I Thought I Used To Hate Wings. Like, The Food. They're Messy And Hard To Eat And They Hit On So Many

i thought i used to hate wings. like, the food. they're messy and hard to eat and they hit on so many little autistic pain points that i have with food. i used to dread getting them with my family, and as an adult i never went out of my way to get them.

but i finally let myself try them again tonight... and it turns out they're pretty good! but that's because i got to try them on my terms.

i got boneless wings.

"now sky!" you might say. "those aren't really wings. they're basically chicken nuggets."

Yeah, I Know. i heard that every time we got wings as a family – and that's exactly why i never got to try them. i always got the regular wings instead... and i hated it!

i've always struggled with eating meat with bones in it. when i have to pick at my food in order to eat it, my stomach begins to shut off and say that i'm not actually hungry... so i only get through half of it before i can't eat any more. plus the fact that they're already messy means that all that picking makes my hands greasy and i don't like how it feels when my hands are a mess and—

"why don't you just Eat Them," my dad would say. how do i answer that? i am trying to eat them. it is not good for my autism. (i did not have the words for this as a child.)

this isn't even the only food i have this struggle with – i live in the south where crawfish boils are a crowd pleaser, and as much as i love the taste, i can't eat enough of them before my body shuts off. it takes me too long to peel each one to reach the meat on the inside!

so why didn't i just get boneless wings, if i have this problem with so many foods? i still don't fully know. but the echoes i hear from my memories tell me that it's because they're "just chicken nuggets," and if we're gonna get wings, we should get wings.

so the one thing that would've helped my autism was simply shamed out of my life.

...to my dad's credit, he did use that mindset to get me to try a lot of things that were outside my comfort zone as a kid. him telling me "you don't go to a chinese restaurant to get chicken nuggets" is one of my formative memories, and choosing the cashew chicken that day is a big part of why i love chinese food as an adult!

but i didn't choose to go to that chinese restaurant. and i didn't choose to get wings back then either. i might have handled it a lot better if i had chosen it on my own terms. and what better proof do i have than tonight, when i finally chose to try boneless wings, despite the shame it was associated with?

i could have shared their joy for wings as a kid if i had simply had that chance... but at least i can enjoy them now.

new pre-stream archive! in which i talk about my confidence going into this attempt at the True Arena…

new stream archive, in which we save Hot Topic from certain destruction at the hands of the food court! uh, sorry, the food cult.

A bunch of smaller updates to the blog...

the work never stops when you launch a website! ever since the re-launch of skysometric.co, i've found all sorts of edge cases and missing pieces to add to the site's styling. most of them are minor updates and polish, but here's a few pieces of design language that i'm especially proud of...

"Follow This Blog On Tumblr," Front And Center

it's not obvious enough at a glance that this site is entirely built on and powered by Tumblr, so i've added a big "follow this blog on Tumblr" button to the front page that makes it as clear as possible. plus it pulls double duty as self promotion~

on the right is what it looks like when it's highlighted. it uses the same basic styling as the post tags, but with an outline on hover.

Usernames

it turns out that tumblr applies a special css class when you @ someone in a post, so i've hooked into that to make them look fancier than just regular links! this way it's easier to find and follow my friends 💖

In This House We Love And Appreciate Our Friends

Light Theme Improvements

both of the screenshots above use the light theme, which has been punched up pretty significantly since launch – i might actually like it more than the dark theme now...???

you can switch themes with the toggle on the left menu. eventually i'd like to make it automatically choose the theme based on your system preference, like the links page currently is...

Asks

a lot of the styling on my site is simply built on top of the default Tumblr blog theme styling, which it uses as a fallback for anything that i haven't added my own touches to. this was the case with asks, which i only did a minimal amount of work at launch to make sure they followed the right color scheme – otherwise, they looked exactly like asks do on the default Tumblr theme.

now that i'm actually getting asks, though, i decided to punch them up and make them look more like something that fits my page!

i still can't believe the CSS standard lets you control the radius on each individual corner of a box, but doesn't let you add an outline to text. what even are their priorities over there?

i still have some more work to do – like making sure this supports asks with media – but it's a good start! and i'm especially proud of some of the technical work that went into this behind the scenes, especially with making reblogs of asks look nice...

