Well I said I'd come through! Doesn't matter that it's like a week or two from 2026.
God, time really flies by and it's so unrelenting in that respect, you just have to keep going with no clue where you'd end up, and for me that has been particularly rough. I've been dealing with a sort of 'identity loss'...rather the fear of it. Something something, the acceptance of changing tides, I need to be more accepting of it...
But then...
Y'know, I should just type whatever I want to type, I've been getting really conscious about what I want to say and if anything I have to share is worthwhile, and while that helps with the existing problem of being terminally online, it also means I am more likely to explode rather than reply to a friend, and that just won't do. I ahould stop worrying about if I have anything worthwhile to see, especially on this digital garden space thing that's just for me! Why should I perform something I'm not here too? I will rant about something completely random! Like....I absolutely prefer V2/V3 Vocaloids over the newer releases. The robotic cadence adds so much texture to the song imo, to have Miku sound so smooth and humanlike may be more preferable to current day producers, but there was a freedom and variance to old (I mean until 2010) Vocaloid songs that I miss from the current day Vocaloid scene. Don't get me started on Project SEKAI, I feel like an old man yelling at the cloud in that respect. I just don't get it!!
I miss Windows 7, that era of internet rather. Well, something about Win 7 was so like clean and presentable. No bloatware, no "you need internet access to verify you own your product" bullshit. If I buy a software, I get the license key for it, and that's that. Somewhere along the line it became all about subscriptions and I recoil in horror at the prospect of it. Paying monthly for Nitro, Drive Storage and YouTube Premium is bad enough! I can't even own the shit I buy? Why?! Why is the only way piracy now! It's gotten so bad that design courses in colleges are just giving torrenting tutorials instead of getting that education license, it's so expensive! I've only been buying indie Steam games, but it's still bothersome that you need to be perpetually connected to verify that you own the thing you bought, with your own money. It almost wants me to sail the high seas again.
I did also like the skeumorphism era of design. Things may be shifting, but the current trend of flat, clean, professional, soulless corpo websites is still reigning strong and I think I'M SO TIRED of it. I want to make a webpage that looks more like a scrapbook than a clean site. But I think I'm all talk and no action right now. Maybe someday....
Nope, still not working yet! It's a long wait huh!
What can I even say, I guess Twitter really wasn't meant to last for that long. It's been actually nice to stray away from these well worn paths of social media. Gives me reason and incentive to look more into the IndieWeb scene and figuring out what is 'me'. It's been uh....interesting...?
What hurt me more than losing that 9K follwer account was the realisation that a lot of the friendships I formed were really just fickle approximations of what they should be, easily broken by hard days. "Fairweather friends"...I used to think that term is meanspirited but now I understand the sentiment. It's like, if you feel personally inconvenienced by me being who I am, is it worth it to agonise over maintaining such a relationship? I don't want to feel like I'm accountable for anyone other than myself. That my peers believe me and my words, respect my space, my worldviews. Something like that...
It's uncomfortable but important to have these conversations with yourself. Save yourself a world of pain.
In other news, I graduated! Masters in Animation Design... apparently I was one of their best students and I can't quite believe that but my ego does appreciate the sentiment. The struggle now is to decide 'what the hell will I do with my life?!' I think I need some longform projects to sink my teeth into, or atleast prop up as an excuse whenever I'm asked about my perpetual flight from marital responsibilities. I've started writing a good bit of Kuriko's and Nishiki's lore, but I need to get things organised first. What goes into a character bible, huh?
There's also this site...which to be honest I haven't touched this past month, but I'm planning to dive into. First with replacing the Song Recs site. I hate how clean it looks, what I wanted was more of a grunge vibe, but I'm just not good at this CSS thing quite yet. Its's okay, it'll be an eternal WIP until I get serious about this webpage thing.
PSSST! Look at these stamps!
Alright, see you! Hopefully sooner than next year!
None of the links work! It's a long WIP for me....
This is Katsu here! I finally went off the deep end huh?
Well, it's certainly better than doomscrolling...
Things I need to do:
This was a pain to figure out but I'm so happy with it. I really love the Windows 7 theme and skeumorphism and the general vibe of it all...
As for why I went this route: okay it's really silly but I just stumbled into the 'make your own website, fuck the social media' side of YouTube and it was like.....yeah I actually really missed the 2015 days huh...
Speaking of Twitter, I'm hoping that the difficulty of making a website itself makes it a barrier-of-entry, essentially gatepeeking the more annoying sorts? Maybe?
Anyway! See you!