Hey, it's me Bryce

• Bring back to blog page

After completing this website redesign I've been spending a lot of time thinking about what it is I'd like to do with it. I'm still not entirely sure but there's some things that I'm trying that I like and some things that I'm not sure about, but I'm still just thinking and I'll figure something out, I'm sure about that.

I've been somewhat intrigued about hosting a site on github pages, or maybe even moving this neocities site to be hosted there instead. I'm not sure why I just feel like whenever I start things like this, or have some kind of idea, that I just go completely manic trying to figure out the best way, or investigating all the different possibilities. I don't think I will move to a github pages site, I think I'd rather stick with hosting it on neocities, one just because I've already pretty well established myself here, and two because github is owned by Microsoft, and if I did move that wouldn't be very "separate myself from big tech" of me would it.

But I do really like some things about it, mostly that it supports displaying markdown as a webpage without any kind of setup or anything and I really like that. I've been considering posting my video scripts to be read by people if they wish, and I write everything in markdown, it would be really nice if I could just upload those files and have them displayed very cleanly. I think that's just a cool idea I guess.

But I also know that there's ways to do that here on neocities, it'll just take a little more effort. I saw a project on https://monastic.neocities.org/, called MDZG (which stands for markdown zen garden) and it was a tool that you could upload to your neocities site to display markdown files in a really nice clean manner, my only problem with it is that it would have to replace my entire website from my understanding and I don't want to do that, I really like the look and design I have now and would like to stick with it.

But I do anticipate this site being a kind of ever changing and evolving thing for me, maybe it won't stay the same forever or maybe it will, but there's just some changes and improvements I'd like to implement. Markdown support of some kind is just one thing to add to the list.

Another thing that I'd like to go onto that list is some kind of RSS feed. I'd like it to be supported for my blog entries and maybe also this "things I've been working on" section. I anticipate that it might mean consolodating the two into one, or maybe they could stay separate I'm not sure.

This is me writing this a few days later, I figured out the whole blog / rss thing that I did but today I decided maybe not to keep that public? I dunno felt a little too personal, at least what I wrote for my first entry. I didn't juts delete it I still have it saved I just might not keep it public, or at least I'll change some things about it.

I've been thinking and wanting to start dualbooting linux on my main laptop and pc for a while now, but I've been a little scared so I put it off for a long time. Then, yesterday (January 17th) I just decided to go for it. It was a little scary, my laptop that I do everything on is a Surface Laptop Studio with an i7 CPU, rtx 3050ti gpu, 32 gigs of ram and 1tb ssd storage. It's not like amazingly powerful but it does everything I want it to do amazingly well, but since it's a Microsoft product running anything but windows 11 just feels kind of weird I guess?

I knew there'd be a lot of tinkering and setup I'd have to do, there's a project dedicated to running and optimizing the way that linux runs on surface devices just because it's kinda weird and tricky to do. I had to install a new kernel so that the touchscreen and pen input would work, and worse than that to get the touchpad to work properly, but now that I've done that and set it up well it works pretty much perfect and great I love it.

I've never used Fedora before but it's just one of the distros that is officially supported by the custom surface kernel or whatever, and I've been wanting to try a vanilla gnome experience, i'm not too fond of how they have it set up on Ubuntu, but so far I've been pretty fond of this actually it's nice. I also figured it would be good because Nick from the linux experiment on youtube says that it's his daily driver so it's gotta be good right?

I've slowly been installing all my apps and stuff to see how it runs and if I end up really liking the way that my workflow works on Fedora, I fully intend on just wiping my windows partition and using this instead full time. I tried installing Davinci Resolve but it was having some kind of issue, I'm sure I can fix it but I also wanted to give kdenlive a try so I'll just try and go fix it after I play around with that.

I'm gonna have to try out some other DAW's since Ableton Live is not available on Linux. I've heard good things about Bitwig studio, which is made by ex Live devs so that'll probably be my go to, but I might also try some Foss options such as LMMS for a bit we'll see. I don't really use Ableton as often as I used to so it's not like a huge priority for me at the moment.

The only other thing that I'm kind of worried about is that I use Onedrive for literally anything (barf I know) and using that on Linux is a bit weird. I've been intending on setting up my own nextcloud cloud storage but I just don't think that's like a viable option for me right now, I might look into other options like Pcloud, I like that they have a one time payment option that's kinda sick.

Today is the day after I uploaded my Fediverse video, it's a Saturday and I don't have much going on so I think I'll start all my research for my Dracula / Nosferatu video. That involves watching a lot of movies, some of which I have seen before and some of which I haven't, and I'm pretty excited. I need to make a definitive list of all the things that I want to watch, or read I guess. So far all I have is:

• Nosferatu - Robert Eggers*
• Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror - F.W Murnau*
• Nosferatu the Vampyre - Werner Herzog*
• Bram Stoker's Dracula - Francis Ford Coppola
• Dracula - Tod Browning and Karl Freund
• Dracula (the original novel) - Bram Stoker
• Dracula: A Graphic Novel - Bram Stoker and Matt Pagett*

And for now that's about it. There are so many different adaptations and things that I'm probably missing so maybe I'll end up adding more to this list but I guess we'll see what happens. I'll be checking things off as I do them.

