Remainder Reminder

 Well, I got my homepage into a position that I like, and rolled it out. It has a cool kind of old-style terminal vibe that I like (click and take a look, I'll wait!). I think it also looks cool on mobile, where I moved the sections to tabs on the side and still holds most of the same old terminal vibes without the exact same form factor. I also made it navigable via keyboard (as well as mouse/touch) to really give it that terminal feeling. The problem is, I have no content, haha. I actually just would like to use it for a kind of landing page that shows various projects I am working on, but that kind of gets weird because of my diversity of interests. I still need to think about how to represent various different types of projects in a way that is at least somewhat intuitive or at least makes sense. We'll see how that goes.

A couple days ago I was writing about my old blogs and how they just disappeared into the ether, which had me thinking about it just as I was going to bed and a lightbulb popped over my head. Wayback Machine! So rather than going to bed at my usual early hour, I crawled through a bunch of snapshots and uncovered some old gems. Well, gems for my nostalgia, I don't think anyone really cares about me playing FFXI or drinking to excess for a frankly disturbing number of days in a row. And just looking through now, I found some writing that is fairly transphobic*, even though it is couched language expressing that I don't care how other people live, which was I guess fairly tolerant for 2005, but in 2024 just isn't cutting it. So, perhaps fortunately, my blog wasn't popular enough to be indexed too often, and there are only bits and pieces available to read. Still, I am considering trying to dredge through and maybe repost anything interesting I come across (if there is anything like that) for curiosity value.

In other news, I have been training for a half marathon. Before COVID I was a pretty competitive runner, and would generally finish in the top 10-20 participants in any given half marathon. Then COVID hit and I stopped exercising. There was an outdoor mask rule that people took seriously, and it is hard to do cardio with a mask on, so I basically just gave up. Fast forward to about a year ago (April/May 2023) and my work sponsored people to join the Incheon Half Marathon. I signed up for the 10k race because I knew I was in terrible shape, and ended up having to run walk to a 56:53 finish (I just looked it up). That is a shameful pace and I felt terrible about myself. I realized that I needed to get my act together and start doing something because this wasn't good.

I started running daily again after that wake-up call and pushed and pushed most of last year. My pre-COVID half marathon time was between 85-88 minutes, and I really wanted to get back to that level, nevermind that I am five years older now (45!!! almost 46!!!). I didn't manage to break the 90 minute barrier last year (I ran something like 90:20 in November), but I was right there, and felt confident entering 2024 that I would be in a good place come Spring. Also, there is a certain poetry behind the idea that I went from run walking a 10k at the 2023 Incheon Half Marathon to being back on my game and running under 90 minutes in the half course at the 2024 race. 

Sadly, that was not to be. The original date that registration closed was like April 22, with the caveat that there was only room for 10,000 runners. The race never filled up in the past, so I waited. When I checked it on April 6th, just out of curiosity, the website had a pop up that said they reached the quota and registration would end on April 5th at 5:00pm. I missed the deadline by like 12 hours. This was frustrating on multiple levels. First, I really like the Incheon Half Marathon. It starts at Munhak Stadium and then goes straight down the road through some underpasses, over some overpasses, then over the Songdo Campustown Bridge and all the way down through Songdo to the sea before looping back and ending at the stadium. It is a beautiful run, and it is in my neighborhood. Also, it is a big race and they have some international talent come to compete for prize money. The second reason I got frustrated was because I had planned my training specifically for the date of May 12, and now had to scramble to find another race. One annoyance of living in Songdo is that it is surrounded by the sea and even though it is in the 'metro area', getting to races in Seoul or other places is too much hassle. 

Anyway, I looked at the race calendar and weighed my options. There was a small race in Sangam (Seoul World Cup Stadium) on the same day, and then another race on May 25 in Incheon at Seaside Park on Yeongjongdo (where the airport is). I weighed my options, small uncool race in an inconvenient place but on the correct date, or wait two weeks and run a more fun race closer to home. Well, the deciding factors were that I was training for a specific date and that May 12 is a Sunday, while May 25 is a Saturday. Sundays are easier for me to manage with family obligations and such, and so I chose the smaller less convenient race. Plus, the real scale-tipper was that May 12 in the morning will probably have tolerable weather, while May 25 is getting really close to the blast furnace zone of Korean summer. Either way, Game On.

