The Year in Review

MOOD: tired
WATCHING: Joshiraku
PLAYING: Uncharted Waters 2
DRINKING: coffee I've been hyping up doing a retrospective entry about how the year went for me, so here it is! Unlike most people (at least going off of what I've seen on social media), I had an excellent 2025 and wanted to write about it so that I won't forget about the neat stuff that happened this year, so there you go.

2025 was a year in which I got to do many things for the first time that I've been wanting to do for a very long time, and it started with me finally getting to attend MAGFest after seeing people posting about it for social media for basically the entire time I've spent on the internet. It's kinda funny writing about it right now since the 2026 MAGFest just ended so this is very old news, but it is what it is. I was pleasantly surprised at how all-encompassing this convention takes the concept of both music and vidya; having attended other vidya cons before, I was fully expecting mainly recent vidya to be the focus of attention, but instead the con (through panels and shows and the other things that went on) managed to cover video games going as far back as the pre-Pong era. There was a very nice video game museum that even had boomer computers there that gave me VCF vibes.

The shows at MAGFest (so the M part of the MAG name) were great too. I didn't realize this before I showed up because I didn't read the guest list very good, but it turned out that Master Boot Record was showing up, which was a pleasant surprise since I haven't really thought about them since back when I found their music on YouTube during college. Their show was fun, both aesthetically but also because the crowd there was actually behaving like a metal show crowd. Having previously gone to shows like Rammstein's most recent stadium tour and being disappointed with how much of the crowd was just standing there recording the thing for social media, it was very refreshing to be in a crowd actually there to vibe to the tunes. Red Vox was pretty neat too, or at least it was neat to finally see the band Vinny Vinesauce is in. Allegedly that was their biggest show ever up to that point, per an article on the Vinesauce Wiki ([link] For me, the biggest thing was the SilvaGunner show that was done in a hallway instead of a ballroom for whatever reason. As someone who used to be really into the SoundClown community back in the mid-2010's (I never got big with any of my posts, but it was still a good time), I was really sad when I couldn't attend MAGFest the first year that SilvaGunner did a rave there, so to finally attend a SilvaGunner rave at the 2025 MAGFest was a big deal for me. It might have actually been the best rave I've ever been to for the simple fact that the "DJ's" (every set was pre-mixed so there wasn't much DJing to actually do) were very active in hyping up the crowd, which I almost never see at EDM shows I've been to (at some other shows I've been to, if the DJ's weren't actively mixing their music then they were just be on their phones!).

[link]

We got to wander around in DC for a bit during our MAGFest trip, which was another thing I've been wanting to do for a very long time. We only really explored the touristy area around the Gaylord that MAGFest was at, and also the National Mall for a bit right before our flight back to Texas, so we were basically only exposed to the good parts of DC. The National Mall was neat, you could really feel the Roman influence on the architecture of the monuments there when you're there in person. We also tried Wawa's pizza, which one of my buddies is now convinced is the best gas station pizza. The plane accident that happened at around the time when we went was definitely not one of the good parts of this trip, and if I end up ever going again (which I hope will happen!) I'll likely be flying into Baltimore and then just driving to our hotel from there on a rental.

After MAGFest, the next major thing I went to was Justice's show in Irving. It was another thing that I've wanted to attend for a long time, especially after seeing all the people saying it's the best live show since Daft Punk's Alive 2007, and I was really disappointed when no dates for Texas were announced in 2024, almost planning to fly to Philadelphia to see them live. But they ended up coming by to Irving, so I ended up not having to fly out to see them live. The show was very good, my only regret is that before the show I listened to Woman World Wide basically on repeat for the entirety of 2024, so the live set they played didn't blow me away as hard as it would have had I not done that. If I went in without knowing how awesome their live sets have become as of WWW, I probably would have thought it was the best thing of all time. It was the first EDM show I've been to where the visuals were done entirely with lights, there was very little use of screens so it felt like you were watching a show at Team Labs or something lol. The live set was excellent, I felt like all the parts of Hyperdrama that were used were incorporated very good. But the crowd... was kinda doing a bunch of that standing around with their phones out thing I mentioned earlier. You can find many recordings of the show in Irving and the shows at the other locations of the Hyperdrama tour very easily on YouTube because so many people were just recording, and in a lot of them the crowd is just standing and watching. I was closer to the stage where people were actually moving instead of just recording so it was better, but you wouldn't get that impression from watching people's phone recordings on YouTube.

