Recently, I have been thinking of old Flash games I played as a kid, probably influenced by all the nostalgia talk by the modern-Internet haters (which is understandable). I didn't grow up with personal websites, but I did grow up with Facebook games and other Flash games. I will save the stuff about Facebook games for next time, but researching old Facebook games made me remember another game I used to love, which is called 小校園 or Little Campus.

On the online primary school platform, there are plenty of learning resources, and some links to online game websites that are both fun and educational. It did teach me a lot whilst entertaining me, some even weirdly memorable. As I graduated primary school, I stopped playing the game, and kinda forgot about it, and even if I did, I kinda assumed the game is likely lost media at this point, why bother?

Yesterday, after researching old Facebook games, it reignited a passion to find the game again. As I didn't remember the name at first, I spent a long time searching key words and specific time periods, but atlas, I found a familiar screenshot, of a building with signs. And that is 學習大樓 (Study Building) from 小校園.

I was ESTATIC when I finally found info about this game, but can I access the game? Unfortunately, as Flash got shut down, the old version of the game isn't up anymore (There's a newer version, but honestly I'm mostly here for only the nostalgia). However, not all hope is lost, thanks to the GOATed Internet Archive, many of the pages, albeit barely functional, is still available to view, or even play if lucky. Alright let's get to the review part.

Little Campus is a online learning platform designed for children, it contains books, games and even forums for kids to post on^[1]! While there are a lot of buildings there, and probably a pet system too, but the part people remembers the most is the Study Building

Like what you saw in the image I shown, it is a building with 7 floors, each floor representing a subject students often learn at school. There's there are sections that you can click on in every floor, either cool information, stories, or Flash games.

The floor I'm most memorable about is the Science floor. First of all, one of the games I remember the most is in this floor, which is a game experiencing the gravity of the 9 planets of the Solar System... 9? Interesting fact is that this game was released on 2001, and Pluto was banished from the list of Solar System planets on 2006, so it makes sense the data didn't match up. However, it seems the devs never bothered to update the game even after 2006, well kids this is why you should check multiple sources!

Anyways this game is actually not broken. You play it by spamming the left and right arrows on your keyboard, when the bar on the bottom left corner fills up to the line with the planet's label, you can jump using the up arrow. If you jump into the rocket perfectly, you should be able to advance to another planet. However, sometimes you would fail even after seeming like you filled up the bar just right, probably a bug or the game is too hard. Also if you jump too far, the character screams bloody murder, so jumpscare warning. You can play it by clicking here (As soon you're not on mobile)!

Another thing about the Science floor is that I remember there's somewhere that you can disect a rat, and I was quite morbidly interested. I played that game for a while, but since someone else was in the room, and I figured they might become disturbed, I stopped playing and somehow never picked it up again. Shame IDK if that page is lost.

Some time later I will create a shrine for this website, it is quite a huge part of my childhood. Even though most people here won't know what it is, it should be a fun information to share, as it is also part of the culture of Flash.

Jokes can achieve a lot, it can make people like you for being funny. However, I can be quite picky about jokes, and tend to take them seriously even after understanding they are jokes.

Due to my serious-ish and sensitive personality, I don't often enjoy jokes, especially those that feels like targeting me. I especially I hate how a certain uncle uses this to make me upset, like joking that feeding me to the koi fish (That's a major reason why I hate my relatives so much, they rarely respect me, but honestly adults rarely respects children). Something about my dad being a dick, fear of height warning: There's also the time my dad held toddler me over the railing on the third fucking floor, just to gets some laughs over my fear, I'm surprised I didn't get major height fear after this. Anyways that makes me hate jokes even more.

As I grew up, I learnt that jokes doesn't have to be about hurting me, it was just my relatives being assholes. I really love puns, even the very corny ones, I remember during primary school I got to hear many dumb puns, some of those I found from an e-mail by a senior I don't know (it was in the online school platform), they sent a powerpoint to basically everyone. The content is a compliation of many jokes, I only remember some of the jokes (which are impossible to translate), but man it was funny. I also likes jokes that is related to my interests, I remember me and my friend pretending to be villagers by tucking our hands into the sleeves of the other arm, then we'd make villager noises. I think it leans to just being silly than being actual jokes, but honestly it is one of the funny things that I like.

On the Internet, people makes jokes and memes a lot, there's like a new one every month, some I found quite funny, some I don't like as much (which I will discuss later). The most interesting one is Hauk Twah. Originally, I didn't like this meme, it sprung out of no where, it feels very artificial. I thought it's some rich person who manipulated the algorithm to make people look at this joke, and then the trend-chasing people will buy products with the label "HAUK TUAH", then the rich person gets money. Pretty sure many people also found this joke annoying, neither do they know why it became this popular in the first place. However, some people uses this irritation towards this meme, and decides to sneak this phrase into random tweets, like they might be talking about animals or shows, then they would say "It is like comparing a hawk to a shark!" Upon realising the joke, the viewers roll their eys and groan, but honestly? This is the part the joke gets funny. Some memes like this one takes time to actually become funny, like fermenting wine. My favourite Hauk Tuah joke has to be , saying:

my neighborhood actually kinda goated for birdwatching theres so many crows and also a hawk   as well

The double space hinting at the realization and then narrowly avoiding saying the thing is hilarious as hell.

While I have grown to enjoy memes and jokes, they are some jokes that I am not very fond of. Some are just my taste, some are likely not very good or respectable in the first place.

• Jokes based on lies: Like some people would say fake information (like game updates or lore), like "OMG xxx is dead?!?!" And when some commenters would ask for the source (I always check the comment section to make sure if the OP is lying), the OP would be like "I'm just joking msjfniw 🤪" (this 🤪 fuckass emoji is always used by people I don't like, sorry if you like this emoji though), or they would use the image where a blue face eats a cookie. I always block these people, these jokes aren't funny, and likely makes misinformation more rampant.
  You might be like "These jokes are too fake to be real anyway, people who don't realise that are too stupid in the first place!" Idk some of these feel genuine, I thought you guys have tone indicators, why don't you use them /gen.
Aforementioned blue face image
• Schrödinger's douchebag: They say something controversial, but when you call them out, they claim that was a joke. I think most people can agree this is not funny, but it feels very common on social media (I have been trying to use Twitter less). I'm not sure if it's exactly relevant, but I remember seeing someone saying "um dont do this to artists" with a screenshot of someone asking for commissions in a informal-ish, but not impolite manner. Many people got confused, or even mad at how that artist is so entitled when there is a client asking a simple question. The OP explained it is just an inside joke... But that account has thousands of likes, why would you post a joke with a target audience of less than 5, and is easily taken out of context like what's happening rn? (Someone commented something similar)
• It shouldn't even be joked about in the first place: I was in a Facebook group of a certain fandom that I lurked in, and one day the owner announced the group is going to be deleted after a week cuz the show ended crappily. While I was kinda sad as the memes they send are stupid but kinda enjoyable, I kinda accepted it as nothing lasts forever anyway.
  When the date they delete the group comes, I'm surprised to see the group is still here. The owner said the announcement is a joke and the group will go on... I left the group myself. I believe that it is inappropiate for group owners to joke about something like this, like if it's just one post claiming to delete the group, and clarifying it's a joke at the bottom of the post on April Fools Day, it would be better. But claiming to delete a group where there are many people who had fun being in the there, and making people's sadness of leaving this place into a joke? Yea I'm not allowing that in my life.
• Semi-relate note, I recently joined a meme group because Facebook recommended me one of their posts, it was kinda funny seeing occasional horny or out-of-context posts. Recently the owner announced a post saying they would kick out lurkers unless they post something, although I am one, I still don't wanna post anything (I'm shy). I didn't really mind if they kick me though. Anyways, later on I saw someone posted that they didn't really like this policy of kicking out lurkers. And apparently that was a joke as well, the owner also complained that "people take everything on the Internet too seriously"
  ...But, there is NOTHING on the announcement that hints it being a joke, it's only those who have stayed in the group for a long time that they might know it's just a joke. I decided to leave that group too. Come to think of it, all the Facebook groups I have stayed it are kinda miserable to an extend (at least it's only these two that have questionable moderation).
• Subtle foreshadowing: Back to less serious stuff, there's this meme where character is doing something normal, but short clips of the character meeting their misery is added in between the frames. It is poking fun at how the foreshadowing is not subtle at all. However, I didn't laugh at the joke, I just found the sudden clip changes very uncomfortable, like scratching a blackboard.
  Somewhat related is that I saw another post with a screenshot of someone on Tiktok complaining about this meme being not subtle at all. Then a Tiktok commenter saying something like "Ok I get you are autistic you probably like Beetlejuice and Will Wood too." I don't know if I'm offended, it's just that I don't like Beetlejuice (at least the 2024 movie, I don't like I had to sit through half of the movie being about a family falling apart and a girl falling in love with some rando. I don't know about the autism accusation, but I like Will Wood tho.

Man I sound quite harsh in this post, but Internet can be awful sometimes. If only I can quit social media entirely, but I always get understimulated, I am too used to social media maybe. I am not quitting instagram though, it isn't very miserable in my opinion.

