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April 4, 2026
I spent last week obsessing over how to do modulus math to try and figure out how to program rock paper scissors on my calculator. It literally kept me up at night on the 1st. Finally I found a pdf that explained it enough to me to understand what I was doing wrong. So at work I wrote down the code I thought I'd need for TI Basic. When I got home on the 2nd I spent about an hour inputing the code. Then I spent about 4 hours troubleshooting. I couldn't understand why the unfavorable match ups for player 1 weren't taking away hit points. I added code to be able to check the calculations while the program ran and found they were correct, so the problem had to be in my series of if/then statements. Specifically, I think I had too many if statements and not enough then statements. Basic is strange because sometimes for simpler things it doesn't require a then statement. Anyways, when I figured that out, I did some play testing with my spouse. We found it was more fun if we didn't lose HP during ties. Then I added a player vs computer mode. The program is currently awaiting approval from a moderator on Cemetech, but when it's there download Secret Rivals for the TI-83/84! Or don't. It's just rock paper scissors 3 times at once, it's not that fun. Tons of fun to make though.
March 29, 2026
I bought a new battery for my digicam on ebay. It lives! The old one was 16 years old and I think the cold from the rides just killed it. Also, more importantly: I finished my rough draft for my text adventure! Next will be transposing everything I wrote in a notebook into Inform and trying to figure out how it works. When it's all in there, I will flesh out some of the other features like what the game tells you when you use items in ways that don't progress the story. I feel good enough about my progress to finally share the project name: More Eau. Stay tuned! I'm also going to work on another post related to the weekly rides aspect of Cryodrome. I think that will be linked in the Season 3 section when I finish. Or maybe it will get it's own link on the main page. We'll see.
February 28, 2026
I've downloaded inform, the text adventure (or IF) making engine. I'm reading through how the games are constructed in it. I'm making a map on graph paper and I'm writing room descriptions. I also made some extremely basic ASCII art for the title. Progress. Also, my RECIPRCL program I mentioned a while ago that was 1.1kb for the calculator -- I've made it around 100 bytes. The previous system was a directory with 9 different formulas, but the new version is a loop that will go as many times as needed until the user enters a zero. I'm happy with an 11x improvement. I think that program is as lightweight as possible. Now that my programs have been up for a month, they're sitting at over 200 downloads. TICalc did not allow me to make an account, or never sent me an email to let me finish making it, so I'm just sticking with Cemetech. I am back to playing Doom; pistol starting on UV. I beat episode 1 this way.
January 23, 2026
Blog Post Roundup
I want to look back at my posts from 2025 and see what I actually accomplished, and see what remains undone.
Post 1: I still have instagram for myself personally, but I deleted the app from my phone and I am on it way less. I check in maybe once a week.
Post 2: Still no custom art, but I did invert the colors of Ice Floes and I like it a lot better. I know a talented digital artist now, though. I've still made no progress on the text adventure -- a recurring theme of me finding other projects that are more immediately fulfilling.
Post 3: I did use GIMP to make the graphic for the summer rides, but I disliked the program and the rides never happened. Nowadays I use Photopea, an in-browser version of photoshop. As far as watercoloring, I made some art for friends, and I made the weekly rides element in the rides section.
Post 4: Trying to practice what I preach, I deleted my spotify. I also made the robots.txt really restrictive to crawlers.
Post 5: Big one. I did not use Monk's Copy Shop. I did make magnets with the QR code and gave them out at another weekly ride. I made a big updates section on the landing page instead of making an email newsletter. I also have a Signal chat for everyone who shows up to the ride. Now for the personal project Doom Done Par. Very difficult. I was pistol starting every level on UV difficulty. UV means there's more monsters, and in tight hallways it's impossible to get past without some firepower. I was having fun routing the runs to get rockets or a chain gun to solve that issue. I felt like I was getting really intimate knowledge of the mission layouts. But I think I should have either done pistol start challenge or par time challenge, not both at the same time. I did not complete this project, but for the time I put in, I had a blast. I would pick it up again as par time only or pistol start only, but a lot of other games have my attention lately.
Post 6: No update, all true.
Post 7: The stamp handle I ended up making myself. I had a wood block shaped like an egg for whittling practice. I cut off nubs on both ends and drilled a 3/8ths hole in both the handle and stamp and attached a 3/8ths dowel with wood glue. It works.
