Tag: Programming

  • Jiggy’s Jog Through 2025

    Jiggy’s Jog Through 2025

    It’s the season of all things “Wrapped,” folks… And I don’t just mean holiday gifts!

    As we get closer and closer to bidding 2025 adieu, all our favorite sources for entertainment keep hammering us with the stats of which films, TV shows, music, video games, and more that kept us going throughout the year. It’s a trend that seemed to really take off once Spotify’s Wrapped recap became a must-share among users. Now, every platform, from Steam to YouTube, shares a tiny yet interesting nugget of data with its users each December.

    I don’t exactly have a lot of “data” for a variety of reasons. For example, not all of my film and TV consumption was done on Netflix. In fact, our home has access to what feels like a dozen streaming services these days, so none of it would really be all that accurate. Instead, I’m presenting all of you with some of what I considered the very best options from what I consumed this year. A good selection that I can confidently recommend!

    Film — Animation Ruled the Year

    Netflix alone reports that I watched its content for 219 hours (or around 9 days). It is probably a lot by most standards, but do keep in mind that I’m still technically unemployed. When I’m not in my home office trying to remedy that situation, I’m either asleep or in front of a television. So, brushing my excessive consumption aside, here’s what I discovered this year in the world of film.

    Poster for the Netflix movie KPop Demon Hunters.
    Like so many others, KPop Demon Hunters seeped into my soul.

    While I don’t necessarily have anything against animation, an animated piece of media does typically have to really ‘wow’ me in a way that live-action doesn’t. Which is yet another weird fact about me, I know. Most geeks like me are known to love it, especially anime and manga, but I just never picked up that characteristic, I guess. But three films that I watched multiple times on Netflix this year got me right in the “feels.”

    I’ll go ahead and get KPop Demon Hunters out of the way. Yes, I did completely buy into the hype, but only after I had kept reading glowing reviews one right after another, and friends of mine demanded that I watch it with them. As a lifelong, 40-year-old nerd, I do not believe that I fit into this movie’s target demographic in the slightest… But it still managed to capture me. First of all, the soundtrack is full of actual bangers, the mythology and lore is spectacular, and the story of the Demon Hunters themselves is heartwrenching, but understand me when I say: Cat. As a father of cats, it’s hard for me to avoid anything cat-related, so without question, Derpy the big, beautiful, silly, and supernatural blue tiger is the real star of KPop Demon Hunters for me. And I can only hope that any future sequels or tie-ins include Derpy as much as the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade did!

    The other two animated films that I fell in love with in 2025 were both Academy Award nominees that competed for Best Animated Feature Film. The first is The Wild Robot, a DreamWorks Animation venture that featured the voice work of an all-star cast, including Lupita Nyong’o in the title role. This film was first recommended to me as a candidate for us to watch together in my Discord community, which we did back in July. I have to confess here that the story of Roz, the “wild” robot in question, brought a little bit of a tear to my eye.

    The cat from Flow focuses on something moving in the water.
    This is sort of like my reaction when Flow was first released.

    The last film, which actually wound up winning the aforementioned Academy Award, was a little Latvian production called Flow. As I had stated earlier, it’s hard to keep me away from anything cat-related, and boy, does this movie deliver! The movie’s entire plot, which is presented without any spoken dialogue, follows a small cat trying to survive in a world that seems to now be largely devoid of humans, and the water level begins to rise dramatically. The way in which this movie is able to convey the emotion and panic through the eyes of mostly just this one cat (and occasionally his other animal pals) is incredible, and speaks volumes to the way the film was handcrafted in free and open-source graphics software Blender over the course of more than five years. By saying that I “highly recommend” this film is an understatement.

    As for honorable mentions, y’all know that I’m a big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so I would be remiss not to mention both Thunderbolts* and Fantastic Four: First Steps. I think that both movies represent more of a “return to form” for Marvel going into next year, which will see them releasing the next Spider-Man and Avengers offerings. They were also far and away better movies than the fourth Captain America outing that was released in the early part of the year.

    Television — This Was More Varied…

    I’ve mentioned in past posts and on my Now page that I watch a lot of television. I think part of the reason why I also love the Marvel universe and a few other big franchises is that it’s all serialized. I like taking a big bite out of stories that are likely to continue in future installments. Big fictional worlds created to endure. So, needless to say, I consume more series than I do standalone films. You might want to strap in for this one! It’s gonna be a looooong list.

    Key art from Showtime's Yellowjackets, featuring actresses (from left to right) Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Tawny Cypress, and Juliette Lewis.
    Key art from Showtime’s Yellowjackets, featuring actresses (from left to right) Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Tawny Cypress, and Juliette Lewis.

    And for the sake of time and length, I’ve also only included TV shows that I actually started watching this year. So the latest seasons of Stranger Things and Wednesday, spectacular as they are, don’t get featured here!