I like shrimp, glad I'm not allergic to it. It's yummy in dishes, sushi, dumplings and more. Unless if I have to peel the shell, I will always take the chance to eat it.

I am very fond of the shrimp sushi with onions from Sushiro. I love onions, they give off a hint of sweetness and irresistible aroma, and it matches perfectly with the crunchy shrimp.

Though the flavour of the shrimp is tasty, I feel like the texture is very importance in enjoying this food as well. There are some dishes that grinds up the shrimp into paste, and cook them into balls (or whatever shape). While some people may enjoy it, I feel like there isn't as much enjoyment in eating it, while it is still bouncy, it loses the crunch which I loved a lot.

Perhaps one day I should write a blog about onions, which I came to love ever since becoming an adult.

It's Christmas month, which means everyone is getting into the jolly spirit of giving and having feasts. I just added a few decors in my main page, the snowflakes (not starflakes) and christmas hats on my OCs, yup good to go. I'm considering changing the color scheme for the main page for a while, still deciding on the colors though.

This is not the official chrismas special blog tho, I'm planning to write something about Christmas cards that day. And this blog is more about something I remember being a kid.

My primary school is a christian school, it doesn't celebrate halloween, but it sure celebrate christmas to the fullest. There are christmas music playing, prayers and special events, and even a party where students can share their food.

The vibe is really nice, though there is something off. I touched my head, and felt there's something, I put a bit pressure, and it popped. I didn't really know what it is, nor did I really put much thought into it.

Soon after that, I got very itchy. My parents told me that I got chickenpox, and it is very infectious. I remember having a fever on the first few days of having it, but honestly I don't remember how that went as it isn't even the worst part about the chickenpox, the worst part is the itch.

Like the normal rules about itching: Don't do it, if you keep at it, your skin is gonna break and bleed. But it's not like child me is gonna listen (or even able to), IT'S! JUST! SO ITCHY!!!! There are so many blisters on my stomach, and I can't help but scratch them. It took me ages of treatment and medicine to become completely healed.

But what stuck with me for a long time are the scars. On my stomach, what replaced the blisters are round scars, which looks a bit disgusting if you ask me. I wasn't exactly about this, but at least these are hidden away by my clothing, so nobody can see them anyway.

Currently, the scars pretty much faded away, with only a few staying. I'm not sure if they are permanent, I have no plans removing them though. It is a disease I don't wish upon anyone other than my worst enemies, it is a painful experience for sure. I heard that chickenpox can be quite dangerous, so I'm glad the itching part is the worst thing happened to me in this experience.

So for a while, whenever I open my laptop, no matter what my original goal is, I will always get distracted and play two games, either Minesweeper and Atlantiles.

Not sure when exactly I started playing Minesweeper, I think I saw people talking about how they never learnt to play this game on Facebook, and I decided to try it out. While I figured out the rules pretty quickly (the numbers represent the amount of mines in the surronding eight blocks), it still took me a while to completely solve expert level, there's patterns to learn to clear tricky blocks, and also RNG. Anyways, after remembering all the tricky patterns and solving the expert level multiple times, my goal slowly shifted to solving it as fast as possible.

I eventually figured out that I can use the spacebar to clear out blocks after placing the flags, my clear time significantly got faster. As of now, my best record is 93 seconds.

For Atlantiles, it is more recent, which I only learnt about from a Cookie Run Minigame event with similar rules. I'm pretty sure I had played a similar game when I was a kid, was it one of the minigames from the Ochaken game series? Not sure. Anyways as I was playing the thing in Cookie Run, I got quickly frustrated as I was having a lot of difficulty to find the pairs, and that resulted in running out of time. While I slowly learnt how to clear out the tiles quickly, I would still say the game is fairly difficult.

Eventually, from a Discord server, I heard there's the game that works the same, called Atlantiles. Well unlike Cookie Run's, which allows reshuffling if there's no more matchable pairs, this one doesn't reshuffle, and considers it game over. Well atleast the time limit is far less tight, so I have plenty of time which tile go to which. It does take a lot of effort analysing, because if you match a pair of tiles, but the other pair can never meet each other, you are setting yourself into game over. Luckily, a few days ago I managed to beat all the levels.

These two games scratch my brain so well, perhaps I like the feeling of seeing stuff crumble away and disappear like finishing a list of chores. But sometimes I get absorbed into playing these games so much I would lose my sense of time, that's a problem~

Not gonna be a long blog post, cuz I remebered I wrote something about character AI on September, even though I'm not a fan of AI art. I feel quite bad how I didn't realise it is kinda insensitive of me, so I just went back and hid the section I talked about it. Will not do that again, so thank you for the understanding 🙏

My favourite animal isn’t cats, it’s hampters. I really like how orbular and fat they are, they are also very stupid-looking (affectionate). But for some reason, a lot of my things are themed after cats, like Cosmos, my username, and you’d be more likely to see drawings of cats here than hamsters. So what’s going on?

My fascination for cats started when I was very young. My family never kept cats as pets, but my grandma did, kinda. The cats are outdoor cats, and aside from feeding them, the cats are quite distant to others. I only remember chasing after them to pet them but always failing to do so, so my impression of cats when I was a kid was that they aren't very affectionate creatures. However, that didn't really stop me from liking cats, they are very cute after all. I only see cats that are willing to be touched to be miracles, I remember going to a cat café for the first time and holding a cat doesn't run away, I was quite astonished.

When I was a kid, I had a strange dream that felt quite real, it felt like it was my previous life. I dreamt that I was a cat in my grandma's house in my past life, I was in the garden, chased by my cousins. I would've thought it is a real memory if it weren't the fact that being turned from a cat into a human isn't very realistic.

And then during my Minecraft era, my Hypixel friend (which I lost contact with) made me a skin, I asked for cat ears, so he added cat ears like how I wanted. Although my love for cat ears wasn't very big at the time, this is probably a major turning point, because when I made my own skin, I also added cat ears (which is Kyrea). And that might have influenced Cosmos and Lavender's design.

No matter I want it or not, cats will always be a big part of my life. Though why do I not draw hamsters as much? Well, hamsters are kinda hard to draw, while they have an anatomy, they are also basically round, mochi things, and it is very difficult to capture that soft, rotundness.

While I'm reading some blogs, I saw someone mention that they rarely see the ocean, which I found somewhat surprising.

I live in Hong Kong, which is located the near ocean. And whenever I travel to somewhere, it is very common to see the ocean outside the view of the bus or whatever you are on. Basically, the ocean is a familiar thing to me, it is beautiful, but nothing new. Whenever I watch non-Hong Kong shows, if the characters go to a beach, they might go "WOW THE SEA IS SO BEAUTIFUL!!" with a childlike wonder. I didn't very understand their big reaction, I just assumed it is for show effect and exaggeration, I was like "How strange they are, reacting like they are seeing the sea for the first time", but then I think, "wait, they might be really seeing the sea for the first time!"

There are plenty of populated areas that doesn't have large bodies of water around, and people have to travel miles to see the ocean. While to me, ocean isn't a rare sight to see, but to some, ocean feels like a sight of the lifetime. And perhaps their logic is kinda like how I view snow.

Hong Kong doesn't really snow, and the last time it did was in 1975 ^[1]. As a result, people in Hong Kong rarely ever see snow, but luckily for me, I got to see it when I was travelling to South Korea like a decade ago. It was very cold there, my fingers hurt from the cold so badly I cried, but aside from that I had a lot of fun. On the last day of the trip, the snow fell like my mom told me. It wasn't very big, the snowflakes were rather small, and it quickly faded into normal rain as the temperature wasn't cold enough. It was somewhat underwhelming, but that is the only time I got the chance to see this miracle weather.

Thinking of this experience, I can imagine someone living in a snowy climate, wishing they could see the ocean, just like me wishing to see the snow. It's strange isn't it, what's considered normal by some is considered special by others.

Maybe one day I should go travel to see the snow again.

While scrolling social media, I saw posts encouraging people to build their own personal sites, in a rather passive-aggressive way, saying that if you don't make one you are a horrible person blindly consuming content. While I strongly advocate starting your website, I don't like their tone. So in this blog, I am going to discuss the pros and cons of making and viewing personal hobbyist sites (like mine), and I am going to base the data off my own experience, so this discussion isn't professional by any means.

Pros

1. Full customizations and decorations

Being able to create stuff with HTML, you are able to talk whatever you want while style colorful stuff in the background.

In most social media (like Twitter), there's not much decoration you can do. Sure there's profile pictures and banners, but there's not a lot of customizations aside from that.

And in your personal websites, when you know enough about HTML coding, you basically can do whatever you want. Even after I made a theme for my website, I can add even more flashy stuff in smaller details like the blog titles. Or if you know Javascript, you can even add tag systems, flipping book pages, or maybe add games (haven't done this one, nor do I wanna do it, too hard :P).

2. A more peaceful environment for self-expression

In personal websites, I feel it is more comfortable to talk about the stuff you really want.

In social media, it feels like there's a type of content people want to see, and as people are naturally drawn to numbers going up, people often want to make stuff that gets them likes. And for people with less popular interests (like OCs, obscure media), it might take them a long time to even build an audience, this can be very discouraging while you see people who draw popular media fanart get thousands of likes. While I like drawing fanart, I feel so sad when my original art that I put a lot of effort in get little to no likes (my Lavender birthday art got 0 likes, man...).

