Just barely missed finishing Blaugust. I was inches from the finish line. Then, one Saturday, I did way too much, reasoning that I'd still be able to at least do a short blog post at the end of the day. I didn't have to write about everything, I told myself, just a short throwaway post would suffice. Then I could do a proper post on Sunday.
Well, I collapsed in exhaustion before that could happen. I don't even remember what all I did that day, it was mostly boring personal shit like errands, but it was too much of it and I went to bed at like 21h00. After missing a day, I didn't see much point in continuing. I failed. Oh, I know the goal is 31 blog posts, not necessarily one post every day. I could've made two posts the following day and it'd be fine. But I'd have known.
One thing I realized is that the amount of friction self-hosting my blog adds made the challenge way, way harder than when I did #100DaysToOffload on Bearblog. On paper, it's not that much extra work, but when I have to do it every day, the cognitive load adds up in my mind. When it's not a box I can simply type some words into and click go and it does all the work for me, it makes me want to do it less.
Which is why I'm simultaneously ashamed and pleased to admit that I'm moving this blog yet again. I'm not going back to bearblog, but I'm moving to Mataroa, a delightful minimalist blog platform that's been on my radar for awhile but I didn't realize the benefits of until recently.
On the surface, it's not too much different than Bearblog, but it offers the following much-desired features:
-
NO CUSTOM CSS. The blog looks how it looks. There are two customization options: one to use a larger font, one to use sans-serif font in the content of blog posts. Serif is the default. I've enabled the first option. I may enable the second one. I'll see how I feel once I have a bigger chunk of text to look at. Otherwise, I don't have to worry about how it looks at all.
-
Built-in anonymous commenting system, with manual approval
-
Image hosting! Even a free account will allow you to host up to 100MB of images, which is plenty for my needs. Attaching images is also much easier than with kiki: I simply drag-and-drop it into the posting interface.
-
Newsletter subscriptions! This isn't something I care about, but a lot of people seem to prefer getting updates via email rather than an RSS reader, so readers who want it will have that option.
-
If I decide to pay for a premium account so I can connect the blog to my domain name, it's a very reasonable $9/yr (compared to bear's $60/yr, which is quite steep to host a static mostly text blog)
So yeah, Mataroa seems like the obvious choice in hindsight. You can find me at mattbee.mataroa.blog and use the subscription links you find there to see blog posts going forward. Having such a streamlined process may incentivize me to go back to posting from my phone sometimes. I can't promise I'm going to start updating every day again, but hopefully my output should increase. You can stay subscribed to the feed you're reading; mattbee.zone is going to stick around as a project/porfolio page, and I'm going to start using the RSS feed for general site updates, but these will be much less frequent.
My creative output was a big ol' goose egg for most of September, outside of the usual fedi posting. It was kind of nice. I read a lot, I played a few games. I expected the next bit of writing I did to be a Game Badges update, but the end of September took an unexpected turn: I learned of the existence of Super Mario Bros. Remastered, a full recreation of the original Super Mario Bros., Lost Levels and Super Mario Bros. Special for Windows and Linux. It's made in Godot, and it also has a very full-featured level editor.
I desperately wanted to participate in the Mario Maker scene when it came out in 2015, but I couldn't justify the expense of a Wii U just to play one game; also, I didn't want to give Nintendo full control over my work. I didn't want to put my creative energy into something on a gatekept, temporary platform. The existence of a free equivalent on a platform that will always be accessible and relevant1 is very exciting to me.
I've made three levels I'm proud of in as many weeks: Beach Brats, The 4th Element and Night Flight.
Night Flight
They're easy, medium, and hard difficulty respectively. I've uploaded them to a platform called Level Share Square which SMB1R has partnered with: it allows you to download peoples' custom levels from within the game. You can also get them from My LSS profile, or I've added them to the Mods section of this website, or you can get them from the mods section of my itch.io page.
That's about all I have to talk about for right now. Hope to see you over at the new blog!
-
I expect Nintendo will eventually get wind and issue a cease and desist, as is their wont, but that just means the project will have to move underground. There's no removing it from the internet now that it's out there. ↩