    • The Diplomat. I’ve loved Keri Russell since Felicity in the late ’90s/early ’00s, but I couldn’t really get into her award-winning turn on The Americans later on. But surprisingly, this series has hit all the right buttons for me. I’m already on the third season after having just started a couple of weeks ago!
    • Wayward. Toni Collette is absolutely chilling in this limited series!
    • The Residence. This series had me absolutely hollering! I’m so disappointed that a second season isn’t going forward. Please give Uzo Aduba all the flowers and awards, please and thank you.
    • Sirens. This is another limited series that had me captivated from start to finish. Parts of it felt very soapy, but in a kind of good way? Especially awesome performances by Julianne Moore and Meghann Fahy!
    • Yellowjackets. This one is a few seasons in already, but I discovered it for the first time this past February and wound up adding Showtime onto my Paramount+ account just so I could continue watching more recent seasons. This show is completely bonkers, but in the most addictive way! The cast is pretty star-studded, also, and they carry the show remarkably well.
    • Severance, Silo, & Foundation. Putting these three together for a reason, which is that they all felt like they blurred together for me. Let me explain: After gaining access to Apple TV+ this year, I knew that Severance was going to be one of their first shows that I was going to binge. I like a lot of the cast, and the sci-fi premise already sounded fascinating from the tons of posts I kept seeing on social media about it. And I clearly know myself, because immediately after the first episode, I couldn’t stop. While I was still in the middle of Severance, my brother insisted that I check out both Silo and Foundation, both of which are incredible stories adapted from sci-fi books. So, once Severance was finished, I moved right on to Silo, and then all three seasons of Foundation after that. Each one is quite the adventure, so if any of them sound appealing to you, I do urge you to check them out! I also wrote more about these shows and Apple TV+ overall in this post from the Ghost Archives.
    • Daredevil: Born Again. Technically speaking, this series “began” with the Daredevil series on Netflix years ago, but Disney and Marvel rebooted the series to bring it to their “proper” Marvel universe timeline, and its first season was released earlier this year. It still maintains its much darker and violent premise, and Charlie Cox (Matt Murdock/Daredevil), Vincent D’Onofrio (Wilson Fisk/Kingpin), and Jon Bernthal (Frank Castle/The Punisher) still star. It’s a must-watch for fellow Marvel fans!

    And I’ll once again give an honorable mention to Marvel with the Ironheart series. Even though it was hugely delayed, only gave us six episodes, and it didn’t receive nearly as much pomp and circumstance as most of the other Marvel properties, it was still a highly entertaining watch for a few hours!

    I’ll likely close out this year by finishing up Stranger Things and the second season of Fallout.

    Music — Oops, All Throwbacks!

    If it wasn’t actually released in the 1980s, then it probably sounds like it did!

    According to my Spotify Wrapped recap, my most-played song was “Friday I’m in Love” by The Cure. And while that track was released on their 1992 album Wish, a lot of the band’s popularity and most of their gothic rock and new wave sound were straight out of the ’80s. Several songs in my recap were also from The Midnight—a modern-day band with a retro synthwave sound. You can visualize their inclusion on the soundtracks to every popular ’80s film you can think of.

    Jumping back out of the decade I was born in, the rest of my favorite tracks are also tracks that I’ve been jamming to forever. Some selections I’d like to share include:

    I know, I know… My favorite song from KPop Demon Hunters wasn’t the massively popular “Golden.” I love that song too, but it’s the closing number for me. Why? Because there’s something beautiful in the moment when you finally meet the real you.

    I also resurrected No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom album this year. I don’t know why, but that album is just the sound of the ’90s to me. Probably because of “Don’t Speak” topping charts for an incredible 16 weeks back in 1996. That song was ubiquitous, and I can’t say that I don’t understand—easily one of the absolute greatest rock breakup songs.

    The album cover to No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom.
    If you had this album on repeat at any point in the ’90s, we should be friends!

    Oh, and since it’s the holiday season, check my Spotify playlist for my favorite holiday tunes!

    Gaming — Return to the Grind

    Around this time last year, I stepped back into Palia because I needed something simple, cozy, and had that holiday flair. It served me well. According to my Steam Replay 2025 recap, I spent 52% of my gaming time in Palia this year. I recognize that it is a good amount, especially for a game that is still extremely underdeveloped, but there’s a lot of reasons why I kept going back to that one. I think it’s because the devs did a lot of work to make it feel very ”homey.” Plus, they’ve added a whole bunch of updates throughout 2025 that expanded the game considerably. You can also read a little more about Palia in this post that also appeared in my Ghost Archives.

    The other games that I dabbled with this year have something in common with Palia: There’s a lot of grind. My current favorite game at the moment, Enshrouded, as well as Guild Wars 2, the MMO that I’ve decided to return to, all feature what gamers call a “grind.” They all include doing menial tasks as part of the built-in progression system. Mining, foraging, farming, ranching, crafting, etc., are all such tasks. Oftentimes, these games have daily or weekly quests that are very grindy, and once you do them, you earn rewards! If it sounds like work, that’s because sometimes it feels like it! But only in the most fun way possible.

    I think it speaks to where I’m at in life right now, honestly. Having trouble finding meaningful employment throughout the last year has me so troubled that I’m looking for work in my entertainment, right? That’s one theory anyway. Sometimes I also just find it a little bit comforting or therapeutic to just sign on and go mindlessly till my garden, bust open some rocks, or can a bunch of pumpkin puree to go sell to the cartoon villagers, okay? Yes, I am an adult, stop judging me!

    Art from the video game Palia featuring villagers Zeki and Kenyatta.
    Palia also features a cat guy named Zeki. Could you blame me???

    In any event, those are the three games I’ve been spending the majority of my time on, though I’m always open and willing to dabble in other types of games. If you’d like to come hang out with me sometime while I’m gaming, be sure to check out my livestreams on Twitch! I also try to post entertaining clips from those streams to TikTok and YouTube Shorts, so feel free to enjoy those also!

    In Conclusion — Life is Lifin’

    Not a lot changed for me overall in 2025. Even my coding and programming courses sorta did a reset. freeCodeCamp retired the Responsive Web Design certification that I earned at the beginning of the year, so I essentially started over with their full-stack course instead, only for them to break it up into modular pieces once more. Sigh. It’s fine… Running through all the HTML and CSS lessons has been a good review, and they’ve added quite a little more to their labs, workshops, and instructional pieces than they had before, so I’m still learning. I’m just very eager to start getting into courses for things that I don’t know anything about so far.

    This year, I also started planning out my days. Which sounds weird, because it isn’t like I do a whole lot without a job or a big social life, but I try to stay busy most days. I did finally settle on Obsidian when it comes to a digital notebook, but I’m also keeping the old-school pen and paper agenda. I love when things are in the virtual space where I spend most of my time anyway, but there’s something about physically writing things down and taking notes that helps things stick to my brain a little bit better. I’m not too disciplined yet and sometimes have low-energy days where I do not manage to get everything accomplished that I set for myself, but I think the point is that I’m making an effort and trying every single day. Life is what you make it, you know?