In personal sites, you don't really know if people actually viewed your stuff, even if Neocities works like social media with the likes, there isn't an algorithm like Twitter and others, the timeline is just the people you follow, or the most recent updates if you go to the global feed. But honestly, this kinda takes off the need to chase for likes, because there's no numbers to chase after (unless you add a like widget in your site somehow). If there's no need for fame, why not just go all out and be true to what I like?

3. Long postssss

In personal sites, I get to see a lot of long blog posts, like what I mentioned two blogs ago. Social media seems to prefer short posts more, and I don't see long threads very often. And while I was scrolling Neocities, I saw a lot of people discussion a variety of topics like the rant of modern Internet, their own interests etc. While short tweets with a dumb punchline that requires you to understand most recent trends are fun sometimes, I'm finding these longer posts very interesting to read.

Cons

1. Requires a knowledge on HTML

While HTML is considered to be quite simple for many, learning it still requires quite a lot of effort, especially those unfamiliar with coding. Social media is easy to use, you just type whatever you wanna say, then social media shows the stuff you typed. While HTML is simple if you just add text and images, most people would prefer if the website layout is prettier. And the fact CSS is a bit confusing if you don't know anything about it, this confusion can be quite a big barrier for beginners.

Learning something takes courage, energy and time, it is true for every skill, even if you think HTML and CSS is easy. It took me like a year to improve my site to this current state, and I am still learning new stuff about CSS (Like how I learnt how to use grid-box recently). If I haven't gotten the basics of coding from my secondary school and university, learning HTML would be a lot more difficult, so I can imagine how daunting this is for those who never learnt coding.

2. Mobile phone problems

Whilst I'm coding and viewing websites, I noticed these aren't very good for mobile users.

For coding, typing the code on mobile is very difficult. Not only the keyboard is very small and is prone to typos due to how big my fingers are, you can't really use shortcuts conveniently such as Find and Replace, Copy and Paste and others. Also, it is very hard to debug on mobile, as I can't access inspect mode, which is exclusive for computers. Inspect mode is my main method for finding mistakes/adding new stuff, without it I feel less motivated to code. Moreover, I don't know if it is a bug on my phone or if the browser is weird, when I type stuff in the Neocities editor on my phone, the screen jumps up and the part I'm currently typing is hidden from view, and I have to scroll back down to see if I have typed anything wrong. This is perhaps the part I hate the most for coding on mobile.

For checking out people's sites, I noticed a lot of websites are not mobile friendly. I sometimes browse the Neocities feed when I'm on the train (it is very boring there), and among the ten-ish websites I clicked into, 60% of them are a bit difficult to navigate but still viewable, 30% of them are completely broken, and only 10% of them are mobile friendly.

While I feel quite bad for pointing out the mobile-unfriendliness of websites made by people trying to have fun (and my site isn't fully accessible by any means), I think if you want to encourage people to join the community of personal sites, I think you should at least acknowledge this hobby isn't very friendly to mobile users. There are many people who use their phones more than computers in the current age, I would be one of them if I never decided to use Adblock while listening to Youtube, oh and also Neocities.

3. It is not a social media

While personal websites allow higher self-expression, it is not a substitute for social media. In social media, there is an algorithm that makes it easier to find people who have similar interests or personality with you. You can also find the newest content of something, the news? The updates of your favourite show? Just type the keywords and here's the hottest posts about said thing! Webmasters don't often deliever news like social media, and the fact this hobby isn't exactly popular at the moment, you shouldn't really expect content to come and go very quickly.

While people are starting to hate the culture of eating up content like fast food, I feel like it is very difficult to completely avoid it in this day and age, people are often encouraged to know about the newest stuff at work and social situations, and they might prefer to stay like that. If people try to use Neocities to get away from all social media, I can imagine many not getting used to the quietness and quitting this hobby for a while.

There might be points I'm forgetting to add, but what I wanna say is that I believe personal sites isn't a cure-all for the enshittification of the Internet (man "enshittification" is such a funny word), despite all the fun stuff of coding websites, it doesn't really fulfill all the needs you can sate in social media.

Man I sure said a lot of stuff just because I don't like someone's comment, jesus christ it's like 1300 words. I might have overreacted by this, and that commenter might have only exaggerated their tone to get people rage-create personal sites. But that's what happens when I see comments with lowkey-aggressive tones, I will take them 100% seriously even if those are jokes, and I will create a long ass essay in my head on why these comments are WRONG (and maybe post it too).

In real life, I am quite an introverted and quiet person, which shouldn't be too surprising considering I don't talk to people much either on the Internet. Therefore, majority of the people just see me as the shy person, normal stuff.

I am not the type to talk a lot in real life, so I often just sits by the side and listen to whatever people are talking about. I guess this is why even spending years in a class, I don't make much friends. There are friend groups that are nice enough to have me around, maybe eat lunch together. But there is always that feeling that they don't really feel at ease with me, like being with someone not to be handled roughly with. Perhaps they would be talking about homework or the current TV shows, and when I speak up, the tone with noticebly change and formally go "Oh hello, how are you doing? :)" The kindness is appreciated, but it still feels kind of sad, though understandable.

I sometimes feel like people see me like a child, I'll try to list out some of the examples I feel this way, including the ones that are probably irrational.

• The kind and formal tone when peers talk to me (mentioned above, though I'm sure this is just what happens with people talking to acquaintances)
• Being guided around during group activities (Not exactly fair I listed this as the group leaders are supposed to guide the shyer people)
• Being told that I'm kind of air-headed
• A teacher actually telling my classmates to hang out with me more (I'm pretty sure this only makes the social interaction unauthentic)

I think if I had been more sociable, these won't even happen to me. Majority of these are kinda my fault anyways, as I often subtlely push away any social opportunities. Even though I don't know how to change myself, I keep wondering what went wrong, like do I not talk enough, or do I talk too shyly?

I often see sociable and loud people as someone I should be, they are talkative, they joke about crude and dirty stuff a lot, and everyone loves them. I don't think I am a very formal person, considering the infrequent swear words I say here, but compared to my irl peers, their swear jar is overflowing while mine has plenty of room to spare. Some people say Cantonese has a lot of colorful swear words that can make English ones shudder in fear, I almost feel bad I don't feel like putting them into good use.

What I'm trying to say is I often imagine if I speak more crudely, or maybe joke about something dark or lowkey sexual, maybe I would stand out more, and people would notice me, and see me more as an equal. And yet, this is a mere speculation, maybe it wouldn't work for a girl like me, and the only thing I'd get are side-eyes.

Wait actually, what do sociable people even talk about? Man why did my brain always block out memories during social situations?

What I have learnt from counselling is that I cannot change what I am, while changing my personality might attract more friends, but those friends aren't even the ones I would want to be close with. If I am introverted, instead of making myself into an extrovert, I should do things that accommodate to my style. "Naturally you will find friends that you feel comfortable with" I won't exactly think it is true, in university you either have a lot of friends or you sit alone at school because nobody talks to each other. But at least now, I have a group of online friends that I can share everything with.

I'm pretty sure those who read my blogs are the ones I can trust. Recently there is someone who comments slurs on guestbooks, and that person also commented on mine. I have already deleted it, but I am afraid that if I talk about this too publicly that troll would harass users further... So if you also got these kinds of messages, try to add some sort of filter, which my guestbook has added.

Vent again: ugh being quiet about this reminds me the times my teacher tells me to stay quiet about being bullied so that my bullies would lose interest in me. Not only this didn't work, it only makes me feel like the adults didn't care about me. Now I'm just sitting here, feeling quite sad about this memory...

When I'm writing the blogs, I sometimes calculate the statistics of my blogs. It seems I average around 30 blogs every 3 months, so I wondered if I can reach 100 blogs this year. And to my surprise, I sure yapped a lot this last few months, and today, I finally reached 100th blog. It is quite an amazing feat considering how little I rambled online prior to making this website, I will reveal how much words I have written at the end of this year, it is over 9000 words.

I couldn't remember if I mentioned that in a similar way before, but if I haven't, it is something I feel like whenever I post to social media (And if I had, ignore this part, sorry if I keep repeating old stuff). This feeling is kinda similar to this video, often times when I post stuff online, it rarely gets any feedback while I see other people get many replies. It feels like being around cool kids as a quiet kid, whatever you do, you wouldn't get anyone's attention, because you aren't interesting enough. Although I'm not the type to chase for fame, it still feels lonely feeling like I am being ignored. Whilst I build this site more and more, I'm starting to believe that "If I'm not going to be noticed anyway, why not share my stuff in somewhere I am more comfortable in?" I don't know how many people read my content, but hey all my blogs can be styled, that's a major improvement from most modern social media!

Personal websites are such good media to talk about whatever you want to say, I also find reading other people's blogs really fun too. In Twitter, I don't see people lengthily ramble about stuff very much, as Twitter doesn't allow more than like 280 words in one tweet. While people can still type more by making long threads, I notice the tweets that gets viral are often short jokes that are probably overdone and perhaps not very funny IMO. The situation is probably better on sites like Tumblr (which allows long posts and has better algorithm from what I've heard, still not gonna use it due to the porn bots), but I found the blogs posts from personal sites the most interesting to read.

