It’s Cold Outside

I’ve had my holidays, and I’ve watched the stop motion tapes. It’s been relaxing, and perplexing. The 1970 Stop Motion special Santa Claus is Coming to Town is equal parts nostalgic and truly strange; and I’m going to use my website to do a deep dive on a few details of the movie, because that’s the reason for the season.

A Fascinating Intro

I was reading Scott Hanselman’s blog, in which he talked about implicit usings in C#. Riveting way to start a post, I know. But a little quip from him caught itself in my mind… and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it for a little bit.

NOTE: Did you know that Visual Basic has had this very feature forever?

Uh, no Scott, I wouldn’t have expected anyone to know that!

It’s Not Easy

Even the biggest of giants can’t do it. I always love to make fun of the bigger tech companies. Ever since this site went up I feel like I’ve been bashing Google’s documentation (rightly so). But a while ago (May-17 2021) I found something that really made me realize just how many mistakes are out there.

Running Linux on Windows

WSL is a pretty neat piece of technology; you can run a full Linux OS inside of your current Windows session. It’s one of my favorite things that Microsoft has made in recent history. WSL definitely beats out trying to run a VM inside your current session, but there’s one major downside. It’s not really possible to run GUI applications from WSL, unless you set up a bunch of other stuff.

A Few of my Favorite Things

I’ve had this site for nearly a year now, and I have a few articles I’m most proud of. Unfortunately, as time passes and I produce more and more content, those articles are going to be pushed farther and farther down the list. It feels bad to see those articles getting pushed out, so I’ve made a list of things that get special treatment

Hugo’s Missing Parts

Hugo doesn’t support SCSS, which is really a shame for me. The Hugo community does have plenty of support for Themes and CSS, but if you want to build themes or use materials from other SCSS frameworks you’re on your own.

Hello again

It’s been 2 months (or 2 and a half!) since my last post, and that’s a long time to host a website and not post anything on it! In that time, I dropped a whole project and picked up a brand new one (or two or three).

What is Text?

Now that you have a mostly functional site, you’ll need to get content into it. Luckily, Hugo makes that easy! Markdown is a simple but expressive syntax which makes creating formatted text simple and streamlined. GitHub uses it to format commits, Microsoft Docs makes heavy use of Markdown, and now you know that Hugo’s text-to-HTML strategy is Markdown as well.

And I Deal… hmm. Let me grab my calculator

I play games in the RPG system GURPS, which is the general universal role playing system. It’s a neat system who’s biggest feature is flexibility. You may have noticed that a lot of RPG’s and RPG-adjacent games have a spceific genre associated with them. Most are related to or are the great-grand-children of J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings books. These systems have a few big upsides: first, they’re easy to grok — you know what the knight does, and you know what the ranger does, you’ve seen these archetypes do their thing. The other big upside is that they tend to have straightforward combat mechanics.