Birds. They're all around us. They are wonderful beings of pure bliss. I love them all.

I've wanted to write about "birds" as a general topic for a long time now. There's a lot to say, I have so many bits and pieces of drafts, ideas, thoughts. On birds themselves, on my personal relationship with them, on their cultural significance and how humanity treats them. This is my attempt at actually putting all of that into a semi-coherent text for you to read, or just to have actually written it all out. I don't know if anyone will get that much out of reading this, but I care about this topic deeply and I need to get these words out.

This is a bit more of a personal one, some background on me personally and on my identity.

As you might have noticed, I am a catgirl. But what does that actually mean? For some, it might just be a weird cute thing they know from anime, others might think "a girl who likes cats". For me, it means I am a cat and a girl (kinda). Both are equally important parts of my identity.

I am trans, I am nonbinary, and I am otherkin. I am also autistic. All of these are properties of me as a whole. They add up to create this entity that's writing this post right now. Remove any single one of these properties, and you end up with a completely different being.

To unwrap() or not to unwrap(), that is the question:

So I've finally given in and started to learn Rust last month. It's a really cool programming language, with some interesting differences to what I've used before. (JavaScript and Python, mostly)

There are some really pawesome guides out there, "The Rust programming language" is definitely a must-read in my opinion, and Rustlings is nyamazing for anyone who likes to learn by actively working through interactive problems.

After reading through a lot of those big thorough guides by experienced Rust developers, I've started working on my first actual Project. I approached the development of this project by just trying to get small parts of it working in any way I can manage, and then build upon this. In that process, I learned a lot of small subtilties that guides like the ones named above just can't really cover. This post is for sharing those things, those cool little tips to make your first Rust project just a little cleaner and more Rust-y. Originally I wanted to make this about a lot of different topics, but then I've realized that my notes already contain so many things about just one part of Rust: The Enums Option and Result. So this post will be about those, and hopefully will mark the start of a series on this blog.

While reading through this, you might think that the things I'm mentioning are obvious. That's okay, and that's the point. Nothing is ever completely obvious to everyone, and this is for those like me, who often don't immediately recognize the "obvious". And, to be honest, I am writing this just as much for myself, writing all of that stuff down to aid me in my own ongoing learning process.

So, let's start!

With Twitter in a downwards spiral thanks to some rich guy whose name escapes me breaking everything, the Fediverse has been getting the biggest influx of new users in a very long time. People have been recommending "Mastodon" as a Twitter alternative for a while now, causing #Mastodon to be the top trending Hashtag on many days.

Browsing that hashtag one can find a lot of misconceptions about what Mastodon is, how it works, and what its limitations are. These misconceptions are not just spread by people who dislike Mastodon and try to convince others not to use it, though. They are also perpetuated by people who seem to want to increase the userbase at all cost, regardless of whom it attracts to the Fediverse.