GUESTBOOK
LOG
03/07/2024
This log entry is going to be a little unusual. It is to do with this site insofar as it is to do with someone without the influence of whom many of the things and memories this site is meant to enshrine and celebrate would not even exist. And that someone is Akira Toriyama, who the world has just found out has passed away.Since hearing of this my mind has at once gone numb and also been racing with a flood of memories and connections and influences that his work has had in my life. A lot of it was dumped haphazardly onto Twitter, where whole communities are mourning. I want to mirror those thoughts here so they aren't lost in the void of social media. It cannot be understated how much of my life was touched by DB or how much love and joy I experienced because of it. This was already going to be a year of DB for me, and now more than ever it MUST.
It's going to be a little rambly and not in any coherent order, but these are the tweets. I plan to write something much more cohesive and in-depth when I make the space to in a proper DB shrine on here:
For real, this entire 21st century - So much of what baked itself into my very being came from Toriyama's work. I would not be the same without the things he has created. RIP, way too damned soon.
One of my earliest online communities was a DBZ forum that no longer exists. The city I went to college in and spent a big chunk of my adult life in was because of someone from that forum. Literally my life took the path it did because of DB, even setting aside the art influence.
Childhood hobbies and interests like customizing computers were also partly born out of a strong desire to shoehorn DB into everything around me. My first forays into gamedev as a teen were DB things. It was such a catalyst for so many things in my life.
Literally right now I have been reteaching myself rigging and trying to push my skills further BECAUSE OF DB. When I do weightlifting, what gives me the most strength? Visions of DB that live in my head. Visions that could not exist without it.
Most of the scant remnants of my own art from 20+ years ago that I still actually have is - you guessed it - DB art. It gave me something to hold onto during a lot of rough spots in my life. A captivating world & a pointy-haired alien I could fall in love with over and over again
My first real friend that I had real inside jokes with in middle school... one of those was a DB reference (literally just saying 'OOOH, PICCOLO COLOR' when seeing something green... I was twelve and she was eleven lol)
There was a boy I befriended (and later crushed on) in a summer art class in (I think) 2004 over the fact that he was the first person I ever met who drew DB stuff. I bought a sketch of Vegeta from him, and I'm pretty sure I still have it, too.
I made an actual real new friend right here on twitter dot com just last year largely because we're both very similar kinds of freaks about DB.
The number of things I tried to shove DB into (apart from various iterations of Windows). I named Pokemon after the characters. I made parks in RollerCoaster Tycoon themed after DB. All the customizing in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4. I wrote a Frogger/DB crossover in 6th grade.
Between my main fic, its spin-offs, and all my fic notes, I have written over 150k words of DB fanfiction. I only started writing in 2020. But I would never have thought to try getting into it without DB.
02/29/2024
Just about beefed it on remembering to make a log at least once a month this year, hooray for leap day! Anywho, haven't had much time to do more than little bits of stuff this month. I made little emotes for the about page since I see a lot of sites have a "mood" widget or similar and needed an excuse to make a set of Amaruuk emotes in the style of ones I'd made of previous characters back in like '09.Other than that it's just been housekeeping mostly. I am very tired lately, and have been I guess trying to take more time to just relax and do nothing on purpose or do a social activity with a friend since I have historically let those things falter in favor of trying to fill all my free time with making things that won't get made unless I make them. There's also been some big reshuffling at work (and I got promoted to Production Lead) so I just need to adjust.
01/20/2024
Gonna try making at least one log entry a month this year. Last year I got really busy and dropped the ball on them, but I'll try to do better this year, even if it's just life updates and not site updates!On that note, I did just add a little mood thing to my about page (and made breathing room for other "current" items) using code repurposed from the current year automation script. I had made all the emotes earlier this week, but then the ice storm we had finally knocked out my power right as it was finally melting and I had no electricity for 2 1/2 days. It's been a weird week, and I look forward to things returning to normal!
