I’ve been working on a personal project lately. I haven’t forgotten about my site at all, but I don’t have the time to do much fun stuff, or even to write.

Whateveerrrr. I can tell you about two things that I can’t add to my media log right now.

I read Sayonara Eri by Tatsuki Fujimoto. It’s pretty short and kinda weird, but not the kind of weird that’s cryptic enough to prevent you from forming interpretations that make could any sense.

I can’t add it to the media log because I would have to change something somewhere to auto-generate a Manga section and I’m too lazy to even start thinking where I put that.

I also read/played When It Rains by Zalkova, very short as well (it took me less than an hour to complete). I was not expecting it to be so funny. It’s not meant to be a comedy, I think, but there’s plenty of comedy in it. I suggest checking out this page that describes a bit of the setting and characters before playing it.

I can’t add it to the video games log because I designed it for works that have a 2:1 aspect ratio image cover/poster, and I never made a “no cover available” placeholder.

One aspect I really don’t like about the “indie” web is the experience of fiding another adult who turns out to be yet another tech-savvy person with a site full of tech-savvy blog entries like “how to dockerize your JVM application” or whatever. It’s much less frequent on Neocities and Nekoweb, but it’s still a thing even here.

What I really want to say is: I wish more people had cool personal websites. I don’t think the technical aspect of having a website is a barrier: we used to use FrontPage back in the day and it worked™️. Isn’t there anything like that nowadays? Isn’t social media hated enough?

I should draw.

I added a changelog of sorts listing new content on the site. This should make it more tolerable for those who don’t use RSS. Man, I really need icons.

I’m currently watching Uchuu no Stellvia. It feels very 2003 indeed. It’s totally one of those shows my younger teenage self would watch and not remember much about it. So far the plot has a quite silly development, superficially touching upon topics like insecurity, friendship, teamwork, self worth, skill building, and other stuff. That’s what makes it so charming, imo. It’s fun.

The You’re Under Arrest OVA finally got its HD Blu-Ray release, and it looks good enough to appreciate the tiny details of every frame.

Every time we get one of these HD releases, I’m reminded that we’ll never get to see the old Slayers series or HxH 99 with good image quality. The “master tapes” they have are probably nothing more than the DVD versions we’ve already seen. Everything else was probably lost, sold, or dumped. I would appreciate at least a partial remaster like the one they did for Tekkaman Blade II.

I found out a few things about that Neocities thingie that takes screenshots of every page you update. For starters, it’s buggy and might render noscript elements as visible text.

But here’s something more interesting about it: It has its own user agent, Screenjesus. As other people has reported before, this makes it possible to change your site dynamically so the screenshots that it grabs are different to what your visitors will see visiting your page:

if (navigator.userAgent === "Screenjesus") {
  // change something,
  // e.g. replace the body for an image,
  // swap your theme or generate a
  // cool looking thumbnail
}

I didn’t do anything too interesting with this information, but now I’m forcing Screenjesus to use my 2000s theme, so that’s what the thumbnails of my website are showing.

I’m not done with this yet but… I’ve added a system of switchable themes! As with everything else in my website, it was 100% written by me. And it was a pain, because adding themes to multiple-page websites (as opposed to SPAs) makes it really hard to avoid CSS flickering/flashing when the page starts loading unless you have server-side rendering to set the preferred theme from the start (which of course, I don’t have: this is Neocities). No one forced me to make a website that can work with JS disabled in an era that no one browses with it disabled, so I’ll stop complaining.

To try it out, press the ugly “Switch theme” button in the top-right corner. There are only two themes: the default one (“lain”), and a new one (“2000s”).

Sigh, I’ll keep working on this later.

Artists‼️ if you happen to read this, please do the 100 Questions for Artists questionnaire. I would love to read more about the few folks I’ve seen around here.

btw, I’ve now listed every relevant RSS feed on my website. Nearly nobody uses RSS sadly, i cri.

and also btw, I probably won’t be liking updates on the Neocities feed anymore. I don’t care for likes, and they don’t mean much tbh. I’m still checking the updates from the people I follow and even others, anyway. If I want to take an extra step to interact with any of you, then I’ll drop a message.

