A supposed tendency I've heard of (read: read about on a single blog) is for blogs/personal sites to have an early post detailing the goals of its author. These are, in some ways, taken by the reader as a list of promises. If the author doesn't abide by what they say, isn't that a violation of expectations? More than that, doesn't it fly in the face of the readership when the whole thing is inevitably abandoned after a few months, perhaps with some vague promise of greater activity later?
In the interests of appeasing my own need to excuse myself from poor thinking and poor planning in general, I'm going to eschew a true statement of goals. After all, I'm prone to changing my mind in quick succession; I don't really make decisions as much as settle for whatever outcome has become reality.
So, why am I even writing this post, then? Despite what I've said above in an attempt to avert authorial responsibility from myself, I do think that having some idea what I would like to do can at least provide some guidance for myself later. If nothing else, I can look back to see some indication of an intention, and that might jog my memory as to what I meant to do. Forgetting what I set out to do is a terrible affliction and one I suffer from all the time. I would say that it's a big part of why I've so many abandoned projects.
Disclaiming aside, I suppose the primary aim of this post is to explain one particular thing I want to do with this site, and what I set out to do from the outset. Namely, in starting this little personal site, I was actually starting off on a bit of a personal project to create an unofficial knowledge base for THP. Something I've spent a lot of time faffing on about is the idea of a THP 'manual' in order to explain things to newbies and generally confused users. There have even been on-and-off attempts at such a thing, one of them a collaboration with Teruyo a couple of years back now. A conclusion I came to after a few of these abortive efforts is that things on the site aren't prone to staying completely static. Yes, months can pass between overhauls of things, but that's still a fairly fast pace, with some long-time things like sage [1] disappearing before I could document them. More than that, thinking about it, do we really need such a top-heavy effort? THP as a culture is pretty loose and driven more by community knowledge... in theory.
The true fact of the matter is, this site is a bit of a selfish wish to both explain things about THP to people without all of the effort of repeatedly explaining it off-site. Even before I was a janitor, I felt the need to inform people who seemed confused about various facets of the site. Sometimes it was a simple need to combat what I saw as potential misinformation. Other times, I wanted to make sure that newer people understood the history of the site and the reasoning behind various things. I'm sure I annoyed more than a few people because of it. Still, I always feel like there are better methods than what I'm using. Hence, I'd like to use this little personal space of mine as an informational space for THP as a community.
The community is another part I'd like to touch on real quick. As I mentioned, I'm a janitor on the site. Whilst that doesn't convey much in the way of authority to me, it does make me a member of staff at least in a tangential way. I can't speak for the site in the most official capacity possible, but I can at least supply some little insights and do my part as a semi-official representative to do a little outreach to the community. Now, this won't be a fluffy (hah!) corporate blog or anything, worry not. I'm merely speaking as an independent part of the site in hopes of reaching others who share in this community. Ideally, I'd like to reach others who aren't with us yet, but I'm not going to hope for too much on that end; this site is publicly indexed, so maybe?
Of course, this shouldn't be too terribly shocking of an admission, given the landing page up front, but the big, big aim of this site is just to catalogue my thoughts and entertain myself. Even if the majority was taken up by informative guides to THP and ramblings addressed to the community, the underlying goal of it all would simply be to give myself a chuckle, or at the very least to give me something to do. The fact that I'm sharing it publicly won't temper any bad habits, poor thinking, or confused stances I take on topics, nor will I be all that influenced by the fact that there are (I hope) eyes scanning these pages. I suppose what I mean to do is simply provide a little bit of an indication that there is a human hereabouts rather than a silent presence on a bulletin board.
All that out of the way, my next post should hopefully be on something with some substance regarding some important matters on THP. I'm trying to lay it out as a practical guide, though I also want to address the rationale behind it as well. I'm still not sure if I want to include pictures or not. Screenshots can be good for these sorts of things, but I'm feeling rather lazy and don't want to set up the tools on my desktop. [2] If you have some feeling on that, you've got my e-mail on the front page to give me a shout. Otherwise, it may very well just be text-only — as most of the Internet should be, anyway.
[1] For those who don't know or never knew, typing 'sage' in e-mail field (something that has technically made its exit as well!) would prevent a thread from bumping. This is still a retained feature for some imageboards, and it's a holdover from the textboard beginnings of 2ch and earlier. In essence, it was used as a courtesy to people watching the topic list by not having a thread bump due to an off-topic post. Its practical use has never been well understood by most imageboard denizens. Besides, what does it matter when you have update tracking and less than ten posts a day?
[2] Screenshotting doesn't come standard with a window manager like Sway, so I'd need to install grim and slurp, not to mention setting up all the keybinds for it. I don't take screenshots all that much regardless, so it's not a huge deal to me. Nonetheless, sometimes it would be handy, I guess.