Tagged nonfic

A lot has happened this season. If you read the last post, you'll have gotten the full story, but TL;DR, my mother died and I had to move out of the house I've lived in my entire life. The good news is I'm moving to an apartment Thursday, but that's beside the point. I'll talk more about that in the life update section.

Partly as a result of the aforementioned events, I only watched three seasonals this time. I was interested in picking up one more, but then the big life nuke happened and now I don't even remember which show I was going to pick up. Fortunately, I did manage to finish all three of them, and even a couple classic shows!

Completed Seasonals

Witch Hat Atelier: I have to say, this show was fucking amazing. I knew it would be going in, since everybody seemed to love the manga and the anime is a premium adaptation. The show is drop dead gorgeous, the story is awesome and fun and just all around great, it's just one of those shows you need to watch. The biggest criticism I have is where they left the first season, an issue which I hope will become irrelevant very soon. In essence, the show didn't just end on a cliffhanger, it ended in a way that made the season feel incomplete, like there should've been another episode. Just didn't make much sense to stop there.

Dr. Stone: Science Future Pt 3: I really, truly love this show, I do. I stand by what I said about the show peaking in the New World season, but even so, I was still enjoying myself up to the end. Unfortunately, I very much did not enjoy the final scene. I'm about to "spoil" the final scene, but it's not really a spoiler since I can air my grievance without saying anything important. In the final scene, it's revealed that they're working on a time machine. They don't complete it in the show, they're just working on it. I feel like the time travel thing kinda cheapens the sacrifices made by all the different characters and such? It's something a lot of works have a problem with not accepting that sometimes, a thing that happened just sucked and there's nothing you can do about it and you have to accept it and move on. The show did that before. Sigh. Oh well, I'm not going to let that ruin my love of the rest of the show. Please watch it, it's such a deeply humanist work. I love how it loves humans and science and I hope you will, too.

Akane-banashi: I originally decided to watch this show because other people said it was going to be good based on how good the manga was. They weren't wrong! Excellent, excellent show. I should really watch Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu as well. It was also the easiest to watch, due to being officially posted to YouTube, something I wish more series would do. I've heard the money from actually broadcasting a show is extremely low, and I kinda wonder if ad revenue from YouTube might actually be more profitable. Glad I picked this one up, can highly recommend.

Continuing Shows

Beastars/To Your Eternity: I made some progress on these, at least. Three episodes left for the latter. This is almost entirely because my life got upturned. I'm hoping to finish these next week or so, or at least before the end of the summer.

Next Season

The Ghost in the Shell: I love the 1995 Ghost in the Shell movie and Standalone Complex, so I'm excited to watch this one. I never watched the others because I heard they were terrible, but other people are saying this one looks good, so here's hoping it turns out great.

Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You: This particular show I saw on the seasonal charts with a score above an eight before the season even started. Apparently, the first episode was originally released in MAy, but the series officially starts July 3. I looked at the description, and the show sounds interesting, so I put it on my PTW.

You and I are Polar Opposites S2: I didn't even realize this was coming out until I saw the MAL chart and I am very excited to see this one! If you read the last recap, this was one of my favorites of the winter season. I hope the quality continues.

We'll see if I pick anything else up, but I'm going to be busy at the beginning of the season at the very least, so I might not go for anything else.

Classic Shows

Turn A Gundam: Kinda on my own with this one now, since the YouTube series I was following with it kinda died out. I've only watched five more episodes since last post and have decided not to watch it week to week anymore, but at the same time, I'm not just going to binge it. I'm limiting myself to one episode a day at most. Aside from that, I'm still enjoying it!

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam: Speaking of Gundam, I decided to just go ahead and continue on without my friend. I chewed through this one pretty quickly, going through all 50 episodes in a matter of weeks, mostly at work because somebody posted it to YouTube. Unlike TOS, I watched this one subbed. I may end up watching ZZ dubbed because my choices amongst what people posted to YouTube are the English dub or Portugese subs, and I don't speak Portugese. As for what I thought, excellent series! I think I liked TOS a little bit better, even though this show's production values are a marked improvement, but still. Regarding future Gundam series, I think I'd like to watch all the ones Tomino was behind (whether they are well or poorly regarded), and then just go through the greatest hits for the rest of them. I know all Gundams are not created equal, so there's no sense wasting my time on garbage.

Digimon Adventure: Almost forgot to put this one down. We did end up finishing this one, and it was okay. As I said, I have a lot less nostalgia for this one than I thought. Honestly, Pokemon was better, but maybe I'm just saying that because I have a lot more nostalgia for the Pokemon anime.

Dragon Ball: After finishing Digimon, I suggested starting Zeta Gundam, but my friend wanted to watch this one instead. In high school, I rewatched DBZ and actually started watching Dragon Ball alongside it. The Dragon Ball watching kinda fizzled out as DBZ kinda won my attention. I was watching for nostalgia, after all. I think I only got a few episodes in on that initial viewing, because I don't remember even getting to Goku's first transformation. We just passed episode 31, and I've really been enjoying it! Kinda hoping we continue on into DBZ after this, as I never did watch the entire Buu saga. I might try to convince my friend to do a watch of DBZ Abridged as well. Then he'll finally get it when I make references to it...

Kyousou Giga: Literally no progress. I mean, understandable, considering the circumstances, but at this point, I think I might end up starting over.

The Rest of My Life

I'm finally moving into an apartment this Thursday. I won't get to enjoy it, though, because I'll be moving in Thursday morning and leaving for my aunt and uncle's camp Thursday evening for Fourth of July weekend. It won't be a huge deal to do that, it's not like I have a ton of furniture to move or anything, I just have to move the stuff I took over there. Still, I'm looking forward to the weekend!

In addition to getting an apartment, I have, inadvisably, gotten a new and addictive hobby, one which isn't super expensive right now, but will become more expensive as I get deeper in. I have gotten into gunpla. I started off buying a High Grade RX-78-2 Revive kit and set of Godhand PN-125 nippers from Newtype. In addition to the cost of the nippers and kit, it also cost me ten bucks shipping and a week of waiting. I should also note I bought just the one kit and nippers because I wanted to see if I actually liked the hobby before buying anything else. Before settling on purchasing from Newtype, I looked at a lot of other stores, mostly online, but I also looked at my local Michael's. I didn't initially buy from them because their kits are generally five to ten dollars more than online and they do have a limited selection. However, soon after I built the kit, I wanted MORE. I saw my mother had a 30% off coupon to Michael's in her email and decided to go there. Even if the kit I got was a couple more bucks than what I got on Newtype, I wouldn't have to pay shipping or wait a week, so it would still even out. I settled on a High Grade Char's Zaku, because Zakus are a really cool design and I really wanted one. I also bought a cheap pair of tweezers. I went up to the register and tried to use the coupon, but it weouldn't work. The cashier scanned a coupon on her phone for 40% off instead, which did work and I got it for less than what I would've paid on Newtype without shipping. I decided to sign up for my own Michael's reqards stuff and got a 25% off coupon. Well, it was time to go and get a new kit! I got a High Grade Hyaku Shiki which, with the coupon, was once again cheaper than Newtype.

Keep in mind, this all happened in the span of two weeks, and I completed all three models. I am hopelessly addicted. I did hold off on buying another kit before I moved... Except I'm lying because I bought a Real Grade Zeong as a housewarming gift to myself. It was on clearance at Michael's for $46, compared to $73 on Newtype. Again, if I did buy it from Newtype, that's ten bucks shipping and a week of waiting. I'm not going to get to it until next week at least, but I'm excited to build it! I think my next purchases for this hobby will be some sanding stuff, including a glass file. Or maybe I'll get some Gundam Markers, or both. I do want to get into painting and doing some custom work, though maybe not super heavy into it. I'm not going to be buying an airbrush station or anything like that.

Last post, I mentioned the Golden Butterflies Podcast. Since that post, I have been in two more episodes, the Oshi no VTubers episode (for which I did wrangling, hosting, and editing) and the Console Wars episode (which I just showed up for). I had a lot of fun and I hope to be in many more episodes in future.

I have also acquired two Sony Mavica cameras, which are the ones that use floppy disks. The first one was an FD85 I found on Facebook Marketplace being sold by someone in the same town, and only for ten dollars. I thought the seller had it from the time, so when she said she had bought it recently, I was like, "You bought a floppy disk camera? Why?" And she said, "I didn't know it used floppy disks!" It came with the power cable, some floppies, and even the A/V cable, so it was a pretty complete package. All I needed to do was replace the battery. This was before my mother died. After my mother died, I was once again on good old Facebook Marketplace, and I saw a pretty complete FD92 for 25 dollars. It came with not only the power cable, floppies, and coveted A/V cable, but also a memory stick and the manual! Thing was, it was located in Maryland, but honestly, I needed to do something crazy. So, I scheduled a time with the seller and rode all the way into Maryland. It wasn't actually that deep into Maryland, it was before you hit Cumberland going on 68 from Morgantown, but still. It's a really pretty drive, so that was nice. I guess that makes me a collector now.

A lot has happened this quarter, but I hope I can get my life back on some kind of track.

My mother died on April 29. I'm still dealing with the fallout. I wanted to write something about her. It doesn't feel right to talk about my pets upon their deaths, and not her. Hell, I even wrote something about my father when he died, though that post was more about all the things that changed in my life in 2018. That post was written here on my Neocities, whereas my pets were written about on Tumblr. I suppose I'm just continuing the tradition of human deaths getting their posts here.

My mother was born in 1961, the ninth of ten kids. She had just had a birthday, so she was 65 when she died. She told me one of her earliest memories was in 1963. Her sister came home early, and when her mom asked why, she said the president had been shot. She remembered her mom turning on the TV and crying at the news.

When she was a kid, she would watch a show called Chiller Theater with host Bill Cardille. One night, they played a movie that she couldn't remember the title of, but somehow involved bloody fingers. Her older brother pretended to go to bed early, but hid under her bed. When she got in bed, he put his hands over the headboard and said, "Bloody fingers!" Once when she was recounting the story to me, I think I commented something about him being mean. She said yeah, he could do mean pranks like that, but he also did a lot of nice things for her, like once on Halloween some kid stole her candy and he got her candy back.

I can't remember if my mother was in university or high school when this happened, but she went to the Greenbrier on a school trip. This would have been late 70's or early 80's, depending on which one she was attending. It's long been common knowledge that there was a fallout shelter underneath the hotel, but this was before that information was declassified. One day during her trip, she was on an elevator and noticed an unmarked button. It piqued her curiousity, so she pressed it. When the doors opened, two men in suits passed by and looked at her funny. She decided that maybe it wasn't a good idea to stick around and went back up. Obviously, I don't have any way to verify this story, but it's what she told me.

I was trying to remember what cars she owned. I know her first one was an AMC, and at some point she had a Nissan truck. She had a Geo Metro, and I think the one after that was the Ford Tempo, which may have been right after I was born, I'm not super clear on the timeline, but that was the first car of hers I personally remember. I think she either wrecked the Metro or it died somehow, and she really needed a car right then. That day, it was raining when she went to one of the local dealerships. She was looking at the cars on the lot when an older salesman came up to her and said, "The other salesmen are too afraid to get wet. Can I help you find anything?" She explained the situation, and he said, "I have a car that's at a really good price, the catch is it's a manual. Is that okay?" She said it was, and he showed her the Tempo. I can't remember what she paid for it, but she got a really good price because they couldn't sell it. Even back then in the 90's, manual transmissions were not exactly desired. Up until our most recent car, she exclusively drove manuals. The Tempo had a special feature as well, a luggage rack on the trunk that came in handy when we went to yard sales, something we did very regularly when I was a kid. That car ended up getting totalled when she hit a deer.