Post 8: I wasn't clear in the post, but I designed the spoked cards. I drew everything then inked it and digitized it in Photopea. The spoke cards are now the second prize.
Post 9: I'd still like to add a chat box, or a comment box, or guest book.
Post 10: I have 5 programs now for the TI-84+. I have uploaded them all to Cemetech and as of this morning I have begun making a TICalc account. As far as using bleach on the stencil, I have tried a couple methods and neither turned out how I'd like. I think I'll try one of those sponge paint brushes next.
Post 11: Just a fact.
Post 12: As of writing, my programs have been downloaded 8 times. Pretty cool.
Thank you for joining me on this roundup. Maybe I'll do this next year as well.
January 9, 2026
I've made 4 programs on my calculator and yesterday I added a link to a new area on this site under the projects drop down. Three of them are really simple and barely gave me any trouble as a brand new TI programmer. The program named RECIPRCL took me all December and I finished it during class on Jan 6. I was having a hard time with if/then statements. The formula is simple, but I wanted it to have a variable number of variables. I solved it by having the user input the number of variables at the beginning into a directory and having it take you to a version of that formula with the right number of variables. The program is kind of taxing on RAM at 1kb, but I don't know how to optimize it yet. So, for the time being it is done. I haven't uploaded anything to cemetech yet, but I intend to. I also plan to make more programs, but I'm caught up on formulas useful in school.
December 25, 2025
On the 21st I decided to make the ride posts section be divided up by seasons. This should have been done way back when but only occurred to me now. So now you don't have to scroll as much.
December 19, 2025
A while back I found a drop down element native to HTML so I wouldn't have to use javascript in my code. It's currently implemented in the projects section of the main page. Rides begin tomorrow and I believe I'm ready. I've prepped the coffee and deep cleaned a nalgene that will only be used for coffee water this season. On the non-ride side of things, I recently bought a TI-84 Plus Silver Edition (non CE) secondhand from a friend of a friend. I've been learning how to make programs on it. So far I've only made two very basic formulas for work-related uses, but over the course of my student career I hope to compile all the formula programs I make into a zipfile and upload to this neocities, ticalc , and cemetech. I also bought a DIY silkscreen kit and made a small squirrel stencil for Cryodrome purposes. We can either bleach or silkscreen the design, whatever people are interested in. Same with my large Cryodrome stencil, although personal experience makes me say that stencil should be done with bleach instead of ink. Speaking of squirrels, I made a favicon for the site of the albino squirrels we see in the neighborhood where the ride meets up. I used a free pixel art editor. Looking forward to rides and taking photos on my Insignia NS-DCC5HB09 I've had since 2010. See you tomorrow.
November 1, 2025
Experimenting with animation elements for the site in an attempt to make it seem more lively. I'd like to add a chat box eventually. Made the Cryodrome element fade in. Going to try to make the updates element pulse... Okay, several minutes later and I've made a dedicated index page CSS, and settled on color changing for the updates. Hoping this cleans up the code if anyone is looking at it besides me.
September 5, 2025
I ordered the spoke cards for the first prize. They're smaller than I anticipated, but they're free so who's gonna complain? I also learned how to cross stitch with the goal of making every patch, but after designing the pattern for the Cryodrome logo and making one, I decided against this idea. The design made a patch that's too big and too labor intensive to be feasible. I will order some from Etsy as well. I did RAGBRAI this year and made coffee every day in a butane stove, so I'm going to do the same for the '25-'26 season of the 'Drome so that anyone short on money can still hang out and have a cuppa without over spending. No, I have not made any progress on the text adventure besides come up with a pun title for the concept.
June 18, 2025
I decided to implement a prize system for attendance this next season of Cryodrome. I've made stamp booklets that can have up to 8 stamps. I made a Cryodrome stamp a while back as a linograph project. It's not a good enough stamp to use on fabric but for a booklet to track attendance it should be acceptable. I asked a friend with a lathe to make a handle for it. I've designed something for one of the prizes, constructed the other, and brainstormed the last one. The middle prize will be buttons I've made out of bottle caps, soda tabs, and safety pins I saved from pinning my jersey numbers for college cycling. For a primer layer on the buttons I used cold galvanizing spray from work. I'll be getting the rest of the paint here soon. I have 20 booklets made which is far more than I anticipate needing. And I will be making fewer prizes as the attendance requirements increase. Top tier will only have 10 total. I'm having fun with all of this. Although, it is all kind of a distraction from the daunting task of a text adventure.
