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I am feeling much better. I added a gif I made yesterday to the About page. I used the free, open source program Pixelorama to draw it while my partner took a nap. I like making little gifs. I want to work on my pixel art skills when I'm not working now that I have my own computer desk here at home. I like minimalist designs in general. I find that subjects I struggle with rendering on paper I generally don't have as much trouble with in pixel art.

Zonelets and Neocities were the boost I needed to start playing around with HTML. It's funny to be able to learn something as you go. There are so many resources on the internet. You can search for how to do exactly what you want. Marina already built-in a nice CSS thingy (still working on my terminology) to start with so that I don't have to doubleback in a month to fix all of the style errors I produced because I tried to add styles to each page by myself. A lot of this is more intuitive than I was expecting.

If I post I'm doing something, I have to do it because I made a "public" commitment, right? I'm still tired and a little out of it, but I want to start my ferment today after work. If I do, I'll post a follow-up update with pictures. I wrote a fermentation calculator in Python3 awhile ago that I run through my terminal. It helps me figure out how much salt to add for 2% salt by weight based on the weight of the cabbage and any other vegetables I am adding. I have a little food scale that I measure my ingredients on before I put them in. Measuring my fermentation ingredients by weight helps me make reasonably re-creatable recipes, and it gives me a little peace of mind knowing that my ferment is less likely to allow dangerous food-borne baddies to thrive. Eventually, I would like to invest in a nice pH meter so that I can possibly standardize the goal pH for each type I make.

I want more people who are not scientists by trade to be able to participate in their own forms of research. I want scientific gadgetry to be accessible to more people. Imagine if we had local labs, like we have local gyms or local libraries. People could bring their interests and explore them in ways they aren't able to where they live. The lab would be sterilized at closing everyday. Microscopes, pH meters, calorimeters, bunsen burners, cell culture materials, water quality equipment, a wing devoted to electronics, lab techs on hand to help with any questions and to supervise for safety. Maybe each person would have to submit a written proposal for each experiment or inquiry like in high school/college labs to ensure that things are done safely. I know it sounds expensive and complicated, especially since scientific equipment is not cheap, but imagine the social and scientific value of giving people space to really get into their interests in an ideal lab setting together at their own paces! I guess I'll settle for the food scale in the meantime.

If there are any large universities near you and you do want to do your own research, sometimes they have a sales/auction floor for their old equipment that is open to the public. The stuff is heavily discounted because it's old, but if you have space, a way to haul things, and a passion, it might make the difference for you.