hai! helo! i go by the names of blerg, martin and martinthedragon, and this is my totally very cool and awesome personal website, have a good time! (not much of that to be had yet, i know)
you may know me from the nuclear tech mod for minecraft and related projects (the remake for example)
if you happen to know me some other way instead though, well, hiii!
ever wanted a radio that features primarily one artist who consistently pushes out peak music (vylet pony)? well, look no further: https://radio.ntmr.dev
this page will feature more stuff as time goes on, so check back later!
for your reference, this page was last updated on the
smolblog
here's a little short-form version of the blog where i can post smol random things (times are localized to your system locale)
- finally published my first blog post, it actually ended up being a meta-post about blogs lol
- oh yeah i've also actually been working a lot more on the ntm remake again in the past week given time allows me to do more of that again too, and it actually feels fulfilling to do so, so i might truly be back on track
- i've had a bit of a general productivity downtime and overall immediate tiredness at the thought of creating and working on stuff for many months at this point, but i realized a few different things over time and especially a couple days ago that would explain why this is more of a recent thing in the grand scheme of things, and why it used to be basically the complete opposite. it's a few factors, but i think it makes sense now psychologically. might end up writing blog posts about it and what's been happening, but i do think i'll be a lot more productive again from now on, so yay yippie
- thank you everyone for squimshing the derg 100k times, and congratulations to whoever made the hundred thousandth squimsh
- i'm a third of the way into my break from discord, and i have to say, things haven't truly left my mind yet in any real way.
i don't really spend time on discord right now so i can invest that time elsewhere, sure, but it still feels more like a wait than a break so far. maybe because i just have that much more time now, maybe it's still an addictive pattern, so i'll still wait out most of the month, but it's also quite a change in general given i no longer talk to friends i used to communicate with on a daily basis, and they didn't reach out via other means like i had hoped either (and i only have their discord).
then there's obviously the ntm discord which i've been administrating for years, and the five years i've been on it had quite a good impact on me personally in various ways, despite how i sometimes felt about some things. so i think ultimately it's not something i would want to let go.
point of the break was figuring that part out from a new perspective without being hooked to it daily, but i think the answer will be that i'll stick to it and stay an admin as long as discord doesn't become way too shit of a platform, it just matters to me.
when i return, i still definitely want to push the community towards being more peaceful and openly nice. people don't say nice things often in a lot of places even if they want to, and i think it should be normalized not to hold back. doesn't at all mean people can't be sad or angry about something, but any thing that lacks, would lack like any other thing. like, appreciate what people build or make instead of shutting them down for mistakes right away. don't always make your opinions personal, even if you didn't intend for them to sound like that. everyone is fragile in this world, anyone who tells you otherwise was probably drowned in toxicity and spite and/or hasn't realized yet. a nice comment every now and then can make all the difference in the world. so have a good day, and maybe give a hug to someone you care about!
- i finally finished porting my website to php. no more complicated golang/caddy templates, no more bash scripted server backend, no more authentication handled in caddyfiles, and in fact not a single plain html file on the site at all anymore currently. if everything went right, you shouldn't notice a whole lot of anything having changed :p
- one of the most tiring things i see across the internet is mindless, opinionated hate over people's creations, personal preferences and way of doing things. the people who spread this hate are few and far between in reality, but tend to pool into certain spaces and hate on or make fun of others for doing something, just as much as for not doing something or doing it a specific way. especially for things that don't even really matter to anyone else. it ends up creating a sort of belief system of its own, populist critique in an almost dogma type of way that ends up being convincing enough for some people to perpetuate it, ultimately with no other goal than to hurt and waste everyone's time. and there's also these kind of backseat clipboard guys who always manage to come up with some prejudicial doubt against people or things. the "nothing ever happens" type of people, who look at something and come up with a thought-terminating cliché because they think they're superior over others not following their exact idea of the world and how things should be. it's these kinds of people that make day-to-day communication tiring, not only online but everywhere. and a lot, if not most other people, let themselves be slightly taken in by their sentiments. there's a bit of a chud in almost everyone. and for a community to be healthy and constructive, it is most vital for these kinds of people to simply be weeded out, even if they usually don't violate any community rules in particular. pushback against it by virtue of fairness is understandable, but undeniably what made a lot of my days communicating online rather miserable, because it ends up being the same thing over and over again. my advice when creating a community, make sure to either talk to, address, or get rid of these despair anchors as soon as possible, before they can take ahold, and people should be encouraged to (friendily) point these fallacies out in each other
- i've decided to finally free myself from discord entirely for most likely at least this month. there are reasons to this that i may reveal when my break is over. either way, know that for the time being, i won't be reachable via discord as a contact option. for anyone interested, i'll try updating the smolblog a little more often. i'll have a lot more time in my day without discord now anyway :p
- finally drew myself a new pfp, yay (still not quite happy with the design though, guess there'll be another attempt in the future). the old pfp is available here for archival purposes
- reminder that ai training has been a huge detriment to me, everyone else, and the internet as a whole, severely affecting infrastructure, stealing people's work, and empowering malevolent people to not only attempt to put others out of a job while being worse in every way, but to also spread misinformation and hate, and i wholly stand by the stance that any supporters of this, or people who illegally send out scrapers to steal content and nearly denial of service attack servers, should be figuratively lynched
- collected my ambitions into a bit of a todo list, check it out
- remember to feed nothing to the void from time to time: dd -if=/dev/zero -of=/dev/null
- tip for hot days: mix yogurt with some jam and lemon juice, just awesome
- oh yeah songs from gonarch's lair will of course be added to the ntm radio, and the in-game radio is actually highly likely to release next monday!