From the types of sites I often browse, aside from art sites, I also enjoy browsing sites with a lot of blogs and rambles. I find blogs that discuss certain topics the most interesting, even if they are talking about something that I'm not familiar with (like shows I've never watched), it is nice to learn about new things and know about people's opinions.

It is very interesting, not only blogs has made me write a lot, they has also made read a lot. I have mentioned before that I'm not a fan of reading due to my weak concentration, but it seems reading blogs feels far easier, maybe people often use simple words when writing their blogs. Does it improve my writing skills like reading literature does? I'm not sure, teachers are probably disappointed in me the day before I start reading masterpieces, but I think this will at least not make me blindly scroll on social media.

I had another lucid dream last night, however the attempt to control my dream is less successful this time.

I remember the dream mostly consists me avoiding any contact from the government, and I don't know why either, I wasn't in any trouble, they just need to ask me something. However, the government called my mom, so she and I need to go to some goverment department for something.

So we got to the train station, I noticed the train station looks weird, dangerous even. For whatever reason, we had to walk through the gates high above, like parkour stuff going on. While passerbys walk on the platforms like normal, I'm not interested in jumping for the beef /ref, I ain't got the balls to jump onto those scary platforms.

I forgot what happened next, but I eventually found myself on a street near my home. At this time, I suddenly became aware that I'm dreaming. I decided to try doing something I failed last time: summoning my OCs. I tried to manifest Cosmos into existence, but no matter how much I tried, she wouldn't appear. I even saw a tabby cat on the streets, so I stared at it, trying to use it to help me imagine Cosmos harder. "Maybe she might appear to me while hugging me..." I thought to myself, for whatever reason.

However, the dream didn't make my imagination come true, just like real life where you can't make something real by just imagining stuff. I felt like it is because my mind isn't in deep enough sleep (my eyes can feel the light through my eyelids), or maybe my dream is fooling me once again. Anyways I eventually gave up and relaxed my mind, and perhaps I had another dream that I don't remember.

Man I am certain my dream mind is too much of a trickster, I can't even have some fun in my dreams.

There are times that I will encounter stories that talk about the evil of humanity. The protagonists are often the victim of the sins of evil people, they are often beat down and suffer from the most heinous torture you can think of. The protags are probably so kind and pure-hearted, perhaps they keep a little pet somewhere. But the humans, who are oh so villainous, decided to beat the pet to death because they enjoy laughing at the protag's pain.

I'm sure I have mentioned that this type of story is one of my most hated. For one, I already know humans suck, I don't need or want to be reminded of this. I'm aware some of these writers might have suffered a lot in their life, and they are using the story as an outlet to express and criticise how evil humanity can be. But in my perspective, I have seen the malice of people so much, this topic feels like it has been beaten to death.

There's also the thing me getting very distressed after watching these kinds of stories. I couldn't understand how my sister can view them and just go "damn this is sad" and get over it, while I go into fetal position at the corner of the sofa trying to keep myself together. I don't know if it is empathy for the characters or something, I just feel so bad that it feels like the pain is inflicted on me, even if those cruelties are cartoonishly evil.

And some of these stories, I'm pretty sure the writers make it as disturbing as possible for shock value. Like "Look at this poor girl being bullied and assaulted horribly! You should feel angry and scared!" Like, the message about the cruelty of humans is already clear, there's not much point when you add excessive torture. At this point it feels like the target audience is those who get off to people in pain.

Most importantly, it feels kind of strange that there is not a single good person shown in these stories. While yes, the protagonists usually finds one good person or two after their tragic backstory, but at a certain degree, isn't it weird that in the backstories, every single human being shown are irredeemable assholes?

Perhaps this question of mine comes from one of my newer beliefs. While it is true the world is full of bad people, and perhaps we are being ruled over by bad people too. But if we assume that every single human on this Earth is evil, it doesn't feel very correct. There are people who volunteer to help people suffering from disasters, and people who study to create something that can change the world for the better, and people who help complete strangers even though it doesn't benefit them whatsoever (I still haven't gotten over the time a stranger on the street helped me feel better after I got sick from blood donation). If I say I hate all of humanity because of all the wrongdoings I've seen, it feels like I am dismissing all the kindness I have seen and experienced in my life, it just doesn't feel fair.

It sounds a bit immature, but one of the reasons I avoid watching any shows full of cruelty is because I'm afraid I will forget there are kind people in this world after being reminded of all the horrible things I've seen in the past. I don't want to lose trust in people, I don't want to be afraid of people yet again.

So, this blog concludes by why I avoid watching certain stories. However, considering how sensitive I am, almost every story makes me feel upset in a way, so that might be quite annoying if I ever want to find inspirations for writing.

So I watched two movies lately: Millennium Actress and Birth of Kitaro: Mystery of GeGeGe. The first one I watched is for the movie review assignment from the anime course, the second one is just me being curious about the plot, but the motivation to watch this one is somewhat caused by the course as well.

I'm going to keep this review brief because I'm somewhat sick of writing reviews, but I think these two movies are quite good.

Millennium Actress is about a director interviewing a retired actress of her past, as the actress talks about her past, the interviewers become characters in the memories. Sometimes, her memories are mixed with movies that she took part in, she would become the protagonists of the movie, and yet the plot of the movie reflects what actually happened in her past.

Her past also heavily revolves around finding an artist who was being seeked by the police due to the politics of that era. She fell in love with that artist at first sight, and during the time she spent time with him, the artist gave her a key as a promise to meet again. However, as he is being chased by police, he had to keep running away, and she didn't have the opportunity to properly talk to him again.

It is very gut-wrenching to see her past, I'm quite surprised that this kind of romance doesn't make me feel annoyed, but genuinely sad. But I think one of the reasons is that it isn't just about love, but also about her change in passion and hope. It is the hope of meeting the artist again that she is motivated to travel many corners of Japan and become an actress. The last thing she says in the movie is "I love the me that keeps chasing after him." or something along the lines if my translation feels off, but man this line really ties the whole theme together, so good.

I actually wanted to wathing Birth of Kitaro for a long while, but never actually got the push to do so. Some of the people I followed seem to really like this movie, saying this movie is very emotional and stuff. I also saw really good fanart of Kitaro's family with Mizuki (Doesn't this character share the same name as the author?), some of it quite wholesome, some of it are juicy fanart of Mizuki. The good feedbacks of the movies has brought me curiosity, and I was planning to watch it some day despite not knowing the source material that much.

When I was in the anime course lecture, the teacher introduced the author Shigeru Mizuki and the series GeGeGe no Kitaro (I found it quite interesting that "GeGeGe" originates from his peers making fun of him, but he decided to use this name for this series. I guess authors reclaiming something they were made fun of is more common than I thought), and the teacher also played the trailer for Birth of Kitaro, which motivated me to watch this movie even more.

This movie explains the past of Kitaro, like the title said so. The movie starts with Mizuki travelling to a mysterious village to learn about 'M', a medicine that makes the human body powerful. And after meeting a white-haired man (who is referred as Gegero) who's looking for his missing wife, strange deaths occuring around a family, and clueing unravelling, you will see how awful humanity can be. Like, holy shit what the fuck.

As this point, you might think humanity can't really redeem itself but to let it die. However, this movie didn't let that happen, which just a simple answer: "Because it is the world where my child lives". Despite everything humanity has done, Gegero still doesn't want humanity to end, just because he wants his son to live on. The answer is actually quite simple despite the complicated question, but honestly, I quite like the conclusion a lot.

With two movies watched, I think I should read Alice in Wonderland like I mentioned in Status Cafe months ago. But I need to go bath first.

I made a thing where the image pop out when you hover over the collapsible button. It took me surprisingly long to figure this out.

As you might know, I wanted to make my website more decorative and colorful, so in many corners of my site, I have made some redesigns and decorating, like the art index page and the fandom page. And yesterday, I noticed the new updates section in the index page needs to have some more interesting stuff going on. So I decided, instead of just showing the title of the newest blog, the style of the collapsible should show as well.

And as I was rewriting some code for this, I also wanted to implement something cool, which is the thing where the image pops out, mentioned at the first paragraph. One problem is that I couldn't get the image to get below the button, it seems making the child element having lower z-index than the parent is quite difficult.

There is a solution though, giving the parent the "transform-style:preserve-3d;" property and the child element having "transform:translatez(*insert negative number here*)" can make the effect that the child element going under the parent. So I tried that... it didn't work. Why didn't it work when the example the people gave worked???? I went to sleep frustrated because it was 1a.m..

I tinkered with the CSS for a while, and finally noticed the cause: the filter property is interfering the translatez thing for some reason. So I just changed the filter to box-shadow, then the thing finally worked.

Yea now the style of the collapsible can show on the main page, isn't it cool? I'm planning on making a fake music player for the Listening section, this should be way easier.

Both my parents are born Hongkongers, and we have been living in Hong Kong as long as I remember. However, I have been asked the question of "Are you non-native?" more than I expected, twice in fact, wait was it three? No matter how many it actually is, it is strange it happened more than once.