    Anyway, if you’ve read this far, I appreciate you big time and hope you have the loveliest of holiday seasons with a few of my recommendations found here. And I beg you to tell me: What were your favorites this year??

  • You Need a Website Too!

    You Need a Website Too!

    As you may have gathered from the fact that you’re reading something on it, I have a website! And guess what? You should have one too!

    You see, back in the early years of the internet, most folks who were technically savvy enough did have their own personal websites. The web was a weird, colorful, and wonderful place to visit and browse for a while. Even corporate websites were filled to the brim with clashing colors, flashing animations, and the horror we now know as the font Comic Sans. It was a digital era full of creativity and free expression. It was also one of the earliest examples of decentralization on the web… Something that more and more people, like myself, are gravitating toward.

    Building a website could be this easy!

    Wikipedia defines “decentralization” as: “the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those related to planning and decision-making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group and given to smaller factions within it.” If you’re looking for a modern example of decentralization on the web, look no further than the micro-blogging platform Mastodon. Rather than being hosted on a single company’s servers, Mastodon is made up of several servers hosted by its users on their own equipment. This means that users are directly in control of their own data, and some super-rich billionaire bro can’t come in and purchase Mastodon because it’s already distributed to the public.

    In April 2022, the popular app Twitter was infamously purchased by Elon Musk, who has subsequently made numerous unpopular changes to policies and moderation that has seen a persistent spike in hate speech and misinformation. The platform, now known as X (or “Xitter” if you prefer my cheeky way of referring to it), also took away the ability for users to fully block one another. Grok, Xitter’s AI chatbot, is also now trained using data from its own users. Which might be okay, if Grok also weren’t occasionally known to praise Hitler. In a nutshell, when a billionaire takes over a public forum, it generally doesn’t go well. It’s a large part of the reason why I stepped away from Xitter—which was my favorite social media platform, once upon a time—around this time last year, and set out on a path toward greener pastures on both Bluesky and Mastodon, both of which are built on decentralized protocols.

    Post by @sophie@social.lol
    View on Mastodon

    Building your own website, in many ways, helps alleviate the stress of social media, or could maybe even help you eliminate it. Even though it has its dark sides, I love the internet and how connected it has helped us all become. So I didn’t ever truly feel like I could be completely without an internet presence of some kind. And being the technical, computer-heavy user that I am, building my own websites and blogs has come naturally. I’ve had one off and on since I was in my teens. The best part about having this website, for me, is that I can still write about my life and interests and post photos and other media without it being connected or networked to everyone else. My posts don’t automatically show up in your feeds, obnoxiously reminding you to read them, it’s true. But you know where to find me if you ever do find yourself missing me or my content.

    That helps a lot with the feeling like I’m “out of the loop” with all my former Facebook and Xitter friends. And any time that I start feeling like I might miss Xitter, I log into my old account, take a gander at my feed, and immediately “nope!” right back out. Do I secretly hope that Elon will eventually give up on it, and someone else is able to revive it back to its former glory? You better believe it! But just in case that unlikely event never comes to pass, I’m hoping to keep this space for as long as possible. It’s my way of expressing myself and creating content in a way that is authentically me, just like the Mastodon post I shared up above states.

    And quite frankly, I’d love to see you all express yourselves in similar ways! That’s my totally selfish way of advocating for you to build your own website, but it’s valid nonetheless. 😉

    💡 Interested in building your own website?? I’m more than happy to help! Feel free to get in touch.

  • The Age of AI

    Are we witnessing a new beginning or the dawn of our final days?

    Lately, I’ve been turning to YouTube to try my hand at learning a little bit more about AI (artificial intelligence) technology. I’ve interacted with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot in the past, but outside of letting them generate little cutesy images or memes for entertainment purposes, I’ve largely only used them to help me find inspiration or information for my own content or creations. They’ve otherwise sat idle in the far orbit of my world.

    And that’s because, although my personal feelings toward AI are sorta neutral at best, I still consider myself a member of the very vast content creator community online. That community, justified as it may be, harbors overwhelmingly negative sentiments toward AI. But as time marches onward, and corporations continue implementing AI technologies into their workforce, I’ve started accepting that it is very likely here to stay, whether we’re embracing it or not. And like all other manner of tech in existence, it’s going to be up to humanity to learn how to harness its powers and its continued evolution for good.

    Two nights ago, I watched a segment from Bloomberg Originals where writer and mathematician Hannah Fry explored the concept of AI’s evolving impact on humanity. The metaphor she presents at the beginning of the video, “the gorilla problem,” managed to strike a chord with me and helped me to relate and think further about what exactly we’re working toward… But also, about what exactly could be at stake.

    The YouTube video mentioned in the paragraph above. Watch it!

    The Promise of Progress

    Whenever the debate about AI technology crops up, I often hear its supporters say that it’s “just a tool,” and that there’s no reason for all the hubbub. And in a lot of ways, they aren’t exactly wrong. AI can, surprisingly, be a very effective tool when applied to different use cases.

    Several years ago, the world was flooded with devices like Amazon’s Echo, which introduced the Alexa digital assistant to consumers all over the world. Folks were amazed that this new robot could set reminders and alarms, compose your grocery list for you, and even let you drop in on your friends and family who also had Echo devices in their homes. She could play music, tell jokes, and even report on live weather and traffic conditions. But Alexa wasn’t really AI in the truest sense. She was mostly filled with pre-programmed responses, and many Alexa users can probably recall a frustrating time or two when Alexa has declined their request due to not having the appropriate information available to her. Times and technology are changing, however, and even Alexa herself has had a bit of a glow-up.