Speaking of deer, the next car she got was a Saturn. I can't remember the model, just that it was a Saturn. On April Fool's Day one year, we were travelling on a relatively busy road when a deer jumped in front of us. She definitely hit it, but the deer got up and ran off. She was screaming and cussing because she thought she totalled another car, and I'm pretty sure we had just bought it not even a year before. She drove home and we got out to look at the damage, only to find there was no damage. The only sign we hit that deer was some hair stuck in the hood. That car died not super long after from some unrelated engine trouble.

After that, we got our first Ford Focus. This one was the first car we had with power windows, and when we got it, it had a radio with a six CD changer. It really came in handy when she started dating this guy in Virginia and we had to go on these four hour road trips. This one we sold for $500. The air conditioning didn't work anymore, the back driver power window didn't work, the CD changer had long broken and been replaced with a boring single CD radio, and it was just kinda falling apart, so she got a new car. I was 19, and I decided to get my learner's permit, and the old car was supposed to be mine. Well, after a couple months of driving with her, she said I drove too crazy and stopped trying to teach me. Thus, we sold the car and I didn't get my driver's license until a week before I turned 30.

The next car was another Ford Focus. This car's life ended because my mother's ex was doing the oil changes, but when they broke up, he stopped doing them and she forgot about it. The engine was grinding before the oil light came on. I only found out afterward that the oil light might as well be called the too late to save the engine light. When we finally got it looked at, it was confirmed that yes, the engine was a loss. Funnily enough, even though the engine was a loss, the car still ran until we could get another. No telling how much longer it would've lasted, but at least it didn't leave us stranded.

After that, my mother got our current car, which was yet another Ford Focus. This was the first automatic I'd seen her buy, and it was also our first car with no physical media player. I finally got my license a few years after. She was apprehensive about letting me drive the car at first, but by the end of her life, I was driving her almost everywhere.

Some of this might seem pointless, especially the stuff about the cars, but it's stuff I want to remember, and to share with you.

When I was born, I was late in the worst way possible. My mother had been in labor for three days, but the local hospital refused to do a C-section. She ended up having to go to Charleston to get one. When I finally came out, I was blue. She begged the doctors to take me away, because she didn't want to watch me die. I remember she told me that it was tradition to smoke cigars to celebrate a new baby, but neither her or my dad smoked, so they chewed bubble gum cigars.

She took an active role in my school life from the beginning. I still have an award she received for volunteering at Head Start. In elementary school, she'd come in on Fridays and read to my class. She also was part of the PTA, and I think she was even president of the PTA for a while. I remember being at school after hours for PTA meetings and running around empty hallways. There were also times when I forgot my homework, and the janitors were kind enough to let us in so I could get it.

Once, when I was six, my mother made me help her clean the living room. I hated cleaning with her, not just for the normal reasons anybody would hate cleaning, but because she would always end up yelling at me. She pointed to a little toy on the floor and said, "Pick up that green thing!" I don't know what happened leading up to this, but she must have already been pissed off, because she said it very forcefully. The problem was, the toy was blue and I was six and autistic, although she didn't know the last part at the time. I asked her what green thing. She bent me down over it and said if I didn't pick it up, she'd hit me. I probably took too long to tell her the thing she was pointing at was blue, but again, six and autistic. She started counting and when she got to three, she hit me. I finally asked her if she meant the toy that was actually blue, and picked it up. My mother always told people she never hit me. She seemed to forget about this incident. To be clear, it was the only time.

In the third grade, I threw a minor temper tantrum and ended up getting suspended for three days because I wouldn't talk to the principal or vice principal. My mother did not take this well. When we got home, she screamed at me, asking why I did it. I told her I was afraid the police would come and take me away. This wasn't true, I just wanted her to stop screaming at me. This only upset her more. I remember waking up the next morning and going downstairs to find her crying over this. She went to the school and fought with them over it, leaving me to sit in the office all day waiting on her. In the course of those meetings, the vice principal told her I would grow up to become a criminal. Hilariously, this vice principal later got a job as a professor at my university, and I had him for a class in my first semester. He was nice enough to apologize for his remarks. Going through the house, I found notes she took for that meeting. She really did go to bat for me against the school. I just wish she didn't scream at me over it.

Throughout my childhood, she was always taking me places. I remember going to the Blue and Gray Reunion, a Civil War reenactment in Philippi, pretty much every year for a while. I remember going to parks and zoos and museums and even caves. Caves were a big one. Places like Laurel Caverns and Seneca Caverns. Those were a lot of fun. She dated a guy in Virginia for a while and we went to Skyline Caverns, which has a section full of crystals that only grow in a vacuum and are very rare on Earth. While she was dating that guy, we also got to see lots of historical sites around the area, like Monticello and Montpelier. Montpelier was especially cool because we got to tour it while it was still gutted for restoration. I'd love to see it again, it's certainly completed now.

That reminds me, the first time my mother heard the word "coon" in the context of a racial slur was when she was dating that guy from Virginia. She was sitting in the car with him, and he said, "Look at those coons over there." My mother was looking for a raccoon, so she was like, "Where?" The guy said, "Those coons over there!" and pointed at a black couple pushing a stroller. She said that was one of the reasons she broke up with him.

My mother had several boyfriends after my dad. I don't have any recollection of this, but she told me one of them hit me behind her back, and she got rid of him as soon as she found out. There was a long stretch of time when she was doing online dating. That's how she met the guy from Virginia, who we visted for long stretches in the summer and a few weekends during the school year. There were a couple from Ohio as well. The third to last one was the one she was with the longest, also from Ohio. We'd go to his house weekends, sometimes he'd come to our house for a weekend. When she was with him, we often visited the large flea market he lived near. He was also relatively close to Dayton, where we visited the National Museum of the USAF and Carillon Park, among other things. This boyfriend also took us on vacation out west, where we saw Mount Rushmore and Yellowstone.

To tie off the thread about going places with her, anytime there was a school trip or something I wanted to go on, there was always money for it, and if there wasn't, she found it. If there was a place I wanted to go, we usually found a way. Usually. I was into ghosts as a kid and read about a haunted place in Berkeley, California, which I confused for Beckley, West Virginia. I asked my mother to take me, and she refused. Bitch.

Continuing the other thread, she finally broke up with third to last after he cheated on her for the third time. The last two boyfriends were local. Second to last helped me to get my current job, actually. In both cases, she spent a lot of time at their houses and kept a lot of stuff there. The first time I had to carry a bunch of stuff out of her ex's house, I told her if she ever did it again, I wouldn't help her. Of course, the final boyfriend she had just couldn't put his foot down and when I got roped into helping her get her stuff out again, it was even worse. There was a section of his closet that was so thick with her clothes, I couldn't get my hand inbetween them. I had to have a friend help me, it was ridiculous. This was also when she got really into plants in a big way. Don't get me wrong, she always liked plants, but at this boyfriend's house, she had a place to put them. She made me help her carve out a space for those plants in our house, which was better than what we had there before (a mess), but it allowed her to go beyond even what her spineless people pleaser of an ex did.

When I was in second or third grade, my mother hurt her back. She had fallen down the steps of our porch, which were concrete. There was a surgery available at the time, but the doctors told her nobody would operate on her. From here on, it was a sore point. Sometimes she'd tell me she was sorry we couldn't go out and do things like we used to when I was a lot younger. After her injury, she got on disability, but she still worked under the table cleaning houses for a long time. This was one way she could make ends meet. She became a wizard with finances and became very good at getting assistance through government programs, an adaptation she was forced to make. She also volunteered with Literacy Volunteers for a very long time, and even won an award for it. She did a lot of things with them, like homework help and fundraising. She was also on the board for a long time. I remember spending a lot of time at the library because of this. This is also how I got my online handle, as the computer class I always mention when I tell the story was through Literacy Volunteers.

When I was in third grade, possibly related to the suspension, I was diagnosed with ADHD. I started seeing a psychologist and taking medication, and would continue through high school. I remember I was on Adderall, but was taken off in sixth grade because I think a study came out about Adderall's addictiveness. I remember being on Vyvanse in high school as well, which kept me up at night and left me extremely irritable when I forgot to take it. I wouldn't find out that insomnia was a sign of an improper dose until literally last year, when I attended a work conference. I was on Wellbutrin the whole time I was seeing that psych, I think.

Somewhat related, at some point, I had a bed wetting problem. My mom talked to the psychiatrist, who did the psychiatrist thing and prescribed a pill. When I went to dad's house, he balked at the idea of a pill and instead woke me up in the middle of the night and made me go pee, which he thought would train me to do it on my own. I don't know who was right on this one.

When I was a junior in high school, I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. I think it was a year or two before the DSM V came out and put Asperger's in with Autism Spectrum Disorder. I found the report from the diagnosis when I was looking through things.. It said I was great at processing written language, but had a hard time with spoken language. I thought about this, and about all the times my mother insulted and belittled me when I didn't immediately understand what she said, all the times she got angry when I didn't catch something. She fought so hard for so long to get that diagnosis, she knew what the report said, and yet when I acted like I was autistic, she still treated me like shit. What kind of fucking sense does that make?

She called me a worthless piece of shit to my face, twice. The first time, she pointed to something and said, "Hand me that thing!" Of course, the thing she was pointing to was just one thing among many other things, so when I paused for a second to figure out what she actually wanted, she said, "You really are a worthless piece of shit, aren't you?" The second time, we were driving somewhere and she asked me what a sign said right as we were driving past it. I told her I couldn't read it in time, and she said the same thing, exact same wording. "You really are a worthless piece of shit, aren't you?"

I tell you what, the worst thing about your own mother calling you a worthless piece of shit isn't that she said it, it's when you start to believe it. Not because of the two mentioned examples, that's just fucking stupid, but you know.

I remember once, when I was in university, I had spent a few nights at a girl's apartment. Nothing happened, she was just a friend helping me out. A week or so later, I was in the car with my mother, and she said her boyfriend at the time told her I was going to get that girl pregnant and she was worried about it. I said, "Emma's trans." She said, "Oh, thank God!"

One time, maybe a few months after I got my driver's license, I was driving home from the lauindromat with her. At the time, we were going to one in Jane Lew, so we took 79 home. This particular morning, I was very exhausted. I can't remember the specific reason why, but I was so tired, I was almost starting to nod off. I tried to pass another car and I guess I barely avoided an accident. She said, "You cut that guy off! You really cut that guy off!" I don't know why, maybe I was just that tired, maybe I was just happy to have not wrecked, but I started laughing. Instead of yelling at me, she started laughing, too.