May 9, 2025
I found a site that could generate (obviously non-ai, it uses a template) a hazmat sign graphic and looked up the specifics for liquid nitrogen, so there's the background. I also spent a very long time trying to figure out how to get a semi-transparent box behind the text. Very thankful for the people from 10 years ago with the same problem. I added another semi-transparent box behind the header. I think next I'll make an icon for the tab. I've also drawn my graphic for Doom Done Par, but I need to color it digitally. I also fixed the links on this page from my previous posts (I had several extra "/").
May 2, 2025
I am realizing that shutting down the Insta page will require me to do marketing. There's a small list of things I should probably do. Make QR codes for my pages is a good start. With the inclusion of my Summer series of rides, I have a graphic which I can turn into a postcard with the QR code and site address. I'll probably go to Monk's Copy Shop to get them printed as I know someone who used their services to make some spoke cards for a race he did. I'll leave them around our frequent stops. Lots of coffee shops and bike shops have community boards. Another thing I've been thinking of to keep people interested in this page is to make an email newsletter for when big updates or events happen. More research needed on how to make a sign up incorporated into this site. I don't want to use a service like Mailchimp because I'd like to keep using things that are open source, or at least free.
I also have a fun, just-for-me project planned. As is probably obvious to some of you, I like Doom. I like that all of Episode 1 was shareware --an idea and model I really like, which is why all my DIY games are dedicated to the public domain--and I like that all the levels have a par time to beat. I've beat Doom before but never on Ultra Violence or harder, and never under par time. I plan to do a Doom Done Par project for myself this Summer. It just seems like a fun challenge.
Addendum from May 4, 2025: QR codes are incredibly easy to make. Bing generates them for free.
April 17, 2025
I watched a couple interesting videos about our current internet/political age and the techno-feudalist world we live in. I also watched a nice video about measures to take on this page to trap AI scrapers in an eternal loop of nonsense links. If you're reading this, also consider making your own website/webpage and phasing out your traditional socials. Or if that's too daunting, make an email newletter for your actual friends who would miss seeing what you're up to online. Start small in your big tech divestment and tackle it in bite sized chunks. I was also reminded that DEVO was ahead of the curve on all of this. General Boy stated in 1979's Duty Now for the Future
"There is a direct connection between Devo's work in the music field and a big wiggly world around us. You may not be aware of this, but we are in the middle of World War Three. It is not nuclear bombs that we must fear; the weapons is the human mind or lack of it on this planet. That will determine our fate... We must fight back. We must know what we want. We must want what we need, and what we need now is Duty Now For The Future."
So I will continue to believe in the things that make it tough on me. When it comes to Big Social Media and data harvesting, the only way to win is not to play.
April 6, 2025
I've just re-edited the photos on the weekly rides section to be 360p tall and auto adjusted their width. I'm typing this prematurely because the site is not loading properly yet on my phone, but on desktop it looks fine. I'm teaching myself how to use GIMP for a graphic I plan to use fo the Summer series of rides I'd like to do. I'm thinking of other projects to do as well; mostly various crafts like earrings and iron-on patches. The background art process is also ongoing because I'm learning how to watercolor.
March 8, 2025
I already know I'm spending the off-season this year reformatting all the photos to be more phone screen friendly. Some of them aren't even computer screen friendly. I'll spend some time making divisions for each ride. The other big project will be wokring on the text based adventure game. I've been following a beginner's guide by Huw Collingbourne. That's also a long process because fixing up this site is the first priority. A small improvement I still want to make is having my own custom art for a background on the main page instead of the public doamin image Among the Ice Floes (which is still a cool piece of art).
February 25, 2025
This is an effort to get off the main social medias. Cryodome is already a community building group that only supports local coffee shops and restaraunts. The more I learn about coding this site, the more I want to integrate other local sites and services into the page. If I want to stay off Instagram (already off Twitter and Tiktok), I have to stay engaged with this site and hopefully be engaging enough that other people will also want to build their own pages and divest from the attention-monopolizing social medias. At the same time, Cryodrome, to me, is more than a winter bike ride. It's the umbrella for all my interests to gather under and share without feeling like I have to market them or brand myself.
"Practicing art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow." Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
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