12/31/2023
Welp, we’re at the end of the year, and I guess I should make up for the lack of log entries for the last several months by writing a huge one right now to sum up the year as I experienced it. I guess I talk about site updates in these more than life stuff, but why not change it up? Definitely not because this is way too long for a Twitter thread or anything. The entire geist of this site is deep-diving my past, so why not sometimes share my present?I’ll start by saying that even with the rocky start, 2023 gave me more than any one year has given me in a REALLY long time. It kicked off with my mental health and sense of self-worth being at a long-time low from a horribly long job hunt that bled into the start of the year. It didn’t help that my ‘net visibility was tanking (and has yet to recover). But what did save my bacon was getting the best job I’ve ever had in my life in February, and it has been the gift that keeps on giving. Outside of a few streamer pals in 2022, I haven’t really made proper friends in YEARS, and this year I’ve made so many IRL friends and even found a new online friend amidst the rubble of Twitter of all places. I love you all so much you have no idea!
A fitting fortune I got in a party favor at a work party
In addition to a fresh new friend group IRL, my work has opened so many doors for me - not only the obvious “affording to live” and “can actually support friends/causes” part but I can make merch now with little to no risk for the first time, and don’t even have to store it in my awful, tiny apartment. Hell, work has even improved that! I got a huge new shelf from it and made a lot more space in my living room and made things more accessible for the first time in years.
One of my coworkers has also inspired me this year to make a lot of changes that I’ve been meaning to make for a VERY long time. I yeeted my old, awful bank for a credit union, I got a credit card, and for the first time since 2016 I bothered enrolling for health insurance for next year. For a while, it was just one amazing “I can’t believe this is real” thing after another. I am even engaged! My fiancé is amazing and for real I wouldn’t have made it through 2022 to get to the good shit this year without him. How did a weirdo like me even GET this lucky?
That said, the year wasn’t all sunshine and roses. The old “death and taxes” idiom has never been more relevant. I’m going into a new year knowing I will come out of the other end having lost a cat to lymphoma. The diagnosis was the one “I can’t believe this is real” event this year that was horrible instead of wonderful. I don’t know when I’ll lose her, but I just have to make her as comfortable as I can for the time she has left. This also came several months on the heels of a different vet emergency in June that almost cost me a different cat (though in total, both things together have cost a staggering $7000 in vet bills which I couldn’t even remotely afford myself and is going to take a long time to pay off - please commission me or donate!).
As for the "taxes" part, having a job again means paying taxes, and once more being an unwilling participant in the war machine as half of that money goes to slaughtering thousands of people around the world for greed, R&D on more horrific ways to do so, preying on poor young Americans who want a college education, and unfettered environmental damages. Y’know, instead of making everyone’s lives better and safer, improving our dogshit education and healthcare, unfucking the economic realities of the working class, and bolstering/restoring the environment. This country continues to be the bane of all who live.
For lack of a better segue, I guess I should talk about art - I’m an artist and it’s a significant part of my existence. While I made a lot this year, I don’t feel like I branched out or improved much, and there’s no stand-out pieces really. Just a lot of small stuff. Call it practice, call it going through the motions, I dunno, but I suppose I can chalk it up to adjusting to a massive life change while also continuing to create new stuff with some regularity (thank you, weekly streams!). I didn’t focus on large projects at all like I did last year. And of course, online visibility for most of it dropped to nearly nothing. Even Tumblr is mostly still liking and reblogging my 2022 stuff, haha.
Next year I want to try things with a little more scope (but not too much). I want to learn an engine for real this time (Godot specifically). I want to collaborate with friends. Also, I probably won’t hop on as many monthly prompt lists which this year kind of burned me out on the concept, though some of it was a fun return to older subjects with a fresh coat of paint. A lot of what inspired going back to some old roots was the continuation of this site, especially since I kicked off the year rebooting all my old dragons for the Dragon Lair. Hopefully I’ll finish that section next year! It'd be nice to get at least one shrine done, too. Neocities continues to be my favorite thing on the internet for another year :3
09/29/2023
So I still haven't been doing much with the site (progress on the old PC shrine has been held back a bit by a rework) since I've still been quite busy, but a lot has happened this month! Not only the flood of followers I've gotten in the last several weeks, but I got engaged earlier in the month and today is my birthday!Hopefully I can get some time soon to put more stuff up here, there's a lot of fun ideas that are scratching at the surface, plus I found some really old art in my closet recently I thought was lost to time. Gotta make time to clean out my scanner for that (and the rest of the backlog of stuff I wanted to scan for the site for months now).
