June 9th, 2026
This post was first intended to be a toot in Mastodon but as usual it got rambly so I decided to make it a journal entry.
I am happy to inform that I am the proud recipient of a Bachelor's degree! I'm a university graduate!! Think I can legally myself a scientist now. Authority plus one!
As I was doing my internship online back home, I was able to attend commencement with my family and we made it a whole week long trip. Oh gosh, was it FUN! Not only did I got to go to several commencement ceremonies, one from my college campus, another from my campus' Honors college, and the big one at the main campus.
I also took the chance to give my brother a tour. We visited the LBGT+ friendly local bookstore. I purchased How to ADHD by Jessica Gable and Forest Euphoria by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian. While the first one was a sort of impulse purchase thanks to my special interest on indigenous natural philosophy, the former has a bit of a history. A few months ago, I attended a webinar hosted by the National Association for Science Writers where Jessica talked about the book. I had a bit of a interest in ADHD because of several college mates with the condition. The webinar just increased my interest tenfold. I was really happy to have found the book in the store.
Updating on the last entry, I have moved from planetearth.social to scicomm.xyz. There were mainly two reasons. The first, the emotional one, was the large amounts of follow requests I received. The amount of attention scared the wits out of me. The second reason, a technical one, were the various limits of the instance. Thus, I moved to scicomm.xyz with a higher character limit.
On website updates, I redesigned my website, maryseph.com using Eleventy. I added buttons, joined webrings, and wrote several slash pages. Then, about a month later, I joined omg.lol and created a whole separate account and website for personal stuff. I joined social.lol, their Mastodon instance. I kept reading amazing things about the community and was still struggling with maintaining any sort of online presence. scicomm.xyz wasn't cutting it for me because it's an instance with a specific topic. So if I wanted to post about my craft projects or web weaving, I would have had to do it without those toots being public.
I was also concerned with the vibes of Mastodon instances. An LBGT+ friendly one was a must but I also didn't want to join one that was too general and risk seeing things that upset me every time I opened the site and had to tighten my filters. indieweb.social was too technical, planetearth.social was too casual, and scicomm.xyz was too strict for my purposes. Enter, social.lol which is a mix of all of the above. Users are fellow indie web hobbyists and tinkerers. There's always an interesting post from someone I don't know making something cool.
During my internship, I started a blog hosted at micro.blog which at the time of writing I have already migrated away from. My blog and personal site are currently hosted at bearblog.dev. Despite it being a markdown-based minimalist blogging platform, it's also a great website maker. I am developing a digital garden, tend a little microblog, and just finished designing an entries page, all within the same site! It's so flexible! Plus, the community is tight and diverse.
Think that's enough about updates. Let's talk future plans (oh gosh). Professionally, I hope (wait no-am) looking to move to Germany. I really enjoyed my time there when I visited over the summer and would like to spend more time there. ...which is such a weird way to say that I want to find a job at a broadcast company like Deutsche Welle. I also want to improve my German, now that I have had plenty of experience in the U.S (and have frankly gotten sick of the south). I wanna see Europe! I wanna live in a place with functional public transportation! I want to be in a place where cool tech things are being created! Good vibes only right now! I can't do it unless I keep up the hype!
Some things in my immediate goals list are designing a CV, a portfolio for my main website, and finishing the CSS course. Motivation has been a struggle but the more I spent blogging on these sites, the more I am building up motivation.
Talking about motivation, I think something like monthly updates with goals to track (like those mentioned above) would help with accountability. This monthly I would like to have a CV based on this template.
See you next month! Hopefully! Maybe! Ahhh!!!