The Upgrade

WATCHING: Ranma
PLAYING: Chrono Trigger
DRINKING: coffee I originally started writing this post on October 1, but due to delays with finishing the upgrades I wanted to do to this website due to IRL events it got pushed back to almost November. Whoops!

Anyways, looks like I ended up not following through with what I said in my previous journal entry and didn't end up writing another entry before the end of 2024. In fact, looks like I haven't touched this Neocities site in almost a year! But now the wait for an update to my website is finally over. Judging by the metrics that Neocities showed me, you'd think people were at the edge of their seats waiting for an update given how there were over 10,000 hits on this website in the two years it's been up (in its incomplete state), my guess is that 99% of those hits came from bots clicking on the link to this website in my Twitter profile lol.

The old look based on how Yahoo's Japanese site looks was hurting my eyes, so I decided on redoing everything with a different look that's focused on readability and inspired by newspapers. I'm not sure about how the current gray background will be received; I picked a light color that doesn't hurt my eyes when reading this website at night, but it's definitely in sharp contrast to most other Neocities websites which tend to be either really bright and colorful or really cyberpunk-y and colorful. Hopefully all the 88x31 website buttons that I will soon be adding make up for the lack of color elsewhere on my website's theme. I'm glad that I also finally found a use for the FarmFresh icon set I got over a decade ago, which is apparently so old that you can't download it from its original website anymore.

I'll add an About page later on that will better explain what I was thinking of when I designed this website. Beyond that, a major thing I want to do with this website is basically use it as if it's Photobucket and upload backups of random images I have, some of which are hard to find now because of how bad Google Images's algorithm has gotten. But I don't know how soon this will happen since I'm using a script to generate all the pages on this site and I haven't yet implemented a way for this script to handle images. These days I'm more consistent with what I mentioned in a prior journal entry about waking up early to work on personal projects, so it might happen sooner than later.

My plan for my next journal entry is to talk about how 2025 went for me, with the twist being that I will actually be writing this retrospective journal entry this time instead of just talking about it like what happened last year. Thanks for reading, and until next time!

Research

I've been thinking for some time that I should update this thing with a new journal entry (or blog entry or whatever you want to call it), I imagine that the few people who visited my Neocities site thought it was a one-and-done thing that will never see an update again, so I guess this journal entry exists to prove them wrong lol

There's not really much to say because I haven't really been working on any of my personal coding projects in the past few months. I was intending to spend some time updating this site to have more functionality, but I ended up having other priorities such as working on my video game idea, which consists of a forever project that I've been restarting over and over through the years. I've previously tried making this game in Unity, but certain things annoyed me about that engine, so for a while I was considering just writing my own thing in C++ with Vulkan serving as the graphics library. Well, I spent some of November reading up on Vulkan, and the result of that research was that I now have some newfound appreciation for the game engines we have these days! I also looked into Godot (since I don't want to go back to Unity) and liked what I saw, at least initially, so once the time comes for me to start programming my game again I can definitely see myself using Godot to do it, or at least until I find something in Godot that upsets me at which point I'll Start Over Again.

I also spent the past several months getting on what I jokingly call the Jocko Willink sleep schedule since he infamously wakes up at 4 AM to exercise. Since I injured my eyes last year I'm basically no longer able to do computer stuff in the evening because they start hurting A LOT, so I either have to basically wake up at 5 AM to do all my fun stuff or I don't get to do it. There are pretty much no downsides to living like this, plus I now have guaranteed free time every day so long as I stay disciplined and wake up on time, so hopefully more progress on my personal programming stuff will be made in the future. So far I've been using the time to do the aforementioned research on what method of gamedev I'll be using next, but also to read something for my game which I will maybe cover in a later journal entry.

I guess that's it for this update. Hopefully I'll do another journal entry before the year ends, likely the typical retrospect most people do at the end of the year, but the bigger hope is that it won't take me another two months to write the next entry (lol). It would be cool if I could also put in some time into adding more functionality to my Neocities site, but since it's currently not a priority for me it might take some time before my site becomes as fancy as most other Neocities sites. Thanks for reading, and until next time!

First

I've decided to publish this site before fully finishing everything on it, mainly because I have too many ideas for it and if I wait until I finish implementing all of them then the site will never get published. Basically this website exists for me to try out different ideas I've had for a while, such as seeing if I can make my own markup interpreter (every blog entry and article on this site is written in my loose interpretation of WikiText and is then rendered as an HTML page using a script), and seeing how much of a functional website I can make by pushing "pre-rendered" HTML and assets to Neocities. That doesn't really sound like something worth making what is basically your own version of WordPress for, but there are several features I plan to add that you can't really do with WordPress OOTB, plus I don't really like all the JavaScript bloat that most of the pre-existing blogging solutions generate on the page, plus writing my own thing is more fun lol

Anyways, expect more features to be added to this website later on, such as a theme for it that's less boring than the current boxes on a white void that were inspired by Yahoo's Japanese site. Until next time! Hopefully I'll feel like writing a proper blog entry by then because I just kinda forced this one because this website needed an introduction.