08/10/2023
Didn't manage to get done what I wanted for tonight, but today was my site's first birthday! Summer is the busy season at work so I have had to put this project a lot further back on the backburner than it was. It is weird to have skipped so many months between logs. I had started the scaffolding of a new shrine placeholder, so perhaps that and the shrine's icon can be done within the next couple of days or so. I've been on such a nostalgia kick lately and have been jonesing to work on this site, I just haven't been able to.I also just wanna say a big thank you to everyone who's followed, and especially to those who've stuck around after my work on this project has slowed to a crawl. I appreciate all of you, and I love this place and all the cool sites I've seen on it to pieces!
05/03/2023
Hopefully I'll have some time to make more substantial updates this weekend or something, but I wanted to say thank you for over 50k views on my site! I got my links page caught up with more buttons to other people's sites and a link to the neato thing I used to make gen 1 style Pokémon cries for my little sprite and the fakemon I made of my cats. There is now also a way to reach the newer meme page but you'll have to find it yourselves :304/08/2023
Managed to squeeze in an update today and not just little bits of poking around with stuff. The Dragon's Lair now has 4 completed dragon pages. There are a couple of short ones left to do but then a few of the remaining ones are a bit more involved and long so I'll get to them when I get to them. There is also a secret meme page I made the other day that I'm sure some of you have seen but nothing links to it at the moment - I have plans for that and some other little silly single-page things.03/22/2023
Trying to find time to do stuff here again, but I've been busy, haha. This is definitely a project that could only have been pumped out at the rate I was doing before because I was unemployed. Updates will always come but they'll be a lot slower for sure. I have a lot of things still planned for this site!In other news, because I now work in a sticker shop, I have a massive advantage to making and selling my own sticker designs! Three of them are now available in my Ko-fi shop, which now has a link on the Links page separate from the normal Ko-fi link.
02/01/2023
Did mostly a bunch of minor housekeeping stuff during the span of time since my last log, but in the background I'd been making graphics for the Dragon's Lair section, both the navigation animations and splash illustrations to sort of reboot each of my old dragons that now have their own pages. Some of the dragons never really had names, so it'll be interesting figuring out how I want to do header stuff.My bf's been doing all the JavaScript stuff (his brain, my hands on the keyboard as usual), though we're going to redo the nav stuff a different way on the code side later on to have more control (also use individual frames which also allows me to make them as more optimised JPEGs instead of APNGs, so hooray for that. In the meantime, I'm figuring out how I want to even structure the content on the pages.
I also made a shrine icon and placeholder shrine page for Kaiba within the last week. I'm not sure what I want to do with the page, but I want it to have the vibe of the show, feature music and other stuff, and have things to explore all delivered in a unique or interesting way.
01/14/2023
Took a break from doing redesigns of all my old dragon characters (which will eventually be used as main images for each of their pages in the Dragon's Lair) to write up the Cat Mom Glossary in the Pet Zone. I want to add images and maybe audio to it at some point, but hey, the data's all there!12/31/2022
Wanted to make ONE last entry before the year ends. I managed to finish getting all the art from all the years in my Historical Archive gallery section (and a few remaining new things from this year) yesterday. I wanted to do a bit more tinkering with things but there just isn't time, haha.I did also want to say thank you for 50 followers - hadn't done so yet, and I should! Neocities has been one of the best things about 2022. It's my chill little haven where I've been able to just relax and play around and even get a steady little trickle of new mutuals and visitors! It's been nothing but positive here - so much better than social media. I hope next year is full of even more Neocities goodness :3
12/17/2022
I made art assets for a GifyPet yesterday so I wanted to knock out the basic layout of the Pet Zone so I could actually put her up someplace! I had also decided some time ago that when said page was up I'd remove the cats from the shrine index page and have them as part of the Pet Zone instead, leaving the shrines for fandom only. I still need to make icons for the couple of other shrines I want to make on that front, but that's not a priority at the moment.12/14/2022
Made some fun placeholder pages for the Pokémon and Zelda shrines. The former took longer to do than I meant for it to 'cause I had to record two of the sound effects myself in an emulator. Apparently Gen 2 era cries for Gen 2 Pokémon are impossible to find on the internet. Maybe someday I'll record them all and put it up in the Goodies section.12/04/2022