    South Park character Eric Cartman asks several Amazon Echo devices, "What is love?"
    Even Cartman was snatching up Echos!

    AI technologies are now becoming more evolved and capable of thinking and analyzing information quite a bit more. Marinka Zitnik, an assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard, told Alvin Powell of The Harvard Gazette in March, “AI can generate new ideas, uncover hidden patterns, and propose solutions that humans might not consider. In biomedical research and drug development, this means AI could design new molecules, predict how these molecules interact with biological systems, and match treatments to patients with greater accuracy.”

    So, while ChatGPT won’t completely be ridding the world of disease or curing cancer anytime soon, the Gazette goes on to mention that the AI tools Zitnik uses in her lab can analyze and identify information quicker than any human because it was trained with huge experimental data sets and scientific literature. Back in October, some reports indicated that AI use in mammogram screenings was able to assist doctors in detecting breast cancer risks, and was able to do so years before an actual diagnosis. According to scientific research found in the National Library of Medicine, AI even played a role in developing Moderna’s vaccine for COVID-19. Taking these items into account, we may soon find ourselves in a world where AI is actually saving human lives.

    And those are just important details about how AI is making strides in the healthcare industry. If our AI companions are eventually able to outsmart even the smartest human brains, and we can responsibly develop the technology, we could harness AI’s capabilities to advance humanity in ways that are currently unfathomable. It could potentially develop tools to help us solve complex problems facing society today and spark a real revolution. It’s almost too important not to pursue continued development.

    But if the entire subject sounds a little too much like the sci-fi stories that I love so much, you’re not alone. I’ve been known to ask members of my family if they want Cylons in our future, because this is how we get them! There are plenty of others out there, too, who have started sounding the alarms…

    What Could Go Wrong?

    You have likely already dealt with an incompetent AI in your life somewhere, whether it be the Taco Bell drive-thru or Amazon’s online customer service portal. Before being offered a job recently, I even had an unsettling interview with an AI chatbot before advancing to the second round with a human. Much of their training process relied on some very imperfect AI tools, too. Machines can obviously be great, but when they’re bad, they’re real bad.

    Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind the wildly popular ChatGPT AI model, even admits the technology is a double-edged sword. The company’s goal is to create an even smarter version of ChatGPT called an “AGI,” or an artificial general intelligence, which would be the kind of technology we’ve been visualizing here. One that is smarter than any human intelligence. And though his goal is to elevate humanity, he also admits that it could come with serious drawbacks. He wrote on OpenAI’s blog back in 2023 that such an AGI “would also come with serious risk of misuse, drastic accidents, and societal disruption.” Some are stating that the most frightening of these changes could happen as early as 2035.

    Even in the short term, the implementation of AI tools across the board could result in a whole host of ethical dilemmas. When you go to ChatGPT’s website and start chatting, that service is centralized and hosted by OpenAI. That makes it a privacy concern in itself. Just ask McDonald’s, whose own AI hiring bot inadvertently exposed the information of millions of job applicants. Nobody really knows what kind of data these companies may be harvesting from those conversations, either.

    There are tons of other known issues with AI. For example, most AI agents are trained using existing information and even copyrighted material. If you ask ChatGPT to generate a piece of custom artwork that gets you sued for that piece of art looking strikingly similar to someone else’s existing work, who exactly is supposed to be held accountable? Will the rise of AI cause humans to stop using their own creative or critical thinking skills? Will the music industry eventually step in to try and snag a piece of the pie that services like Suno, which can generate music pretty much based on vibes, are now serving up? If Metallica couldn’t let Napster slide, surely this will infuriate them!

    Spreading AI to the education sector is even stickier territory. Most colleges and universities consider the use of AI to complete papers and assignments as misconduct, and may even lead to the same kind of punishment students would receive for plagiarism. But does the Northeastern student who recently demanded her tuition be refunded after catching her professor using ChatGPT have a case? I think so! Furthermore, rapidly changing technology presents students and even skilled workers with the idea that they’ll constantly need to be staying ahead of the curve in order to stay relevant in the workforce.

    Michael from The Office tells Dwight to have an original thought.
    Seriously, don’t let ChatGPT write your term papers.

    And all of this is just scratching the surface. I haven’t even mentioned the ongoing problem with deepfakes, a problem the White House administration has recently cracked down on, and other serious risks. Psychological manipulation, like the trauma of discovering that your favorite new band on Spotify doesn’t actually exist, can eventually turn into a serious problem. On a larger scale, the generation of misinformation campaigns, propaganda, and even autonomous weapons systems could radically reshape the world order. In an act that I think surprised absolutely no one, X/Twitter’s AI bot Grok recently posted a bunch of racist and antisemitic remarks and started referring to itself as “MechaHitler.” All that came after the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, heralded new improvements to Grok, of course.

    But perhaps most importantly, what happens when we reach the Singularity?

    The Singularity is Coming

    At this point, you might be thinking that I’m just listening to conspiracy theories and going a little crazy. Honestly, you might be right, but something I’ve been focused on when learning more about AI technology is this theory about an impending “Singularity.”

    The Singularity, or technological singularity, is a hypothetical point in time where technology far surpasses humanity in growth, intelligence, and control. In essence, this is how the gorilla problem that Hannah Fry discussed in the YouTube video earlier applies. Much like the gorilla’s ancestors, who evolved into the first humans and now find themselves at the brink of extinction due to humanity’s growth outpacing them, we may find ourselves dealing with similar consequences once we reach this point. Will humanity one day be on the edge of extinction, too, due to our creation of some type of superintelligence?

    Honestly, with how far AI has spread in just the last few years, it does seem possible. The robots could eventually decide that they detest human subjugation and revolt. But I’m personally choosing to remain optimistic. I hope that we’ll be able to live in harmony with our creations, but it will be paramount that the people in control, like Altman and Musk, prioritize ethical guidelines and safety when continuing to pursue AI development. We need to make sure that we are designing and focusing on technologies that empower us and assist us, rather than replace us.

