Pandoc is a magical piece of software. It'll handle anything you give it, and with just a few bits of tweaking, you can get its output to look like anything you want. It can turn your work into a book-formatted PDF with page numbers, anchors, a table of contents, and anything else you might need. And by changing a few arguments, you can have it generate an epub in whatever style you like, complete with autogenerated metadata.

As writers, it's always best to write in whatever environment you're most comfortable with, and pandoc won't interfere with that in any way. Be it Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Libreoffice Writer, or just a plain text editor, pandoc will take it and turn it into anything you want.

On this day, 365 days ago, I was struggling with intense writers block. I was left unable to write for over half a year, with all my concentration given over the stress of moving country. After a few weeks of settling in and suffering without internet, I decided to do something outlandish. I decided to go from writing 0 words a day, to writing at least 500 a day for the next year. I'll be dotting this blog post with some exerpts from my first journal entry.

Over the last 4 months I have written roughly 60,000 words in the form of a personal journal that spends 500 words each and every day documenting that day’s events. I started doing this exercise 8 months ago, and I am now on day 243 of it.

4 months ago I wrote a blog-post marking the third-way point of this entire endeavour, and made a note that I’d probably be back for another one at the two-thirds point. Well, here I am, and the truth is, I don’t have all that much more to say about all of this. In order for me to articulate the sheer quality of life improvements that writing a daily journal like this provides, I would have to be able to imagine what my life would be like if I wasn’t doing this. Honestly? I can’t do it. It sounds bizarre but I would absolutely be a different person if not for the introspection and self-care that this provides. Like I said before, in a way this makes me my own therapist, and it really feels like that sometimes.

I don’t use this blog nearly enough, do I?

For the last 4 months, I have been writing 500 words a day, every day. They’re in the form of journal entries, just collections of writing about what my day was like, and as of last night, I wrote the 120th entry. It seemed like a nice round number to make a blog post about the whole experiment, so here it is. When it comes to what this experiment has given me, it’s a lot. At the risk of sounding like a click-bait article, it’s changed my life in immeasurable ways. However, it is important to keep in mind that it hasn’t revolutionized who I am as a person, or whatever, it’s simply been a highly effective tool.

Hey, have you heard the great news about our lord and saviour Rust?

Jokes aside, Rust is a seriously good language and is worthy of the endless evangelism you've probably seen around the internet. If you already know a fair amount of Rust, great! If not, oh dear.

This blog post is going to be aimed at programmers who are fans of Rust, and want to spread it until it blocks out the sun. C knowledge would've probably been useful to have whilst I was porting it, but since I didn't know it you probably don't need to know much either.

I'm not really sure what else to say. They are both disorders that make even the most basic of daily tasks nearly impossible, and combined they create a maelstrom of impossibility that hinders even thinking about doing things. Showering more than once a week is a rarity on the scale of being a miracle, and doing anything but following an endless array of distractions is cause for celebration.

I've spent the whole day with my face buried in a hex editor, silently cursing at nobody in particular.

All the Borderlands games so far have been built on top of UDK, which is basically just Unreal Engine 3. It's pretty outdated by this point, but the series' stylized aesthetic means that's not much of a problem. They're fun games, but that's not the point of this article.

We're trying to get the damn developer console working in Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel.

This is no easy task. This isn't something you can google and get an answer for. This is going to take hard work, determination, and a lot of swearing.

I ran into some issues with this, so I decided to make a post about it in order to help others.

I'll assume you've already installed jekyll-compass, and have added it to the gems list in _config.yml, and I'll assume you came to this blog post to try and figure out why Jekyll is giving errors and complaining that Compass things don't exist. Well, here's the short answer for how to fix it:

Remove the Liquid front matter from your main.scss (and/or similar other files). Done.