There are people who use genAI because they find it legitimately useful in certain contexts (or maybe they’re forced to), while others use it “just because.” Both cases contribute to empowering tyrannical companies, but the latter is a special case. Using genAI without reason to then show it in public should carry some social stigma.
What if someone I get along with falls into that special category? Am I supposed to accept that not everyone feels the same way about genAI and swallow my opinion when they use a generated image as a pfp or wear a T-shirt with slop on it while talking to me? I’m sorry, but I need to point out the elephant in the room at least once. I don’t like being paternalistic, but some people will play with whatever shiny thing you put in front of them. They’re free to do as they please after listening to what I have to say. If we all shut up to avoid making things awkward, while some people already feel it’s “normal” or “cool” to use genAI for anything, then we’ve already lost. This isn’t about the slop, it’s about the future.
I hate Big Tech so much. The future looks very grim, even if the bubble finally bursts. They’re promising too much and delivering too little at a huge cost even for themselves, but I don’t think they’re going to pay when all of this falls apart.
Many of you guys don’t provide RSS feeds. Very few of you use a framework or library that auto-generates your feeds. Very few of you painstakingly write your RSS feeds by hand, or use a desktop app to manually specify the fields to then build it.
Well! I am making an IN-BROWSER RSS 2.0 FEED BUILDER! Because YOU DEMANDED IT!
(I demanded it. For you.)
It’s gonna be tailored for people who don’t know much about coding in general and prefer learning by seeing “what’s going on.” But I still want it to be very flexible.
This is not Frutiger Aero, but I need to include Japanese character designs to make it interesting. Official art of Nanami Madobe by わかば.
This is probably my most “unnecessary” blog entry so far. But you might find some value in it, especially if you’re interested in nostalgic aesthetic trends.
I don’t think I’ve ever rolled for Artoria, despite her being my favorite character from the original visual novel. The only reason she’s NP 4 is because she keeps spooking me.
The author of Ganbare! Nakamura-kun!! got harassed over the suggestive sexual content in her manga, specifically a part involving the protagonist and an octopus, and an illustration featuring a student and his teacher. This is a manga I personally own. I was not expecting to hear news about it since I read it. I don’t like the people who harassed her, but as I usually do, I’d rather focus on the context that perpetuates that behavior even without the need of algorithms: gargantuan platforms that push interconnectedness between their users1.
And more recently, X started auto-translating posts on users’ feeds. They no longer need to click on the “translate” link, hurray! Of course, I read this as a way to increase toxic engagement in an inherently toxic space. The language barrier is an obstacle to the platform’s attention economy, as it isolates those who actually have something in common with each other.
I must also clarify that I do NOT support the idea of “federate-all-the-things”. ↩︎
I liked the first season quite a lot! I don’t get why some people who are supposedly well versed in the Nasuverse did’t. I haven’t read strange Fake, but everything “made sense” to me (of course this is never 100% achievable when it comes to the Nasuverse).
Even if you’re not interested in nostalgia or aesthetics, please, consider joining the Frutiger Aero Archive Forum!
The userbase is quite small but also quite active, so there’s enough material every day to spend a few minutes reading threads about many different topics. It’s surprisingly not a dumpster and not dead.
Keep in mind there are many underage users. I believe most of the registered accounts belong to minors, but most of them have never posted at all. Among the active users, most seem to be adults… which is great, and if you’re an adult, you should register and participate so we’re even more!
I still don’t understand what the deal is with RSS on Nekoweb. Users publish RSS feeds just for them to be displayed on the homepage??? I’m NEVER able to find them on the sites themselves.
I want to belive I’m wrong, because this sounds like the stupidest idea ever. It’s like a very cumbersome way to make your own walled garden.
If you were subscribed to my main “home” feed, you’ll start seeing entries from my microblog and favorites too. So if that’s an issue, subscribe to the ones you’re interested in individually.
Dude, I love searchmysite. It’s a manually-curated search engine for personal and independent sites: no corporate websites, no SEO exploiters, no garbage! And yes, I’ve found quite a few sites of my linking using it in the past few weeks.
You might have heard that the keywords meta tag (like <meta name="keywords" content="anime, manga" />) is useless, but searchmysite takes them into account! (Although nearly no sites uses 😔 not even mine lol I’ll add them later).
You can submit your own site here. Don’t pay much attention to the “List duration” row; it just refers to the tier you’re using (Basic, Trial, or Full.)
If you can find your site there… it was probably me who submitted it.
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 Zelkova, 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 1:2 aspect ratio image cover/poster, and I never made a “no cover available” placeholder.
I loved the characters and the relationships they have with each other. The animation is amazing too. But I found everything else so boring, sadly, so I don’t think I’ll watch season 2 :/
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 liked it. The pacing is weird, many characters end up underdeveloped, some relationships are established or deteriorate too quickly as if the script said “Add drama here…”
And yet, I would gladly watch a sequel. I ended up liking it for its simplicity, for the nostalgia I have for the era it was made in, and for how it touches on topics like… feelings of inferiority.
