Blog on The wild broccoli 🥦

The emperor

Sun, 03 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Emperor Huizong of the Song dynasty is generally remembered in popular history as a comically tragic (or tragically comic) figure: the emperor who disappeared into a fantasy world of fine art while his empire crumbled around him, ultimately losing the northern half of the empire to barbarian conquest by the Jurchens. However, this is a flattening of a complicated and sophisticated ruler, one which serves more as a convenient and simple morality tale like one of Aesop’s fables than an accurate portrayal of the real historical figure. In this way, we can compare the moralistic mythology around Huizong to that of the Roman emperor Nero, who similarly championed arts and culture during his rule only to eventually be overthrown and later be conflated in popular culture with the Antichrist, labeled a profligate who fiddled while Rome burned.

The goblin's quest

Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After a while, I finally came up with an idea for a game. Of course, this is the easy part, and now I must do the hard work of actually creating the game, the art, and everything else. I think it’ll be fun, because I have no game development experience other than making silly little Twine and Ren’Py text adventure-type games and visual novel experiments. I suppose that’s a little more experience than “nothing,” but it’s still not a lot! And of course, I have very little experience in creating… hm… how do I say it… code that has a visual output? Everything that I work on generally just creates numbers or text, haha. Even working with audio plugins (from my past life) was pretty confined to a one-dimensional data space. For this reason, I’ve decided to make a 2D game with Godot.

April Fools

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Happy April Fools’ Day! There is no prank for today, as I am too old at heart¹ to come up with this kind of thing. I also think that the sort of prank I can think of that would affect this blog might be sort of malicious and annoying towards the viewer. And of course, dear reader, I could not bear to do something like that to you!

Due to various reasons, I’ve started falling behind on all my various obligations, both “real” and “un-real”. To try and stay a bit accountable, I thought it could be useful to write down a “to-do list” of the things I want to achieve soon in the near future:

Some slight reorganization

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

So this was probably imperceptible to anyone who read my site but I actually had the flex: parameter mis-specified in my CSS file this whole time, which made it so that I couldn’t write blog post titles that were too long… or else something bad would happen. Something evil. Because of this I’ve been keeping my titles very short just in case.

I have now fixed this. While I was at it, I also decided to divide up my blog entries by year and include the little mood emoji that I like to put on each post. I’m not sure if I want to put in a fallback mood for when I inevitably forget to put in an emoji, or if I want to have the Blank Spot of Shame instead.

Sidenotes

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have always been interested in margin notes, ever since I was a young child reading the annotated edition of Dracula. Ever since then, I’ve searched for books where the pages are filled with little extras and bonuses, though usually they are footnotes or endnotes, which are not quite as delightful to read as the beloved side note. Gwern’s site uses side notes quite extensively, and I’ve been a fan for many years. Another site that I spent a long time perusing through was the annotated Ada which is a work in progress for annotating Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, which was one of my favorite books also as a young child.

Artist's questionnaire

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I decided to follow up the previous questionnaire with another questionnaire. This one was written by stupied.neocities.org and you can find the blank version here if you would like to fill it out yourself. If you do, please tell me! It’s fun to see what people have to say about the way they do things. Now, I wonder if I make enough art these days to even call myself an artist…

Webmaster questionnaire

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I found this fun little questionnaire on MOUSELING.net and decided to fill it out. Here’s a blank version if you’d like to fill it out yourself. Please let me know if you do, and I’ll read it too!

I live!

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I said that I would update my blog soon, but three months passed and I let the blog lie fallow. As spring has come, my website layout emerged from the snowy winter to grow new flowers.

Last semester, I ended up withdrawing from a difficult course due to poor health. Perhaps you were on tenterhooks all these months reading about the medical mystery that plagued me. Was it rheumatic fever? Was it cancer? Was it Castleman’s disease? Was it Munchausen’s symdrome, the favorite illness of people who make random stuff up?