A couple years ago, my mother got uterine cancer. This had nothing to do with her death. In fact, she kinda won the cancer lottery. It was the slowest growing type, was in its first stage and contained entirely to the uterus, and it's not like she was using it anymore. All they had to do was a hysterectomy and she was done. The recovery from the surgery stopped her moving, though, which made her disability worse. Soon after this, she got a MRSA infection. Her doctor prescribed her an antibiotic, which she ended up having a bad reaction to. She found this out after a blood test at her endocrinologist revealed her kidney function was low. The doctor literally called her and told her to report to the emergency room, and she was eventually admitted. My mother hated this hospital stay. I don't want to get into too many details, but one egregious example of something that the hospital did to her was give her a drug that was the same kind of drug as one she was allergic to after she told them about the allergy because they were literally trying to give her meds she was allergic to. My mother didn't know she was allergic to the one they gave her and was wondering why she broke out into hives until she looked it up, but the people giving her the drug should've known. There were two effects of this stay. One, not moving a lot compounded with the surgery recovery to make moving even more painful, and two, she didn't want to go to the hospital ever again. Literally told me not to send her there, even if she was dying. Well, she won on that one, at least.

As a quick aside, on the first night in the ER, they provided her a bucket toilet to pee in so she wouldn't have to walk out to the bathroom. After a while, the doctor, not realizing something was in it, tried to move it. She raised it over her head and the contents spilled out on her. My mother and I both laughed at the poor woman, but she took it in stride.

After my mother's back injury, her condition gradually worsened over the years, paired with a lot of other health problems. She slowly started being unable to maintain all her stuff. This produced a hoarding problem. I was no angel in this, I have similar brain worms, but I'm trying to be better. For example, I got into making my own pocket notebooks, for which I was saving cardboard from pop boxes. I have a lot of this material saved up, so I decided to stop collecting it until I get a chance to at least make more notebooks. I don't want my fun little craft hobby to develop into hoarding. I recognized something could be developing, and I hit the brakes. I don't think my mother had these brakes in the first place. She kept buying plants, for example, and buying tools for the plants. I've found several moisture meters, a few clearly used, but several more not even opened. Going through the house, there was what probably amounted to hundreds of dollars worth of yarn. It went to the dump because it was where the rats roamed. I couldn't verify it was sanitary and it's not something you can just clean easily. It was in a room we couldn't access for years because she had so much stuff in front of the door. Even before she was disabled, she had a problem, the disability just made it so she couldn't deal with it. I stil don't know how she managed to take care of so many fucking plants, which she then proceeded to torment me with by putting them in my way and screaming at me when they inevitably got knocked over.

This woman screamed all the time. She screamed bloody fucking murder when she misplaced something, for example. Cries of, "I just had it!" or, "Where is it!" were heard constantly because this bitch probably had ADHD too. THe whole fucking family is six different flavors of neurodivergent, though I don't think most of them are diagnosed, it just became obvious when I knew what to look for. She screamed almost anytime she was upset and cried and whined to the point where even when she had a legitimate complaint, even if it warranted such a reaction, even when I was in the wrong, it felt like it was bullshit. When I confronted her about screaming once, she said I shouldn't care because it wasn't directed at me, but it didn't matter that it wasn't directed at me, it still felt awful hearing it. This had a severe impact on my mental health. I thought, if only I didn't have her second guessing me and screaming at me for my mistakes and making me walk on eggshells, I could take anything else life threw at me. I guess we'll find out now.

One day, I got my mother her dinner, like normal, and I went to work, like normal. I got home at my normal time and took a shower like normal. Something felt off, like maybe I should check on my mother, but I went to bed anyway. I got up an hour or so later and had to go to the bathroom, and I thought about that feeling I got earlier. I decided to go to the bathroom first. Might as well do that before my life got comopletely turned upside down. I did my business and came back out. When I finally checked on her, she had already been gone a while. Her skin was cool, and her body was stuck in position. I had left my phone upstairs, so I used hers to call 911. The operator answered, and I said, "I think my mother's dead. She's stiff and cold and I need you to send an ambulance over." The operator said, "Do you want to start CPR?"

What I wanted to say was, "Lady, she is in rigor mortis. You have to be dead for several hours to undergo rigor mortis. She is day-ead. There is not anything you or I or anybody else can do for her."

What I actually said was, "She's stiff and cold. Please just send somebody."

I messaged my friends in our group chat about the situation. The ambulance got there and we got to work removing the body. I remember the dog, who was laying on the couch at my mother's feet, was barking and snapping at the paramedics when they tried to move her. I had to carry him out to the porch so they could remove her. My best friend arrived not long after. He had left work to be with me. After he arrived, Code Enforcement came and promptly condemned my house because, well, the house was a wreck, and not just because my mother was a hoarder. The building itself is almost certainly beyond saving. I've felt like I was living in a ticking time bomb for over ten years, always wondering with every noise, every little creak, is this it? Is this the day the house collapses on top of me? When it initially happened, I was afraid because I didn't know what would happen to me. Now, I think I'm kinda glad I don't have to live in that anymore. My friend who came to be with me immediately offered his couch to me. I took the dog and some essentials and I've been living there since that day.

The next day, we got to work. Code Enforcement gave us until Friday to get stuff I needed out before they put the plackards up. After that, I and anybody helping me would need a permit to get into the house. We made so much progress on it, they gave us a week on the first permit. That was when it became clear the house itself wasn't worth saving, but at this point, we're trying to save the land and build a new house. Also on that day, I went to the funeral home and made arrangements for the remains. My mother always told me she didn't want a funeral or any service, she just wanted to be cremated. I followed her wishes. The only reason I went through a funeral home was because that's just what you have to do in West Virginia. When I told my aunt about it, she told me that the rest of the family wouldn't accept that, and I told them that if they wanted to get together for something small, I'd even come, but no services is what she wanted and I would not be involved in any planning. That was their baby and they were in charge. As for the remains, it took a week or so to get them back. They told me I could either get an urn through them or go somewhere else and buy one, even said it might be cheaper, just to make sure it was a certain size. I found one on Amazon that was purple (her favorite color) with a hummingbird and some flowers on it. When I got the ashes back, they put them in the urn for me and sent me on my way. That morning, I printed out a ten milliliter measuring cup in transparent blue PLA, which was a filament she really loved. With that, I scattered a portion at her parents' grave, a portion at the house in front of the window where she sat with her plants and watched the birds at my feeders, and a portion in the woods behind the house where generations of pets are buried. After I was done, I put the measuring cup in the urn and sealed it. 30 milliliters of her were scattered, and the rest stay with me.

The death certificates took way longer to come in than the ashes, which really sucked. I needed those to do anything with her accounts, including the car and the home loan. I ended up not getting those until a month after she died.

The first time I heard the phrase, "Death is a process" was probably on some YouTube video, but I'm sure it was within the last five or so years. The phrase is a very accurate description, not just for the physical action of dying, but also for the social consequences. I'll be dealing with the effects of my mother's death for a long, long time.

At this point, the property's in probate and it remains to be seen if I'll be able to keep it due to her debts. There's a loan against it which it wouldn't be a huge issue to keep paying, but I don't know what they'll make me do about the credit card debts, which the estate is still liable for. I did pay off the car and put the title in my name, at least. It would suck to lose the land, but I'll live. As for somewhere to live in the meantime, my friend said I could stay on his couch as long as I needed. The house I'm at has two bedrooms and the landlord is a mutual friend's mom. I would just move into the other room, but my friend's dad and his girlfriend moved in there last year. They're still looking for a place, so I may end up moving in there anyway, but my uncle has an apartment I can move to in August if I can't find anywhere by then. Hell, I may move back in with my friend once his dad moves out anyway. It's a bit up in the air, but I'm not in danger of becoming homeless right now, and for that, I'm grateful.

I finally finished getting things out of the house. I got almost everything out I wanted, plus some bonus items. I'm just glad to be done going in there, at least until we start the demolition.

As for her goddamned plants, I took a bunch, plus her terrarium she made. Family took a lot of others, and some were sold at a yard sale, but I've still got a bunch on the porch. It sucks. I told her she needed to downsize, but she wouldn't listen to me. Before she died, she told me, "Please don't let my plants die when I'm gone!" Under the circumstances, I think I've done pretty well. A few of them are definitely dead in her absence because I had no idea what to do for them, and it's not like I can ask my mother. Most of them seem okay, with a few not doing so great because they're outside and I don't have anywhere to put them out of the sun. I may even take a couple more because I'm fucking insane I guess.

There's so much more to this story, but I can't do more. It's taken me weeks to write this because it's been so much. I've probably forgotten some things I wanted to say, but I want to finish this this week so I can focus on other things, like the story I've been working on, or the next anime season review. I need to move on. My relationship with my mother was complicated, but it's over now. The truth is, I loved that woman. I also hated that bitch.

I hated her. I loved her. I don't know how to sort that. I feel like I haven't even grieved all that much. Maybe that's because I've been too busy dealing with all the other things surrounding her death. Someone told me I've been very strong after her death, and I don't know if it actually is strength so much as just rolling with the punches. I still randomly think about her, about how I can't ask her things anymore, or about how I bought that cyan PLA because I thought she'd like the color and I never got to make her anything with it. For a while, I couldn't stop thinking about how I found her, something which has, fortunately, mostly passed. Maybe one day, I'll figure out how to unpack all this. Right now, I guess I'm just taking things one day at a time.

This is turning out to be an anime blog more than anything else, but that's okay, I do watch a lot of anime and honestly, it might be fun to check in at the end of each season. It's certainly a guaranteed post every quarter. I just checked, and my last post was in February. Oof, and I was doing so well at the beginning of this year.

So here's how this will work. First, I'll list the seasonals I've been watching that have ended with my thoughts, then the seasonals that are continuing (there are effectively none this season, but when that happens, it'll go after), then the status of the classic shows I've been watching, then I'll talk about next season's shows, then we'll have a life update at the end. If I'm going to do this every quarter, might as well also make it a general check-in.

Completed Seasonals

Sousou no Frieren S2: I loved the first season, and I still love the second season. Frieren was at its weakest last season when it was trying to be an action show, and this season's action wasn't exactly super strong, but it didn't bother me nearly as much as the demon diplomacy arc from last season. Other than that, it was just more of a thoughtful, fun, gorgeously animated, and at times hilarious show.

Jujutsu Kaisen S3: Yet another excellent season. Apparently, people hated this arc in the manga. If this adaptation were any less premium, I probably would've hated it, too. There's a lot of exposition dumping in this one. There was even an entire episode where they literally stand around in a white room talking about the rules of the Culling Game. At least in the anime, they had pretty motion graphics and good sound design to keep your eyes from rolling out of your head. I can't imagine the pain of reading this in a manga.

Sentenced to Be a Hero: This show was a lot of fun, with really good animation and a cool, super interesting premise. The title is something I'd like to compliment, it's very striking, although I can tell the Japanese title is very different. I think I said in my last post about this season, I could see the protag going down a very dark (and brooding) path, but halfway through the series, he does change a little. Thus far, while I wouldn't call the show feminist, it at least doesn't get grossly sexualized with its main female characters, which is something I was kinda dreading. My favorite character was the guy who thought he was king, he was hilarious and I loved how he actually kinda got a following.

