BBS / Oneliner

If you're reading this, it's feasible that you came via the front page, endured the fake decrunching routine, marvelled at the starfield and clicked through to the blog. If that's the case then you might also have noticed a new card - an SSH address and a 'connect' button. If you clicked the connect button (and I'd be disappointed if you saw it, and didn't) then you'd have been given the option to leave a note.

I can't imagine this site gets very many visitors, (I did just recently install some stats but I don't really have a baseline about how much of it is just Google and other bits and pieces crawling it) but it's not really about that. I'm really seeing this site as a playground for me to try things out and to act as a record of stuff I've been doing - lately I've been filling the gaping void in my life with quite a few different activities and I thought writing them down would mean I'd have a nice record later on to look back at what I've been upto. That's the main motivation for it, but with the chance someone might stumble across an experiment, or a photo, or a story, and get something out of it too. I've tried to curate a bit of a vibe across it - you'll see lots of mentions of 'nodes' and 'traces' and everything is lowercase etc - I want to create a kind of consistent feel, like inhabiting a world almost, encourage people to click on things and provide very little by way of explanation. The opposite of user friendly, probably, but why not have my own weird corner where I can do weird stuff? 

The BBS thing is just another of these experiments. To tell you the truth, it's really about the ANSI art logo at the top of the front page - I'm not an artist and so when I first started the site, I wanted a logo to put there and I thought I'd ask ChatGPT to make something (it wrote all the code too) and it made the graphic, and I liked it but it never felt authentic - if you looked at it, you could tell that it wasn't really viable ANSI - some of the blocks were different sizes and it would've been technically impossible. With the site, I can put in the footer that the site was made with GPT but with the art, I couldn't think of an elegant way of indicating that, and it made me feel like a fraud. So what I ended up doing, was manually recreating the logo in Moebius. I've updated the logo at the top with a PNG of the ANSI, but if you connect to the BBS, you'll see it as intended (if you use the in browser method, or use something that renders ANSI properly, anyway). 

It just felt important to me. Now I don't know if I'll pass everyone's purity test because the original came from GPT, but I feel like I've bridged the gap, I learned about Moebius and about half blocks and iCE colours - I've admired ANSI/ASCII for years from afar and this was a nice way to dip my toe in I think. So the BBS exists because I thought it'd be a fun way to put that image up in the way it's supposed to be but I will probably also extend it a bit, maybe allow terminal based blog reading - again, pointless, but it's fun!

So am I expecting many people to leave unsolicited oneliners? No, not really, but I like that it's there and that it's possible that someone might (what are you waiting for?!)