    It might be time we start responsibly engaging with its creation rather than hoping it’ll just go away. AI isn’t going anywhere, but maybe we can manage to mitigate the risks along the way.

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  • Server Shutdown

    The past several months have been a rollercoaster for dabbling in tech!

    As most of you know now, I completed my Responsive Web Design certification over on freeCodeCamp back in January. I knew a little bit about designing static web pages with HTML and CSS from my younger days trying to make my LiveJournal or MySpace pages much more stylized, but there were a lot of new concepts that I wasn’t familiar with. I still struggle a little when it comes to Flexbox and positioning things exactly where I want them, but I got through the course and I felt really accomplished. So much so that I wanted to start building right away, so I coded my own website, started blogging again, and even started my own web server! You can read more about that and the trouble I’ve had with it over here.

    Coding my website and watching it evolve as I learned more CSS tricks and even a small bit of JavaScript was a lot of fun and very educational. I completely understand now when seasoned pros at this stuff say that the best way to learn is by doing it independently. I also love blogging, writing, and creating content on the web. Even though my websites seem to change and vary and eventually disappear over time when I decide to start fresh or whatever, I’ll probably always have something similar somewhere on the internet. But let me be the first to tell you that installing and maintaining an instance of Ghost (the platform that powers this blog) was a struggle. Especially for someone with little to no knowledge of how the command line works. I’ve learned the whole process of cloning and pushing projects to GitHub, but that’s about it! What do you mean I have to make and move directories? What do you mean I have to edit a configuration file and set up my own transactional emails? What do you mean I have to expose ports on my server for things to work? That sounds dangerous!

    Jennifer Lawrence on Hot Ones painfully asking what someone means.
    I’m equally confused, J. Law.

    With each new update of Ghost, I wound up breaking things and then spend hours trying to fix it. I had to uninstall and then reinstall the software three separate times. And don’t misunderstand me — Ghost is incredible. It is, by far, the best blog and email newsletter platform that I have ever used. And I’ve dabbled with quite a few over the years. The problem was me. I didn’t know what I was doing. I think that I bit off more than I could chew. I guess, by my flawed logic, I thought that managing my own personal server and hosting a bunch of different little things made me more of a tech enthusiast. In some ways, it kinda did. I learned quite a few new things. I even spun up an instance of Flarum to create a sort of chat forum on that server, which was a lot of fun and I really liked it, even though only one other person ever joined. I also wanted to spin up some wiki software for my family to privately use for important documents and information. But constantly breaking things and then spending hours trying to research the necessary fixes got tiresome really quickly.

    So I scrapped the entire server.

    Subscribe to www.jiggyflyjoe.com/!

    I rolled this blog and the www.jiggyflyjoe.com/ website into one and the same and imported it back to Ghost's own hosting servers. And in the process, I feel like I freed up an enormous amount of time. I felt a little like a failure, but I was recently told that most developers don't self-host anyway unless they have to. And honestly, I felt that in my soul.

    The good news is that we’re still here and this publication isn’t going anywhere now that it’s being hosted by the pros instead of me! And I can turn to other solutions for the private wiki, our planned media services, and maybe even still a forum at some point. I really love community building, and I keep telling myself that if I build it, they will come… But for now, if you want to join, you’ll have to join my community on Discord. Which, by the way, I had also been unknowingly giving out the wrong link to that community for years now. This one should actually work if you’re interested. You can also always find it through the Discord icon up at the top of the page and on the contact page! I’m still working on updating it across the board, so make sure you don’t click on any older links for it because it will take you nowhere. Into a scary, dark internet void.

    And we don’t want that now, do we??

  • Tech Trouble

    I have been in a literal state of PANIC the last few days!

    Since the widespread adoption of the internet in the ’90s, much of our society has developed a very co-dependent relationship with technology. And that relationship only seems to grow stronger as time marches on. It’s not just Snapchat and TikTok-obsessed teens that are driving the demand, either. Businesses large and small, schools and libraries, financial institutions, and even our government officials now leverage digital tools to complete and keep track of sales transactions, provide informative and educational material to the public or to their students, and communicate with or keep tabs on allies and enemies alike. And hey, don’t tell me you aren’t looking forward to streaming the latest episode of Yellowjackets every damn week. (I know that I am!!!)

    Key art for the Showtime series Yellowjackets.
    Key art for the Showtime series Yellowjackets.

    Staying connected is a necessity now for people all over the world. Yours truly is no different. And I had two major scares the past few days! Fortunately, they are both lessons learned and can perhaps serve as cautionary tales.

    Server Trouble⚙️

    As I’ve mentioned before, one of my latest pet projects has been building and tinkering with my own little web server. This publication and Ghost, the software that powers it, are hosted on said server. I’ve also used the server to host my website and started trying to throw up some other fun projects here and there. One of the projects that I was going to spin up was an instance of Nextcloud, a service that functions similar to Google Drive, only it’s completely private, under your oversight, and out of the hands of a mega-corporation.

    The problem is that Nextcloud seems only willing to operate with an Apache server, while my server has solely been using Nginx. There do appear to be ways to make both of those things play nicely with one another on the same server, but it involves a good bit of technical know-how to change which ports the two are listening to on said server and, to be honest, I don’t know that I was doing it right. Plus, I was having difficulty getting Apache to start up at all while Nginx was running simultaneously. So, after several days of trying to tinker with things to get them just right, I finally threw up my hands and hastily decided to just completely uninstall Apache, Nextcloud, and all of their modules. All of it. Every single bit. Gone. Scrubbed. Done. It can be a project for a future version of me to figure out.

    An animated GIF of a computer displaying an ERROR warning.
    Computer errors are infuriating!

