The accumulated thoughts of Seryndelle
<p>I was a dope! As my Status Cafe widget on the homepage has mentioned this past week, website updates have been delayed for a few weeks because until yesterday, I'd been unable to open my code editor, <a href="https://phcode.io/">Phoenix Code</a>. Well, as it transpires, it was a simple fix: I just needed to copy and paste the Bash command into my Linux terminal and it did everything for me. My…
<p>First of all, allow me to wish you all a very happy new year! 2026, blimey. We're only two years away from the setting of a futuristic story I remember writing as a child. But let's turn our attention away from looking forward for a moment, and instead cast our minds back to last month.</p> <p>Yes, the link roundup for December 2025 is here at last! I can barely remember what I included as I…
<p>As of roughly three hours ago, I've hit my target of reading 20 books this year! It was a little too close for comfort, but rather than dwelling on that, it's time for me to celebrate the year just gone by sharing the books I've been enjoying this year with you all (listed here in the order I read them).</p> <ol> <li><a…
<p>Well, when I bade you farewell at the end of <a href="link-roundup-003.html">Link Roundup 003</a>, I said that the next time I spoke to you would be during the Christmas countdown... and lo and behold! Yes, thanks to the ambiguity of the words I used in that post, I can rest assured in the happy delusion that I'm not, in fact, a week late posting this.</p> <p>In all seriousness, it's been…
<p>Happy Halloween! It's been a quiet month here at the Sanctum—I haven't even got round to keeping my Now page up to date. The truth is, I've been pretty busy with real-life stuff; none of it bad, thankfully, just very time-consuming. Hopefully at some point soon I'll muster a bit of time and motivation to come back to do a bit more work here on the site.</p> <p>Before we dive right in,…
<p>Apologies for the slight delay in publishing this month's link roundup! The good news is that I didn't forget to collect a bunch of interesting links from around the Web over the course of September—I just happened to forget to post them. D'oh!</p> <p>In any case, I hope you're excited for this month's goodies. (If you missed Link Roundup 001, <a href="link-roundup-001.html">click…
<p>I'm feeling the itch, folks.</p> <p>Not the itch to spend hours doomscrolling, nor the itch to spend every concert with my phone out taking videos instead of living in the moment, but the itch to simply reconnect with friends I've fallen out of touch with since I quit social media in January this year, as well as to socialise with new friends from my job and hobbies outside of the context in…
<p>I don’t really like “meta” blog posts. Blogging about blogging is interesting to bloggers and to people who might want to become bloggers, but it’s not sustainable, and by continuing to look inwards rather than outwards, we limit not only the pool of people who are interested in a given post, but also the pool of subjects we can talk about. It’s a vast world out…
<p>I’d forgotten you existed, <br>but out there, right now, <br>you lie, unaware— <br>grocery shopping, perhaps, <br>or gazing into midnight <br>through the kitchen window. <br>You tell yourself you’ll try <br>to do the washing-up sooner next time. <br>I do that all the time, too.</p> <p>Right now you are crossing a room, <br>walking, laughing with friends <br>(your nose…
<img class="center" height="388px" title="Photograph of Whiteknights Lake © Copyright Kevin Young and licensed for reuse under CC BY-SA 2.0." src="https://seryndelle.neocities.org/images/WhiteknightsLake.jpg"> <p>Gold through green and green from brown;<br>Brown above and coming down—<br>Alice blue and buds of white;<br>Silver leaves that stroke the light—</p> <p>Trumpets then of…
<p>Welcome to a new feature, which I intend to make into a monthly tradition on this blog! Inspired by <a href="https://satyrs.eu/garden/tagged/link-roundup">Mx. Tynehorne's link roundups</a> and <a href="https://seedofworlds.blogspot.com/search/label/weekly%20links">Seed of Worlds's Shiny TTRPG links</a>—amongst many other similar ideas out there on the Web—I want to compile some of…
<p>I recently realised I'd be doing myself a favour by compiling a very concise list of music recommendations. However, I like lots of artists from all kinds of different genres, so choosing which artists to ignore would be a real ordeal. Then I had another thought: what if I pick the single most representative song from each artist's discography so that people can see what I listen to with…
