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!