- for anyone who hasn't caught wind of it yet, vylet pony released the gonarch's lair album the other day. the amount of lyrics is insane, the lyrics themselves are insane, and the music is on constant attack mode
- can't stop thinking about spyro and how cute he hops around like just look at him. i already completed the first part a while ago, really wanna finish the whole trilogy remake. the goober simulator
- i love how after all these years of codecs and standards being developed, ogg/opus has become the widely accepted standard for audio and av1 for video and images (avif), both of which are in large part developed by xiph.org (see the daala codec for the roots behind av1). the organization was originally founded and run by a person developing the open source codec ogg/vorbis to combat mp3 becoming proprietary and requiring royalty payments. xiph.org gets way too little credit for this. they also take care of a lot of other audio-related projects, like the icecast software running on the ntm radio. <3 xiph.org, for keeping audio and digital media free for everyone!
- sometimes i wonder how i'll ever be able to work on the things i want to work on, when somehow it seems like the days just pass without a whole lot happening, even though i keep on denying further projects and even collabs people ask me for. am i making the wrong choices?
- you can now pick a different font for this site on the options page
- cuddling your lover is the best fucking thing ever honestly
- youtube just gave me a video that has filled me with existential dread while i was lying in bed. fuck... i need to stop doing useless unfulfilling things and finally use my time to do what i want
- it's incredible how often a gameplay experience gets designed a certain way, for example disincentivizing something by making it really annoying and providing some other, more pleasant way instead, and people still knowingly choose the annoying, awful and torturous path anyway. i'm not sure how to explain this phenomenon besides defiance and/or masochism (and honestly i've found myself to do the same lmao)
- there's a strong difference between building software fast and building software that is fast
- i often wish people could just interact with each other with kindndess, dignity and respect, just having a good time (without being obnoxious in public settings). life could be simple, we could have it all, yet so many choose to make fun of certain groups, be bigoted, or just be plain rude. a lot of people can be "weird" or "eccentric" to others, but what does it really matter, why be mean for it? why talk yourself into thinking it has to bother you, instead of improving someone's day? i see this very often on discord for example. many don't have patience with others when talking and jump straight to calling someone dumb. many others care about their ego more than anything. and many more think people have to be a certain way (or can't be a certain other way). as if any of those things really mattered to society and the world. what's much more important is that as many people as possible can live a good and happy life, and yet most people seem to actively choose to bring unhappiness to others in all kinds of ways, or to laugh at their misfortune. i have so many thoughts on this topic, and i have a full length blog post about it in progress. in the meantime, why not be the reason someone sheds tears of joy, instead of sadness?
- monarch of monsters vynils (18+) dropped for pre-order, go get one if you're a vylet pony fan!
- today i read the first book in the wings of fire series. yes, the entire book, just in one day. that thing was captivating and really well written, goddamn. it's apparently rated for middle-grade-aged children, but that's honestly very deceiving due to the sheer amount of gore and graphic descriptions. the plot is compelling too of course, there are cliffhangers at the end of every chapter, the story had me go through all sorts of emotions, and the writing involves all your senses so you can imagine the scenes really well in your head (unless you have aphantasia). go check it out!
