03/14/2022 new cats 'explore' page! explore cat-related sites... more to be added soon.
03/16/2022 integrated mathjax & LaTeX for my statistics page. although it seems to break if you click on a different page and come back to it later. i honestly have no clue what to do about this. & new 'helpful sites' archive
03/19/2022 redirected unfinished pages to '404 not found'... i should have done this a long time ago, but i wanted to do something with javascript (i didn't)
03/22/2022 woo! mathjax & LaTeX works! thanks to This Guy...
04/01/2022 happy april fools!
i now have a music player, roughly based off the bandcamp player, which can be found in my music diary. it's really useful so i can embed music that is not on bandcamp, though i may eventually transition all my music onto players like this for the sake of continuity (don't worry, i will still link places to support the artist!) don't look at the code... i totally took it from a tutorial and edited it...04/11/2022 needed to satiate my urge to create alternate stylesheets, you can find my wip mlp theme on my 'my little pony' page. i'm entertaining the idea of adding different layouts for different pages, like having a different about page code, but i do want to keep things simple for the most part.
04/26/2022 scrapped previous idea - i'll just keep a theme toggle on the header for anyone who wants to experiment. added more art to my drawings page.
Welcome to my sweet little garden on the outskirts of the interweb. This site's name is inspired by an Ian McEwan novel, "The Cement Garden". Here you will find personal writings, a few amateur essays, some art of mine (that is, if I ever get around to uploading it), and links to resources that I find rewarding and/or interesting. This site is a constant work in progress, and to be frank, the only pages that work are the ones marked 'New'! If you find yourself lost, clicking the header (or a simple refresh*) will lead you home...
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Here are some buttons if you would like to link to me on your site! There are a few designs, so choose whatever interests you most...
I'm by no means a programmer, although I once had plans to transfer to a university as a CS major. One day I want to revisit learning C++, however studying CS in college was quite alienating. I did not have much in common with my peers in terms of values, goals, and drive. I'm pretty "tech-critical", and although I've picked up a few things, I don't really care to learn about the newest technology nor to be a part of it.
My mom majored in CS and now manages databases at our local community college, and used to work at Intel, so I have had a lot of exposure to programming at a young age. My dad even tried to get me to go to a bootcamp for Python in middle school, because at the time Python was this easy, up-and-coming programming language which had a lucrative job market. I never went to the camp, by the way. Trying to 'get' me to do stuff because of the money is pretty futile. It was really my mom who got me interested in CS: "Programming is an art, the language you use to speak to the computer," she'd say. Optimizing programs, finding the easiest and most efficient way to write them – being an "architect" – is the part of CS that appealed to me.
I used to customize my profile on Deviantart with HTML when I was younger, then I moved on to making and editing Tumblr themes. This is rather embarrassing, but I would mess around with others' themes to the point where it didn't even look like their code anymore, and I'm pretty sure a prolific coder vagued me about it... It haunts me & I wonder if they added that new rule in their TOS because of me. Then, in 2019 or so, I would copy Carrd source codes onto Neocities and edit them there, because I didn't want to pay for extra features. It was very inefficent! To this day I wonder why I never sat down and read/watched tutorials (especially since this complete HTMLCSS course is only 11 hours), it's good to start from the fundamentals when learning anything– but I suppose I have trouble learning in the traditional way. My friend is taking an introductory Web Design class and even then, he's learning things I don't know... my own incompetence amazes me.