Oshi no Ko S3: This show has been consistently pretty great. In the last episode, the main characters finally put two and two together, and the reveal was deeply, deeply touching, but then the girl was like, "Doctor, I haven't forgotten that you promised to marry me when I turned 16, and I'm 16 now!" I can't even with this. I love this show but hot damn. I know in the manga they kissed and everybody hated that. I don't know when that happens, but in the anime, it didn't happen here. Maybe we'll get lucky and they decided to tone that down? I'd hate to see this one crash and burn.

You and I are Polar Opposites: This show was so funny and adorable! Just a lot of fun to watch, great animation, and probably my favorite OP of the season. The characters are so much fun, my favorite was Taira and his dynamic with Azuma. Just a good time all around.

Journal with Witch: Possibly my fave of the season, and deffo my fave out of the four originals I saw this season. At the start of the season, I compared this show to Bunny Drop, but they're very different shows to be sure. The production values are just right for the scale of this show. It never looks bad, although it never looks super extravagant, either, but it's a gorgeous little story about a girl trying to find her way after suffering the loss of her parents with an aunt who's trying to figure out how to handle what's happened. Highly, highly recommended.

My Hero Academia: Vigilantes S2: Speaking of shows crashing and burning, holy fuck, what happened here? Last season was pretty good and I was looking forward to seeing more of these characters. Well, guess I'll go fuck myself, because this season isn't about the main three characters. It concerns itself way more with characters from the main show. Right in the middle of a 12 episode season, they devote three episodes to Eraserhead's backstory. This could've been an OVA, or at least contained to one episode. Then, when we finally get back to the new characters, we find out that Captain Celebrity isn't actually a womanizer who cheated on his wife, he's just easily misunderstood! Way to make the character significantly less interesting, assholes. Maybe I should've dropped this one, except last episode was actually super fucking cool because Knuckle Duster finally came back into the story and had a really kickass fight with this season's villain, where it's revealed the villain has Knuckle Duster's stolen quirk and idolizes his old persona! THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE WHOLE SEASON! What were they thinking? There's technically one more episode left, but I don't think it'll change my mind. I doubt I'll return if there's another season. EDIT: Before I completed this post, I watched the last episode, and yeah, I was right. I did not change my mind at all, and I'm even more convinced I should just skip next season if it even happens at all. It's very clear this show has no faith in its cast, so why should I bother?

Champignon Witch: I dropped this one, unfortunately. In a lot of ways, I really did appreciate what this show was trying to do, at least, but it was so horribly let down by its poor production values. The reason I dropped it is because I was really far behind, like four episodes behind, and I finally thought, you know, if I'm having this hard of a time keeping up with this show, do I really need to keep watching it?

To Your Eternity S3: Speaking of being behind, I'm still playing catch-up with this one because they took a two week hiatus and I forgot about it when it came back. Completely ruined my rhythm. This show's production really suffered after they switched studios. This season definitely looks at least a little better than the second, but it's still not great compared to the first. I still loved the story in the second season, though, but I nearly dropped it this season because holy shit, did I hate this one character that they really focused on earlier on in the season. I did manage to get past that, and a lot of people have said this is the manga's worst arc, so I'd like to try and stick with this one. You know, I just realized, this is kind of the opposite situation of Jujutsu Kaisen. That show is a premium adaptation that elevated its source material's worst arc so that even the worst parts are at least bearable. This show is definitely not a premium adaptation and its worst arc is probably just as painful as its manga counterpart. Again, even though I'm behind, there's still a couple weeks left on this one, but I don't think it'll change my mind.

Continuing Shows

Beasters S4: Remember how I said this category would be empty this time? I lied. Netfux decided to be bastards and just kinda randomly drop the episode all at once. Yeah, this is kinda what they do, but they're still bastards. Also, I'm calling it season four, fuck you. I'm only two episodes in, but I hope to finish this one in the time between seasons. I might write something about the whole series when I'm done, but I really do love this show. The show's MAL score is pretty low compared to previous seasons, so I guess a lot of folks didn't like the ending, not that MAL scores really matter that much.

Next Season

Dr. Stone: Science Future P3: Consistency is for viscous substances. Really looking forward to the ending to this series! Truthfully, I think this series kinda peaked in the New World season, but I still really like it and I'm happy to see it through to the end.

Witch Hat Atelier: I've heard so many good things about this manga, but I just can't get myself to read manga for some reason. What little I have seen of it looks gorgeous, and from the previews I've seen, this looks like it'll be a premium adaptation. Probably gonna adore this one.

Akane-banashi: I actually don't know much about this, I just saw somebody raving about the manga on Discord and decided on a whim to add it to my PTW as I was looking at the seasonal charts just now. The studio doesn't seem to have a great track record judging by the MAL score, but I hope I'll enjoy this one.

I don't know if I'll pick up more shows later or not, nothing else is really jumping out at me from the charts, but that's fine, more time for classics! Speaking of...

Classic shows

Turn A Gundam: Still following, still really good! I'm currently past episode 18.

Kyousou Giga: I watched one episode, and got so caught in playing catch-up I never got around to watching the rest. I hope to finish this one alongside Beastars before the spring season goes into full swing. If I end up sticking to just the three shows listed above, I should have plenty of time even if I can't finish it before that, I hope, especially because I really liked the first episode!

Digimon Adventure: I finally got around to watching this one with my friend. We've been watching five episodes at a time and we've got 15 episodes under our belt. It's definitely a baby anime, but in the same vein as live action Sonic rather than Animal Mechanicals or something. It's alright, but I probably wouldn't watch it alone, and I honestly have a lot less nostalgia for it than I thought.

The Rest of My Life

I'm finally getting back into 3D printing after a bit of a hiatus. The unfortunate thing is I was also supposed to get into electronics and soldering and stuff along with that, but never did, so the things to do with it outside of that often don't interest me. Like, I don't play TTRPGs (unfortunately), I don't need a dice tower. Something I've been slowly printing is a Cray-1 model. I think I have to reprint the cable panels, I thought translucent blue would look cool, but it doesn't stand out against the black background. I'll have to just use regular blue. I also need to clean up the grill fins, I think I can just go at it with a craft knife.

I also recently got a traveler's notebook! I got the passport size one from a company called Wanderings that came with three blank notebook inserts, a craft folder insert, a plastic card holder and zip bag insert, a rollerball pen with pen loop clip, and a binder clip. Not sure what people use the binder clip for, but the pen loop clip ain't great. It slides around and creates impressions on things around it. I decided to take matters into my own hands and design a sort of pen loop card that goes into the craft folder insert. There's like a little slot in the folder flaps you can shove cards in. I designed it so I could sew some elastic band to it and 3D printed it in PLA. I don't know why I thought I could sew, but that didn't exactly pan out for several reasons. First of all, as you may have inferred, I can't sew. Second issue, I made the holes in the card that I was supposed to use to sew the elastic to the card too small. I could poke through them with an awl to make them bigger, but after realizing I couldn't figure out sewing, I decided to improvize and just duct taped the band to the card. It actually works, though, that's the pen loop I'm using right now. I also wish it came with more than just blank notebooks, because I'm certainly not an artist, I need line ruled, or at least dot ruled, or even graph ruled. Something to keep my text straight.

Speaking of awls and notebooks, I'm slowly getting into book binding, starting with making pocket notebooks for my traveler's notebook using cardboard from pop can boxes and paper from old spiral bound notebooks I had laying around. Side note, fuck spiral bound notebooks, I suffered all through school with them when I should've asked for composition notebooks. Has anybody else had trouble with these fucking things having their metal spirals get bent and coming undone, and not just getting undone, getting tangled with your other shitty spiral bound notebooks? Fucking hate that shit. Anyway, I got a kit with some waxed thread, a metal ruler, an awl, some bone folders, and some sewing needles for less than nine bucks on Amazon. Kinda regret that because it came with a bunch of other stupid bullshit I don't need, but it's no biggie. I also printed out a book binding jig that has a lot more holes than I need, I only poke three holes to make these, but might be more useful as I get deeper into this rabbit hole. It's good I'm making my own notebooks as well, because I thought this traveler's notebook was Field Notes size (3.5 x 5.5 inches), but it's not, it's half an inch shorter. Not a fan of Field Notes, never used them, but I'm not paying that much for a pocket notebook, especially when a WalMart Jot and Pen notebook of the same size is 77 cents and is stitch bound rather than staple bound. Maybe the paper's better quality, but I doubt it. In any case, those don't fit. I bought a whole bunch off Amazon that are the right size, but they suck. The paper has major ghosting with the pen that came with it. The notebook paper I'm using isn't much better, but I already have it. Maybe someday, I'll buy higher quality paper or something. For now, I'm having fun making these little guys. I'll just keep the ones I bought in case I run out of the ones I make and don't have the time or energy to make new ones.

In terms of writing, if you've talked to me lately, you've probably noticed I keep bringing up that story about James Joyce despairing because he only wrote two lines that day and his friend telling him it was better than yesterday. I started two new projects because not only do I have video game ADHD, I also have writing project ADHD. I think it's due to the fact I have regular ADHD.

Lately, I've been involved in the Golden Butterflies Podcast, a podcast for the artist collective Discord I'm in. I'll have to make a separate post for that, but so far, I'm only in the (third) introductory episode. I'll be hosting an episode on VTubers that I think will be recorded this coming Sunday, so look forward to that.

Overall, this anime season has been excellent and I hope for even more good shows the rest of the year. I also hope to actually finish some projects at some point. We'll see.

I'll start by saying the title is a little dishonest. Sorry. It's more correct to say Zootopia isn't just about race, but that's not as eye-catching. I guess that means I'm admitting to clickbaiting you.

Lately, I've been seeing a lot of people say that Zootopia has a bad message, that the themes regarding race are done very poorly. I don't necessarily think these people are entirely wrong, and I definitely don't think they're evil or anything, but I do think their view is a little too narrow. The big complaint with the "race metaphor" is, of course, that black people didn't use to eat white people, or white people didn't eat black people, or whatever. The problem with this is twofold.

First up, a lot of works do actually fuck this up, and way worse than Zootopia could possibly fuck it up. For one particularly famous example, let's take X-Men. X-Men is a metaphor for being queer. The trouble is no queer person can explode you with their mind, much to our collective chagrin. You can see why people might want to control mutants, or even eliminate them. Bigots in real life do not have a good reason to do this.

Second, people seem to take broader metaphors to mean just the first thing to come to mind. I can illustrate this more easily with my own work. A while back, I wrote a visual novel called Luna, a Story That Has Nothing To Do With Dogs, So Maybe Don't Play It if You Want Something About Dogs. In that story (spoilers), a(n older) character literally shoves something down another (younger) character's throat. Somebody I showed it to said it was a metaphor about gay kids and their parents, and they weren't wrong, but that was a little narrow. It was more broadly about kids getting the older generation's ideologies and expectations pushed on them, getting them shoved down their throats, as it were. So it wasn't just about gay kids, it was also about gay kids. For another more recent example, while I haven't had anybody say it was just about AI, I can see somebody saying that about You Die in the Game, You Die in Real Life. It is sort of about AI, but it's more broadly about the stupidity and horrors of Silicon Valley's startup culture. I mean, the name of the company is Virtcero, paralleling the IRL startup Juicero. Someone could just as easily come to the conclusion it's about Waymo, and they wouldn't be wrong about that, either.