I only started watching it because I came across the opening. Which was made using clips from the anime, but it really intrigued me and I loved the song.
I have mixed feelings about AIR. I started reading the VN (the old Standard Edition) knowing I wasn’t the target audience. I typically don’t like this level of moe and I don’t like nakiges or anything designed to “make you cry,” but I wanted to try something different and it had to be a romance visual novel.
I found enjoyment in certain parts, like the Minagi route and the Summer route. Honestly, the Summer route kept me hooked. But the Misuzu, Summer, and Air routes, put together as one story, are… fine, at best? I simply didn’t care about Misuzu, and I think that’s quite important to enjoy most of what happens in this story. I don’t find her relationship with Yukito romantic at all, as she’s too “dumb” and described as a “childish-child” and doesn’t do much other than suffer from the curse and say weird shit, and he’s an older guy with a somewhat clear goal.
I loved, loved, loved the Taiho Shicauzo OVA series. It’s a really silly series but it’s so charming in a way no modern anime manages to be.
Quite relaxing for me too, as it romanticizes adult life just as I like it. Modern anime does this too, but the early 90s look reminds me of my childhood so it’s easier for me to get immersed.
Some of us reject the use of genAI (generative AI) profusely, and to some, this behavior makes us look like we’re overreacting to just a new technology. Are we that different from Luddites? What if an AI model was trained “ethically,” respecting authorship? Could we use genAI in a “correct” manner, like “any other tool” instead? There’s a variety of answers to these questions that you could get from people who dislike genAI.
I can only defend my own perspective and speak from my own values.
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 got a bit bored watching Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. It’s not bad, but the plot didn’t really impress me. The writing itself was good, in the sense that the pacing, twists, and dialogue are well put together in just 10 episodes, but at the end of the day it’s a very simple story.
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”).
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.
But it wasn’t… that bad? I’m not a Sonic fan, I’ve never liked these games, classic or not. I don’t understand what the goal is supposed to be. But I found Sonic Adventure DX… mildly entertaining. I see charm in it.
Some of it was so poorly made that it made me laugh. The dialogue is hilarious.
During my teenage years, the only manga I picked up was Love Hina. While the pretty women and tropes are meant to appeal to young guys like my former self, they were not what hooked me in. The cute designs probably helped a bit, but I don’t think I’ve ever tolerated reading or watching anything for the designs alone, and for the most part, Love Hina isn’t something that I would describe as… good. The actual reason I kept reading was the main protagonist’s goal of getting into Toudai, the University of Tokyo, after he had already failed to do so in two previous attempts.
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.
Ron Gilbert finally made his own sequel to Lechuck’s Revenge (and Tales of Monkey Island, surprisingly enough) aaaaand…
…it was alright. I don’t mind the art style, and the ending is fine. That’s what many other players didn’t like, but they didn’t bother me. Guybrush not having a good reason to go on an adventure did. And the difficulty was extremely easy, like this felt way easier than Tales of Monkey Island, even. Damn.
I’m not joking when I say it’s nearly impossible for a game, book, or movie to make me cry, or at least to make me feel emotional pain. Omori did. The legends were true.
It’s one of the most amazing games I’ve ever played, and I think I’ll enjoyed it more than other people because I went in blind.
I tried out 3rd Strike years ago when I didn’t know anything about fighting games. I got bodied, of course.
Now that I know a bit more and I have a grasp of the basics I wanted to try again. It was way more fun and I was able to beat the single player mode after setting the difficulty to the maximum level. I picked Ken beacuse he’s easy and fun.
This was very pretty, and it kept me entertained for the whole 100 minutes, but it doesn’t have much rewatch value. I might keep listening to the catchy songs.
I’m ok with movies and series having weak plots as long as they excel in something else in their narrative. This one doesn’t have anything. I’m not sure what the theme/s of this movie is/are. They emphasize this concept about people’s colors that the protagonist can perceive but they don’t really do anything with it.
I don’t think I’ve ever completely felt part of a fandom community, even if the experience I had way earlier in my life was much better than today’s. I’ve written about this before, implying that online communities were “better” because their spaces were more confined, with their own set of specific rules, culture, and users accepting the community above themselves as individuals.
The relevant tacit keyword here is “identity.” Despite how easy it is to interact with others nowadays, I think today’s world feels homogeneous and boring, both online and offline. The late 90s and early 2000s shaped my idea of what the internet was for and how it worked on a social level. To me, my online identity was not meant to show much about my “real” self. My online identities were typically tied to hobbies or interests, and to the specific communities I was interacting with. When treating any subject, everything I had to worry about was the people I was talking to, not the possible outsiders. It was comfy, to a certain degree.