In the first one, someone asked me this question, but I don't really remember if he clarified what makes him think of that. My sister speculated that it is my voice that might remind them of a non-Hong Kong accent, possibly South East Asian. I don't really know what characteristics defines an accent, so I can't comment on that.

In another scenario, someone asked me this question due to my accent and appearance, she said my appearance looks a bit like mixed-blood. I'm quite surprised by this feedback, because nobody has pointed this out for the entirety of my life, the most people has commented on my appearance are insults.

I have forgotten if I got asked that question three times, but if it is true, I'm pretty sure the question is asked because of my voice as well.

Honestly I think it might make sense for people to be curious of my accent. When I was a child, I stutter a lot and couldn't speak smoothly, I even had to attend speech therapy during primary school. While I have gotten better with speaking smoothly in the present, perhaps my voice became different from others due to my odd growth of my speech patterns.

Another possibility is that I picked up different accents from all the videos I've watched. My mother tongue is Cantonese, but I mostly watch or listen to videos with English audio. For as long as I remember, I don't really find interest in stuff that are in Cantonese, rarely do they contain stuff that I enjoy (sorry TV I don't like family drama and romance).

I believed that from all the videos I've watched, I might have picked up the accents, and mixed up them into my own accent. I heard it is something that can happen if you frequently exposed to foreign media.

I wouldn't say it is a problem, I just think it is quite interesting, funny even, to be asked this question despite my parents never commenting on my voice or appearance like that.

The dream starts with me and my crush in a park high above ground and you can challenge your courage by jumping over huge gaps (with safety ropes). There's prob a name for this but I forgot, but I have seen tiktok clips of people in China playing this (One pretended to be a JiangXhi and hopped into the gap lmao). Anyways this isn't the interesting part, just something about misattribution of arousal I guess.

The next part of the dream is a story, which is far more interesting. There is a world where people are connected to higher beings using magic. When those beings use magic, a certain population of people might explode, quite absurd.

So when the world detects magic use, they will send off an alert system to tell those affected to stay somewhere safe (to not harm other people). The affected people started glowing with cracks forming. It is very sad to see nobody can do anything aside to pray, there are even children who is affected by the magic.

Surprisingly, they didn’t explode. The glowing stopped. Some people started to tear up, cheering that they are spared from the tragic fate, but that is not the end of the story.

Suddenly, the affected people are enveloped by an impenetrable bubble, and they are levitated to outer space. Apparently those higher beings sometimes kidnap people to keep them as pets. The higher beings said “Adopting humans from their home planet is wayyy ethical than buying from one of those awful breeders who don’t care about human wellbeing”.

Um I dont think kidnapping is ethical either.

The higher beings also mentioned something about the explosion phenomenon often happens to children, with the average age being 11. And the caretakers often get so heartbroken they would die soon after the children died from the explosion, so a lot people die. But I don't really see the point in explaining the statistics, like are you going to solve this problem or not?

It isn't the most interesting dream, but it did entertain me a bit.

I have done a lot of stuff with my site at this point, I found it amazing that some of these stuff are things I did not plan to put in at all, like the art gallery, which I initially thought is too difficult to implement. Now that I can do so many things in my site, I almost got rid of the need to post in social media, the freedom of expression is so great.

Like I have described in the past, this website feels like my home. But sometimes I ask myself a question, "Then what rooms are each of my pages?"

It makes a lot of sense the index page is the living room, as it is the first page people see when they enter my site. The blog page is my bedroom as the website title says, it is dim and quite comfy, and also the place for expressing myself the most. Art page is probably the kitchen, cuz I'm cooking /silly. Then you may ask, what about the Food Log page? Idk, and I didn't cook any of the food listed there so I doubt this is the kitchen, it'd make more sense to be just a book.

For the fandom page and OC page, I'd imagine it as a shrine that some people have for their fav medias. I wonder if there are people who dedicate an entire room for their fav characters...

The songs page is just the music player.

Hamster: hampter

Damn I'm running out of things to say, I don't even know what the about page is supposed to be. Speaking of which, I'm planning to revamp that page a bit, I feel there are better ways to introduce myself, it can look a bit more fancy.

Well this blog is a bit unorganised, but it's kinda fun. Anyway currently there are 93 blogs (including this one) this year, can I reach 100 before the year end? Stay tuned to see if I can become a certified yapper.

This blog is a collection of random stuff because I want to experiement how much I can do here and talk about random shit that is too short for a blog.

First of all: Collapsible matryoshka.

Ok that's a fun experience, because using the collapsible class directly fucks with my Javascript code, I have to make a new class for the collapsible mentioned above, it's a dumb experiment worth trying, but might not do again.

Also, whilst I'm write the code, I remembered I need to credit the assets used in my previous blog, as the assets does not belong to me. However, I feel like just typing the list of credits using paragraphs might be too bland. Soooo, I added a CSS for the credits in blogs. Whenever I credit something, the credits will show like this:

This glass-like coloring has been more prevalent lately in my website, I really like how it gives off a slightly fancy and polished look, like a transulent crystal. People should try this style out more :3

Ok enough HTML experiments, and here comes random rambling.

Whenever I search the word "Neocities" in social media like Twitter, I often see people describe Neocities as nostalgic or old, because it is based off an older web-host Geocities. But perhaps I don't browse the social side of the Internet when I was young, I never experienced personal websites during childhood. The most I do on the Internet as a child was playing Hello Kitty dress up games or something similar, there's also games from Eclass, a platform for students to learn using online materials and games. I'm pretty sure there was a game that allows the student to travel in a building and each floor has different information to learn and minigames to play, I wonder how this game is made, and if I can make it too...

Ok as I was saying, I never heard of people expressing themselves through personal websites until last year when my Discord friend mentioned this to me (A.K.A. the time I started making this site). So when I'm coding this site, I don't have the wonderful feeling of nostalgia akin to listening to a childhood song. But regardless, I found coding HTML really fun, coding my personal website has given me the motivation to express myself freely. The major downside is that you need to learn coding, but I have learnt a lot of coding basics from secondary school and university, so not a major problem. Also, HTML by itself isn't very hard, it only does get difficult when you add Javascript to it (Dumb fact: I can hear my brain groaning to myself everytime I want to add more Javascript to my site, it goes like "Kiwi PLEASE don't you know how time and energy consuming it is to code???").

Man this blog is so unorganised, but whatever, somethings are meant to be unorganised. I mean people on Twitter post the dumbest shit and somehow get thousands of likes, so why can't I post a blog with random matryoshka buttons?

At this stage of my site, I'm starting to run out of ideas about what to add here. I have almost done everything I wanted to do here, ramblings, OCs, fandom stuff... Despite all the freedom personal website gives us, it feels like I lack creativity. Sky's the limit, and yet I have no wings.

However, a new idea popped up out of nowhere. I looked at the blog collapsibles as I messed with the CSS, I thought to myself, "Can I do something cool with the background?"

And so, I found a website that creates check patterns, and I just make a random pattern, and placed it in the blog for Cosmos birthday. Wow... it looks so cool, why hadn't I thought about this idea before? I really should do more of these cool stuff during special occasions.

After doing this, I realised how much more I do do with the boring-looking pages, like the art index page. It was just a list of art categories written in text, there's nothing interesting to look at there. Therefore, I turned them into buttons, used that pattern as the background, and made a rainbow with them. Taste the rainbow motherfucker. This page looks so much more interesting now...

Another cool thing I did recently is that I added a photo frame for each of my favs in the fandom page, so people can see what they look like as they learn about my type. And for those I especially like (including Pome), I added extra decorations to their photo frames.

I'm not very much a decorative person, even when doing stuff I enjoy, I only do the part I feel the most necessary. I would describe my works as straight-forward, and probably plain sometimes. Adding fancy stuff to the blorbo page feels a bit overwhelming, because I don't know what kind of assets I should use, or where to find suitable ones. Cookie run characters are easier to find though, there are plenty of game assets available in wikis and fan kits. Pome and Holly's photo frame looks quite pretty now, but for Chigiri and Barou, I'm still thinking how to decorate theirs as I don't know where to find decorations that match them, man I don't want to draw new assets.

I think there's a lot of improvements in the fandom page and other pages too, while they serve their functions, they are rather under-decorated. Perhaps I should look online for more free-to-use assets, like Foollovers, even though I get 403Forbidden when I check this website, I swear I could access it with VPN before, but now it doesn't work anymore :(

This sudden idea burst has made me realise how much I can do here, I had so much fun decorating. Perhaps I can scroll around websites to see what kinda of new cool stuff I can do next. Though I feel like my website might have too much stuff going on, would it cause lag in some people's computers?

Today, I had quite an interesting dream, I managed to become aware that I’m in a dream. It took place in a giant hotel, I don’t remember exactly what I was doing, but I think some sort of game was taking place.

And somehow, I remembered that I’m actually in a dream, it wasn’t clear as to how I figured it out (likely there’s a small environmental change in my room), but I knew it’s a good opportunity to do whatever I want. However, I knew that if I became aware that I’m dream, it often means I’m about to wake up. So I kept telling myself, “Don’t ‘open’ your eyes, don’t jolt yourself back to reality…” even though these thoughts makes me more likely to wake me up, luckily I didn’t.