This brings us to what I'm trying to say about Zootopia. It's not just about race. It's about prejudice, and yeah, I know, that does include racial prejudice. The thing is, I don't think it's trying to one to one match onto any real life race relations. After all, who are the predators supposed to be in this metaphor? Black people? That does make some sense, black people are often stereotyped to be angry and violent. Or you could be really bad faith and say it's actually white people, and actually, the filmmakers are saying white supremacy isn't really a thing anymore. In fact, I think this interpretation makes more sense. White people used to eat (colonize and enslave) us, but that's in the past, we're all friends now except those pesky agitators... Obviously, this reading reflects very poorly on the creators, and I definitely don't think that's what they were going for.

The fact is, the predator/prey divide doesn't exist in our world, much like the human/mutant divide in X-Men doesn't exist in real life. Unlike in X-Men, however, predators and prey are effectively on an even playing field, outside of the predators having sharp teeth and claws. It averages out, though, because prey animals have their own defenses. Zebras, gazelles, and elephants all have size and muscle mass, for example. Also, in the movie, it seems like neither predators nor prey are actually minorities. I don't exactly have Zootopia's demographic data in hand, but they don't exactly say predators are minorities in the movie that I can remember. You can say that makes this metaphor a bit milquetoast, but that's not really the criticism I hear all the time and isn't what I'm responding to.

Where does that leave us? I don't know, man. Zootopia is a family comedy in which a villain uses old prejudices to pit one group against another. Does the distinction between "Zootopia is about racism" and "Zootopia is about prejudice" really matter that much? I mean, I guess it matters as much as saying Zootopia botched its race metaphor. I don't think anybody who might disagree with me on this is stupid or anything. It's just something that nobody was challenging and I wanted to say something about it.

A while back, I was in a conversation on Discord about the current US political situation and someone mentioned wanting to move to another country. I said that nowhere is safe from the Trump administration and I was going to elaborate, but then somebody called me a doomer and a couple other people got in on it. This made me feel a little dogpiled, so I didn't say anything else. I wasn't trying to be doomer, but maybe I should've just said everything I wanted in one message. I usually do precisely because it leads to misunderstandings.

But it's true. Nowhere is safe. After the election, people thought blue states would be safe, and they're clearly not. Foreign countries aren't safe, the kidnapping of Maduro and Trump's constant threats towards Greenland and Canada show that much. On top of all that, all across the world, nuclear arsenals are still on a hair trigger. If things heat up, there's a very good chance that everything will be destroyed.

Now you might be wondering, how the Hell am I not engaging in doomerism when I say that?

Because we're winning. It might not seem like it. ICE, Trump's personal army, is terorizing the country, with Minnesota as its current focus. He's trying to rig the midterms to avoid impeachment. The economy is taking a nosedive, propped up by a tech industry obsessed with keeping the LLM bubble from popping, even as it's rapidly failing. Bad things are happening all over, and the world seems a darker, crueler place.

But guess what? Nobody is taking this lying down. Even after the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, I've seen plenty of videos of people standing up to ICE, literally getting up in front of their vehicles and shouting at them. Just a little bit ago, I saw a video from LA where people were blocking them in a building by putting garbage in front of the entrances. The rest of NATO is gearing up for a fight that Trump will almost certainly back down from. Trump is so toxic, that he's been stalling other fascist movements. Even his attempts to rig the midterms are failing.

We're not out of the woods yet. We need to keep fighting, and we also have to think about the future. Once Trump is gone, we will have to accept that things won't go back to the way they were, nor should they. The US will need to become a better citizen of the world, and make amends not just for Trump's actions, but for countless other transgressions against the world. It will be hard to commit to this, the people who support Trump will still exist after he's gone, but it's worth working towards. If we all play our cards right, this may end up healthier for the world, anyway. No single country should have this much power.

So yes, I stand by my statement. Nowhere is safe from Trump. This isn't a fight we can run away from, but it is a fight we can win.

So I was talking on Discord with someone and suggested they infodumped about sumo wrestling on a blog (don't ask). They said they were interested in making a Neocities, but that it was an intimidating project they were worried they couldn't do. I implore that person, and anybody who happens upon this post, that if I can do this, you can, too! I realize I'm not on the level of complete normie when it comes to tech, but I'm also definitely not a technical person. The most code I know is a small amount of HTML, a smaller amount of CSS, and a tiny, tiny amount of Javascript. Still, I could figure out Strawberry Starter, and even figure out enough raw CSS and HTML to modify a webpage generator's output to my liking.

This post will be divided into three sections: A history of how I published to the web, then a description of my current workflow, and finally, some advice for people who want to make their own site with Neocities or possibly even other web hosts.

A Brief Account of My History with Web Publishing

My first experience publishing my writing online was DeviantART. That, or it was Blogger. DeviantART was where I posted fiction, and the Blogger site was a politics blog. The DA is still up, but I don't suggest looking at it, the first thing I posted was in 2009, when I was in high school. It's all juvenile now. The Blogger site was hidden a long time ago, never to return. While I've never been an outright right winger, I know for a fact I said some really shitty things on that blog that I'm deeply ashamed of and I don't want anybody else to read. For the Blogger site, I just wrote using the site's built-in tools. As for DeviantART, I wrote my stories in WordPad and copied and pasted them over. Super simple stuff.

In 2011, I got myself a Tumblr. Again, there, I just used the site's built-in editor for posts. Initially, it was used for shitposts, but I soon deviated from that. Again, I ask, please do not go through my old Tumblr posts, or if you do, please try to understand I am a very different person now. I posted on Tumblr from 2011 to, well, I recently posted an obit for my cat, but other than that, I think I mostly stopped posting after the porn ban. A good chunk of that era, I was involved with Gamergate, something else I am deeply ashamed of. I probably said a bunch of other heinous shit there I can't even remember. Just be kind to me, please. During this time, I was still posting to DeviantART up into my university days.

In the late 2000's and early 2010's, I was super into Newgrounds. For many, many years, they said they planned to have a section of the site called NG Lit, which would've been lit if it had ever been released. As far as I could tell, there hasn't been much talk of NG Lit for a very, very long time. A shame, I would've loved to have posted my work there.

At some point in 2013, 2014, something like that, I was made aware of Twine. Twine is a tool for making hyperlink-based interactive fiction. Twine's output is an HTML file, so you can put your Twine games anywhere that allows you to host HTML. For me, that was Dropbox, which allowed hosting of HTML files as webpages. There came a time that Dropbox stopped supporting this, though I can't find when. I can't remember how I happened upon Neocities exactly, but it was most likely because I was looking for how to publish my Twines again.

In 2017, I made the first version of my Neocities, which itself used Twine. I realized pretty quickly this was a bad idea. It was a pain to update it whenever I wanted to post something. I very quickly moved the whole site to plain HTML. This second version of the site is still preserved if you follow a link labelled Old Rodania or Old Site or something like that. Eventually, editing and posting to the site by hand making every HTML page really got to me, too. So, eventually, I started dabbling in static site generators.

I first became aware of SSGs from Bryan Lunduke, who talked about Hugo. He also turned me onto WordGrinder and was one of the people who made me realize how cool Linux was, so unfortunately, I owe a lot to him. Unfortunately because he turned out to be a pretty horrible right wing nutjob. Regardless, I found out about Hugo a long time before I actually started using it, which ended up being in 2023.

If you look at the first few posts on this blog, you'll know what happened, but here's the gist. I thought I got Hugo working great, turned out I didn't actually, I tried a bunch of other SSGs but they were all too confusing to operate, and finally, I settled on Publii. Publii worked for a while, but then I came to a point where Neocities CLI, which I was using to upload to the site, stopped working for me. It was also a pain to use between multiple PCs. Eventually, after trying to get Neocities CLI to work and then looking for alternatives to Neocities CLI, Publii, and even Neocities itself, I found Strawberry Starter.

Again, full story in a previous post, so here's the CliffsNotes. Strawberry Starter is based on 11ty, another SSG, which I think I even looked at when I was looking for alternatives to Hugo. Still, the extremely well-written documentation allowed me to make something I'm quite happy with.

I didn't include social media like Twitter or Mastodon in this post, nor did I talk much about software I used for my actual writing, as I feel like those are different stories entirely. Drop me a line if you'd like to know more about that.

My Workflow Today

When I want to work on something, I start out by going to a folder called ppr (Personal Project Repository) and opening a terminal there (done by right clicking in my file manager and clicking whatever the option is listed as, something like open in terminal). I use Git to sync to a website called Codeberg and between computers, so I do a quick git pull command to make sure I'm up to date.

The next step varies. If I'm working on an actual story, I go to my writing folder. If it's a blog post, I go to my blog folder. If I'm on my Steam Deck, I have to do an extra step. Steam OS is an immutable operating system, so if a software isn't already built in or available as a Flatpak, I have to use a program called Distrobox to make a virtual environment to use it. These days, Distrobox is built into Steam OS and already integrated so that it uses the same file system as the Steam Deck, so I don't have to futz with trying to find my files after I exit. I simply run distrobox enter (name of virtual machine) and off I go. I need to do this so that I can use WordGrinder and NPM for Strawberry Starter. If you're on something not immutable, you don't have to worry about this.

I then open up WordGrinder and work on whatever project I decided to work on, and save it as a WordGrinder project (.wg) file. When I'm ready to post, I export the document as a Markdown (.md) file. If I've exported to Markdown, I move the Markdown file over to the src/posts folder in the Strawberry Starter directory. Here, I add the front matter to the top of the file, which looks like this:

    ---
    title: (title here)
    date: yyyy-mm-dd
    tags:
    - one tag
    - two tags
    ---

Once I do that, I can use Strawberry Starter to preview my changes if I really want to, which is more useful for when I'm modifying the site itself than when I'm making a blog post. To do this, I just run the command npm run dev and go to localhost:1234 in my web browser. When I'm satisfied with what I see, I kill the web server with control+c (if applicable) and run npm run upload to both build the site and upload to Neocities with one command. If you're not using Neocities or you want to upload it by hand for whatever reason, you can just use npm run build to build the site so you can upload it wherever. I personally upload into a folder on my site, which allows me to have the blog as a separate section.

After I've done all this, or even if I've just made changes, I exit the VM (if applicable) and run three more commands:

    git add .
    git commit -am "Whatever I want the commit message to say"
    git push

I run git add . to add any files I've created to the Git tracker. The period basically means add all new files, but you can also type --all. git commit commits the changes. -am has two purposes. The a is so that all changes I made to everything in the repo are commited, and the m is to make a commit message, which can be whatever I want. I'm pretty sure one of them is literally, "THIS BETTER FUCKING WORK OR I'M THROWING MY COMPUTER OUT THE WINDOW."

For other pages on my Neocities, I used a webpage generator and pretty heavily modified the output. The way the generator outputs the page, it bundles the CSS and the HTML into the same document. I have a test page on my site which is the original bundled file that I modify when I want to make changes. I put the CSS in its own file and simply copy and paste the boilerplate HTML when I want to make a new one. It's not so bad to modify the CSS, I just have to copy the changes to one file, but if I change the boilerplate HTML, I have to make sure I modify every page that uses it. I'm pretty sure I've got it how I want it now, though, and any further pages I make will be for other projects which will either have unique pages or will not be linked in the navbar, which is the biggest issue.