I also got to go to Vegas this year! It wasn't really on my bucket list as much as DC was, but it was still neat to "end up" in Vegas (both trips were due to people going there for something specific, it wasn't just me going by myself to gamble or whatever). Out of the casinos that I got to see (I didn't get to go through the entire strip both trips), I thought the themed ones like Caesar's Palace were neat, but a bunch of the other ones just seemed like they put a casino down without much thought and I guess people just choose which one they stay at based on which one has the better deals at the time of booking. I enjoyed how walkable the strip was, it's certainly a better time than trying to wander around in Dallas on foot. The food I had was pretty good too, though I'm told that it used to not be as overpriced. The GCW shows I came to see were very good; we came to see the ones that were being ran as counterprogramming to Wrestlemania, and I didn't get to see the first show because I got sick and needed to rest, but saw the others. Everyone gave their all at both the clusterfuck and Effy's thing, I walked away with the impression that that was the best wrestling I've ever seen. Overall both trips were a good time. I definitely want to come back just to see all the residencies since I didn't get to see them when I went.

My annual trip to San Japan deserves a mention in this journal entry as well, I guess. I think for me the highlight this year was seeing Mariachi Entertainment System's show since it's been a very long time since I got to see mariachis perform, and also exploring a bit more of the Riverwalk than I usually do on my annual San Antonio con-related trips. The con was good in general, but with how much I've attended San Japan they're all starting to blend together. I can't remember if this was the year when one of the escalators was broken or not. Getting to talk about Saya at the visual novels panel right after finishing it this past summer for the first time was really fun though, definitely one of those moments that make coming to a convention worth it. San Japan is still a fun con just to hang out at, so I'll likely be returning in 2026 unless something comes up.

I think that's it for the major "adventures" this year as far as trips outside of my apartment are concerned. I got to travel a bunch and go to events I've wanted to attend for a very long time, which made 2025 a breddy gud year.

You can't really talk about 2025 without mentioning the unemployment crisis that was going on that year, and I was part of that crisis after being laid off for seven months before finding my next gig. On the one hand, being unemployed sucked because of all the uncertainty, but on the other hand I enjoyed finally getting some time to think about what I want to do with my career after basically just jobmaxxing for eight years straight with a focus on opportunities instead of picking things that I really want to do. I unfortunately didn't get to work on my personal projects as much as a result of this unemployment period since I had to use most of my free time for interview prep, so hopefully in 2026 I'll get to reverse the pattern of neglecting personal projects now that my job situation has been sorted out. This Neocities site was basically the only major personal project I got off the ground in 2025, but I think it's better than not putting anything out at all which has been the case for the prior several years before 2025.

One of the highlights of this unemployment arc was finally getting to read Saya no Uta. It wasn't so much that I didn't have time to read it before when I was employed, but more that when you're unemployed you have infinite free time, so during the times when I wasn't doing interview prep or grinding on LinkedIn and Indeed I'd read Saya. It actually kinda took me a long time to read the whole thing since I'm notoriously slow when it comes to reading VN's, but I managed to get through it. I thought it was good (it was in Urobutcher's hands so this was inevitable), and I also appreciate that there weren't any jumpscares in this VN, which takes restraint when writing a horror VN. Getting to go to San Japan almost right after finishing it was fun too, I got to discuss something I just got done with at the VN panel which is a rare treat for me since everything I watch/read/play tends to never be the current "in" thing.

The end of the year was dominated by the release of the Chainsaw Man Reze Arc movie in the US. Before the release of this movie, the Reze arc was my favorite arc of the entire series thus far, mainly because of the Beam fight, so I was very excited when I found out that instead of being in the second season of the anime it's getting the movie treatment. And I had the cynical expectation that the pool scene would have had its fanservice turned all the way up. What we got instead was even better than what I expected. First of all, Mappa made this movie's colors way more saturated than the muddy colors of season 1, so it was just more fun to watch in general. The Beam fight exceeded my expectations, some people were upset at how flashy it was but I thought the amount of flashiness was appropriate given how goofy the fight is. But with the pool scene, they went with this more restrained approach that emphasized the intimacy of that scene, and judging by what people have been saying on Twitter it seemed to have a very profound effect on its zoomer audience, to whom this seemed to be a very fresh thing compared to the raunchy way in which love is portrayed in many contemporary films. As in, very profound, I saw several instances of people saying they went to see the movie over five times just to feel something. As someone for whom the Reze arc is their favorite arc, I'm very glad that this movie turned out to be this memorable thing that might even be remembered as one among the greats.