I started to sprint across the halls, I noticed that the things around me change unusually, like that Minecraft AI thing people have been talking about. I kinda missed flying in my dreams, so I imagined myself floating, and I started flying. I also wanted to manifest my OCs into my dream, but I assumed that I needed something stronger to trigger this event.

While I have a lot of superpowers in my dreams, a major nerf for my dream self is that I am very dumb and gullible. Even if something very small happens, I get distracted from the current event immediately. Sometimes my dreams can trick me, one time I became aware that I’m dreaming, my dream “wakes me up”. I would groan that I couldn’t experience lucid dreaming, but in fact I’m still in my dream, it’s just that my brain tricks me into thinking I woke up.

I feel like I could’ve done a lot more in that dream, I still think it is an interesting experience, as I only had lucid dreams like four times or so.

The concept of flow state is mentioned everywhere on the Internet, and Blue Lock. Flow state is the feeling of focus whilst doing something you enjoy, you would feel like your attention to this activity is very high, and time passes very quickly. It is a state of mind which many people wishes to experience, as people say. However, I was quite confused about why people chases so hard for this feeling, I mean, I feel this way of focus very often.

Ever since I'm a kid, when I am doing something like doing homework (no I don't like homework, this one refers to those which are easy to do, like copying words) or drawing, I get immersed in the activity quite quickly. I often do these tasks while listening to music, which doesn't affect my performance very much. But when I get into the presumed flow state, I forget about my surroundings, so much so I don't really care about that my earphones aren't playing any music anymore. And when I finish doing said activity, many hours would have passed.

What do I feel about this experience? While it is something quite helpful and quite enjoyable to an extend, I wouldn't say it is as magical as some people would describe. This opinion might be unfair as I experience this far more than some people, perhaps I'm too used to this feeling.

This is a slightly annoying part about being in this state, when I have to pause the activity to do something else (like resting or eating dinner), I get quite irritated. It is similar to the feeling where you have to get out of the comfy hot shower when it is freezing cold outside, or being waken up from a good sleep. Your body is used to this feeling and is content with it, this sudden change gets jarringly uncomfortable... But wait, is this really flow?

With a bit of searching, I found this article: "Neurodivergent Focus: Flow State vs. Hyperfocus".

Hyperfocus can resemble flow, but with a crucial difference: a lack of control.

Typically a person will become so fixated that basic needs fade away. They might forget to eat, drink, or even use the restroom. This can lead to exhaustion, dehydration, and disrupted sleep patterns.

Hmm, that kinda describes me. I remember I getting so focused in my tasks, when my family members calls me to dinner, I get very upset because I don't want to stop. And I remember the many times I feel very awful after being focused because I didn't allow myself breaks to not lose the feeling of flow. While there exist times I did remember to take care of myself after being focused, perhaps majority of these flow experiences are in fact hyperfocusing?

So the conclusion of this blog, does that mean the chances of me being neurodivergent is higher now?

First and foremost, happy birthday Wolf! Sadly, due to me being busy with homework and having no time and energy, I've got no new art to share. And because of how little I have written for his character, there isn't a lot to share, but I'll try anyway.

Wolf is some dude who likes to stand out and do cool stuff, like fighting and being a prick sometimes. Like, why would you want to just sit around and heal people when you can throw hands? And yes Wolf's main ability is supposed to be healing, hence the chat dialogue with Ruth mentioning healing.

In his early life (and when he wasn't called Wolf yet), he often listened to his mentors and higher ups, being well-behaved and a skillful healer... However, he always found something's amiss, feeling like his life needs something more. But everything changed when he met Raven, a person who listens to noone but himself, a genius with a fascination with going to outer space. Wanting to be like Raven, he changed to his name, Wolf now follows Raven to learn about mechanic stuff. While Raven doesn't normally socialize with people, he didn't really mind this new company (he seemed to approve Wolf's intelligence). And being with Raven, it changed a lot in Wolf's life (for the better or worse, he did act more like a dick).

So, what happened to Wolf and Raven's relationship? Wolf doesn't really know the full details, he only knew that Raven joined the team of Sky Pioneer, and sometime after that, Raven lost his dream of going to outer space. He was very mad about Raven's change in demeanor, and started to find Sky Pioneer is be kinda fishy (mostly due to him blaming them for Raven's situation). This is why he travelled to the outside world, to find any clues about this group. Lucky for him, he is going to meet a small team of travellers, one of them even personally knew the late leader of Sky Pioneer!

Hope that small lore drop can sate your hunger a bit. And now, let me talk about something in my life.

This is something I suddenly remembered today. Do you guys have something called graduation autograph book? IDK if it is called that, but it is a contact book you give your classmates to write when you are about to graduate. I have only given this to my primary school classmates, I don't really remember why we never did tttyhis during secondary school.

While I wasn't very close to most of my primary school classmates, I was quite enthusiastic about them writing it, because I get to know some of their fun facts and what they think about me, it can be a fun read... Though they often have the same impression of me, which is being quiet. I often get disappointed when the only feedback people give me is that they think I'm quiet, even though it is understandable they think of me this way, as I don't talk a lot. But what's funniest about this book is that I wrote the statistics of people's impression of me at the first page of this book. Among the 18 responses I received, 22.2% of them thinks I'm smart, 33.3% of them thinks I'm quiet, the rest is others/did not mention. I guess past me was very insecure about this phenomenon lol.

I think the best part about this book is that there's a question asking "Who is your best friend?", and I feel happy when I see my best friend writing "You" as the answer. I'm glad we both see each other as best friends.

Do you have this kind of book when you graduate?

Something about editing HTML files is that I tend to change the layout a lot, likely to simplify the code or improve something, but that also means I have to change many things in multiple pages, which might take a lot of time. This probably gets easier if I use something like Github, but that's something I still haven't understood yet, so I'll save that for later. For now, if I change something like the mini art galleries in the OC pages, I have to change them manually every page.

However, I have a few tips to speed up the process.

1. Find and replace

If I want to change the format of something quickly, like if I wanted to change paragraphs into list format, I would want <p> to become <li>, but if there is lots of paragraphs, it will take forever for me to delete and type 'li'. However, there is a function called type and replace. By pressing Ctrl+F or ⌘+F if you're using Mac like me, the editor will open up a find window where you can find certain words and replace them with other words (click the + sign). This is what I often do (I was using the method of copying the entire code to a text editor in my laptop and use find and replace before I knew this), but I felt like there might be a even faster way...

After looking up some stuff, I found out by clicking F1 and opening 'show settings menu', there's a lot of stuff I don't really understand, except for the keybinding, where I noticed it might help me somehow. In my settings, the keybinding is set to Ace. Looking up this keybind, I found this List of keybinds for Ace. I found the most useful keybinds: Find All. By typing Ctrl-Alt-G in Mac (or Ctrl-option-G because I don't have alt key), I can highlight all instances of a word I need to replace, and I can just paste the thing or delete them and type them out all at once. It even speeds up the process of putting Dropbox links, I have to modify the links a bit to make the image show, and Find and Replace really helps changing all the links at once.

2. Javascript

This is a even newer method. I recently changed how the art galleries work, a window containing the full image opens instead of opening a new page entirely when you click an art, it feels more convenient for users. However, that means I have to remove all the "<a>"s containing the arts, except for albums. Find and Replace doesn't work so well anymore because of the album situation, I think there's another thing that prevents it from working properly but I don't have much time writing this. There's also a situation where I wanted many elements to be wrapped in a div, but again, Find and Replace can be a bit clumsy here.

Anyway, I found out that Javascript and Jquery can help a lot, it can help you unwrap elements or wrap elements. It can also help changing some attributes like adding/remove classes and other stuff.

I still remember the days before I learnt Javascript, thinking that I didn't really care to make my website too complex. Well now not only the pages contain tons of Javascript, I can also use Javascript to help to speed up the coding, shockingly helpful. Though I sometimes wonder if the people who disabled Javascript could not view them, that would be quite sad.

Not a lot to write, I just received a morning message from someone special. But I become so giddily, despite all the pain I went through this month, I feel so joyous.

Blog report end, see you when I know what to write next. For the mean time, I'll just giggle and kick my feet.

Ok let's get the basic things out of the way first.

If you saw my Status Cafe, you'd probably know I was having a pretty bad food poisoning. To explain, on Sunday, I went out to eat in an restaurant I often go to, and ordered food I often order. When I was preparing to sleep, I noticed my stomach was feeling a bit bloated than usual, but I paid no mind to went to sleep... One hour later I woke up and threw up in the toilet, and that lasted for hours, like eight hours in fact. It was so bad I threw up everything in my stomach, I tried to take some medicine and drink some water, but I would always end up throwing up all the stuff out. I felt so painful lying on the sofa (it would be easier to rush to the bathroom that way), I wondered if I should go to the hospital, but it would take so long I'm not sure if it would affect the mid-term test... Yes I got sick the exact day of my mid-term test, and there's another the next two days.

