Synaptic Saturday #4: Site updates, Mewgenics

Site updates

For full details, you can refer to this post.

The new image zoom feature in action. Be careful though, some images when clicked are pretty large (10-20MB) but I'll always warn you beforehand.

The new two-column layout for dedicated galleries.

I’ve done a few updates to the site the past couple of weeks:

• Most importantly, I’ve moved all assets (images, videos, PDFs) to AWS S3.
  • First off, this offloads heavy files from the GitHub repo. AFAIK, there’s a soft limit of 10GB that could be stored in the repository.
  • Second, it should make loading stuff faster on your end. While there seems to be a bandwidth limit as well for GitHub; larger, more dedicated providers like Amazon Web Services should provide a better experience overall.
  • In summary, blog.carlospanganiban.com is still hosted in GitHub pages, while assets loaded in via cdn.carlospanganiban.com are from AWS.
• Next, I’ve prepared all images to be compressed and resized for preview.
  • All the images you’ll see on all pages will likely come from ...assets/thumbs. These are all resized to a max width of 800px, and are ran through a compression algorithm. The original files will be stored on ...assets/images instead.
  • This is because I was working on the Batanes gallery, which contained full-resolution shots from my camera. And these photos were by default 6000x4000px wide and would go up to 10-20MB in size.
  • Then, you’ll realize that even thirty of those would cause any reader to instantly attempt to download half a GB of data without warning.
• I’ve also included an image zooming feature similar to Medium. This also helped me lazy load the full-res images only upon clicking on them. You can see how it works with the GIF above.
• Finally, a two-column setup for galleries (the pictures above are galleries too!) is here. No more “only one big picture takes the whole width” when I need it.

I’ve also experimented with an RSS to e-mail newsletter solution, but it’s pretty shit so I’ll be disabling it for now.

Mewgenics

So I haven’t been writing much since my free time has been devoured by Mewgenics. It’s an awesome game, there’s lots of articles online on how it’s “the most played roguelite ever” or stuff like that, so I might not be posting a review just to echo what people said.

Right now, I haven’t gotten past Act 2 yet since the “eugenics” part of Mewgenics has me hooked. The cat breeding part of the game definitely acts as a fun multiplier when you start getting fatigued between runs. Here’s what one of my cats look like:

The max base stat for a cat is seven. I'm trying to breed for an all-7 (the community calls them seven sevens) cat. This here is Fripouille, with four sevens—they won't be breeding for the "royal family" but their stats are good enough to send out on adventures. Note that they're "highly inbred."

Fripouille's family tree... or whatever this shape is. Family directed acyclic graph?

Cats having a high inbreeding coefficient give mostly negative mutations (most mutations in the game are a net positive). While it seems like I’m only inbreeding my cats here, rest assured I have a non-inbred stud that does all the “royal family” work. I breed the stud with random strays so there’s always new genes introduced to the family. The inbred cousins who still have high stats get sent out into battle instead.

Steam says I’ve logged 45 hours so far, half of it on the Steam Deck, most certainly. I’ve barely scratched the surface, I believe, and this is likely a game that’ll cost me thousands of hours. I’d like to talk about it more, but I’d rather play the game morer! Maybe another time.

On backlogs

• Facebook archive processing, as mentioned in the last Synaptic Saturday.
• Deployment for EMS, that’s going to start ramping up this month.
• As for the site, I’m going to need to improve on the new :::gallery system. While the two-column setup works, I believe a masonry system should work the best with images with mixed aspect ratios.
  • You can see with the mini-gallery with the Mewgenics photos above that there’s a lot of negative space when I have an image that’s a bit too long. Somehow I’d like to make text fill that negative space too, if possible. But that is quite nontrivial.

On the horizon

• Posts about music, I’m going to need to get into the headspace since I’ll have to pick up the violin again for Maundy Thursday.
• A post about our Maundy Thursday tradition, I’d say it’s something to look forward to.
• Gunpla stuff! Just started doing a kit this week.