Doing a bit of minor housekeeping today, like finally adding the Blender badge to the badges section and turning that into a marquee (not sure if people could tell it was scrollable so that was bugging me and I changed it). I also added the credits screen and background swapping features to the Game Boy Camera page like a week ago and forgot to make a log about it, whoops! That page is now feature complete, there just needs to be more pics in the gallery and I might make more backgrounds at some point.11/24/2022
Threw together a placeholder for the Dragon's Lair page yesterday. Mostly it was because I made a Dragon Cave account and grabbed some eggs without realizing they die in a week if not hatched so I had to make something really quick to put them on. Still haven't worked out how I want to structure the content and navigation of that section so it will likely be just eggs for a while. I also added several new Neocities links to the Links page!11/21/2022
Made the Pondering page a couple days ago - the basic structure of it is done, just needs some good ol' scripted interactibility. Still need to make more pics for the Game Boy Camera page. I've made the credits screen but haven't implemented it yet. I did a little bit of general site housekeeping just now, though - linked some more Neocities, added another quiz result, and updated the to-do list.11/15/2022
Knuckled down and did most of the Game Boy Camera page! All that remains is to take more pics for its gallery (under the 'check' menu item) and I want to make a credit screen under 'shoot' - couldn't have done the JavaScript without my bf who basically sat next to me and channeled wizard powers through my hands after I'd set up the rest of the page/done a nice little flowchart of interactibility. Screen graphics were largely captured from an emulator (with the graphics then edited in Krita to suit the background screen) and the music came from this page. VG resource didn't have the game in its sounds section so I also captured those from the emulator with Audacity.11/10/2022
This site is 3 months old today! I've also taken a break from gallery stuff to make the scaffolding for the Game Boy Camera page. There's gonna be more JavaScript on there than most pages and I have no idea how to do something that complex yet so that will come later. No, I'm not recreating the whole game - just a small gallery and some of the other weirdness I enjoyed.11/05/2022
Got a bit of new content up (namely 2011's gallery and some tidbits on the about page), but mostly I just optimized the heck out of a big chunk of my images and cut my storage usage in half (even though it's barely any in the first place X3). I've kind of settled on a process for future optimizing of images, so I won't have to go back over new ones. It has been a long time since I bothered using JPEGs - which was certainly in evidence based on which years already had their images in that format and which were Oops All PNGs!11/03/2022
Still plugging away at adding content to the galleries, namely the art galleries at the moment. There are a lot of years to go through but thankfully I've reached the 2010s! Some of these years are making me realize I should find some way to record video of some of the Flash stuff I did. I don't currently have a way to do that, but I'll likely find one!Behind the scenes (which will show more when I get to the Time Machine stuff), it's been a doozy piecing together the chronology of 2007/08 specifically. A bunch of stuff is missing, including two entire OCs. I have had some luck in discovering a bit of lost media digging around and reactivating accounts I didn't realize I could access/reactivate and finding little tidbits. At the same time, though, some of it also reminds me once more how much on the internet is just purged if not preserved deliberately. 2003 and earlier are years I'd love to be able to map out properly as well, but nope! There's gonna be a lot of guesswork.
10/26/2022
Been trying to completely populate the galleries page, at least to the point of having things in each section. Still need to take newer pics of my collections (and might add a plushie collection at some point, as well as pics of old desktop setups since I found some of those in my diggings).Actually got some more stuff on the goodies page - I just made a Blender button I'd been meaning to make since I used it to make the shrine icons. I've also added a set of Windows 9X style icons I'd made for a project years ago but I figured I'd make them available here! Lastly, I added a bunch more people's Neocities buttons to the Links page. There's still a couple folks I wish had buttons but maybe someday!
10/21/2022
Hit 9000 views last night! Had been saving a sound clip just for it - see if you can find it! Also just now got around to adding some stuff to the "neat stuff" section of the links page. I'd say it's now complete enough to remove Construction Pikachu from it. Slowly but surely ticking things off my to-do list!10/11/2022
Still have no idea what I'm going to actually put on any of my shrines content/layout-wise (will have to peruse others' sites for ideas), but I'm at least making the icons for the main Shrines page! I couldn't not use rotating 3D renders for them since I already have most of the models I'd want on-hand (the Star Trek ones are my own, as will be the 3 cats - I just have to make edits of another cat model I made).For the Dragonball one I haven't decided whether to make Dragonballs or Vegeta. I have an alternate one for Star Trek of Data if I decide to do the latter and go full blorbo mode. I also want to do a bit more styling, like individual backgrounds or something. There are a couple more shrines I'm not sure if I'll actually do, as well (a pet bird from childhood and Rurouni Kenshin.