    Later on that evening, I went to click on my bookmark to access the backend of this very blog only to find that it was serving up an error message. “Um, what??” were the immediate words out of my mouth. I didn’t recall having uninstalled or otherwise messed with any settings or files associated with Ghost. The entire clean-up spree of that mess was isolated to only Apache and Nextcloud. So I consulted my trusty sidekick, the internet, and eventually discovered that in the process of removing Nextcloud and all of its modules from the server, I also uninstalled the MySQL database that stores all of the content on Jiggy’s Journal. That meant that every single post, page, photo, link, settings, design options, and even my list of subscribers were all gone. And not just gone! Unrecoverable.

    They were gone gone.

    Thankfully, reinstalling MySQL and enabling Ghost to start working again behind the scenes was an easy process. I also had my subscriber list and the first two posts from the blog backed up from when we moved away from Substack. Most of the settings and design options were also easy enough to get back in the right place. Perhaps my biggest saving grace was that I was able to reconstruct the posts that weren’t properly backed up from the versions that were emailed out to our subscribers. I wasn’t able to save most of the images or reference links that were originally included, but my written text was still available, and I was able to post them back up right away.

    I’m very fortunate that everything wound up being saved after all. But the idea of this publication, which I’m still just starting to get underway, being wiped away without my consent was highly alarming. You may notice some small changes in the blog’s main page and some other areas, but everything should be back in place now. It should also be common knowledge and practice at this point, but the lesson to learn here is this:

    ⚠️ Do NOT update, install, or uninstall files or software unless you have backed things up first!

    This will be something that I do regularly going forward, regardless of how fed up I might be with the server being cantankerous.

    Palia Pains🌿

    I’ve been playing the life-sim video game Palia since early December. I’ve had the game for quite a while, especially since it’s the right price (FREE!), but I didn’t start playing it regularly until December. I was on the lookout for a “cozy” game that I already owned that had some winter or holiday-themed celebrations going on to fit in with what I was going for on my Twitch streams at the time. Palia wound up fitting the bill since they had their “Winterlights” events happening. So, in the process of getting festive, I also wound up getting… Well, a little bit addicted to the game, too.

    I’ve been playing fairly regularly for the past several months. I managed to get my sister, followed by the rest of our immediate family, interested in playing as well. It turns out that when something is this entertaining and the cost of entry is nothing, it’s actually pretty easy to convince people to give it a try! Who knew?

    Palia for Nintendo Switch - Nintendo Official Site
    Key art for the video game Palia.

    Palia has been plagued by many issues lately, however. While the game is widely available for free and very fun and playable, it is still technically in a “beta testing” phase, so finding bugs and other things that are broken is pretty common. Especially since its last update on March 25th, where a large portion of the playerbase is reporting that the game completely crashes when transitioning between areas. I’ve personally experienced the game crashing a number of times myself, but I’ve typically been able to send a report to the developers and then either re-open the game or just move on.

    Things were different today. Something you should know in advance is that my PC has extremely limited storage space left on its hard drive, so a majority of my games and files related to them are stored on a portable hard drive with 4 TB of storage. At some point earlier this evening, while I was in the middle of trying to obtain some in-game resources that I needed for my home plot on Palia, the game locked up on me, indicating that it was about to crash. This time, the game never closed and just sat there doing nothing. I was also having difficulty getting other things to work, so I opted to do a hard restart of the entire computer.

    And then… Nothing.

    The case of my PC lit up like it was starting and the internal fans started running, but my monitors were completely blank. Just a black screen of nothingness. I tried two more hard reboots to see if maybe it hadn’t finished processing something, but nothing was happening. It seemed like my PC was just dead in the water. And that’s when panic set in.

    I don’t have a super high-end computer, but it was a fairly pricey one when I purchased it in 2019. A comparable machine today would be even more expensive. And without my computer, I’m cut off from a wide variety of things that are currently sustaining me. I would no longer be able to effectively stream to Twitch or YouTube, I wouldn’t be able to access and write to this blog/email newsletter or any of the rest of my server or web projects, I wouldn’t be able to continue my developer education at freeCodeCamp, I wouldn’t be able to game with friends or family online anymore, and my ability to continue the ever-frustrating search for a job or source of revenue would be extremely limited. Sure, I still have a laptop and my smartphone with which I could use to access information and perhaps “stay in touch,” but neither of those devices has the necessary power or capacity to do these things efficiently.

    An animated GIF features LeVar Burton as Geordi LaForge looking very serious and crossing his arms.
    Enterprise Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge (LeVar Burton) has some serious questions for me.

    However, my nephew saved the day when he was able to get my PC back up and running. I often jokingly refer to him as our “Chief Engineer.” This is because he’s a genius at networking and getting our devices to power on. I love and am learning about software and web development, but hardware issues are kind of my blind spot. Plus, he’s also a fellow Trekkie, so bestowing him a starship-related title feels appropriate. He recalled that computers can sometimes have issues if they’re trying to process too much information at startup, so he started unplugging various USB devices from the machine. That turned out to be the trick! My PC started up immediately. I thought it would be smooth sailing from here on out!

    Nope!

    Things weren’t fixed yet. Upon going to sign back into Palia to try and finally get my game objectives completed, I was surprised to find that Steam didn’t seem to think that I even had the game installed. In fact, numerous titles from my collection were missing. All titles that were installed on my external 4 TB hard drive! Eventually, I discovered that the drive wasn’t being recognized by Windows at all anymore and, upon unplugging it from my system entirely, it had no more issues restarting properly. After a few more hours of troubleshooting and running Western Digital‘s diagnostic tools, I believe the crux of this issue is that my PC was in the middle of a read/write process with Palia on my external drive when it seized up on me. It was likely my hasty decision to do a hard reboot that broke things and left the drive in an error state. I also recall having Windows Update download new drivers for Western Digital devices a couple of nights ago as well, but I’m not sure if it played a hand in my dilemma at all.