Anyone who “fixes” other people’s art gets an instant block from me. So fucking rude. If you don’t like it, then you can speak up. Going out of your way to modify someone’s work because you think the artist has bad taste is something only a cretin would do.

There are aspects of my relationship with art that I should express in my blog. It could get… lengthy.

I’ve noticed that many artists avoid drawing their characters’ foreheads, to the point that their bangs appear unaffected by gravity when the characters are upside down.

I complain a lot about the state of fandom spaces on the internet (have you read this and this?) so it surprises me that I haven’t blamed the gringos for anything yet.

Supposedly, the English-speaking side of the internet is more international/diverse. In reality it’s gringos who monopolize discourse and establish values, logics, and etiquette. The stupid culture war became real when people outside the United States started treating media in terms of “woke vs non-woke,” and when yelling “media literacy!!!” became cooler than actually applying it. A random dude will “explain” an anime in a 1-minute video on TikTok and young folks will absorb whatever he said as the truth if it sounds morally appealing.

Or a game like Stellar Blade gets mentioned because of its sexual content on a liberal website; right wingers see it later and overrepresent the opinion that made them mad about a game that actually nearly no one complained that much about. Like, who gives a fuck about a very specific sexualized character? Are you kidding me? That drama was 100% fabricated, and intentionally or not it polarized people around a false dichotomy.

But you see, both the liberal media and the conservatives are rewarded with interactions and peace of mind, so that’s all that matters, right? Something-something-capitalism, I suppose.

The smartest people I know from the internet are usually not gringos. Smart people think feminism and anti-fascism are good causes, and that they are not necessarily in contradiction with whatever specific shocking or fucked up content you might find in something fictional. Nor do they base their education on TikTok videos.

I don’t mind autoplay background music on personal websites, but I can understand why other people hate it.

I don’t understand why no one complains about nested vertical scrolling, though? Like vertically scrollable areas within an already vertically scrollable page. That’s a UX nightmare.

Legend says Melty Blood: Type Lumina was going to be a Fate fighting game but they decided to give Melty Blood a sequel instead.

I don’t think this is true but it could be, because what other reasons could there possibly be for Fate not having a modern fighting game?

I’m back®©™. I’ve been visiting a few of the personal websites that I already got to know thanks to neocities, so could say I never left? But I admit I rarely visit those sites without RSS feeds.

There are more updates I want to do here, related to both content and the layout (I want to give everyone an excuse to read the thoughts I have about the stuff I watch without reading my entire posts!) but this will do for now.

I liked the idea of answering the questions in this prompt I found on layercake, but I think I’ll split it into many entries of several questions at a time because a few of them deserve a post(s) of their own.

Ok let’s say I’m back. I have a lot of stuff to do, tho.

I should’t add new content without “finishing” the design of my web first. The main menu is incomplete, the microblog could have its own RSS feed, my media log doesn’t have a proper index, bla bla. So I’ll be working on this for the next couple of days.

It’ll be hard, but hey.

I have not abandoned my site. I simply haven’t been active anywhere online

In fact, I haven’t been very active irl, which is a problem. There are projects I haven’t tocuhed in months and I feel guilty about it.

By the way, this site supports RSS. Not just its root (/): every section like /blog, /favorites, and /anime also has a feed. Just add the URL you’re interested in to your RSS reader and it should find the resource (and if it can’t, just add the /index.xml.) I haven’t included a feed for the microblog because of reasons.

I found an interesting article about “nerd spaces” and gatekeeping, so to speak. Then another one that held a different perspective.

Let’s see what I can say about it, heh.

Well, this is a hello world of sorts for the microblogging feature.

I kinda like it. For the preview thingie I tried to make it like a TV, so it clamps the text to only show the first two lines and starts from the bottom.

As with everything else so far on my website, I didn’t use JavaScript. Maybe I should have. Working with font sizes in CSS has always been a pain, and there are certain things that don’t support transitioning.