Some Advice and Other Info

So first things first, probably don't use Git to sync your shit. I'm sure there's a better way to do this. I'm not a programmer and this is the only thing I've ever used Git for, so setting it up and figuring out how to use it was very frustrating. Why am I using it? Well, one, sunk cost fallacy, two, I mean, it works now, I guess. Technically, I don't think you're supposed to use Codeberg for what I'm using it for, but shhh, don't tell them. Why did I start using Git? Well, it's supposed to track all your changes and I can use it from the same terminal I run Wordgrinder in. This was bullshit because I don't even know enough to look at what changes I made and being able to stay in the terminal isn't worth it. I'm just a stubborn idiot who always has to do things the hardest way possible, overthinks everything, and always gets in his own way. But hey, you're the same way, right? That's why you're trying to use Neocities for your blog and not Wordpress or something.

Anyway, as for Wordgrinder, as much as I love this software and will sing its praises to anyone who will listen and everyone who won't listen, you don't have to use it. Strawberry Starter uses Markdown for its posts, so you can use any old software that puts out a Markdown file, including a basic text editor. Markdown itself is pretty easy as far as markup languages go and I'm pretty sure a good chunk of Markdown editors are WYSIWYG anyway. Another interesting note is that HTML is okay to put into your Markdown files as well!

As I mentioned, Strawberry Starter is based on 11ty. I looked at the documentation for 11ty itself while I was learning Strawberry Starter and it seems kinda unwieldy. A lot of stuff is just not set up for you, obviously because they want to give you as much freedom to make whatever you want as possible. This is why Strawberry Starter is a good choice over 11ty. If you want a blog in the style that it's going for, you can just use it.

I didn't get into setting up Strawberry Starter because you should really just use the official documentation for that. Seriously, it's great! It explains everything better than I ever could.

In terms of looks, Strawberry Starter has nine themes out of the box, which you can modify to your heart's content, or you can create your own. I personally use the contrast theme, following that philopsphy I mentioned previously of making things readable and simple. I know the rest of the site doesn't really follow that, but for the library, I want to have a focus on the text.

If you have issues, make sure you're covering stupid mistakes, like making sure you're formatting your front matter correctly. I had this issue a few times trying to post. Just little things like getting the date format wrong or forgetting a space somewhere. If you do happen to make one of these stupid mistakes, don't worry, it happens! What matters is that you created something cool.

So I just finished Bunny Drop, the first of four shows I wanted to for sure watch this year. I'm also once again descending into madness with anime this season, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Bunny Drop starts out with a guy named Daikichi going to his grandpa's funeral and finding out he had a six-year-old daughter named Rin. After the funeral, everybody asks the obvious question of what to do with her. Nobody wants to take her in and when they start talking about putting her in a care facility, Daikichi says, "Screw you guys, I'll take her!"

I want to say, I genuinely love this show, but while there is some very light drama, there's not nearly as much as the premise might imply. Most of Daikichi's family is not seen again after this, but he does visit his parents with Rin multiple times and both Daikichi and Rin seem to be on good terms with them. This after the first episode paints them pretty negatively. There's also a plot thread with Rin's mother that doesn't end super satisfyingly. Speaking of plot threads that don't end satisfyingly, Daikichi seems to have a thing with a fellow single parent, Yukari, but we don't get to see them have a relationship. This show could really use an epilogue or something...

Yes, yes, elephant in the room, the manga has an epilogue that is basically the worst thing ever. If you've somehow never heard, in the manga's epilogue, Daikichi and Rin get married. Yes, really. Somehow, the mangaka thought having Daikichi do a Woody Allen with Rin was a good idea, except not only is she basically his daughter, she's also his great aunt. Fucking ew. Literally nobody liked this, and the anime producers wisely decided not to adapt it. It all seems even more insane after watching the show because, like I said, Daikichi really seemed to have a thing for that Yukari lady.

All that aside, again, I really loved this show. It doesn't go for the obvious drama, but it's not that kind of show. It's a cute little slice of life show, and that's fine. As a cute slice of life show, it's a damn good one and I can highly recommend it. At only 11 episodes, it definitely doesn't overstay its welcome, either.

The next show on my list that I'm going to watch is Kyousou Giga. I've already watched the first episode and found it very intriguing! My kind of weird, as they say.

Unfortunately, I seem to have gone off the deep end, as not only am I picking up Kyousou Giga, I am also picking up four seasonals. This will bring my total number of currently watching shows to 11, and I'm still playing catch-up with three of them! The last time I watched this many shows was in spring of 2021 and it kinda burned me out a little, as I said in my post about my anime watching habits. I'm hoping that doesn't happen this time, but I think I've got a better roster of shows this time around. Well, that, and Kyousou Giga won't be week to week, so I won't have 11 shows for long. Beastars will also drop later this season, hopefully after I've finished Kyousou Giga. Out of these 11 shows, two are classics (Turn A Gundam and Kyousou Giga, of course), five are sequels (and one of those sequels is a leftover from last season!), and the four I'm picking up are originals.

First up is Journal with Witch. I think I'll really, really like this one. In fact, I've already thoroughly enjoyed the two episodes I've watched! The premise is somewhat similar to Bunny Drop, actually. A girl's parents die in a car wreck, and her aunt takes her in because, again, the rest of her family sucks. It's definitely a departure from the iyashikei sweetness of Bunny Drop, so if you were disappointed by that show or just want a show that seems like it'll follow the natural questions of the premise better, try this one.

The next show I picked up is Sentenced to be a Hero. I actually ended up watching all three episodes that were out for this one. The first episode was excellent, but then by the second, I realized that the MC was basically like Kirito, or Ayato from The Asterisk War. He's just this edgy guy, but he actually cares a lot, but like, these two sides are in complete conflict with each other. I know the setting itself is edgy, and this isn't the worst example I've heard tell of, but maybe they'll remedy this somehow. Still, I liked it enough I watched all that was available in one sitting. I can see this one either going really well or falling off hard, we'll see.

You and I are Polar Opposites, I only watched one episode of. In fact, I almost didn't pick this one up at all, but I'm glad I did. Excellent first episode of this adorable and hilarious romantic comedy, and I can't wait to watch more.

Finally, I tried Champignon Witch. This show is, unfortunately, let down by its poor production values. In the OP, you can see an outline on the titular witch where they failed to properly composite the image. This is the OP, we're going to see it every episode, you need to get it right! I didn't see any other such errors in the rest of the first episode, but again, the show just isn't animated super well. It's not ugly, though! The character designs are super cute, and the backgrounds are pretty. What I really liked about the show is that it feels like a fairy tale. There's a sense of melancholy and sadness here that I like. I look forward to getting caught up on this one.

I really shouldn't be afraid to try new shows. The reason I was so late on these series is because I waited until Mother's Basement put out his Ones to Watch. I already knew Sentenced to be a Hero looked really cool, why did I need old Geoffy to tell me to watch it? I was already interested in Champignon Witch, why didn't I just start watching it? I wouldn't have watched Journal with Witch on my own, nor would I have watched You and I are Polar Opposites without Geoff's recommendation, but still, it would've saved me two shows worth of catching up. From now on, I think I'll start more shows on my own.

So earlier, someone on Discord shared a list called Decentralize and Clean Uo Your Life! I had several problems with this list. To be clear, I don't have a problem with the person who shared this or even the person who posted this to Tumblr initially, I just don't think it's a great list. Each point that follows was copied and pasted from the Tumblr post exactly. I won't say who posted it, considering we're not even on Tumblr and I don't want this person to catch any flak from this if it somehow breaks containment. There were several links throughout the post, which I have not preserved. I've also deleted any lines that I didn't have anything to say about.

• use overdrive, libby, hoopla, cloudlibrary, and kanopy instead of amazon and audible.

So first of all, Overdrive and Libby are basically the same thing, Libby is just, from what I can tell, the app you use to access the Overdrive service. Kanopy also seems to be under the Overdrive umbrella, which I didn't know before. I never used CloudLibrary because my library doesn't use it. Hoopla was used by my library previously, but they seem to have dropped that one in favor of Kanopy. I haven't used either all that much, but I can tell you Libby is an awesome service, and one of the reasons I chose Kobo as my ereader - Kobo and Overdrive/Libby are very tightly integrated.

There is one thing you should know. The reason Kobo and Overdrive/Libby are so intertwined is because they're owned by the same corporation, Rakuten. Overdrive/Libby being a private company and having control over what should be a public good isn't exactly desirable. I think this situation sucks and I wish it were better, but it is what it is, so for now, there's no point in missing out on this service because of that.

• use firefox instead of chrome or opera (both are made with chromium, which blocks functionality for ad-blockers. firefox isn't based on chromium).

This one is mostly good advice, with the caveat that Mozilla's leadership is the fucking worst and are currently shoving AI into every one of Firefox's orifices. This is just the latest in a string of terrible decisions and mismanagements. If this bothers you, you can instead try forks such as Waterfox, Librewolf, or Floorp. Unfortunately, these forks are very dependent on Firefox, so if something happens to Firefox, these projects are kinda just screwed.

• get rid of bloatware

This point had a link for each word, one was to a site telling you what to install, one was to a bulk uninstall utility, and two were to debloat scripts on Github. If you know me, you know what I'm going to say next. Why go to the trouble of debloating Windows when Linux is right there? Look, I know you probably think that's an unreasonable ask for whatever reason, but this list is about decentralizing and cleaning up your life, and I'm assuming getting out from under the thumb of massive tech companies. Surely somebody interested in such a list would be willing to consider Linux. I'm sure others would have similar arguments for why they can't switch away from Chrome or Microsoft Office. Speaking of...

• use libreoffice instead of microsoft office suite

Hey, the author knew to use LibreOffice instead of OpenOffice! Hell yeah!

Of course, I rarely use LibreOffice these days. Not a knock agaisnt it, it's excellent software, but I do all my writing in WordGrinder, which I highly recommend.

• use trakt or letterboxd instead of imdb.
• use storygraph instead of goodreads.

Two points for the cost of one! IMDB is awful these days, and Goodreads is owned by Amazon, but Trakt, Letterboxd, and Storygraph aren't exactly decentralized services. Idon't say this to discourage anybody from using them, but the fact is these sites are not immune to enshittification.

• use ground news to read unbiased news and find blind spots in news stories.

I never used Ground News, but I'm suspicious of YouTube sponsorships by default. They may not always be scams, but they're almost never worth it, in my opinion. Somebody replying to the person who shared this post said that Ground News doesn't aggregate from independent journalists or some of the other outlets she follows, but again, I never used it. One good resource I can point to is a site called Media Bias Fact Check. This site doesn't do all the same things Ground News does, it doesn't aggregate news stories for example, but it's a good source of info on whatever biases an outlet may have.

• make youtube bearable by using mtube, newpipe, or the unhook extension on chrome, firefox, or microsoft edge

Now hold on, you just said to switch away from Chrome and Chromium-based browsers! To be clear, Microsoft Edge is also Chromium.

While I can't vouch for MTube or the Unhook extension, NewPipe is a great Android app that I personally use all the time. Fun fact, Firefox on Android can use extensions, so you can install uBlock Origin on Firefox for Android and it even works on the YouTube mobile site!