*I am embarrassed and appalled that I would ever write something like this, and even though probably no one read it then and no one will read this now, I am sorry that I said such gross things. That being said, it makes me feel good to know that I've grown as a person enough that I see previous writing and am like ewwww, I cannot believe that I wrote that. 

It's Been a While

Hard Truths: I started blogging back in like 2001-2002 on Xanga of all places. I started as a Lineage 1 blog and detailed my exploits traveling around with my trusty canine companion, which mostly involved being murdered in upsetting ways in what was, I think, the least forgiving PVP game ever. From there, I moved around a bit and started self hosting. I came to Korea in 2004 and then around 2010, I got married and my life went in a different direction. I stopped paying my hosting bills and lost those six years of content, and Xanga obviously stopped existing long, long ago, which means that about a decade of my writing went poof. To be honest, I kind of like the ephemerality of it all, and while my Lineage blog might fulfil some nostalgic yearning, it isn't exactly the works of Shakespeare, or even Dan Brown for that matter. My early years in Korea might have had some curious value, but the world changes and it was mostly stuff written about places that no longer exist and friends that I no longer meet, and so it pretty much falls into the same basket. 

 Anyway, for the past fifteen years or so I have been wanting to start a blog again. It isn't fashionable, and I don't ever expect anyone to read it, but I find the concept of putting my ideas into words cathartic. However, I've changed a lot in this long time. I got a 'serious' job, I have kids, I am almost through a grueling PhD program, and so on and so forth. BUT! I was talking to some students this morning and happened to be talking about planning for the future and mentioned that it is a good idea to do some self-reflection before making a plan. Think about who you are and who you want to be, and then try to make the necessary moves to put yourself in a position where you can be someone who you like. I know that when I was younger I just made decisions based on what I thought would put me into a better position relative to my peers without ever actually considering what position I actually wanted to be in. It took me a long time to realize that, for instance, chasing money or status at work is not the only way to progress along the path of life, and this is something I wish I thought about earlier. Actually, when I first came into my current job, some people I work with were here for ideological rather than financial reasons. Like they wanted to help people and do the right thing and make the world better, and weren't here just for the paycheck. It took me a long time to come to terms with the fact that the way I was looking at life might not be the best way to do so. Honestly, it took me a long time to even realize that it might not be the only way to do so. Still, once I made that leap, then I realized that I should be focusing on the things that make me who I want to be, and not the things that I think will raise me in the esteem of others. That being said, it turns out that these are often the same things! In my blinkered past, I could only imagine people being judged based on income or job title and never thought of people being judged by the quality of life they lived. Or, I never imagined that there were other ways to judge quality of life than through financial and career success. 

 I know, I know, there are tons of after school specials that explain this stuff, but for whatever reason it took me four decades before I finally started picking up what they were putting down. All of which is to say that I have spent a lot of my recent years checking boxes off of someone else's bucket list without ever thinking about if it is what I am supposed to be doing. On a macro scale, my life is moving in the right direction, my kids are healthy, I have a good job that I think I am good at, I am finishing a terminal degree in a subject that I am strongly interested in, and I think that I am working toward making the world a better place. On a micro level, though, a lot of this building towards the future caused me to cast aside things that I enjoyed but couldn't quantify the value of, if that makes sense. Of course, blaming all of this on a lack of self reflection is kind of ignoring the fact that there are lots of things we do as adults because we have to, and I didn't really have much choice in my lack of free time due to work and family. Still, my kids are young but getting a bit more independent, I am fairly entrenched at work, and this should be my last semester as a student (knock on wood). All of this means that I need to start reprioritizing and figuring out what it is I want to be doing, rather than focusing on what I have to be doing. 

Chief among the things that I would like to start reinvesting my time into are coding and blogging. Neither are related to my job or anything like that, but I enjoy both while being good at neither. So all this navel gazing and rambling is basically to say that I am hoping that I will start both blogging and coding with some regularity going forward. Indeed, I just published a fifteen minute incremental game called Snail Facts! (go check it out, I'll wait), and am working on a homepage redesign to reflect my current style sensibilities. I finished the desktop version, more or less, but now I need to figure out how to translate that aesthetic to work on a phone screen. Still thinking about it. Anyway, until later, yo.