogs I read from hyperlinks from others blogs, things like my human room. And also a big one is my analytics page; Here, ill make a list of every person that has linked to my blog in one of their posts(excluding the bearblog carnival).
That list is actually a lot shorter than I thought it was - But my point remains, because I read all of these guys posts.
Is that not the philosophy of personal blogging? I am sure I have read a post on bearblog at some point that the essence of this hobby is community.
Bearblog, the service, is a tool. A tool we get to choose how to use. I choose to click 'dashboard' and then 'thoughts of a guy named mason' everytime I open the home page. How do you use the tool?
2026-03-16 14:02:00
I've been researching how to do that whole V-tuber animated character modeling thing. Given most of my work is done in vector format in Illustrator I think I can get a decent animation from the process. But first I needed something to animate so I took Yuki, the mascot I made for my Noodlist website and went back into Illustrator to draw the rest of him.
The original you can see in earlier posts and on the website. Most of his body is covered up by the noodle cup. At one point I had a tail on him but it was too distracting so I took it off, etc.
But tonight I spent a good three hours with the pen tool drawing up the rest of his body. The goal was to do it in a way that was somewhat symmetrical so that the live2d software could do its keyframe magic better.
Anyway, here is Yuki with the rest of his arms and legs and tail. I also drew up an open mouth and closed eyes. I think I need a halfway shut version for the animation and a not 100% open mouth as well. Maybe tomorrow I'll get around to it.
Also for fun, here is what all the paths look like in Illustrator with everything turned off lol.
2026-03-16 12:24:00
I spent my whole weekend at the hospital and running errands.
On Saturday, my best friend who is like a sister to me had a seizure for the first time. It is currently attributed to an acute ischemic stroke. She is 29 years old.
She seems to be bouncing back pretty quickly and shows zero signs of stroke, only recovery symptoms from the seizure. That's why this is doubly shocking.
For years she has driven me around a lot. She has always felt bad because I don't have a car and begrudgingly tolerate mediocre public transit. She worries about my safety.
The situation has flipped. Now she is not allowed to drive for six months. Soon I will have to start driving her car to take her places and run errands for the foreseeable future.
I'm so glad she's (seemingly) okay right now. I'm still terrified though. I don't know what else to say. I love her so much.
2026-03-16 11:54:00
I have not done a lot of novel reading in the last decade. I can think of a variety of reasons why this may have happened. Having a cell phone is I think the biggest one, since it fills up my time with a lot of chopped-up, calorie-free writing.
The other major reason I quit reading novels is that I started reading a lot more screenplays and comic books. I found this extremely useful as a working games writer. The actual text you write when you are writing for a videogame is structurally and stylistically very similar to the actual text in film and comic book scripts. Comic books in particular, I think, teach you how to write good game dialogue. You really gotta learn how to share attention with visual art, and comic books are absolutely the best example of that kind of thing. And there are so many complex and even "literary" comic books to read! I've written about several of them on this blog in the last few months.
Turning away from novels so that you can slurp down tons of fancy graphic novels does make it difficult to answer certain types of job interview questions, though. There's a certain type of games interviewer who really wants you to be reading novels! I've definitely made some people, both narrative hiring managers and people in other disciplines, majorly uncomfortable when I told them I had a giant pile of screenplay PDFs at home, and a comic book coming to me in the mail, and maybe a short story or two that I could remember... but I hadn't read a novel in over a year. I think they want me to demonstrate some kind of soulful, passionate interest in writing, which they epitomize in the craft of novel-writing specifically. So when you say, "Oh, I read A Garden of Spheres recently," not only do they have no idea what that is, they just don't respect it!
This isn't the main reason I decided to start reading more novels again, but it's certainly a reason. The other reason is that I've got a list of popular stuff from the last several years and I wanted to chew through it. I started with Piranesi.
It's extremely good!! I probably should have read it earlier. I quite liked its mix of old-school survival adventure-writing and almost narrative-deduction-game-ass document-sleuthing. It draws inspiration very self-consciously [laudatory] from a variety of literary and philosophical inspirations and it was quite a lot of fun to see the 19th century shipwrecked-sailor stuff in its most surreal form here.
It's maybe too cautious about overstaying its welcome. I found that the mystery resolved very quickly, because the protagonist spends quite a lot of the story trying hard to not solve it. Instead, you watch him do a lot of anxious self-soothing and rationalization and denial. The last third of the story gets a bit crowded with this stuff, and it has to very suddenly come together. I was at peace with it, though - watching the protagonist rationalize what's happening to him is one of the core pleasures of the story, so it's not a bad trade-off.
One of the reasons I'm reading novels again is that I bought a very cheap e-ink reader and, lo and behold, I really do read a lot faster with it. I should have gotten one a long time ago!! I'll write about it in a bit, but I have to read a bit more with it before I'm sure about what I want to say.
Anyway: Piranesi by Susanna Clarke is very good! Everyone's already known this for years, and I just figured it out!
2026-03-16 08:48:00
When I was younger, I had this problem where I only liked doing hobbies or activities that I was naturally good at. Any time I found learning something new difficult, I would feel uneasy and stop completely. This led to me only sticking with the things I could do well right off the bat and not trying a lot of things that I probably would have enjoyed.
I recognized this tendency a long time ago and I started working on getting better with learning something over time. I remember I chose to play Mario Maker because I was bad at it and I accepted that it would take time to learn. That was positive growth, I think.
Now, I have a new and, I think, related problem. When I pick up a new hobby, as a good little autist, I dive directly into the deep end. I immediately find the extremest practitioners of that hobby and decide I must emulate them. I do this even if the way they enjoy the hobby looks very tedious and unpleasant. I think I want to jump in quickly to prove how good I am at learning something new. Then I immediately burn out on the hobby and never pick it up again.
Recently, I started doing puzzles. I never really cared for puzzles growing up. I wasn't good at them so I rejected them. When I did my first 500 piece puzzle, I enjoyed it. I found it relaxing. Did I do another 500 piece puzzle? No. I found the hardest puzzles I could find and stalled out trying to finish something that wasn't really fun anymore.
Yesterday, I got my second 500 piece puzzle. I'm taking it as a win.