‘Building’ is a relative term, I suppose. If I pay the workmen to build my house, did I really ‘build’ it? No, I didn’t - I paid for someone else to build it.

Well, I haven’t been ‘building’ this website, then. Most of the work was done by an artificial intelligence called Claude.

I’ve been writing a novel over the last few months. All of the writing - I mean ALL of it - has been done by me. But - and it’s a big but - I’ve been using ChatGPT to help me with structuring, plot holes, suggestions for improvements (not line level), stuff like that. It’s been pretty useful, though I find it quite sycophantic. When I decided on building a blog, I tried to get it to help me, and frankly, it sucked at that. Not sure why; its training ended in 2001, but I don’t think markdown and HTML have changed all that much since then. It couldn’t help me code a game in Godot, either.

So, I did a Google, ignored the AI summary and went to Reddit, and found people recommending Claude for both coding and writing - the only two things I use AI to help me with. And Claude has done a pretty good job, I think. Anything you hate about this website - the design, the background image, the colours - well, they’re all me. My bad. Sorry. Forgive me. I initially wanted to make a knockoff of an old Geocities website, so be thankful it doesn’t look like this.

Claude just did the code, I made the decisions - and I did a little bit of the code, actually, in places, particularly in markdown, which I’m semi-familiar with. The cool (again, a relative term) music player on the music pages which you can access via the navigation icons on the left was all Claude, and the layout is based on a template layout which Jekyll (the software I used to make this website a reality) gave me.

This is the first post, because the website has only just gone live. Currently you can read my blog post(s), listen to some of my music (for more, go to the Bandcamp link) and watch some videos of me gaming (for more, go to the YouTube link). I might upload some albums of photographs I’ve taken at some point, but right now, I just want to be live.

Because that’s what this place is all about - it’s a living documentation of all of the many projects I undertake, mostly badly, sometimes mediocrely. I don’t pick one thing I love and stick to it; I pick loads of things over many years and don’t get good at any of them. It’s just the way I am. So my blog posts will be disjointed, they won’t fit together nicely, they won’t be a perfectly-assembled recipe of projects from beginning to fruition - instead, the blog posts will function as a metaphor for the projects themselves. But fuck it. We’re all going to die.

Right now, I’m building a game in style mechanically similar to Fallen London and cyberpunkdreams. If you don’t know those two games, check them out. Mine won’t have an energy system, though.

This is my website. I’m quite proud of it, even though I didn’t do most of the work to make it happen. Thanks, Claude. And remember to wash your hands.