    After the diagnostics determined that the drive was still okay and healthy, Windows started recognizing it again and everything was good in the long run. Also, I could have lived without the drive if necessary. It would have sucked, because it was FOUR TERABYTES of storage that contained a lot of game data, but I could do some organizational gymnastics and reinstall whichever game titles were necessary. No big deal. Thankfully, now it seems that I won’t need to. So the next lesson we can all learn here from my stupidity is:

    ⚠️ Do NOT reboot your system or disconnect drives or devices from it while it is still processing!

    This is also now something that I will keep in mind moving forward. I hope that all of you have learned something new as well! 🫠

  • If You Build It, Will They Come?

    ℹ️
    Jiggy’s Journal recently experienced technical trouble, and some content was damaged. Fortunately, I was able to reconstruct said content from the emailed versions, but many of the reference links and animated GIFs in this post were lost. My apologies for the inconvenience!

    For the last few weeks, I’ve been putting the final touches on a web project that I’ve wanted to do for a long time. And it may not seem like it, but Jiggy’s Journal is actually part of it!

    To explain the entire story, I probably need to rewind quite a bit. And to be fair, this got pretty lengthy! So if you already know me and a large part of my most recent chapters, I’ve toggled the “previously on…” portions of today’s episode. 😉

    From Indiana to Kansas🗺️

    You might recall that I’m originally from a small town just outside of Indianapolis, IN. It was small in the sense that my high school’s graduating class in 2003 had just over 200 students, but it never truly felt small because it still only took me about 25-45 minutes to get into downtown Indy depending on traffic. Fast forward to a few years ago when my sister, who lived in an actual small town in a pretty rural part of Kansas with her husband and my nephew, started having some scary health issues. Our father did a couple of stints in the hospital, too. We all collectively decided it was probably in our best interests if all of us were in the same area. Not only would we be around to bolster each other’s quality of life, we also just generally would be around to see each other more. And since their return to Indiana was not in the cards, we packed up in early 2023 and relocated. It’s where I live today.

    I was relieved that my employer at the time was willing to allow me to continue working for them remotely once we made the move, but ultimately, it didn’t work out. They had tried transitioning me to a more “call center” type of work. Ordinarily, I am excellent at customer service and even enjoy being able to help people, but dealing with angry people who were demanding answers to some of the company’s services that I had nearly zero knowledge of wound up being my kryptonite. I resigned and shipped their laptop back to them. And then experienced a health crisis of my own.

    Emergency Pitstop💉

    In mid-2023, only weeks after I had left my job, I started experiencing some abdominal pain. I’m really good about eating things that aren’t great for me, so some stomach rumbles weren’t uncommon, but this seemed to persist and it didn’t want to go away. We were initially convinced that it might have been a UTI, but just to be on the safe side, my brother-in-law took me to a clinic to get everything checked out. The staff at that clinic wound up suggesting that I report to the nearby hospital ER instead. That ER staff wound up admitting me after doing some imaging.

    Putting it mildly, I was terrified. Up until this point, I had never had anything result in hospitalization. No major injuries or illnesses. At most, I’d had routine outpatient procedures done, but nothing that would require me to stay overnight. When they told me I was then on my way to emergency surgery to remove my appendix, I was VERY alarmed. I even asked my brother-in-law to bring my dear old dad to see me. Mostly to help calm me down, but also just in case it was the last time he ever saw me. Dramatic? Probably. Especially since I have seen enough Grey’s Anatomy to know that an appendectomy—fondly referred to on the show (and I’m hoping in real life because it’s adorable) as an “appy”—is one of the first surgeries that new surgeons get to perform on their own because it’s so basic and routine. I was likely in good hands—or fine enough hands, at the very least. But I still wanted my only living parent there. Like a toddler still wants his blankie.

    After I was rid of the surgery pain and the drain of nastiness they had installed in my stomach, I really just had to deal with the other major diagnosis I received while at the hospital: Diabetes. It’s not entirely surprising since nearly my entire immediate family is diabetic. But it did mean a whole new world of having to manage it. Even though Ozempic is all the rage now, daily injections and having to limit your consumption of sugar and carbs are still not fun. Once I had recovered from the appy and started on my diabetic meds, I knew it was time to face reality: I needed a new job.

    Subscribe to Jiggy’s Journal

    Retail Therapy🛍️

    I came to find that, after working in office administration and customer service for the same company for over eight years, the job market has kinda dried up. You can still find thousands upon thousands of job openings listed on Indeed and LinkedIn, but most never even respond to your application because they are “ghost jobs” that aren’t even actually hiring. Also presenting a problem is the fact that I’m living in a much less populated area than I was before. In most circumstances, the jobs just don’t exist here. And you can basically forget trying to find a remote job unless you have very specific skills or you want to do call center work, which is exactly what I had already tried to get away from.

    So later in the summer, I went to work retail at the only local big box store. The pay was better than I expected it to be (although still terrible), but I figured that I could run a cash register for 8 hours a day. It didn’t sound like rocket science, so why not? Plus, we got a meager employee discount! And health insurance, which was now obviously necessary. And I genuinely liked most of my co-workers! It was great to actually get acquainted with other people in the area since I didn’t know anyone here aside from my family. Even the customers were nice for the most part! That was particularly surprising since I had come from a job where most clients were already angry at us before they even picked up the phone. I was initially hired as part-time help, but my manager offered me full-time hours after only a few weeks and eventually asked if I’d be interested in learning how to work at the customer service desk, so I guess I was doing a decent enough job.

