When I first began this blog last year, it was meant to be a silly place where I allowed myself to draft rough ideas and prose experiments. It did not take long at all for the scope to creep, and for that to be thrown completely out of the window.

Trying to keep up a 1:1 post-per-day cadence this month has melted my brain a little. I thought it wouldn't be a big deal, since I usually write 5 or 6 posts a week, so what damage would there be bumping that up to 7?

Miraculously, I've still had a fair share of blog posts this month that I'm happy with despite the increasing straw-grasping.

But I noticed last night, while working on the website for blogging studies, that I was hit with this wave of demotivation—this alien sensation of not wanting to continue, of not caring to write anymore. It was startling, because since I began in November, I had never experienced such a despondent frame of mind—as though my remaining active brain cells had come together and finally unionized against my onslaught of cognitive tyranny.

On one hand, I recognize I simply need a break, but on the other, maybe I have finally reached a ceiling. I have only so many thoughts, opinions, and ideas. I feel like I've done a good job at being repetitive on this blog—sure, I beat the same drum of values—but I like to think I've always found new, creative angles to attack my favourite topics over and over again.

And of course I have an embarrassing amount of pride in making it to the make-believe, arbitrary finish line on September 1st, the sunk-cost fallacy pointing out that there are only three more days left. Also, the make-believe, arbitrary standards referee checks to ensure that each post is still, at minimum, a thousand words and useful.

I want to make it clear none of the above diminishes my joy, nor does it take away from how lucky I am to be doing this at all. Even when I become emotionally blunted and psychically exhausted, I still have the cognitive wherewithal to keep those facts in mind. Maybe it's also because I've begun watching the 2000 anime series about boxing and sportsmanship, Hajime no Ippo, that I have been so inspired to continue.

Anyways, that's enough navel-gazing for one post. There are a few small things I want to write about that cheered me up.

To start, Ben of Bubbles.town responded to my retrospective of the platform. While most of his response was a well-argued and fair reply to my criticism, he did release a new feature allowing people to filter and hide posts by keyword in response to the large number of genAI posts on the platform. I appreciate not only that a feature was made in response to feedback, but also that it was done so quickly. Huzzah.

Next, I want to share an application in development that was recently shared with me. Jan Miksovsky, creator of the web builder Origami, has announced a new project called Origami Projector. It is rather simple, but that's why I love it. It's designed to be a lightweight web development tool that gives you a real-time preview of what you're creating. You can even upload the work you create to NeoCities or Netlify.

Miksovsky credits the now-defunct platform Glitch for inspiration. If you were a user, I'm sure you were as heartbroken as I was when the site shut down. There were so many cool, weird projects housed on Glitch that wouldn't have existed were it not for its unique ethos and design. It was an excellent starting point for people interested in web development, so I hope to see Origami Projector take off, because I think it scratches that itch, even though it's rather different in how it operates.

Seeing the efforts of others really boosts my spirits. People are still creating good things on the web, by hand, for the sake of others. This has always been the case and will always continue to be the case so long as there is an Internet and there are people. No matter how many headlines try to convince you that the Internet is now only a husk of belligerent robots and platforms created by corporations, the personal and independent web will always be here. The good of the world doesn't stop existing, I promise.