December Adventure 2024

Hi! I’m participating in December Adventure this year! In contrast to a competitive advent calendar like Advent of Code, it is a low-stakes programming and journaling calendar taking place throughout december. I’ve participated in AoC for the past few years, for example solving 2023’s puzzle set using a different programming language each day. But I feel like now is the ideal time for me to take it easier and not to fuss about completion times or implementating algorithms. I welcome the change of pace.

December 0

Today, I set up this page! I will be updating this page every day as my adventure log. I have some plans for the projects I’ll be working on – in particular I have ideas and a half-baked playground open on a different VSCode window. More on that tomorrow :)

December 1

By the way, these updates will be in chronological order. Even though it’s worse for catching updates it seems easier to read through as a whole.

I’ve had this idea floating in my head for a little bit now: the Library of Babel in its modern form is still ultimately a digital recreation of a physical library. It maintains in spirit the feel of interacting with a library, through browsing and random stumbling, though it does add a string search as a form of “oracle” emphasizing the inscrutability of the library. How could the philosophical concept of the Library be reimagined in the era of the internet?

One particular thought that has bubbled in my mind is that of 88x31 badges. Seemingly popularized in geocities, they are a form of building interconnected social networks across websites. The badges act as a symbol of these digital relationships and the graph that they encode, which I think represents one goal of the internet (even if idealistic).

Fascinatingly, people have attempted to scrape and curate collections of these 88x31 badges forever, through a graph visualizations or plain old long lists. I say attempted because such a task is inherently impossible (that is, unless the internet were to become controlled by a couple of monopolistic platforms… yes this site is sadly hosted through GitHub). The internet is just too large and too dynamic to store as a list.

But what if you could? What if you did have an ultimate repository of all our relationships on the internet? This is indeed where I find the metaphor of the Library has the most potential. And that is what I have been working on for the past couple of weeks, including today. I have a skeleton webpage set up to display 1000 different random 88x31s generated on a server. I’m toying around with minimal features currently: old-web aesthetic without old-web inaccessibility, relatively sane dynamic scrolling of appallingly long lists, the specifics of the randomization algorithm. I have lots of things to work on this month and I am feeling motivated! Even though today I only tweaked some CSS (hehe, repeating JPEG backgrounds) I won’t say that I accomplished little (that would be false).

December 2

Who says the updates have to be paragraphs long? Today, I just read about the JavaScript events and methods I could use for dynamically loading a list of 2^65472 images while maintaining an accurate scrollbar. Fun fact! The otherwise-reasonable strategy of “compute a fixed full height for the body and populate the page as it becomes visible” is not feasible due to the simple fact that the maximum value you can plug into a height CSS property is on the order of 2^24 pixels on my Firefox. (Coincidence? That’s very close to the safe integer limit on 32-bit floats. Not going to dig out the specification for this one.) It’s so astronomically far off from fitting the space for 2^6472 images it’s not even worth calculating. I’ll likely have to resort to a simulacrum using a reasonably-tall document (so that regular scrolling won’t move the bar) and gamedev-esque viewing-frustum culling.

I would ideally like to have the whole page on a single infinite scroll, like all the information in this page is just at your (literal) fingertips. If only you could scroll forever and never get fatigued, you could learn all there is to know in this world…

December 3

Slight change of pace! I worked on my portfolio today. Currently, the page is certifiably empty. I would like the page to contain a reverse chronological list of my highlighted work. Each entry has a visual element if possible, a title, date (to the nearest month), description, and outgoing links. While individual projects distinguish themselves from the others, the overall experience should be a smooth dive back in time.

So, to start I’ve been formulating lists of what to put there. I have a lot of projects stretching back a few years, with various themes and foci. I wonder what would be the best way to unify all of them? On one hand it feels crass to assign an “artness” metric to a project, on the other it feels odd to put conceptual work next to practical work. Maybe a different form of categorizing?

In terms of implementation, I think I will be using Jekyll’s include system to have a folder of portfolio entries that are compiled into a static page. That way I can store both structured (front matter YAML) and unstructured (HTML content) information. Though… I could also use data files to make every entry structured – if my goal is indeed to have an image, description, and other fields. That sounds quite reasonable, actually.

I also added some missing links around my site, such as a “home” link in breathing-geometry. That was a fun use of CSS grid.