Anyways, that's how the fun year of 2025 went for me. Apologies for how late this journal entry was posted, I've been doing other things and neglecting my Neocities site as usual. I'm not really sure when I'll update this website again given how I recently found out that some of my goals for it won't be possible given how Neocities functions (per my previous journal entry), but I'm sure I'll come back to it to implement the things I can do on here (like making image galleries), and my next journal entry will likely be posted at that time, if not sooner. Hopefully it will be less book-like than this one, but I think this one just happens to be an exception because of the unusually large amount of things that I wanted to mention. I don't have a reward for you if you read this whole thing, I guess the reward is the feeling of achievement having read so much text in a world where microblogging is the norm lol

As always, thanks for reading, and until next time!

Neocities

MOOD: festive
LISTENING TO: Justice
WATCHING: longplays on YouTube
PLAYING: American Truck Simulator
EATING: random Christmas treats
DRINKING: Darjeeling tea First of all, a big thank you to everyone who commented under the Twitter thread for the previous journal entry! It was just a few people that gave feedback, but it still matters to me since making a blog like this has been something I've been wanting to do for a very long time, and now that it's off the ground I'm glad it's appreciated somewhat. This journal entry will be mainly focusing on random things relating to this website that have come up ever since I made the first "proper" journal entry on here. A few people have asked me about Neocities since me trying to get one off the ground has been a thing for the past few years, so this journal entry is largely aimed at them.

One of the biggest goals I had for this website, and currently the only feature that works on it, is for it to be a place for me to be able to post long-form blogs instead of being stuck with just Twitter-style microblogging. It's been good for that so far now that I've got everything set up, but one interesting thing is that whenever I think about this, one of the things I compare this idea to is just using Twitlonger instead. In the time since I posted the previous journal entry I tried getting on Twitlonger just to see how it's doing these days, and turns out it no longer exists! That was very surprising to me considering how much people were using it for long "tweets" back during the days before covid. My guess is that it had to shut down due to issues with Twitter now requiring money for API access ever since Elon Musk took over. It might also be some other reason, I didn't look too much into it.

Up until posting the previous journal entry, I've only tested this website and its theme on my PC where everything seemed to work fine. But now that it's up on da interwebz, I tried opening it on my Android phone, and lo and behold the fonts are messed up. To save space, I tried sticking to just Impact and Georgia for this site's fonts since those are supposed to be under the whole "core fonts for the web" thing which made me assume they'd come preinstalled with every browser, but apparently Android continues the GNU/Linux tradition of not coming with these fonts even though Google doesn't care much if something is free or nonfree, so if you open this website on an Android phone all the fonts will be messed up. I haven't yet decided how I want to fix this; I'll most likely change things so that the header that's using Impact will be replaced by some SVG logo, and the body text will use some custom-picked font I'll have to include with the website. I suppose this will be a good opportunity to look up what the modern best practices are for using custom fonts on websites; from what I've seen a lot of places are using fonts provided by Google somehow, so I'll need to look into that.

One other unfortunate thing I found out is that Neocities doesn't support Flash. Now, most of the web hasn't supported Flash for probably a decade at this point, so let me explain what I mean here. One of my other intentions with this website is to use it to host random files that I don't want to disappear from the web, and some of these files would have been Flash games. I've seen ways to make Flash game sites using some JavaScript library that would render the Flash files using HTML5 instead of having to use the now long abandoned Flash plugin, and that was one of the things I wanted to do here just so that there's at least one more place left where people can access at least some of their favorite Flash games without going through the trouble of installing Flashpoint or messing with one of the old Flash players or whatever. But after looking into it, it appears that Neocities simply doesn't allow hosting Flash files on their servers at all unless you pay up. So once I finally get around to adding those games to this website, I'll have to either figure out some way of hosting them for free elsewhere (maybe on Google Drive since that tends to be a popular choice for free file hosting these days), or pay up. We'll see what happens.

I'm still planning to write a retrospective of how 2025 went for me soon, so to the single digit number of people who actually read my posts on this website, please look forward to it! Linking my journal entries to Twitter threads so that people could comment on them seemed to work great, so I'll do the same with this post. Anyways, thanks for reading, and until next time!

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.