Polls & Source Links

one of the best looking features i added in the 1.0 version of the site was making the "Read More" a large banner link at the bottom of each post. when it came time to add support for polls, the same styling was a natural fit!

in both of these dark theme examples, the banner link is highlighted. when not highlighted, it blends into the border along the sides of each post.

but there's one other, less obvious place that it's useful for: Tumblr's "content source" link, which allows you to cite a source for your post. these content sources are automatically applied to audio posts linked from other sites... like the old music posts i used to link from soundcloud! this was also a natural fit for the "read more" styling, and a great way to support my very oldest posts and keep them looking fresh ✨

funny how i was promoting my partner's work, YEARS before we were even partners. some things never change!

Updated Icons

the custom icon system is one of my favorite features of the site, especially because of how easy it's been to add and update icons over time. one day i'll go over these icons in greater detail – i actually have a whole post series about my the making of my graphic design style in the pipeline, but like most things, it's only halfway done...

for now, though, i've added new icons for some of my favorite game series, like a triforce for zelda! and i've updated some icons that were incomplete or placeholders, like this "favorites" ribbon. the old icon is okay... but the new sparkling heart is much more representative of me!

the old one has been relegated to "achievements," which is a tag i don't use nearly often enough.

i've also got a new "videos" icon, instead of the placeholder YouTube logo – and the new icon might be one of my best icons yet??

there's even a second version of the icon for gaming-related videos, like stream archives.

Tags And Styling

over the years my tagging system has changed quite substantially, in accordance with the changing algorithms of Tumblr itself. and over the years, the actual posts themselves have changed formats... sometimes breaking the formatting on my old posts!!

so i went back through my archives and manually verified EVERY SINGLE POST to make sure it had relevant tags and correct styling. that's 10 years of archives! and memories! and dinosaurs. oh LORD some of those old posts are dinosaurs.

on a quick tangent, i'm approaching 700 posts rather rapidly! and i'm approaching a MUCH more important milestone very soon...

More To Come

those username links look so nice that i'd love to extend them to other places on the site, like asks and reblogs! some of my oldest posts still don't look great and i'd like to add more features to them! some visually similar elements like tags and username links don't actually function the same under the hood! there's still a LOT more work to do, and tumblr's feature-set hasn't gotten any smaller.

but there's two specific features on my list that i haven't gotten to, from way back during the concept phase: dynamic search, and related posts.

Dynamic Search

for the dynamic search, i'd like to make it so that typing in the search box (see the right menu) would update the list of tags in the menu to match what you've typed! that way you can search for more specific posts and tags than is currently possible. maybe the default tag list could even show random tags to encourage more discovery...

unfortunately that kind of searching requires me to use a little more javascript than i'd like, but i'm determined to make it work somehow! it's not hard to pull the list of tags from the API, i just need some free time and energy to hook that into the actual tag list. hopefully one day!

Related Posts

the default Tumblr theme has a section under each post that shows related posts with similar tags. by default it loads The Whole Post for each of the 10 related posts it pulls up, and the end result... doesn't look great, tbh!

on the Tumblr app, the related posts section shows little snippets of each post in a grid. this has a much better look and feel, and it's something i'd like to make work on my blog theme.

this shows up to 9 posts, depending on which posts match the tags of the main post.

the obvious idea is, of course, to make these look like hexagons. but that makes the content of the snippets way too small! i'll have to experiment with a few different methods and see how it looks in practice.

this is a lot more concept and styling work than the dynamic search, but i'd say they're about equal overall in terms of total effort. both of these would be major additions to the site! hopefully this all provides a little peek into where i'm going with all this ✨

The Site Redesign Is Working

my ultimate goal when i redesigned the site was very simple: i wanted to make a blog that i would make me want to post more than i had in the few years before it launched. and so far, that's actually working – i've posted more this year than i have in any of the other 10 years i've had this blog!

at present, a lot of those posts are stream archives... but the needle is slowly shifting, with a lot of written content and series in the pipeline. knowing they'll look all pretty on the site is a big part of what powers me to write them 💖

that means that all of this work has been worth it. the four years i spent trying to get this site redesign off the ground paid off against all odds; the extra work i put in to polish the little things make me want to use those extra little features; and the motivation it gives me makes me want to finally write and set myself free of the creative slump i was in for several years.

so thank you all for sticking around... cause i've barely gotten started~

returning with an absolute BANGER of a post

Featuring levels set all over the globe, Super Mario Odyssey was originally going to be named Super Mario World until Miyamoti realized he already named something that.

the winning attempt and the final fight are both timestamped for your convenience~

if nothing else, the final fight is worth watching on its own. i might even have to do a highlights video just for it...

new stream archive, in which i conquer the True Arena… but not before the game calls my bluff.