Seems like the site crossed 30,000 views recently. I've fallen off of doing daily drawings-- I need to think of a better way to update an art page. I added Infinity Nikki and Pokemon TCG Pocket to the gacha page, since I've been playing a bunch of them. I've been working on games more often so the gamedev page has been getting some more posts added to it. I've been playing more retail games so I've been updating the game log a bit. I ran into a piece of business lorem ipsum and got around to adding it to that page. I love finding the depths of business writing slop, It's a fun one to update.
tweaked the CCC LP a bit for better page flow. I thought the winding effect it had was neat but it made it harder to read. also fixed a file I was missing.
updated my FGO LP and finished it out. Added the Fate/Extra CCC LP I worked on in Discord to stress test a new approach to getting posts out of Discord, and it worked pretty well aside from needing to upload 120-some videos to Youtube one at a time. I used Discord History Tracker to crawl the thread and filter out other people's posts, then copied it into a notepad document that I ran through regex a couple of times to filter out the metadata and get a list of files to copy. I used a copy command in the terminal with that list of screenshots to move the necessary images into a different folder, and then did a batch resize/conversion with irfanview which took the total filesize of all the screenshots down from 3.6GB to 70.8MB. After that I went back to the text document and, on the advice of Voltage, who I used to know from an old LP forum and ran into today for the first time in about eleven years in the Action Button Discord, used Pandoc to convert the document from Markdown to HTML. After that it was just a couple find/replaces to fill out the image formatting and then that was followed by a slow process of manually uploading and replacing all the video files with youtube links and then doing some find/replace to embed them into iframes. Altogether it took about six hours, but that's still a bit faster than most other solutions I've worked with and most of that was just uploading ten dozen videos to youtube and copying the URLs in. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, and I think it makes it more feasible to do this again in the future. Maybe I'll actually be able to get some more SSLPs properly finished instead of just burning out on the admin work involved in making them now.
Looks like the site's crossed 20,000 views within the last day or two. I've pretty much just kept updating the daily drawing page. Probably need to update the reading log as well. I got a reading chair last week and chucked it in a corner of the room and also got a new e-reader to put books onto the other day-- a Kobo Libra Color, since the Libra 2 seemed hard to find and the Color was only 20 bucks more. I finished reading the second book of The Once and Future King, about 9 or so volumes of The Apothecary Diaries, and got to the part in Count of Monte Cristo where he becomes the Count of Monte Cristo, and that's all a lot more than usual.
I've mostly just continued updating the daily drawing page. I started thinking about adding some thoughts on the drawings on a separate page, but I've been bad at remembering to keep up with it. Updating the website slipped my mind a couple of days in the last few months, but I haven't missed a day of the actual drawings. The other day I got annoyed with the way the h4 tags didn't separate out on the page, so I removed the absolute tag on the CSS as a stopgap while I put off editing the site's look some more. I also took out the overflow property on the p tags because it made browsing on mobile a bit more annoying than it should be, especially when there were a couple of overlapping properties.
I checked the site stats and noticed that I've apparently been at this for a year now as of a couple days ago. Neat. I've been getting more done in general since starting to work at this, so I think I'll keep it up. I have no plans, same as ever, though it would be nice if I could sit down and get some longer-form opinion writing done again. I'd also like to get more regular work in on the gamedev page, but I think I'd want a more dedicated space to work on that more regularly
I went and changed the default cursor to the Maplestory cursor and made it react a bit when you click on things. I found a pack of them here. Neocities wouldn't let me upload .cur files so I had to do a batch conversion to .pngs. I thought about using one of the cursors from the games where your cursor's a gauntlet but I didn't really play many of those growing up and did play a bunch of Maplestory. I think this goes a bit better with the site's aesthetic, anyway. I would've changed some more of the cursor states but I couldn't figure out how to do them in CSS and I don't want to manually edit every page to do that yet. I should probably also go over the cursor files and give them a 1px outline because they blend into the white borders in a way they shouldn't.
Man I really need to finish working on the CSS for the h4 tag. It looks cool right now but it's not working the way it's supposed to.
I updated the javascript on the daily drawing page for April. There was some bug where the toggle would stop working where it had been before. It seems like the problem was something to do with Javascript's fuzzy typing. It had worked before because I'd accidentally written == instead of ===. I think somewhere the strings were getting converted to ints and a strict equality broke it. Something like that. I changed the if/else to a switch and added cases for strings and ints and it seems to work now. I might also go and update it so that the days change to update when you change the month if you have the day menu open, but we'll see.
changed the font to Kiwi Maru after thorhighheels mentioned it being the font that budget games have been using for the last generation or two in their newest video. I think that's neat and in line with the sort of aesthetic I'm going for, so I changed it.
I adjusted the body and html gradients a bit. The background is now what used to be the main body gradient, and the body gradient and border have been adjusted to be more in line with the menu borders and gradients from Final Fantasy 4 Advance.