One other cool piece of software is yt-dlp, which can download videos not just from YouTube, but from most anywhere on the Web.

• use search for a cause or ecosia to support the environment instead of google

I'm not sure why you're telling people to use Ecosia, they use Google and Bing results. Search for a Cause uses Yahoo results.

• use flashpoint to play archived online flash games

Flashpoint is a great project (I highly recommend Mud and Blood 2), but why is it on this list?

• use pdf24 (available online or as a desktop app) instead of adobe

I've never used PDF24, and maybe some of their features are useful, but there are plenty of FOSS document viewers out there if you just need a viewer.

• use thunderbird, mailfence, countermail, edison mail, tuta, or proton mail instead of gmail

Thunderbird and Edison are email clients, the rest are email providers. The difference is the client is what you use to read the email, and the provider provides the email service on the backend. While I am Gmail trash and so don't really use Thunderbird, I would choose it over Edison since it's FOSS. I can't speak to the quality of the providers. Point is, if you just downloaded Thunderbird, you'd still have to sign up for an account somewhere. You can even use Thunderbird with Gmail if you want.

I also mention Thunderbird has announced they would offer an email provider service, but that's not available yet.

• use pixelfed instead of instagram or meta

I can't believe this person only mentioned Pixelfed. I could write an entire article on the Fediverse and how cool it is, but in short, the Fediverse is composed of a whole bunch of instances of various services that all use ActivityPub to talk to each other. One of the most prominent Fediverse services is MAstodon. Not only can anybody set up their own Mastodon instance and have it talk with other instances, a Mastodon instance can talk with other ActiityPub-based services, only one of which is Pixelfed! There's also a YouTube clone called PeerTube. You can follow a PeerTube account from a Mastodon instance, and when they post videos, the videos will show up in your feed. Something else really neat is that comments on that video will show up as a reply thread on Mastodon, and if you post in that reply thread on MAstodon, it'll show up as a comment on PeerTube!

It's sad that the author only mentions Pixelfed and not, well, all that, because this is the only truly decentralized thing on this list.

• se NCH suite for free software like a file converter, image editor, video editors, pdf editor, etc.

I don't know why this person is recommending NCH Software's products. When I checked, while they do have an option to download each program, you also have the option to pay for it? Not sure if the free downloads are trials or what. In addition, I actually found a Reddit thread detailing some shady practices from this company. I haven't verified these claims, but skimming through the list, I'm pretty sure there are way better alternatives for free, and a lot of those options are FOSS to boot. I don't want to say that this list was a cynical attempt at marketing for NCH Software, but this is really weird and I never heard of this company before this.

To conclude, list bad, use Linux and get on the Fedi.

I said in my previous post I'd have to make a post about my anime watching habits. Well, here I am, I guess.

In my childhood, I watched anime like Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z. It was a time in my life where I didn't even realize it was anime. Hell, when I first read Harry Potter, I didn't even realize the books were set in England. In fact, being an autistic kid with ADHD, for a good chunk of my childhood, I wasn't even cognizant of when new episodes came out, so I think I missed a lot. By the time I was old enough to know what anime was, I was in middle school and in the middle of a phase where I thought anime (and animation in general) was dumb and for babies. In high school, I softened a little bit to thinking anime just wasn't for me, but I was still resistant to watching it. Then, in 2011, after I had graduated high school, a friend of mine told me I needed to watch Puella Magi Madoka Magica.

Madoka Magica was the first crack in the dam. Even then, I was resistant to watching more anime. I convinced myself I just liked magical girl shows. I would binge shows like Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura at this point, at night, on my porch, because I was a hopeless romantic I guess. At the same time, I was starting to be more open to watching shows like Adventure Time, so this era was marked by a lot of me getting over myself. However, in 2013, the same friend who showed me Madoka Magica recommended Attack on Titan. I fell in love with that show, and still love it to this day. Yes, despite the weak ending. It was so good, in fact, that I actually started reading the manga after there was no second season in sight. In that time, I also saw the two Little Witch Academia OVAs and got really excited for the prospect of a show based on them. Yet, still, throughout university, I wasn't really into anime.

Come 2016, I had just left university and was looking for my first job. That April, I was excited to watch the first season of the Ace Attorney anime adaptation. This was the first anime I had watched while it was airing from the start. Madoka Magica finished by the time I saw it, and I started AOT seven episodes in. Same with Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress that season, which I started eight episodes in. Eventually, up through 2018, I fell into a pattern. I'd watch two shows that had finished, and maybe one new show a season, two if I was feeling spicy. At the time, I was working weekends, but my shift on Sundays would start later, like in thwe afternoon, and I would often watch anime in the morning before work, and I'd usually try to watch seasonal shows the day the episode came out. I got to watch the Little Witch Academia TV show when it came out, and hey, AOT finally got a second season! I even dropped my first show, Fuuka. I also watched a little show called Death Note.

Death Note was ten years old at that point, nearly 20 now, and I remember hearing about it at the time. Watching it and loving it as much as I did made me realize how truly foolish I had been. All the wasted years I spent being a pompous, self-righteous asshole! I really do wish I had been more into anime when I was younger. I missed so many shows I probably would've loved.

In late 2015, I had a new job with weekends off. It didn't happen right away, but at some point, I started condensing my anime watching into Saturday mornings. This may have started summer 2019, as I had a shift in the number of shows I was watching. That summer, I was watching five shows. Granted, two of them were half length, but still. Even after this, I'd often just add shows to my plan to watch list, thinking I couldn't handle that many shows at once. LOL. LMAO, even. Something would happen that would turn that idea on its head.

In 2020, COVID started and delayed many productions. As a result, the studios kind of just blew their load all over the start of 2021. In that winter season, I watched eight shows, an unprecedented amount for me. It was crazy, or so I thought. The very next season, I would watch 11 shows. Honestly, this was too much, and I was a lot less amicable to the idea of dropping shows, so I kept going with a couple shows I should've just dropped. That summer, I only picked up one show, Sonny Boy. I was still watching four shows that season because of the leftovers from spring! I can't remember if I stopped watching all my shows during this or before, but at some point, I just started watching all my shows as close to release as I could.

I'm looking at my MAL charts as I write this, and it looks like the blowback from that one season lasted longer than I thought. Until fall 2022, I didn't go over four shows, and more often, I'd only pick up a couple new shows. In that fall, I watched seven shows, but four of those seven were sequels. In 2023, I watched a whole lot of shows, with only summer dipping down to four.

Unfortunately, in 2024, I had a year of fatigue. In winter, I picked up one show. In spring, I picked up seven. Then, in summer, I felt like I couldn't keep up, there were just so many shows that looked so good. I felt like I didn't get to watch a lot of shows I wanted to, and honestly, I kinda wish I traded a couple of shows I did watch. Not that any of them were bad! Giji Harem, for example, put a smile on my face, but I would've rather watched Makeine. The very next season, I was just having trouble keeping up. I ended up having to put two shows on hold and drop one. I didn't even dislike the one I dropped, but I just didn't see a whole awful lot of potential in it.

2025 started out looking much like 2022. Three shows in the winter, then two in the spring, despite there being other shows I thought looked interesting. To use my own phrasing at the time, I guess I was taking a break. One of those was Mobile Suit Gundam: GQuuuuuuX, which was more like Gundam G-CUCKED ME. Hold that thought, we'll come back to it. That summer, I watched seven shows, but one of them, Takopi's Original Sin, I ended up watching in the inbetween time before the fall season. I preemptively dropped Sakamoto Days season two (part two of season one?) because, honestly, it's not a great adaptation and I had better things to watch, and I also dropped Kaiju No. 8 after one episode because I just wasn't feeling it. If what I'm hearing is correct, I made the right decision, as apparently the source material just gets more boring and generic as it goes on, ends unsatisfyingly, and completely leaves behind what made it special in the first place. In other words, a waste of my time, and this was when I was starting to try and be more mindful of what shows I watch.

Also during this time, I watched the original Gundam with a friend, the same friend who I watched GcuckS with. Gcucks was my first Gundam, and I wanted to like it, but it was just bad. It was like the franchise sniffing its own farts. It made Char uninteresting! And I can say without a doubt now, after watching the original, Char is an interesting character. I definitely want to watch more Gundam in future.

In any case, summer 2025 was a banger of a season, partly because I didn't waste my time with bullshit. Fall 2025 was also really good! I've even started watching Turn A Gundam week to week to follow along with a podcast type series, which is indeed still going on, if you saw me questioning that in the last post. I was worried because this same pwerson also did a previous podcast that did something similar, but ended abruptly. and it was fun following shows week to week for that as well. This and the Gundam TOS experience made me want to watch more older shows, hence me making that resolution. The same friend I watched Gundam with also wants to watch Digimon, we just haven't found the time, but we'll do it eventually.

If you'd like me to elaborate on anything I've said in this essay, by all means, reach out to me on Mastodon or Bluesky and ask! Maybe I'll even write a followup post. Here's to more great shows to watch in 2026!

I mentioned in my last post, one of my New Years Resolutions was to write more. I guess I'll elaborate more on those resolutions.

For 2026, I want to:

• Write more! I already mentioned this, but it bears repeating. I only released one short story in 2025! Unacceptable! I want to make serialized stories! I want to post more short stories! Hell, I want to write more about my thoughts on things! Even blog posts about local restaraunts will do. I'm already doing better, this makes two posts this year, and the month's barely started! I also want to look into posting on other sites, like Royal Road or Honeyfeed. I think there's a couple others, but those were ones I thought of off the top of my head. In this way, I might actually get together, you know, an audience.
• Watch more (older) anime! My PTW list on MAL is super fucking long! To this end, I've been watching Bunny Drop, which has been great so far. I told someone else that this year, I definitely want to watch Bunny Drop (check!), Kyousou Giga, Mawaru Penguindrum, and season two of K-On! this year. I might be able to squeeze in a couple other short shows before the year is out. Out of the four I mentioned, Bunny Drop and Kyousou Giga are 11 and ten episodes, respectively, while Mawaru Penguindrum is 24 episodes, while K-On! S2 is 26, so half the shows on my docket are shorter, anyway. I started watching Turn A Gundam late 2025 week to week to follow along with a YouTube series, but that series may have already broken down after only eight episodes. If so, I don't know if I'll keep doing week to week or try to speed it up. I still want to put some time between episodes, I was watching one episode of Bunny Drop a day for the first two episodes and then watched the third today (unintentional, been a bit rough). I think I might watch another after I post this. I'm really liking it so far. I'm going to keep watching seasonals, I've got four on the docket for this season, but I'm trying to be more mindful of what I spend my time on. In 2024, I felt like I didn't get to watch a lot of shows I really wanted to, and I started to get better about that. I should write another post about my anime watching habits, or this one will be way too long.
• Watch more (not anime) shows! I haven't watched a whole lot of Western shows and movies for a long time. At one point, all I watched outside of what I saw with my friends was Star Trek and anime, then I finished Enterprise and all I was watching was anime. I haven't even finished TOS! I think I'm only eight episodes in! Eight, 12, somewhere in that ballpark. I also haven't seen anything past Enterprise, and I really wanna watch Lower Decks. I should also finish The Good Wife, really liked that show. Oh, and more movies, of course! I used to watch a lot of movies, what happened?
• Read more books! I bought a Kobo for myself Christmas 2023 to do this, and it actually worked pretty well for the first year. Second year, not so much. I think I only read They Walked Like Men by Clifford Simak and started reading Don't Talk About Politics by Sarah Stein Lubrano. Still on that one. Interestingly, They Walked Like Men was the first book I pirated for my Kobo, and Don't Talk About Politics was the first book I bought for it. Everything else was either a freebie or a library book. By the way, if you do want to use digital library books, I can highly recommend Kobo! I can't recommend Kindle at all because fuck Amazon.
• Play more video games! I got a PS5 for myself last year for Christmas. I played Miles Morales, and am currently playing Ghost of Tsushima. I'm not really playing much on my Steam Deck, though, and I definitely want to use that more. I have been playing more since the end of last year, I played through Far Cry 3 in November for instance, and I tried to get into Death Stranding and back into Baldur's Gate 3. They haven't stuck, partly because I spent a lot of the time where I just have the Steam Deck working on this website! Still, I hope to continue the video game trend and even make it move upwards in 2026!
• Spend less time on YouTube Shorts! Kinda failing this one, sadly. There are some genuinely great shorts creators, like Sellsword Arts and Luke Humphris, and I do see genuinely interesting stuff on there all the time, which makes quitting/managing my time harder. This is why I don't fuck with TikTok, I wouldn't stand a fucking chance with that app. I don't say YouTube in general because, well, YouTube is just what I watch the most of and I don't think it's necessarily a problem. I should make a separate post about that, too.