- honestly it sickens me when i see people throw out cigarette butts into the environment, especially on the road while driving. not only are you jumpscaring the person driving behind you with the sparkly ember, you're getting all kinds of poisons into the environment (on top of all the other shit) along with microplastics that stick around, with the cigarette butt eventually making its way into the waters and oceans. and just the sheer amount of times i've witnessed people throw them out just on the road... if you're already fucking up your lungs please at least be more considerate of your surroundings </3
- if you're wondering, yeah i've hidden the in-progress blog posts for the time being, doesn't feel right to keep in-progress stuff like that. they'll reappear on the same urls though
- garlic doesn't protect against vampires, it actually acts as a bit of a blood thinner. this is all just a massive ploy to get you to consume garlic so they can actually suck you dry more easily
- yeah so about that "fuck it, we ball", that quickly turned into me trying out other editors and considering yet again where software is going, but i think things are gonna be more or less fine i guess. still means no actual work got done on the remake again, oughe
yeah i should continue writing my blog post too, that's directly related
- by celestia, going back to using intellij after so much time of using lightweight editors like kate really makes it apparent how laggy it is
- yknow, i kinda intended to get back to more ntm remake development in february, but instead i've just been doing website shit... fuck it, we ball, we're doing it now
- there's a lot of joy in developing software with sticks and stones (if you have my type of autism at least), you just learn a lot more about the tools and things you use on the regular but would otherwise have other software handle for you
- also yeah here's the thing ntm made a reference to many months ago: https://vyletpony.bandcamp.com/album/ni4ni
it was a horse reference all along
- is it just me or has youtube been decreasing the volume on videos further so they can play ads even louder? listening to music on there with everything maxed out is pretty much the same as setting the volume to 70% on a local music player, this sucks
- the dashed highlighting bar now shows up above and below new posts
- the smolblog will now highlight new posts for you that you haven't read yet (if you haven't visited the site between me adding that functionality and me writing this post, this won't show up for you yet because the javascript on this site needs to store a timestamp of your current visit in your browser's local storage first)
- if you've ever wondered what an ntm developer looks like, unironically imagine someone in a white shirt wearing a striped high-waisted pleated mini skirt together with pastel pink striped thigh highs, and there you go
- contemplated turning this into more of a system "like twitter" (without the stupid clout metrics) by allowing people to subscribe to automated push notifications somehow, but i think an rss feed would also be enough. it's not like i need to shove my writings into people's faces. in fact, i'd rather have the opposite so i can just write whatever shit i feel like. i wonder about adding ways to reply though. well, people can already just email me about anything, but i understand the laziness and maybe lack of anonymity (btw i don't care how "cringe" your email address may be (unless it contains slurs or 4chan-slang, then i will be concerned), and i'm not gonna do anything evil with it either, pinky promise)
- i just realized with this smolblog i basically just recreated twitter, in a way... well, without all the parts that make twitter a hellscape, but i guess that does mean there's at least some appeal to talking into a small box after all
- i love a good sleep, but i often wish days were twice as long and that the brain could handle it like that
- seeing people debate over what browser is better or worse is tiring... it's software (some of the most sophisticated software we have, nonetheless), and most software just sucks for various reasons, so look, if it works, it works, otherwise send a bug report, fix it or live with something else and let others be oughe (if you're using a browser fork developed by a small team, be sure that you're receiving updates and security patches from upstream, as well as that the fork itself is safe; generally, i recommend against using browser forks; use firefox, chromium or safari if you want the least amount of spyware and the best support i guess)
- decided to write down the recipe for the slime that heals you, check it out
- mh i love taking frozen vegetables and turning them into the slime that heals you, this stuff just slaps
- i really wonder how many people come across this site, i should set up a guestbook for people to leave funny notes
- we must destroy the torment nexus
- i'm starting to worry i might've gotten addicted to webdev as a stress relief mechanism in the face of all the other large things i actually want to do
- yay the smolblog templating is working
- man i should really set up a local caddy instance to debug this site better
- sometimes i try to be nice or silly to a friend and then think to myself "damn i must be fucking annoying", so i just get sad
squimshes
go on! click/tap to squimsh the derg!
the derg has been squimshed this many times:
contact
if you'd like to talk to the derg, you can do that using the following methods:
- email: me@blerg.horse (i have a pgp key if you want encryption; check out thunderbird if you need an email client that supports it)
- email 2: martin@ntmr.dev (also has its own pgp key available)
discord: @martinthedragonunavailable for at least the rest of july- matrix: @martinthedragon:ntmr.dev
- xmpp: martinthedragon@ntmr.dev
badges and cool places
if you are also hosting or creating a personal site and want to link me for any reason, consider grabbing my button:
now, surf the web a bit more and check out these cool and fun websites by other cool and fun people <3
here are some more other random and fun badges lol