I've adjusted the p tags to have a maximum width and height, and added a conditional in the css to change based on the screen width. It's not perfect, but the mobile site should look a bit better than it did before (edit: lmao no, it's worse than ever before). I'll figure out how to do it better if and when it starts annoying me, I think. I also made the black background on the p tags transparent and added a drop shadow to the text to bring it more in line with the Dragon Quest games I like.
The giant block of text at the top of the main page has been annoying me so I set it to float off to the right. This caused some problems with the Neocities thumbnail though, so I offset the h2 tags a bit.
I adjusted the formatting on the game log and the update log. The dates are now in h4 tags which have formatting that sets them off to the side. I think it looks nicer.
I also removed the yellow blocks from the side of the main page. They were mostly just there so there was something to look at, but now the intro text does that so they're not really needed anymore.
the daily art was starting to eat up too much space to satisfy my neuroses (70 megabytes! how horrifying. i will surely be executed for this)
except i didn't grow up with floppy disks
, so I finally sat down and installed the webp plugin for irfanview and did a batch conversion to take them to 50% width and 50% height and changed them to .webp files instead of .png files exported straight from my iPad. This took them from taking up 47.9MiB of space to 4.9MiB. I'm not noticing too much different perceptually on the page, so it seems like the transplant worked successfully. Well, aside from breaking a link or something and having empty updates show up in the neocities log. That shouldn't matter too much though and now the images should load a lot faster now.
continued updating the daily art page. There's nothing new content-wise otherwise. It seems like the site's crossed 10,000 views, which is mostly notable because that means the site now shows up on the browsing page list. That's neat, thank you to the dozen, possibly even dozens of people who've been clicking on my page. I'll continue trying to figure out what I can do with the place that I can stick to doing. I've got a couple ideas, but I've been browsing a bunch of other pages and I'd like to not make the mistake of getting too ambitious for what I can actually schedule and work on and end up making a bunch of pages that have a bunch of links that go nowhere that I see time and time and time again. At some point I think I might want to change the site up a bit to do the sort of two-frame pages I see more often on Japanese personal websites because I think it would look kind of cool with the Dragon Quest menu aesthetic I've got going here and give the place a bit more of an identity if I want to have a sidebar, but I think I'd need to have a bit more content first.
changed some of the javascript on the daily drawing page to have a few more conditionals. The toggle buttons now actually toggle the date buttons, and I've replaced the generic year/month/day text with the currently selected year/month/day. I broke out the functions that make the buttons into separate functions that I can call with custom start/endpoints to try and cut down on the number of blank images. Like it doesn't make sense to try and look for any images from January 2024 since I didn't draw anything that month, and similarly it doesn't make sense to have options for April and later right now since it's only March. At some point I'll probably expand this into a full calendar system, but I think I won't worry too much about premature optimization and just put in the relevant parts for now. Also I added a bit of padding to the buttons to make it a bit easier to click them. Also I went and added a little favicon to the main page.
Added a page for my daily drawings, and went and figured out how to add Javascript into the page to load the images programmatically to cut down on how long it takes to load the page since those .pngs are pretty hefty and doubled the size of the website after I added them in. I might convert them to webp or jpg later to cut down on size, but I've got a while before I need to do that.
tried making the front page a bit more visually interesting by adding a bunch of static colored divs to it that break up the border a bit. There's maybe half of a coherent idea in there somewhere. The divs framing the headers seem like a solid idea, the rest is a bit questionable. I'll revert the changes when they start annoying me too much, I think.
update: I cut down on the number of colored divs from like twelve to four. It was too busy. I kept the two framing the headers and added a couple of yellow ones on the right side to do something with the space.
I changed the unclicked link color from red to white to make it a bit more readable. I also checked the site in Chrome and saw the serif option looking less good than I was used to on Firefox and saw that it's because Firefox was falling back to the default serif font on my computer of Noto Serif. Chrome didn't have this problem and the font I'd written down looked bad, so I went and changed the default font to Noto Serif in the CSS.
made eggs for a week and wrote about it, moved the list of SSLPs off the main page because I haven't updated any of them in months. Edited the structure of the main page down into "more frequently updated" and "less frequently updated" sections. Also updated the intro text as the direction this site's going is changing. I also went and changed the omelette page to be reverse-chronological so that the newest omelette shows up on the page preview, and so I don't need to scroll to update the page. I've also gone and made a page to write aimlessly about learning about computers and computing to try and encourage myself to do more self-study, and have something I can point people to to show I know what I'm talking about.