Resolutions one and two seem to be going okay! Three, four, and five, I still need to work on. I don't know if maybe I'm just not vibing with Don't Talk About Politics or what, but I really don't wanna drop it because I spent money on it. Actually, that reminds me, I also need to write (rant) about the Jujutsu Kaisen "movie" I paid good money for to see in the theater that was literally just a recap of the Shibuya Arc that I already saw and the first two episodes of the new season. So many story ideas! So many blog post ideas! The new year will be a good year for writing things down! Look forard to it!

EDIT: I forgot to put the video game section in and had to edit the post like an hour or two after I put it up lolololololololololol

Aw shit, here we go again... - Carl Johnson

Well, Publii didn't really work out. So what happened? Neocities CLI happened.

Basically, when I tried to post You Die in the Game, you Die in Real Life, I was out with my Steam Deck. I tried to use Publii to edit the website, but I was having issues because of the way Publii works. Basically, what I needed to do was export a backup file and use that, instead of pushing the site files to a Git repo. So that sucks, but whatever, I just added the story to the site when I got home.

And there appeared the second issue. I tried to update the site using a little program called Neocities CLI, which I had used before. Problem was, it wasn't installed anymore. No problem, I thought, I'd just install it again. Wrong. It was problem. You see, Neocities CLI is a Ruby program which you install by running gem install neocities-cli. This program absolutely refused to install. I tried so many things, uninstalling and reinstalling Ruby, messing with config files, nothing worked. I had to manually upload the index page and the story page. I didn't even upload the rest of the changed files, so the tags on the post didn't even work properly.

After trying off and on to get Neocities CLI to install and even looking into alternatives, a little while ago, I found something I could use instead, a framework for blog sites called Zonelets. Zonelets, however, was missing tagging and RSS. I then found out about Zonelots, a fork of Zonelets with tagging but no RSS, and Bumblebee, a framework with both tags and RSS. I initially went with Zonelots because the Python script included with Bumblebee kinda spooked me, but then I decided to just go with it since that took some of the tedium out of updates (you have to manually edit the Javascript file for each post in Zonelots, and also Zonelets). Working with HTML (or Markdown in the case of Bumblebee) didn't bother me since my chosen writing program, Wordgrinder, can export to HTML and Markdown. I'd still have to manually upload the site, but I figured I could just make that a separate section and have a standalone homepage. I could've done this with Publii, but the other issue would've still been there, so I decided against it.

Now, you might have noticed this blog isn't made with Bumblebee. Bumblebee is controlled by a Javascript file, and no matter what I did, it felt like it was ignoring the Javascript file. At least, I think that's what it was. Even unmodified, webpages acted like there was no CSS file. So I looked at Zonelet's page again, at the section where the author listed some forks and programs inspired by Zonelets. I saw one that looked promising called Strawberry Starter. I was hesitant since it was basically just a template for an SSG called 11ty and I haven't had any luck with SSGs, but Strawberry Starter's site has really simple instructions that are super easy to follow. It also has, in addition to tags and RSS, a simple function to upload to Neocities! I'm going to stick with my plan to use this as a separate part of the site, and hopefully, you'll see this post and many more to come soon.

That brings me to why I want to do this now. One of my New Years resolutions was to write more. Even if it's simple blog posts, I'd like to post more. Hopefully, this helps me do that. Watch this space!

So some things about Publii aren't super intuitive. Go figure. Still more intuitive than most SSGs I tried.

As you may have noticed, I cleaned this site up quite a bit. The width is now 95% of the screen, I'm actually using the author page, the hero section is gone unless I can think of something useful to put there, and so on. One big thing is the navbar. I had to put the navigation links in the hero section until I realized I still had the Terminal theme's page open in my browser, went to close it, and just happened to notice the navbar in the screenshot. Of course, Publii's documentation for people actually wanting to use it isn't so great, so I went to the demo website and used inspect element to get a hint as to what and where the options for that were. Turns out it's the menus tab, but then after you create a menu, you have to add it to a group called Main Menu? I'm not sure if Terminal just has one slot and there are other themes with more than just the main menu, but it seemed kinda unnecessary, since I don't see a way to create more groups like that. Now that I have that figured out, though, it's looking pretty good.

Aside from that, I recently read The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. It's written in first person present tense, and while I don't really like present tense (it just doesn't feel good to me), it did get me thinking that maybe some of my stuff would be better in first person. Yeah, remember that story I talked about way back in the first post? I'll have to take another look at it, but it might be getting rewritten in first person. I'm actually working on a different story right now, and I want to at least finish a draft of that before I touch something else.

I need to write a postmortem of that VN I wrote as well, also mentioned in that first post. I really am proud of it, even if it was rushed (because I am my own worst enemy when it comes to actually doing this writing thing). People who say they need inspiration kind of upset me, come to think of it. I've got a million ideas and I can come up with more on the fly, I do NOT need anymore inspiration. What I need is that perspiration part. That's my fucking issue. I should also start shitposting more. Shitposting is fun. If you do want to read my shitposty works, you can see my AO3 here. Currently, all my shitposts are fanfiction, and all my fanfiction is shitpost, though maybe I should write more original shitposts.

Something else I'd like to do, speaking of shitposts, is make some web pages that are more in line with the Neocities/Geocities throwback aesthetic that are more typical of this website. This site is somewhat of a throwback to old web design, too. If you've ever heard of Maddox's Best Webpage in the Universe, I actually took a lot of cues from him for both this and the old site. Now, Maddox turned out to be a not so great guy, but I really took his thoughts on web design to heart. Simple, easy to read text, no distracting GIFs or weird microfonts, just a focus on the writing I am putting up here. Yeah, I know this site is a premade theme, but I chose it with those design principles in mind. However, the old Geocities (or Geoshitties, as Maddox referred to it) aesthetic has a beauty to it all its own. If I do make some, they'll be subdomains on this site, so stay tuned for that, hopefully maybe.

Hopefully, you'll be hearing from me again soon, this time with something to actually show for it.

So you may have noticed it's been pretty close to a year since I last tried anything with this site. That's because Hugo sucks and I hate it.

Okay, maybe that's unfair. The problem I had with Hugo was that I tried to update it with a new post, and it didn't update. Couple other things just refused to work as well, like how I wanted to archive the old site and the link just refused to go anywhere.

I've since tried a few other static site generators, such as Jekyll, Pelican, and Publii. Jekyll was also hard to understand, Pelican clicked with me, but had no decent themes, and Publii was rock simple to use, but also had no good themes. There were probably others I'm forgetting, but the fact is, if I can't get it to work and look good out of the box, it's probably unusable for me. Writing is my only skill, I'm not a programmer or any kind of web developer. Hell, even though I dabbled in very simple HTML, CSS, and Javascript, the themes for these SSGs were very opaque to me, so I couldn't even modify any of them.

Well, fast forward to now. I was getting back on that SSG bullshit, only to find that way too many of them are effectively dead. I found one that was promising and looked at its GitHub only to find the last commit was two years ago, for example. I soon came back to Publii. There are still things I don't like about Publii, but honestly, since it's a GUI program with no confusing front matter category folder bullshit, at least it's going to get out of my way and just work. I hope. They even finally got a good theme! Terminal was originally from Hugo, I think, and I thought it was pretty attractive, even though I didn't pick it. Well, whatever problems I had with it before, I'll take what I can get now.

I just know somebody's going to swoop in here and tell me that actually, Hugo is soooo much better because response times or some esoteric programming reason. Dude, I don't care. I work slowly and get distracted easily at the best of times, the last thing I need is to have the tools I use also get in my way.

Publii devs, if you happen to stumble upon this, please let me import HTML and/or Markdown files as posts. Maybe even plain text files, too. Also, what were you thinking making the social media share and link plugins premium? Why those? Especially the link plugin, and come to think of it, why is that a plugin? Whatever, I just made a link to my Mastodon manually in the footer.

What I said about my social media usage still holds true, by the by. Best way to contact me is at the Wandering Shop. I hope to see you all again soon with another post, for real this time. May have to finagle a couple things still...

Hey, all! I hope this post finds you well.

So if you've ever seen this site before, you'll know that it looks a lot different.

The previous site was built basically by hand, which was kinda cumbersome, both to build initially and to update. It was also purely an archive and directory of where I was at elsewhere. That will now change, at least for the time being. I've built this site with Hugo, which should make it easier to use. Well, I say that, but trying to use Hugo has been a bit of a pain in and of itself.

If all goes well, there should be a link to the old index up on top of the page. I'll keep the old site archived there. Hopefully, if something goes wrong with Neocities, it'll be easy enough to migrate somewhere else. Eventually, I'll make dedicated pages for things that can't go in text posts, like my Twines and the PDF files of my one act plays. I hope to make more Twines and scripts, too. I was also the writer of a visual novel earlier this year. It wasn't a big project by any means, but I thought it was really cool to make it. More info on that in a blog post to follow.

I also have a story that's basically ready to go. It'll be the first in a series. Funny story, I actually had someone beta read it and then submitted it to a magazine, and they both said it seemed like the start of a larger story, which... I guess I have to make it the start of a larger story now? I promise that wasn't my intention, it was supposed to be its own standalone short story. But hey, whatever, I've got some things in mind for where it can go.

As for contacting me and finding me elsewhere, I'm basically only on Mastodon these days, which you can find here: https://wandering.shop/@evilroda

I mean, I still lurk on Tumblr, but that's it, so I'm not gonna bother linking it here. Twitter is fucked, and I haven't used it in years, anyway. And that's really it for other places I'm at online, aside from like, Steam and Facebook and stuff, but that's not something I want to give out.

Hope you all get to hear from me soon!