This is the first public instance of one of my rambles, a practice I use often in my own notes. It will fall somewhere between “mildly disorganized” to “completely unintelligible” so if that doesn’t sound like a good time to you, maybe skip this one.

The Website

The Greenhouse is coming along nicely overall. I got distracted looking back over the themes again, but ultimately this one suits my use-case the most. Mostly, I don’t want to have to find an image every time I want to make a post, nor do I want the defaults to do anything fancy or constraining.

I’m still working on how I’m going to organize that “ephemera” section at the top, and trying to decide whether a further distinction between “Blog” and possible a “Writing” category is necessary. I’m doing my best to keep things simple, though, and with the automatic categorization via the built-in taxonomies, putting all of my longer/complete posts in “Blog” and the rest in “Ephemera” may be the best approach.

Still working on setting up everything so that this is actually live on the internet, but I wanted to practice maintaining it for a little while before I push it to the web. Also, I just felt weird publishing a completely empty website.

All things considered, I’m happy with my progress and excited by the prospect of being able to maintain a website. It’s something I’ve tried to do numerous times in the past, and while I don’t want to speak too soon, this seems to be my best run at things so far.

Garuda Linux

My work on Garuda’s GNOME edition has taken a bit of a back burner just as I’ve begun to work on this site. I’ve continued to be active in the forums, offering help and insight where I can, and the longer-term plans are still in the works.

Currently, my intention is to continue to maintain the “main” branch of garuda-gnome-settings with minor tweaks, bugfixes, etc. and create a new branch for my larger re-work of the edition. It will likely be another .iso release or two before the re-work is in a functional state, but I do have a plan forming and a few people on the team/forum to work with.

Some issues need more research, particularly the mysteriously-failing autostart .desktop files, but most things just require putting in more planning/work at this point. The dconf settings need a thorough look-over to make sure there’s nothing else obsolete or weird getting set, and may be further updated if I decide I’m willing to include some out-of-the-box theming.

I think that theming is reasonably achievable, so long as it’s kept to a minimum. This will likely come in the form of including adw-gtk3 and setting it in the dconf init, just for some visual consistency now that GNOME 42 and LibAdwaita are fully out. I’ll have to make sure, but I think Qt-based apps should at least use the default title-bars as long as no environment variables for them are getting set, and I don’t really want to include Qt theming beyond that.

The Garuda GNOME wiki page does need a few updates. I’d like to add a section for AMD and NVIDIA GPU users, as Wayland especially can cause problems and many are still using the old implementation Garuda provided to enable Wayland support.

On this subject, I do plan to go forward with enabling Wayland out of the box. It’s the default behavior for GNOME, tends to improve performance, and is easily switched off if it causes problems.

It’s an ongoing endeavor, but I’m happy with my progress on it and my interactions with the community and team have been exceedingly positive thus far.

Writing

I’m currently midway through writing a few short stories, at least one of which I’ll likely publish here. I think that in general, I’ve continued to do solid work as far as keeping up my habit, and I’m hoping to move towards working on a longer writing project in the near future.

I’ve also been trawling through some of my existing writing to look for other shorts to post here, and if nothing else I’ll be including some snippets I’m proud of over in the “Ephemera” section. All of the writing on my hard drive has been converted to markdown and merged into my main Obsidian vault, but some of my writing still resides solely online in other places, so merging that in is an ongoing project.

As for my long project, I have three existing works at varying stages that were all initially intended to be novel-length, but were tabled for various reasons. All three are candidates for trying to commit to finishing a long project, but it’s not unreasonable that I start a new one. This is something I’m still evaluating.

It’s worth noting that I use the term “long project” as opposed to “novel,” because the concept of a novel in my head is tied to a larger set of ideas about what that looks like, and it’s not something I necessarily want to constrain myself to. A long project is just a better term for me, because it encompasses a broader set of possible outputs beyond a book. It might be that I end up writing a serial, or adapting something into a work of interactive fiction, but all of these are still “long projects,” as opposed to short stories that either get fully drafted or abandoned within about a week of starting them.

Reading

I don’t know how I’m going to address my reading here on this blog, but I’ll at least include updates in rambles like these. Right now, I’m reading Nightshift by Kiare Ladner, and Taltos by Anne Rice.

I’m about halfway through Nightshift and so far it’s been excellent. I like the voice, the story, the characters, and the general sort of flavor at play. Eventually I may write a longer review here on the blog when I’m finished, but that’s all I’ll say for now.

Taltos is probably going to take me a lot longer to finish, and I’m only a chapter or two in. That said, I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve seen so far. Up until now, I’ve never read any Anne Rice, which sort of feels like an oversight on my part. I adore her writing style, and if the rest of her work is anything like what I’ve seen I’ll have to include more from her on my reading list.

Up next on my list, I’d like to re-read The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, as I think I’d get more out of it at this point in my life, and it was just a lovely book. I’ve also picked up a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, because I like to broaden my exposure to really unique styles/voices in writing to inform my own.

Other Stuff

I’m going to do my best to publish updates about all of the things I’ve mentioned here in their own more targeted posts as things go on. It would feel silly to write one of these rambles every time something new happens, and if there are eventually actual readers of these posts I’d like my blog to be reasonably readable.

That’s not to say there won’t be many, many more rambles in the future, but they’re more for my own benefit than anyone else’s.

Stay tuned, do good work, and be kind.

Thank you for reading.

~Sonar