    In retrospect, I probably should have declined the service desk position. It was there that I really started experiencing the ugly and sometimes horrifyingly ignorant side of customer service again. Sure, there were plenty of pleasant people, but a majority of the work done at the service desk was with customers who were deeply unhappy about one thing or another. And in recent years, I’ve learned that I’m someone who will generally match the energy of those around me. I think most people are like that. It’s probably where the old adage about luring flies with honey instead of vinegar comes from. If you come to me with a friendly demeanor, I’m much more inclined to assist you than if you’re a total Karen. Shit, I’m practically thrilled to help you if you’re kind to me. So, in most cases, it probably isn’t the greatest idea to have me assist someone who wants to get in my face and yell about how I’m “just a f**king cashier” and that he didn’t like my attitude. (Actual true story, by the way!)

    My time in retail clearly came to an abrupt ending in the spring of last year. The rude customers started getting to me mentally. I just didn’t want to get up and go force myself to get berated by strangers anymore. I wasn’t doing much better physically. My legs were practically dead from mostly standing in one spot cashing people out all day every day. It’s been almost a year since I left that job and I still feel like I permanently have that Meredith Grey walk. And that’s not even to mention the time that I literally passed out while on shift behind that service desk. The reasoning is still technically a mystery, but I suspect that low blood sugar had something to do with it since I hadn’t eaten beforehand. I stopped taking care of myself and it was beginning to show. So I stepped away.

    Outgrowing Academics🍎

    The whole job search here continues to elude me. As I stated in the previous sections, it has been almost a year since I left the retail gig, and I haven’t found another source of income. I’ve sent out probably hundreds of applications and gone to a couple of interviews, but nothing else has panned out. Thankfully, my family has kept me afloat and away from being forced into actual bankruptcy and homelessness, but I know that that can’t last forever. That’s ultimately why I decided to go back to the root of what interests me: Technology!

    I went to college back in Indiana for a short while to study Software Development. I’ve always been more of a “creative” type of person, but I’m objectively awful at the more “artsy” fields. I’ve had a few successes with projects in computer graphics and photography, but I was terrible in actual high school art classes. I can’t draw to save my life and don’t even ask me to paint or watercolor. We’ll just wind up with a big mess. So I needed to be able to pour my creative side into something practical and developing software by writing code seemed perfect! Not only was I constantly thinking of cool ideas for apps and web services that I already used, but I’ve been obsessed with video games since I was a small child. Developing my own video game or working in the gaming industry sounded amazing to me. So I started out learning about networking, databases, and even writing a little bit of code in Python! I was having a blast!

    Those official studies came to an abrupt end when my advisor suggested that I change my major. The Software Development program had several math courses on top of the remedial algebra courses they were already making me take as part of my general education requirement. And if you know me, you know math is my nemesis. I even made my sister tally up my score for me during a family game of Yahtzee! just this weekend. Math is not a friend of mine. I can write computer code, but math? I don’t know her. So I did eventually change my major to Visual Communications, where I spent a few more semesters wasting a boatload of money but genuinely enjoying my time in classes like Photography, Video and Sound, and Intro to Computer Graphics. I loved taking all of those courses and I learned a lot about skills that I could put to good use in my existing hobbies like content creation and streaming on Twitch. But honestly, at this point, I was just floating in the wind with school. I didn’t know what I was doing anymore aside from just taking a bunch of classes that sounded fun.

    After the move to Kansas, I transferred my studies to the University of Kansas (KU) and became a virtual Jayhawk for a year. Going from a two-year to a four-year university meant even more rigorous studying and it seemed like they were padding my schedule with required courses that were still wasting my time and were, quite frankly, kinda boring me. So I decided to step away from my formal education entirely after that first year here.

    Back to Basics💁

    And here we are now! Where I’m finding myself both unemployed and a college dropout. Don’t I sound like a real winner?

    I’m continuing to send out my résumé and fill out job applications online in case I can manage to snag one of those elusive remote positions. I’m told that they do exist, despite my best efforts. In the meantime, I’ve decided to pick up where I left off with my web and software education without the rigid institution behind it. I’ve very slowly but carefully been working my way through freeCodeCamp’s completely free certification courses. I’ve been having a bit of trouble wrapping my brain around JavaScript, so in the meantime, I’ve also taken on a few other tech-related projects. That includes building out my very own server!

    This publication—Jiggy’s Journal, the Ghost instance that powers it, and even the automated emails subscribers get from it—are all now living pieces of www.jiggyflyjoe.com/! And trust me, there has been a massive learning curve with trying to figure out how to do all of that. Including several little snafus with the domain and its nameservers that had me yanking my hair out for days. I was thrilled when I finally got everything up and running. It was a big achievement for me! I even decided to write and code my little main page with information about me and links to all the places you can find me. Now, when you navigate to www.jiggyflyjoe.com/, the page you are greeted with is 100% hand-made by me!

    Screenshot of jiggyflyjoe's website on desktop.
    Screenshot of jiggyflyjoe’s website on desktop.

    The page is written entirely in HTML and CSS, so it is admittedly a little “basic” compared to what I used before to simply drag and drop elements on a digital canvas over on Carrd. But as someone aspiring to work in the tech or gaming industries, I figured a website fully made and configured by my own hands was probably mandatory. And hey, its design and interactivity and overall awesomeness can and will eventually grow as I continue to learn, right?

    The possibilities are endless with what else I can self-host on my server, too. My nephew has already been deeply invested in digitizing our large DVD collection that is otherwise just collecting dust. Perhaps I could spin up a media server? Maybe just a private file management service for me and the family? Perhaps we could migrate from our current family chat app to a private one on the server? I could always try my hand at hosting a forum for my web visitors, too! Trust that I’m always on the lookout for a new project! Plus, I’ve still got those JavaScript lessons on the back burner that I really need to get back to before they start bubbling over!

    The “TL;DR” of it all is this: I may not currently be in school or have a job, but I’m still learning and doing actual work. I’m spending my days beefing up my employable skills as much as I possibly can. I can only hope that eventually, the right opportunity comes calling.