forever tinkering - a week of breaking & unbreaking

08 Jun, 2025

Does HTML have greasy ichor?

Hands slick with digital ichor, I tinker—gleeful, manic, laughing like a man who’s seen the glimmer of truth at the edge of CSS and gone... quite mad. It’s glorious fun, but not too much fun. The content must flow. It must, or else we stir the gaping cosmic wound that watches with eyeless patience. I have already felt its displeasure.

A migraine—the kind that feels like Azathoth himself has nested inside my brainstem—dragged me from what little sleep I dared claim. It was 2am. The hour of hollow things. No rest. No dreaming. Just endless fog now.

BUT. COFFEE.

Sweet savior. Dark nectar of sanity. I am restored—mostly—though the bones ache and the air tastes like waiting. Rain would be mercy¹.

And yes, Tylenol™, the modern sacrament. But we do not speak of that²³. Not here.

Over the past lunar cycle (read: week), I have clawed from the chaos several tricks I find neat, if not outright arcane:

• Conjuring the last three blog posts to appear at the foot of each entry, using the Bear {{posts}} magic.
• Inscribing rainbow around post-card borders like a digital ward. (Happy pride to all except the current administration who can fuck all the way off.)
• A reply-by-social button that harvests the page URL and feeds it into the hungry mouth of your choice⁴. Hopefully it works as testing is failing...
• Implementing Webmentions that pulls your whispers back into mine⁵.
• Dynamic post titles—fluid identities, shifting masks—so each entry can speak with a different tongue depending on my mood⁶.
• Template sorcery. Automated rites! Broken only by my foolish use of dashes when I should have used underscores⁷. The devil, it turns out, is a syntax error.

It’s been the right kind of madness. Tinkering without losing myself to the tool. Because the work—the writing—is what matters. It is the lighthousefire I keep burning in the stygian dark. Not the dopamine tickle of solving a puzzle, but the long, resonant hum of having said something true.

Puzzles are fine. But this?

This is how I scream into the void, not in terror, but in conversation—hoping to illuminate a speck of it for the both of us, dear reader.

• 23 Aug, 2025 Time is of the essence - Blaugust the Twenty-Second

• 22 Aug, 2025 CSS override for Bear's 404 page - Blaugust the Twenty-Third

  in which our author is way to obsessive about customization

• 21 Aug, 2025 Information density has teeth - Blaugust the Twentieth

  in which our author goes a little psycho psychic physicist with information theory

Footnotes

#me #meta