I've been juggling a few projects recently with what must be a mind-control chip that prevents me from finally calling even one of them complete. This page will serve as a checkpoint, one that hopefully lets me hold myself accountable and eventually move a few projects from the "Active" to "Archived" directory. Here's a list of the projects with the most substantial progress since the last post :

kaliser.com

I seem to enjoy developing the site more than I do writing for it.

Refreshed projects page

The current page is a little clunky. I wanted to modernize it with cards that hover. Also, the currently viewed section will now highlight in posts' table of contents too.

Wow! Thanks, technology! It's essentially done save for a couple of oddities (can you spot them?), so I hope to have it ready to go very soon.

Personal tier lists

I can't help but categorize everything, so I wanted a visually-stimulating (pretty colors) way to rank media I've consumed, namely games and movies. Because it's not good enough to say 9/10. These are only placeholders; I'll be ready to defend my stances once it's released.

It insists upon itself. -- Peter Griffin

This project was inspired by a friend's tier list of Marvel Rivals characters. To save them from permanent embarrassment and public ridicule, I will not share their far-too-researched chart.

Birdsong visualizer

There are two things worth living for: hearing beautiful birdsong in the morning and Fast Fourier transforms. So I wanted to combine the two, using xeno-canto for audio—it's a great project.

Sadly, I've had much trouble getting the displays to work correctly. This was something I threw together during a lull at work, so not especially high-priority. If I can't fix it very soon, it may end up in the dreaded Stale folder until I can give some more attention to it.

A chess engine & bot

My first iteration of this project was completed almost exactly one year ago. Since then, I've learned a lot about machine learning in terms of both code and theory. And I happen to have a little thing for chess, so I revived this project for a complete rewrite. For the first time, my bot played a full game against me (the prior iteration could only evaluate, not choose moves)! It did hang a knight during the opening, then its queen a few moves after, but maybe I accidently trained it to play like me instead of playing well.

This is something that will get a good share of my attention for the next couple of weeks.

Graph metric plugin

Since I last updated the graph metrics plugin for Obsidian, I've been working on getting it up to spec so it can hopefully be adopted as a real community plugin. That, additional settings, and ease of use considerations are my focus now; I think the bulk of the plugin is complete.

Capped a couple of stories

Much like any of my game saves, I have a tendency to view everything I write as "forever projects". Even though I generally don't intend for others to read them, I have a compulsion to make things just as I want it. But just as an English teacher or professor could tell you, it could always be better. I'm trying to shift that eternal mentality to one ever-evolving journal, while keeping more grounded works within a certain timeframe.

One story, a political intrigue set in a medieval/industrial-aged hybrid (no, I have not seen or read Game of Thrones, though I will), finally has an ending that I feel OK with. At the least, it finally feels like it has a direction.

Another follows two doves as they navigate aisles of their emotional driving forces: contentedness, stability, melancholy, greed, rage, despair. This one was uniquely fun to write as it was my first attempt at something like a fairy-tale.

Future progress

I feel like I'm juggling too many things at once, especially since what's listed here does not even include my less digital forays, and even more importantly, tangible responsibilities. Consequently, I'll be focusing on closing out the near-complete and sidelining the "maybe later" instead of making incremental changes on many projects at once.