This game is exactly the kind of experience I wanted to create since childhood. The entire game is played through menus, but unlike a turn-based RPG, the numerical expressions for the actions and their results take the backseat. Every NPC is polished, every encounter feels unique, everything you do no matter how insignificant is told as part of a greater story. You could think of it as an extremely polished visual novel with RPG elements..
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.
If you get to see/watch images/clips of this anime without knowning anything about it beforehand, you’ll be just as confused as you will be, er… visually pleased. The aesthetic here is great, but what is this weird story about clones of historical figures going rogue and doing mayhem? There are many things we aren’t told, so it’s hard to care about these characters in so little time. Maybe fans of the light novels are able to get out more of this show, but I think an adaptation should work as a standalone piece.
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.
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.
Remember how fun it was to pointlessly interact with your computer programs, back when access to the internet was not something unheard of, but still quite limited? It was a time when many PCs were presented as with multimedia capabilities, a term that never seemed able to retain a concise meaning. It was also a time when having floppy disks or CD-ROMs with promotional goodies was simply fun, from exploring the directories and files to actually using the files for their intended purpose.
I recently came across an article by Mihnoír on his personal website, where he voiced his feelings about what I’d call the bastardization of nerd spaces. Actually, he doesn’t refer to these spaces as nerd ones, but from my reading that’s what he’s talking about. I must warn you: what follows contains my interpretation of Mihnoír’s thoughts, which might be way less accurate than I desire, but I hope it’s close enough. And if you haven’t followed the previous link yet, keep in mind you must be over 18 to visit Mihnoír’s site.
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.
I watched Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu around 2006, maybe 2007. I was a bit perplexed by the order of the episodes, yet I loved it and now I think that is the best way to watch the series, including the sequel.
Oh, the sequel…
The sequel was not something I was expecting back in 2009. It just popped up, taking fans like me by surprise (I guess I am a fan after all, but not a hardcore one.) Not only I found it much less interesting that the first season, but I also hated what they did with Endless Eight. However, I don’t hate it now. I don’t know if people who call all these weird decisions “art” are serious, but now I do think myself they’re artistic ones, but they’re also trollish. They can be both. After all, it’s a TV show. They had to work with a public in mind, and that public isn’t just the one that likes and accepts everything they’re shown. Of course people were pissed off, especially if you were a teenager.
There are so many things that I’m not into yet I understand why they exist. Like, “this sucks, I hate it… but because it’s not for me.” But who likes this, and what do they like about it? The episodes are too short, the plot is nonsensical, and the main male character is uninteresting in such a way I don’t even think the boys watching this projected themselves onto him. The designs are kinda pretty though, I admit, and the animation is more than decent.
I rarely laugh watching anime, so I can tell this one was great. I’m surprised it’s not that popular: in my opinion, it deserves another 12-episode season. The main character is the best thing this anime has to offer, she’s funny as hell.
I don’t remember disliking this route in the visual novel. There were things that I didn’t like, but I thought it was “decent” (although I was having a bit too much of Shirou’s thoughts.) That was many years ago, but this was my first time watching the anime adaptation.
In my opinion, this story does not work as an animated adaptation. It’s not just that we no longer know the motivations behind every little thing Shirou does, but it’s also that when you’re reading, you fill many diegetic gaps with your own imagination, so it’s easier to made it make sense. On the contrary, the anime is very detailed, yet spatiality and time are so confusing. A character could be shown doing something dangerous to another one for a long time, without any explanation of why the enemy doesn’t just charge against them and kill them. It doesn’t even feel like time freezes for narrative purposes.
Many digital artists have always been very very protective about how much they allow others to share their work. That’s reasonable: when you make something available online, it might end up being used in ways you wouldn’t approve of. And of course, pride plays a role too. It’s possible that you don’t want you work to be devoid of context, such as an easy way to find your online space (like your account on a social media platform, or anything that clearly shows your autorship). It pains me every time I see someone on Discord uploading a drawing that they didn’t make, without even providing the name of the artist. I think, however, that there are more ways than the obvious ones to share what you’ve liked while being respectful to its creator. And they can be applied on static sites like Neocities’, too.
Actually, it’s not that relevant that it’s Neocities: I could be using any other web hosting provider. But it is a bit relevant.
I’m here because the Internet sucks.
I can’t depend on big platforms
Around the year 2020, the state of the mainstream side of the Internet (which goes beyond the web) made me feel exhausted enough to give Mastodon a chance while moving away from most of the big platforms. I stayed there for about 5 years, but I ended up leaving, dissatisfied with the kind of people and culture I found.
I’m a non-American dude in his early 30s (almost mid 30s).
This website is a centralized place about my nerdiest self: my rants, my reviews, what I really like, what I dont. I try to be casual in the way I express myself here, even in lengthy posts.
I tend to focus on digital culture and animanga fandoms, but anything goes tbh.
My Neocities Habits
I pay attention to my Neocities feed, but I don’t give “likes.” If I’m following you and you’re on my Cool Sites list, don’t think I don’t care about your updates. I just don’t like “likes.”