OK bloomer

Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hello world! It’s been a while. Finals season was upon me. I’m 100% done with one of my final projects, I completed one of my exams this morning, and I’m 80% done with the next final project. Coming up next week is my very last final exam. I’ll have to write a bunch of essays… I hate writing essays! But I’ll do my best anyway. If I do poorly, then I’ll do poorly. My classes are just pass-fail anyway, so it’s not the worst thing in the world. Going to grad school has defeated my perfectionist spirit.

The internet is for cats

Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I really like Neocities. I love that I can use a command-line tool to automate building my site with Hugo and pushing it to the web.

Recently there was a kerfluffle with Neocities where a bug broke iframes for non-supporter accounts. I’m a supporter so I can upload mp3 files and because in general I want Neocities to live and work out, so I wasn’t affected. But it did make me think that it would be good to try not to keep all my eggs in one basket and mirror my site to Nekoweb as well. However, I have no experience with directly accessing the API, and the command-line utilities that people wrote for Nekoweb (NekoUp and nekoweb-deploy are the two that I tried) give me errors that are difficult to debug. In general, it’s a big headache that I don’t enjoy. So I might actually mirror my site to Nekoweb once a month or so and do it manually instead of trying to automate it. But I’ll still keep trying…!

I have returned

Sun, 30 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Thanksgiving break has ended and I have returned to New Haven once more. The double Thanksgiving with my family and my husband’s family was delightful and lovely, though I found most of my time monopolized by my little sister, who attached herself to me like glue and plaintively called out “Where are you, Veronica?” whenever I got up to get some food. It was very cute. Four is such a cute age; I remember when my little brothers were four as well and they were just as attached to me. I can’t help but indulge because soon my little sister will grow up and perhaps come to realize that I’m a boring person… A boring person who edits a website for fun…

I am home

Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On Monday afternoon, my husband, my stepfather, and I made the long drive from New Haven to Central Virginia so we could return home for Thanksgiving to see our families. It’s really lucky that both my husband’s and my parents live in the same county, so we can always have Thanksgiving together. My father and his new family also live in that same county too, but I’ve never had Thanksgiving with him for as long as I can remember. When I think about that too much, I feel strange and sad.

Some small updates

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This might be silly, but I love converting everything to Hugo shortcodes. It’s fun to figure out how to pass arguments to the shortcode so I can create replicable, customizable snippets of website code. So when I found out that Hugo will automatically escape quotes in the {{ .Inner }} if you put it in Javascript, I decided to go for a little walk in the help documents. For reference, I don’t know Go at all, so all functions are being learned as I try to implement something.

Hooray, I did it

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

After many delays, including my hospital stay, I finally finished knitting a hat for my husband! It took twice as long as a normal hat because it’s the famous double-layered Musselburgh hat which I knit with fingering weight yarn.

Here’s the Ravelry listing and a photo of the finished hat! Maybe it’s hard to tell from the photo, but it’s super warm, to the point that it’s actually not cold enough out for my husband to wear it. I used the same yarn to make a sweater and a pair of socks for him too, so now we’re at the end of that yarn.

It's a new week

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I spent the weekend leisurely and visited the Yale Center for British Art, which had a special exhibit on William Blake’s work.

Blake’s printmaking technique was unparalleled. I loved looking at the use of complementary colors in each version of his prints; some were printed in orange ink and used blue watercolor, others were printed in green ink and used warm hues in the watercolor, still others created a rich medley of colors by printing the colors over one another again and again… It really inspired me. I’d like to use color that way in my own art somehow. Of course, that requires drawing something, and I suffer from a severe case of artist’s block. But maybe I could overcome it.

I am free again

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Shortly after writing my last blog entry, I fell ill again. It was like a stroke of lightning, just like all the other times. On Friday, I felt well; I went with my husband to see the movie Bugonia (which was very good, and I recommend it); we walked around in the cold and dark together and viewed the movie posters for the upcoming winter in anticipation. The next day, Saturday, I felt feverish and lethargic; my throat hurt; my neck was stiff. I was convinced after several hours to visit the emergency room (the last time I was sick, the urgent care doctor at my university told me that I should just go to the emergency room, as I had exhausted their diagnostic capabilities and they could do nothing to treat me). I thought something like, “Well, maybe they will do a CT scan of my upper body, but probably they will do nothing and chastise me for using up the hospital’s resources when I only have a fever and nonspecific symptoms.”

