Hello, world! This is my first post on this site. I have no idea why I am doing this. Or what I am doing this for! Interesting semantic question there. Is “Why am I doing this?” equivalent to “What am I doing this for?”. Not entirely, I think. One indicates reason and the other indicates purpose. They could be equivalent if the reason is a purpose, I suppose.

Right now, I’m using the Pelican static site generator. I’m using it because I already know some Python, and I like Python. It does mean that I’m learning reStructuredText as I go along but it hasn’t been too hard so far. I could have used Markdown but I think I might prefer this to markdown. I’ll get around to figuring out the Jinja2 templating engine at some point. I need to figure it out to learn theming, and I need to learn theming if I want to change the footer properly.

Although, really, the reason I am doing this is to yell into a void. I used to blog at some point in my life. Then the worst thing possible happened. People started reading the blog. Actually, no. The worst thing was that I was aware that people were reading the blog. It could no longer just be “Yell into the void.” I don’t intend to make the same mistake with this site. There’s not even going to be a comment plugin. Actually, that might be more because I am not sure how I would add a comment plugin to this thing. I’m sure it could be done. Possibly some frontend nonsense?

Things I intend to yell into the void about might include — but will not be limited to — the following:

• Transportation in Delhi: I live in this city and I’m now really into urbanism and transportation, and, man, Delhi can be pretty car-dependent. There might be photos.
• Politics: Our present government is incompetent, rapacious, bigoted, and shows no signs of going away anytime soon. I’ll vote against them all the time, but until such time as enough people vote against them, I’m limited to donating to news sites, fact-checkers, and mutual aid campaigns, and yelling into the void.
• Language: I’ll mostly yell about prescriptivists and idiots using language to look down on people. Me? I’m a descriptivist. If a usage or phrase is common or popular enough, it’s fine by me.
• Animal welfare: I have three cats and a dog. I really like animals. I like animals more than I like people.
• Birdwatching: I’ve recently gotten really into birdwatching. I’m already at 92 species observed. India is a great country for birdwatching. You’ll find a lot of interesting birds almost everywhere you go. Unfortunately, there’s also a lot of habitat loss happening (See ‘Politics’ above) so some yelling has to happen

I might even occassionally not yell. Maybe I’ll post cool things about cycling, birds, animals, books, the world!

There might be the occassional post about trains and locomotives, especially locomotives of the Indian Railways. There might be photos!

There might be occassional rambling, incoherent rubbish about technology and programming. December will probably be full of that because of Advent of Code, which is really when most of my GitHub commits take place. It’s fun, and can be really frustrating towards the later days. I got till Day 16 last time. Let’s see how far I can go this year. I’ll probably post about each day here, along with links to my code on GitHub. I’d avoid December if that’s not your thing.

I think that’s covered most of what I intend to yell about. Maybe I’ll come back and add items as I come across them.

Now to publish and be damned!