Somehow, I persevered, I waited til 9a.m. which was the time the nearby clinic opens. I did take another 1.5 hour for the doctor to come, but I got the medicine. Probably because my symptoms got less bad after hours, I took the medicine and didn't throw up. The two mid-term tests shockingly went well, even the one I considered difficult, the hardest part for me is just walking to school/home because I ran out of breath standing in the train and had to take breaks every two stations. For a few days, I couldn't eat anything without the great urge to throw up, the best I could eat is liquid food (my sister bought me baby food, taste quite good, especially the blueberry oat one). But today, I managed to eat half bowl of noodles, so that's quite a big improvement. I'm hoping my energy can recover too.

If you are a Twitter user, you would know 15 November 2024 is an important day, because it is the day when Elon Musk implements the policy that gives him the right to use all users' data to train the Grok AI, and nobody can opt out of it. Many users are deleting their accounts and moving to BlueSky for this, which is understandable considering how awful genAI can be. I'm also privating and deleting my more important art just to be safe, while privating probably won't stop the AI, it is more because I heard someone say that they can see the people who bookmarked tweets now. Honestly the tone of their voice sounds one of those people who lie as a joke or to get attention, which are the type of people I hate. But adding useless and awful updates to Twitter is such an Elon Musk thing, so I wouldn't be surprised if he added that in the future if he gets mad at something.

Anyways I uploaded most of my art on Twitter to here, some I skipped tho, cuz man the art was quite bad ngl. While I don't want to delete my accounts, because it contains too many memories, I think I will continue to use it, just to continue looking a cute hamster pics, and watch how the platform continues to burn.

Well, with the death of a blue bird, also comes the birthday of a cat girl with blue wings.

Happy 3rd birthday Cosmos

It feels like such an important day, but man I'm running out of things to say despite her being the theme of this site.

Perhaps I can start with the things that I think I haven't shared to you guys. The inspiration for the bond between humans and cometlings are magical girls (or boys) and familiars, I grew up with shows like Jewelpet and Shugo Chara, so it seems they have affected my art style a lot no matter if I want it or not.

In the story of my old drawings, the familiars I have served as a catalyst for conflict with the villains (at least in the first part of the story, idk about the rest), they got kidnapped by the bad guys, and I somehow got powers to defeat them at the end. Remembering how vivid my memories of the familiar (So vivid that I can imagine a memory where I got hit by a falling star and became friends with it and going on an adventure), I really feel like i should implement this idea to UtSS. So I decided Cosmos should be a cometling instead of some humanoid who has cat ears and wings.

It was quite hard to design her cometling form, because drawing animals is not my strong suit. I also had to decide on the ratio of cat to bird, there are a few drawings that cometling Cosmos has a beak instead of a cat mouth, but I decided that she should just be a cat with wings because it would be easier to draw, also because high bird ratio would make her :> instead of :3.

A lot of her backstory is a mystery, she just kinda appeared in front of Lavender one day, without any of her memories. While I can't say a lot about what happened (especially that I haven't finished writing her story), she lost quite a few important people, and her current human form might bring her a lot of distress when all her memories come back, since this appearance... kinda resemble someone she knew.

Well, I'm not a big fan of making my characters suffer for too long, at least they should learn to grow from their pain. Despite all the uncertainties, because of all the new friends she made, Cosmos becomes more brave to move on and fight to protect her friends. Also, because she has dual magic elements, that makes her quite powerful, I gotta balance her somehow.

I have a lot of things to do, and Wolf's birthday is coming next. Man I'm not sure I can keep up...

I always wished to be someone else. Someone more outgoing, someone stronger, someone more lovable.

I feel like everything would have gone easier if I hadn't been me, someone so quiet, someone so feeble, someone so... unlikeable. If I were the person I wish to be, the world would have treated me better, right?

...But it is the world who's cruel to me. It has always hurted me, it has always made me feel all the horrible things. If the world wishes upon nothing but hatred on me, why should I give it something nice?

So I continue to be myself, just to spite the world. I want to prove that even though I am weak, untalkative, an undeniably flawed person, in the end I am loved in some way, by people who genuinely care about me.

I will thrive on, as myself.

Yea I wrote this cuz I saw the sentence "I always wished to be someone else", stay tuned for new blog tomorrow btw.

Ever since Elon Musk bought Twitter, everything has gone down hill, and being renamed to X (which I won't be calling it) is the least bad change. However, with the appearance of BlueSky, people found a new hope that the old Twitter can be rebuilt there, you can also detect genAI users by subscribing the AI Imagery Labeler

I also created an account there, going by the same alias. I posted a few artwork there, but otherwise, I don't often post there, it isn't because BlueSky is bad or anything that I don't post much, I'm just not a fan of being in somewhere that I feel like a awkward kid among popular kids. But for now, I do notice a few other problems.

As BlueSky is a realtively new social media platform, it make sense that the timelines can be quite empty, and it still takes a while for people to migrate. But because of that, I find it hard to stick to BlueSky, I usually go back to Twitter instead to check out new art and memes, even though I really hate the disturbing content or ragebaits Twitter always shove in our eyes. Some of the content are well-intentioned, but I really don't want to hear about being abused or assaulted when I'm already struggling to feel mentally stable these days, and blocking only can do so much.

(To clarify something, while I did say I quitted Twitter in early 2024, I started visiting Twitter occasionally. It is the only platform I can catch up to new art made by my fav artists and other content. I feel like it kinda hard to get rid of my FOMO, especially during the times I have nothing to do. But I think I did spend less time there, I have Neocities and Instagram, where I can chat with an old friend and send him cat memes.)

Honestly the above mentioned problem isn't very bad, especially if you want to fix your attention span and see less annoying people! What puts me off the most is how much people praise BlueSky and mock Twitter. I completely acknowledge that Twitter sucks a lot, like it can ruin my mental health so much I had to restrict myself to use it less. However, the way people praise this platform feels... uncanny.

When I open BlueSky, if it isn't the art posts from the artists I follow, it is random people, often talking about how they moved from Twitter to BlueSky, and very likely they are saying how BlueSky feels way better than Twitter. Usually, I find these comments quite normal, but the most I see them, the more creepy it feels. I don't remember what post was it, but I remember seeing a meme that makes fun of how shitty Twitter is, and how good BlueSky is, but it was presented so cornily, I feel kinda uncomfortable? With so much posts saying like BlueSky is the second coming of Christ, the love doesn't feel very authentic, culty even. I feel kinda bad using this word, but that's what I feel whenever I see people praising something while never saying anything about its bad points. It just feels like all these compliments aren't going to age well.

Perhaps I'm being a bit critical here, maybe because the people hate Elon so much, they decide to vent out all their frustration on BlueSky. And honestly, it doesn't impact me much anyway, and if Twitter goes to hell, I can probably ditch it for good, or just delete all my art there.

I just realised I haven't properly talked about this game despite the impact it had on me. Although I haven't opened this game for a long time, it is undeniable that it's friendship aspect is very remarkable. Spoiler warning for the game, but I will only censor the more important parts.

On 2020 Jan, I noticed my sister is playing an open-world-like game, seeing my sister getting lost in a seemingly huge map has got my interest. And what's more interesting in my opinion is that there's black avatars roaming around, and apparently those are real players! I asked for the game name and started playing.

I don't exactly recall the string of events, but I remember someone friended me when I was in Prairie, and started taking me to collect spirits and winged light, I named them Bob. I appreciate the help, but at the time I felt like cheating because the portals indicate I'm not supposed to be there yet. When we entered the 8-player room, I decided to leave the player by waving bye bye.

I think the stuff happened quite normally during the start to valley, I explored every corner I can think of, collect stuff, try out new emotes and click on stuff... And on one of the tips, it says "beware of dark creatures" with an image of the dark dragon (AKA Krill) showing. I was already lowkey paranoid about losing wings in the rain, what the fuck you mean there's enemies?

I should mention the Valley Elders cutscene, which is one of my favs. The Valley Elder Twins are so cool and tall, you'd assume they have a intimidating and cool aura. But quickly, they started fighting over the light my skykid was holding, and they played some sort of badminton game with the light as a ball, eventually they yeeted it into the sky... They quickly became my fav by how silly they are acting, classic sibling behavior.

As I reached Wasteland, I noticed the atmosphere becoming more unnerving and creepy, oh no is this the place? In there's I encountered crabs for the first time, I actually thought they were frogs at first, anyway I was so shocked when I learnt they can attack me. I got freaked out and left the area. In the next room, I saw the krill for the first time, I was so amazed by this creature, I took a screenshot with it. As I got closer, the krill shone red light on me, I got scared and hid away, knowing the red light definitely means bad news. After I scurriedly moved to the next area, what shocked me is EVEN MORE KRILLS. I got so anxious navigating the area, I rammed myself into a corner and quit the game.

A few days later, I gathered courage again to play again and travel this horrible area again. But this time, I managed to find two friends, they are moths (Newbies) just like me! I named one Peter and other one Mary. We held hands and got through Wasteland together, still scared but less scared.