I am free

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This week I had another exam, this time in epidemiology. I find the epidemiology course both easy and difficult because I have just enough background knowledge to know the concepts but also have historically used them differently in extremely specific contexts so my intuition can end up being wrong.

Neocities continues to give me 503 errors when I use the CLI to upload my site, so I cannot really recommend using my little batch file for your site. I have upgraded my site to supporter status in hopes that they will start replying to my emails but so far I have received no emails. Well, if I can’t upload files to my site I guess there is alwys the option to use Nekoweb instead!

Happy November!

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As promised, here are some pictures of my travels to Massachusetts. All photos were taken by my husband, who is much better at photography than me! Except the ones that are of him.

I took the train to Boston without much event, other than the Amtrak line being delayed as usual. There, I met up with my husband and our friend Matt, whose aunt and uncle live in the area. From there, we took the commuter rail to Salem, which was packed!

Happy Halloween!

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Happy Halloween to everyone who celebrates! Today I am going to be dressed up as a pumpkin. I tried something very out-of-character for me and put on makeup as part of the costume. Yes, it’s silly, but I really have no talent for cosmetics, so even drawing an eyeliner wing and gluing on false eyelashes was a daunting task that took up a great deal of focus and mental fortitude. Because I now live in New England, I’m going to travel to Salem for Halloween evening! So when I get back, I might try to upload a picture of my costume. It’s really a very simple costume, so don’t get your hopes up.

Much ado about nothing

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For work, I mostly use Stata and a little bit of R and Mplus. I’ve been learning SQL and SAS in school as well, which is pretty conceptually similar to Stata. However, the SAS syntax is no fun for me, so I will continue to appreciate that my job lets me use Stata instead.

The ado-files that I write are largely tiny utilities that define macros that I like to use over and over again. For example, in today.ado, I define a formatted date variable that I can use to name versions of files:

My third blog post

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Castleman disease (CD) describes a group of rare lymphoproliferative disorders that involve enlarged lymph nodes, and a broad range of inflammatory symptoms and laboratory abnormalities. Whether Castleman disease should be considered an autoimmune disease, cancer, or infectious disease is currently unknown.¹

“We could do a full body CT scan but we don’t like doing that to young people like you”

“The lymph nodes have to be at least 2 cm to do anything anyway, so it would be better to wait”

My second blog post

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today I signed up for Atabook¹, which is a creation of Nekoweb², a competitor to Neocities. I’m an old person, so I don’t know about these newer static site hosts. I also don’t really draw a lot of anime fanart or anything like that anymore, so I don’t fit in with a lot of the flashy Neocities blogs which function as portfolios for up and coming young artists.

My sibling, who is 30, told me that when I turn 30, I will be middle-aged³. I’m approaching middle age at a rate of one day closer per day. When I joined the Neocities discord (I think it may actually be the discord for the Neocities Reddit community) I was surprised by how many people under 18 were there. It makes me happy to see young people making their own websites. Back when I was a teenager, I mostly used Tumblr and enjoyed customizing my blog relentlessly. Neocities and other static site hosts seem like the extremely upgraded version of that; you can customize everything to your heart’s content and don’t end up growing neurotic about the number of likes and reblogs you might get on your posts.

My first blog post

Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Hello world; here is my first blog post. I have spent a fairly good amount of time customizing my blog layout, and it is almost time to release the blog into the world. I am feeling tempted to change all of the fonts again, but I really like the look of MS PGothic. Please let me know if there is an issue on non-Windows devices; I do not own a Mac device and do not care to, so my ability to test layouts on other operating systems is nil. Oh, and if you use dark mode, please let me know if there is an issue with any colors that make them less accessible. I can go in and change it for the next update. I think I have fixed almost everything to use CSS custom properties, but you never know.