Laura's Blog

The internet is a creative medium but websites are a terrible creative medium

Laura gonzalez — Tue, 26 May 2026 10:06:21 GMT

Due to reasons i am enjoying a lot of time to think about my career. “software engineering” is going through a big transformation now or so i hear, tragic.

Like many people i still respect I got into this field through being a ‘web designer’ a job that at the time meant ‘i pirated flash in high school and things got weird’ it’s always been a fun creative endeavor for me. And many others! I learned my css imitating websites i thought looked cool. Had more wordpress templates than clothes and so on.

At the time most internet places looked unique and interesting instead of like a shopify template so that helped but anyway there’s this recurrent lament among elder millennials that this just doesn’t happen anymore right, i bet you thought i was going this way and no fuck that, im here to tell you websites suck and you probs got stockholm syndrome about them.

We used to have to care about IE vs Firefox vs the other one i can’t remember and that was it? There was a creative explosion because everybody was fundamentally looking at 800 pixel wide pictures sliced into chunks so you could put text in the middle. It was awesome.

There's more! keep reading this way.

Feed now has body text

Laura gonzalez — Tue, 12 May 2026 08:30:50 GMT

Hey quick update on the blog, I fought Parcel and...for the most part Parcel won. I couldn't really get images to work or anything but if you can read this on your RSS reader it's already progress! There's summaries now.

If you can't please let me know because thats bad.

Did you know theres not even a proper standard for RSS? everybody just winged it in mostly the same way and things worked. What a beautiful world we lived in. pain in the ass to do manually but that's really on me.

I am selfishly making the executive decision to make this summaries only. You'd think this is because because of engagement or whatever but guess what i don't even have analytics in here. No, I just really want you to see the little custom css on every page. This is why im padding even this entry with random garbage so it will go below the fold.

There's more! keep reading this way.

Metroid Prime 4 belongs in a GameStop bargain bin

Laura gonzalez — Wed, 06 May 2026 10:44:48 GMT

Trying to post weekly and I don’t know how to elaborate on this besides just telling you I’m old and nostalgic. Lemme try.

Full price packaged games today - especially from established houses such as Nintendo - are, for the most part, a solved problem. They are incredibly well engineered dopamine machines. Half of the slots at Vegas wish they could have the engagement loop of Zelda or Fallout. The fun never ends and you never wanna put them down.

They are objectively great! They have nailed the number bars to fill and the speed at which they fill, the exact times you can cycle content and gameplay per hour before its stale. They know how to distribute the story beats so it doesn’t get in the way It’s all so so tight.

Games have come a long way since the PS2 era to evolve from 10 hour movie-like weekend romps into these perfectly engineered little endless toys you can’t put down. Always something new over the horizon to check out.

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ok so i lied lol i do know how to make these

Laura gonzalez — Fri, 01 May 2026 15:28:01 GMT

lemme paint a picture here

Since the last time I made an honest attempt at a blog one new Thing You Have To Do as part of a website[^1] that wasn't there before is the pictures for social media. You know them, you love them, they are movie-shaped for some reason, looks real bad when you don't have one. This is normally a small part of the process of releasing a website. Somehow this ended with a 5,000 word post. Slightly above an average AO3 chapter.

Anyway when I started the blog I really wanted my dopamine for releasing something into the open and didn't wanna deal with the images so i grabbed an envelope i had at hand[^2] and wrote this on it, uploaded it, everything was fine. I even found a purple sharpie that's on brand. great stuff!

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Widgets!!

Laura gonzalez — Sun, 26 Apr 2026 12:08:30 GMT

Wanted to throw some personality at the bottom of posts while staying within the limits of my Netlify account, which was grandfathered into the free forever plan and can basically do anything static and will die immediately when doing anything dynamic. The solution? WIDGETS.

Leveraging static data in the post-myspace era

Something kinda cool about static blogs is that unlike posts they are relatively fixed in time. i wrote this on a chill sunday that definitely did not feel like 8C (Americans, you also get fahrenheit, I actually scrape those and the have to convert it)

Widgets normally display live stuff but they also work really well for 'hey this is what was going on back then', journal style. Plus I always wanted to have a little music player on my page. It still won't play music but thats hopefully the easy part, songs are youtubes so i can just stick it in that sticky footer. 👇.

There's more! keep reading this way.

Test pleas ignore

Laura gonzalez — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:56:56 GMT

This is to see if the rss feed is gonna work lol

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Cool, hey!

Laura gonzalez — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 07:13:58 GMT

Trying out some quick blog hosting. Believe it or not this initial post is load-bearing. neccesary. without it nothing works lol

Not much from me this time around, if you are curious about how this works you should check out the code. Im gonna try to explain it because that way i get to try headings and bullets but honestly claude may do a better job than me

whats all this then

The site is built on parcel. ~~Always was~~ It was on gatsby for a bit that was wild. Anyway its just a litle bundler that was around the last time i freshened up my coding skills. It's neat! You build your stuff like its the 90s raedogging html and js and it turns it into a 'modern' 'web' 'app'. they arent paying me to say this.

For the static part this was always easy, just some HTML. For this blog well guess what its fucking markdown. I got this little parcel plugin that takes the markdown files and 'converts' them into 'html pages' that then go on the normal parcel pipeline. it's neat!

There's more! keep reading this way.