<p>A month ago or thereabouts, I switched full-time from using Windows 11 to using Linux Mint. (Previously, I'd just had a Linux Mint installation on a secondary laptop.) It's been a really enjoyable change so far, and while it's definitely not been without its share of headaches, I think that they're worth it, on balance. I wouldn't trade the control I have over my own system for a slightly more…
<p><i>This post was inspired by </i><a href="https://prickly.oxhe.art/this-is-it/">What if This is it?</a><i> by <a href="https://prickly.oxhe.art/">Prickly Oxheart</a>.</i></p> <p>Today, for perhaps the first time ever, I've understood what is meant by the “joy of missing out”. As an extrovert, the thought of missing a party or something fills me with a great sorrow. But the joy isn't…
<p>It's been nearly half a year since my last update on this blog, and the timing of the hiatus was almost comical. If you remember, I'd just started a challenge called #100DaysToOffload. I think that while that challenge might be a good idea for some people, for me, it was a foolish endeavour. That's not because of any shortcoming on my part, nor is it because the challenge is flawed. It's…
<p>Welcome back to the second and final part of the inaugural "Thanksblogging" event here on my blog! It's taken me a few more days than I'd hoped to write this particular post, because I had lots of thoughts on each of the subjects in question. But the good news is that the 8<sup>th</sup> of January is only one week after New Year's Day, which means we're technically still on track with the…
<p>Happy new year!</p> <p>2025 is going to be a fantastic year for this site, I just know it. Not only have we got a full 365 days of blog posts to look forward to (<i>disclaimer: I will <u>not</u> be posting for all 365 of them!</i>), but there are so many other projects I'd like to see achieved before the year's out: growing my wall of <a href="/doodahs.html">doodahs</a> and creating a few <a…
<p>I'm baaaaack!</p> <p>Yes, it's been just over a month or so since this site's last update. I've not got a specific reason as to why that's been the case. It's not as though I've not been able to use my computer or anything. I think it's just a matter of the updates to this site coming thick and fast last month; I must have burnt out on it or something. But since it's a fairly gentle way to ease…
<p>For millennia, philosophy and the arts have been intertwined. It is hardly surprising that philosophers should wish to analyse something as pervasive and as universal as art—after all, many artists would insist that their works are a unique expression of a particular idea or concept, and is it not the job of philosophy to explore new ways of expressing ideas? Yet it is important to…
<p>This past weekend, I was lucky enough to have a day out at the MCM Comic Con in London with some of my best friends! We all cosplayed characters from the actual-play D&D web series <i>Critical Role</i>. I was <a href="https://static1.dualshockersimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/CriticalRoleC3-Imogen.jpeg" target="_blank">Imogen Temult</a> (image opens in new tab), but between…
<p>This will be the first blog post on this site—and all being well, it'll hopefully be the first entry in the site's <a href="../feed.xml">RSS feed</a> as well! As a massive fan of RSS feeds (Nicky Case gives a great explanation of why they're so cool <a href="https://ncase.me/rss/">here</a>), it would be utterly remiss of me not to make sure one is installed on this very site as a matter…
<p>During my time at university, I studied Philosophy. Oftentimes, I wished that language were more precise, so that greater understanding could be imparted through dialogue alone. It was a tall order, and I don't imagine that any philosophical language (like the conlang <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban">Lojban</a>, for example) shall ever enjoy widespread adoption. While that may…
<p>About a week or two ago, I took advantage of the nice weather we had over the Easter break and went with my family to the White Horse in Uffington, which isn't too far from where I live. If you've never heard of the White Horse, it's a prehistoric hill figure—Britain's oldest, in fact, dating to somewhere between 1380 BC and 550 BC. It looks like this:</p> <img…