The night that I made that list and put it on my site (? I think? maybe it was a day or two after that, I haven't really been keeping track) I went to the library, read the Matt Pagett Graphic Novel (which I did not like btw, and I don't seem to be alone in that), checked out a copy of the Dracula film with Bela Lugosi, and then watched the the Werner Herzog film with my wife.

I thought it was just okay? I know a lot of people really really like that one and even think it's their favorite adaptation of the Dracula story, and I don't blame them for that I see the appeal, but I thought it was kind of boring and it felt really long. Granted, the film as a whole felt like a fine length in my opinion, but I just feel like some individual shots and scenes went a bit long. It was really beautiful to look at, I like how it felt very saturated all the colors were very vibrant which was a really interesting choice that I think worked pretty well.

I borrowed a copy of the original novel from my sister in law a loooong time ago, like before I even planned on making this video. I just kind of wanted to read it. I've been making very slow progress, because I am just not a good reader, and when you combine that with the like old english and long drawn out ways of going about things that the novel tends to do sometimes, I just find it kind of difficult to read it. In fact, after I read the first two chapters I kind of just stopped for a really long time, but I picked it up again this past Monday while babysitting my niece, and made quite a bit of progress in it. I think it's gotten easier now that I'm through a lot of the opening exposition stuff.

I plan on watching the Bela Lugosi and Coppola films sometime during this week, I haven't had a chance to yet because my Monday and Tuesday were pretty busy, and I don't think I will today either, but we'll have to see what tomorrow and Friday bring.

Recently I've been working on being more comfortable with being on camera. Those of you that know me will know that I've been working on my YouTube channel's second video for a while but I've been struggling making any progress on it due to the topic being the Fediverse, creating new assets from scratch for that was taking a good long time since, it was much easier for my last video when the topic was a film that I could just pull clips from.

This time around I didn't have that luxury, so I was learning to create my own assets. I'm not a great designer so this seemed like a very daunting task, I've never been good with graphics, animation, or anything like that. But, I recently learned about a python library for making mathematics based animations called MANIM, created by the YouTuber 3blue1brown

So, I started learning how to use this to create some assets, because it seemed easier than practicing talents I personally don't really think I have, and would expand my coding knowledge since I didn't know anything about Python, and had been wanting to learn more languages and stuff anyways. It was really fun, and I'm definitely not anywhere near an expert I still barely know what I'm doing, but I used it to create some cool text animations and stuff like that and I'm pretty happy with what I ended up with.

My only problem with it is that it was taking forever. After spending a few weeks learning Manim, figuring out how to use it for my videos, and making some animations, I had gotten just barely the first two paragraphs of the script done. I'm sure I could've gotten it done a bit quicker and it would be faster moving forward, but it kind of seemed like I was biting off more than I could chew, and I was also finding myself getting bored and distracted. It didn't really hold my attention enough to satiate my ADHD I guess.

So, just this past week or so, I was talking to my friend Flutespell and he helped me decide that I should just put myself on camera. It would be a good skill to practice anyways if I want to work with media.

So I've been working on recording my video and my narration of it, and I think it's been going pretty well. I have one small problem with it though, I'm recording it on my Canon Camera, and it formats the SD Card as Fat32, which has a max file size of 4GB, so I can only record videos up to ~ 12 and a half minutes or so until I hit that file limit. It's not a huge deal, I just record each section of my script separately and it's fine, but it's just a little frustrating sometimes.

P.S: If you're unfamiliar with the Fediverse I definitely think you should check it out, it's been a new fascination of mine recently and I think it's really important. Chances are if you're here on neocities, it'll be right up your alley. You can learn more by clicking the Fediring button in my footer, or you can read about it on Wikipedia or something. Or, if you really want, wait until my video is done and watch it.

Update as of 1/7/25: I have finished all the recording and now I just need to assemble it. Hoping I can have it posted by the end of this week let's goooooooooooo

Update as of 1/8/25: I have completed a bulk of the editing, it's all put together and every clip is cut and put in it's proper sequence and what not, all I need to do now is just add some graphics, title cards for the different sections, etc. I'm hoping that I will have it uploaded this Friday, January 10th. I'll attach a link to here when that is complete.

Update as of 1/9/25 My video is done! Tomorrow all I have to do is record VO for my little "thanks for watching" bit at the end and then upload it! I think I'm pretty happy with how it came out I'm very pleased with it and I think I did a lot of learning and growing as a creator during it's creation so that's pretty coooooool.

Update as of 1/11/2025 I've uploaded it yesterday, it's out now you can go see it. I got a comment on my TILvids upload of it, someone saying that after watching mnay different videos about it, some even reaching up to an hour long, that mine was the one that helped them understand the best. That felt really good and validating I guess? I'm still really new to this whole thing, there was a part of me that was worried that the way I wrote and delivered everything was too confusing and assuming too much knowledge of the viewer I guess. I'm glad that I know for sure I helped at least one person understand better. Thank you vim-witted on TILvids!

If you'd like to watch it, you can head on over to the Videos page. Click on the Fediverse drop down and there'll be a link to the video on YouTube and on PeerTube, whichever one you prefer, and you can even read along if you would like, but it will not be word for word. The written version is probably a little clearer tbh lol