Added Another Eden to the list of active gacha logs. Wrote up a short guide on how to play Android games on Linux. Updated a few of the logs. I got a new keyboard in so I should probably finally get back around to finishing off Sword of Kumdor.
discord caught wise to using it as a filehost and announced they'll make hotlinking stop working by the end of the year, so i've gone and ripped the audio links off the pages
moved fgo back into the active gachas list because it turns out that leaving the place you hang out with all your friends with nothing to replace it just sucks and means you don't do anything
moved fate/grand order from my active gacha logs to my dropped logs. it's not that the game has stopped being fun or that i don't want to keep playing it-- I do, and that's the problem. the game is bad for me and cutting it and my gacha friends out of my life should be a net positive, even if it does mean i don't have any friends to talk to for a while again
decided to change up the formatting on updates going forward to separate the date and the content out like this, since I think adding br tags inside of the p tag defeats the point of the visual separation that i was doing in the first place.
today i thought to myself "i think i will go and learn how to add javascript to a page. how hard could it be? all i want to do is automatically show when a linked page was last edited. it should be as simple as just retrieving the html file's metadata and then plopping it onto the page. operating systems and file browsers do this all the time. it should be easy!" (it was not easy). google search and stack overflow had the unhelpful answers of 'just use document.getLastModified on the page' (i am not on that page) and 'why would you want that? most pages these days don't work like that' (well, these ones do), and the unhelpful "here's how you do it from the user side" (i need to do it with javascript). so, because i have apparently vastly overestimated the capabilities of base javascript without the adddition of some heavy framework and don't think that adding some kind of server and server-side scripting language for a few lines of text on the main page makes sense, i have opted to not add a last modified piece of text to the index page. i might add the document.getLastModified script to the top of the LP pages going forward.
updated the street fighter 6 page, changed the CSS formatting on tables and iframes
decided to section off street fighter 6 talk onto its own page and started recording my online matches for that.
stole a trick I saw on murumart's Greg RPG page of hosting .ogg files on Discord to put music on a page since MIDI support is busted, and added the town theme from Barkley 2 as the main theme of the site. after all there's not many vidcons more mysterious or underreported than the unreleased, unfinished masterpiece of Tales of Game's about a young vidcon-obsessed B-baller on an alien planet set thousands of years after the Chaos Dunks
updated the sword and fairy 7 playthrough with chapter 4. I mentioned it over in the general game log but I'm trying my older approach of recording the game and then picking out the screenshots from the footage. this has resulted in a tremendous increase in the number of screenshots on the page, since I'm not just grabbing them at random while I play. i do not know if this is better, but it is a lot more meticulous now.
updated the fear and hunger 2 log. been steadily updating the gacha logs, though there's not much happening in any of the ones I'm playing right now. I've also been updating the general game log, though I haven't been getting much done. I've got the start of a Brandish 2 page and a Minstrel Song log ready, but I'd like to have at least an hour of playtime in both of those before I add them to the ongoing game list.
updated the play log and my gacha logs, changed the CSS in the p tags to be a light grey (#cccccc for now) because the old bright green color (#00ff00) was giving me eyestrain when I was trying to read it, so I changed it to white and then just went down in color intensity until it stopped hurting my eyes to read in long stretches. this change also brings the aesthetic more in line with the look of dragon quest's text boxes.
was thinking about dragon quest 7 again so I went and uploaded all the screenshots I took when I was LPing it for a couple of my friends a few months ago. got tired of the construction paper and cardboard look so I changed the CSS to have more of an FF7 or 1970s computer science lecture sort of look. Also went and listed out all the gachas I remember trying and dropping over on the main gacha page. not making separate pages for all of them since I dropped them months before I made this site, but it's just there to note how many I've given a shot.
updated the gacha logs. tried adding midi to the site but it seems like midi support's been killed and the first result on stackexchange to try and enable playing midis with javascript has a crypto miner embedded in it, and the other two didn't work when I tested them. also it looks like the site's crossed a thousand views, which is cool since I have terrible SEO and no content.
changed the p tags to display with inline-block instead of block and added borders to them to make it look more like a JRPG text box. it makes the pages more fucked up to read in a way that I like looking at.
played some more fear and hunger: termina, and tidied up the page a bit to use proper capitalization and otherwise gussy it up so that it reads a bit less chatroom casual. I edit the CSS so that there's a bit more clear visual separation between elements because I was having trouble telling the parts of my long text posts apart at a glance.
updated the general game log, made a page for documenting my fear and hunger 2 runs.
continued rambling about gacha games, dropped volcano princess, added a more general 'what i'm looking at' log that i'll probably use to write about all the games i'm not actively LPing. try and strike more of a balance between presentation and trying to get what the game's going for.
added some mad ramblings about gacha games to make it extra clear what i'm doing when i'm not updating my LPs
started playing volcano princess
played some more sword of kumdor, changed the CSS to use some paper textures instead.
played a bit more sword of kumdor, added some of the OST
tweaked the css to make it look more garish, updated the page on image formats, started the page for sword of kumdor with updates through Rtyu, successfully managed to not misspell sword of kumdor as sword of kudmor, added the update log, added some credits.