A page describing the entire idea and overall inspiration and concept for this site, potential long term goals, and answering the question: Why is this even here?
What is this site? Realistically, I’m not 100% sure yet. I’ve been paying for this server and domain for a few years now, ever since taking a class that required a webhost, and yet I’ve never really done anything with it. I’ve used it as a host for a couple different projects and web apps, but for the most part, the root domain has gone unused. There’s a wordpress blog being hosted on a subdomain, but even that is so infrequently updated that I don’t see much point in continuing there.
Instead, I’ve decided to just kind of use this place as a dumping ground for whatever I feel like writing. This could include things such as: code snippets, poetry and writing samples, attempts at creating art, or basically anything else that catches my attention1.
Inspiration
To make a long story short, I’ve been playing around a lot with ML models lately, and specifically training them on a corpus of anime art (both SFW and NSFW, because I am a cruel and uncaring God). Which, of a matter of course, took me to the fantastic Danbooru anime dataset published by Gwern Branwen.
I instantly fell in love with the site at gwern.net and the unique flow it had. Something about it reminded me of the old text files I used to read about phreaking and other suchlike activities back on textfiles.com2. Some good memories of downloading the entire Anarchist’s Cookbook and reading about getting high by “smoking banana peels” and credit card scams.
Implementation
This site is written in Pandoc Markdown, just like its inspirational source gwern.net, and then transposed into a static HTML site using the Pelican generator written in Python. The static site is compiled and linked to templates using the Jinja2 templating engine.
The templates were (poorly) cloned from Gwern by using the resources at their GitHub repo and by using the inspector browser tool to steal fonts and color values. No Dark/Light mode switching is implemented yet, as I’m still parsing through the source files and looking to understand it. It strikes me that copy/pasted code isn’t inherently a problem, as long as one understands and learns from the code. After all, if something should break and I need to fix it, I should at least know how to understand what I’m reading.
I also plan to (eventually) implement the Gwern style popins for links, but that requires a bit of refactoring to take out of the context of that site and cram into the context of this site. And, much like the color mode switching, requires that I dig into — and fully understand — the existing code base.
On that note, this site also implenets the gwern.net sidenotes.js script as a means of turning Markdown footnotes into the more semantically relevant sidenotes. I fell in love with this style of notation because it follows along with my natural inclination towards sidenotes while telling stories, and branching trains of thought, with a clever syntactic advantage while writing long form articles or other ramblings.
The site is hosted on DigitalOcean. Not for any anti-Bezos reasons (though that would be a good reason to claim), but simply because I couldn’t figure out their pricing model easily and DigitalOcean made it far easier to understand how and what I was paying for. Plus, I vastly prefer having a server environment rather than a cPanel based webhost like HostGator. Besides, the fact that I have a server in the cloud means that I could implement a site like this with dynamic content generation without needing to manually tweak and upload HTML files over FTP. The whole site can be generated on the server side and deployed with a simple shell script.
This Site
This site used to (and still technically does) host a Wordpress blog (that I will soon be phasing out and moving out of) but it’s mostly abandoned and full of posts marked private about my own struggles with depression. I just couldn’t be bothered overall to keep up with logging into the web interface and fighting with Wordpress templates and wysiwg editors. But I liked the idea of using a personal website to host some ramblings and other experiments. Which brings me neatly to the name, and tagline of this site:
iJaceebo - What the hell is that?
Ijaceebo - Ouranian Barbaric - “All Gods and Demons are We”3
Both a mantra and an affirmation: Within each of us exists the power that creates all Gods, and all Demons. So, quite literally, all of them are us. Our beliefs bring to life the myths and give rise to the mystical truths. For reference, see American Gods by Neil Gaiman4.
But at the same time, all of us are each Gods and Demons in our own rights. Our belief, our power; Our generosity, and our cruelty, these are the things religions are made from. These are the things that shape the world. Don’t pray for the divine when the solution is in front of you all along. Don’t leave salvation and kindness to the mystical if you can manifest it yourself. If “God works in Mysterious Ways”™ then become a “Mysterious Way”© and do the divine with your own hands.
Other things include: intensely personal blog posts screaming into the infinite void, game development experiments, advertisements for events that I’m either a part of or interested in, attempts to read your mind, random thoughts and ideas, personal manifestos in various flavors, and occultism or magick related articles↩︎
Link provided here to https mirror, but I remember just going to the base site. What a wild time it was to be alive in the early days of the internet… Typing “www” before URLs because the wwwroot directory actually meant something↩︎
Ouranian Barbaric being a whole other topic of conversation for later. It may benefit me to write up a page about this, or I may never get around to it. The world may never know↩︎
I’ve been known to hand out copies of his books as introductory texts whenever people have asked me if I can “teach (them) how to do Chaos Magick” (which seems like a patently impossible request). This is usually along with another medieval grimoire or some other magickal text that is as boring and needlessly verbose as a set of stereo instructions. But I give them these books and tell them, “Come back to me when you’ve figured out how the two are related.”↩︎