We got to the next map: Vault. I really love the atmosphere there, it reminds me of the theatre near home. It is a place usually for performances and dance classes. My sister used to do ballet, I actually tried too when I was a wee little girl, but my mom didn't let me continue because she's afraid of me growing even taller (That didn't stop me from growing anyway). However, I was often brought there to wait for my sister and pick her up. I spent a lot of time roaming around there, there's a mini garden that I thought there are pandas because there's bamboos, quiet corridors, the vending machine that I often mess with, and the subtle piano music playing somewhere. It was very peaceful, I should visit there again sometime, but am I allowed to enter the corridor? (And my original concept for Lavender is that her vibes to similar to the theatre, quiet, mysterious but kinda calming)

Ah I strayed too far from the topic. Nothing much happens in Vault, it's just us worrying if we would fall from the elevator and be separated (It won't happen, we will float along the elevator). It was very beautiful when we ride the manta and got to the top floor, the music also gets louder and beautiful. And here comes my other fav Elder cutscene, it starts by Vault Elder gently asking for my skykid to come closer, their mask and movements gave me the vibes that they have gone through a lot of things, I felt a sense of sadness. My skykid handed over the light to the lantern thing Vault Elder's holding. As it floats into the air, it illuminates the rurals, showing the Elders and the citizens past. The cutscenes ends with all the Elders showing behind Vault elder, slowly bowing down to my skykid, wishing for the success of the next mission... I like Vault Elder, I sometimes call them Vault Mom (gender neutral), I enjoy going out of bounds just to chill next to Vault Elder for a while.

That part

After the cutscene, my skykid is in a room with the broken elevator, and a mysterious gate in front of them. The room is dark, with thunders echoing in the room. As my team entered the gate, we knew this mission will be tough...

We were in Eden, a place so windy it is hard to walk properly, the atmosphere was so tense. With the doors opening, warning showed, "Beyond this door, the Light awaits. By entering, you risk losing all winged lights". This sounds serious, but we have gone so far, and nothing is stopping us, and also I was bold enough to think I am skillful enough to not lose any lights lol. And what immediately followed, is being smacked in the face by rocks. We couldn't really process what exactly happened, then we lost some of our winged light. It took us a lot of trial and error to finally get past those flying rocks, but that isn't even the end.

The next area is a krill patrolling the area, and we have to time and hide correctly in order to avoid being krilled. However, we don't know much about its pattern, so we got krilled multiple times. It was quite discouraging, having lost so many of my winged light I worked so hard for. And some how, we got through that too, and the next area with both flying rocks and krill. After that is a corridor with lot's of winged light, a calm before the storm. A message shows just before entering the final area of Eden, that beyond this is a point of no return, I foolishly thought we can get through this unscathed...

The final area is a place with hailing red stones, getting hit by one can eat up all your energy and take your winged lights. We were bruised and hurt, but we tried to get through, just like we did before. We noticed buttons appear when we get near the statues, but we don't know what it did (It's actually to give the statue your winged light). The hailing rocks seemed to never stop after a certain point, and yet we knew nothing but to move forward.

I finally understood what "risk losing all winged lights" mean, despite my confidence, I was very wrong about myself. "Well, this has to me a planned lose scene... right?" is what I thought to myself, I watched my friends and me slowly lose every winged light, slowly meeting our demise...

I found my skykid slowly falling in a dark room, as I landed, I walked in the direction of a small light. A white skykid sits on the around, my skykid offers them a hand, getting them up. I clicked on the white skykid, there's one option: To hug them. As the two embraced each other, a strong light appeared... My skykid suddenly gained back their wings! YEAHHH I'M ALIVE AGAIN! I flew up, like I always do.

As I entered a new area, I was excited to see that Peter and Mary are there too. Together we flew through the strange building, with mantas, jellyfish and a whale (?!). The music I'm listening rn is the ost playing in this area, and as I was going through this beautiful area with my new friends, we flew above the broken building, noticing the top has the elder statues in the top layer of the vault area, and the camera zooms out to show a large castle-like structure. The climax of the music plays like perfect synchronisation, it brought me so much chills to my bones, god how was I not crying at this part?

We were in space, with the spirits we collected along the journey flying with us. With AURORA's singing, the flight with our friends feels so amazing, like we have accomplished something great.

Finally, we landed in a larger area, it's so big, but we weren't very sure what we were supposed to do. We just see there's a giant gate waiting for us, so we just went there. We slowly walked into the giant gate, light slowly covers the screen, letting us come back to life once again...

After the credits, I was dropped back to home. Peter and Mary was nowhere to be found (they actually never returned D:), but I was quite amazed by the story, I didn't really know how to react. The story may have ended, but what if I kept playing? So on my own, I started exploring more deeply in each areas, well not Eden yet, it kinda traumatised me.

After learning a bit more about the game, I learnt you collect candles and trade hearts, then you can use these two to buy cosmetics. The first one I bought is the big twin tails, as a past twin tails enjoyer, I really appreciate the game giving so much cuteness to this hairstyle. The next cosmetic I bought is the teal cape, because among all colors, I feel like it looks the best. After that, I got the umbrella as my main equipment, it is helpful in Forest (which is rainy and can exhaust you quickly), and also it looks kinda like a sword and looks cool. And my main clothing was from the Season of Rhythm, idk it looks cool. Later on, I got the cape from the Crab Whisperer, I was very fond of the style and colors, it really matches my skykid's vibes. I skipped some of the minor parts, but here's what my skykid look like!

If you remember, Cosmos' design is inspired my skykid, it's the very reason why Cosmos has a deep blue, teal and yellow color scheme, and why she used to have twin tails! Her personality is also influenced by my skykid's (at least that's what I think my skykid's personality is), I enjoy flying and racing a lot when playing Sky, I also enjoy dancing emotes the most, so much so one of my Sky friends named me BEATS (The chat was bugged and they couldn't see my messages). I should really name my skykid, how about Cerulean?

I should also mention one of my fav seasons is the Season of Dreams, where the last event is dancing with the child whose aspiration is to perform in the stage. The child wears red, while I wear blue, it feels like a perfect combination in this performance. I feel like a star dancing in the ice ring, and I must say I was devastated when the child and the other spirits ascended to the sky, reminding me that these people are deceased. My other fav is Season of Aurora, the concert is so wonderful, it brought me back the feelings I first had playing Sky. It also showed the Two Shield War, which fans have been speculating for ages.

Lore and story aside, what amazed me is also the people I found. Whenever you are in trouble, like losing all your lights or getting lost, someone might come up to you and offer to help. I made a couple of friends while I was being helped or I was helping them. And after experiencing the final area, I was quite traumatised, but I knew that other moths might feel the same too. So whenever I visit that area again, I often check for other players in trouble, and help them out. I feel proud knowing some of the moths I helped grew and learn things to be a veteran.

Secondly, people can come up with interactions just using the emotes. When you light someone's candles, or help someone, the players will bow down to you. The first time I saw this, I decided to get the bow emote, and I started using it like how other people use it. There are no rules saying you should bow to other players, and yet players somehow came up with this culture, allowing manners to be part of the game, I always felt it is so funny and amazing.

Thirdly, I sometimes can't imagine how nice players can be. For multiple seasons, I received seasonal packages from some of my Sky friends. These things costs money, and you just give them to me? Someone whose face you never even saw?? I still remember spending hours chatting and hanging out with them, it is quite a surreal experience. While I don't enter the game as often, I'm still in their Discord server.

I really recommend you to at least get to the ending playing this game, the art, story and gameplay are just wonderful. If you want to play long-term, it can be a bit grindy, but the cosmetics are quite nice, you can even play the piano when you buy it. Also you might get to meet some nice people. Perhaps maybe it will change your life a bit, just like me!

Yesterday, I came across a video analysing a horror series, "The Analog Horror Series Where a Giant Cat Deletes Math (And Everyone Dies)". I'm quite a big fan of existential horror, I like it when I feel like our life is so insignificant to higher beings so great we cannot comprehend it, this fascination is quite similar to my awe to the great universe (man am I even able to write these kinds of stories?).

Knowing the series is about math, I know it would be quite hard to understand, as the analyser mentioned. But I thought some comments will help me understand the series, but uh, even the comments explaining it is kinda hard to understand, it is like math lecturers trying to explain how to calculate something but you end up being confused anyway. What some people got from the videos is that Taiga is something that destroys the rules of math.

Intentionally or not, it gives me a sense of fear, not in the sense of existential horror, but something more common: The fear of complex math. In the first video in the channel, there's a section where the narrator explains some terminologies and math stuff, and my knowledge in math isn't that advanced, so all the explainations doesn't really help my understanding. Later on, the video flashes some unfamilar symbols and math rules, and it gave me a feeling of dread, so familiar, especially that I'm studying electronic and computer engineering, which has A LOT OF math.

Math isn't exactly my strong suit, I'm just learn logical stuff more quickly than others. I never learnt M2 (extended maths, I think that's how it's called outside Hong Kong?) during secondary school, which I lowkey regret because I feel like it would help me understand maths better now. But what I know is that there's always a fear of math inside me, like most people do. Whenever my teachers teaches something new about maths, if it is something abstract and I can't comprehend it (I'm still confused about sin cos tan sometimes), there would be an internal panic going "Oh fuck do I REALLY need to learn all that?". And that's how I felt when that moment was shown, nothing in the mathematical document makes sense to me, but it is supposed to make sense... r... right? Damn it do I really need to understand all that?

In the second video "Everything is happening at the same time .", the video starts by zooming out from a galaxy, then the video shows another galaxies, then the galaxy forms into clusters, and said clusters form other clusters... Thanks to the comments, it is one of the fews things I can understand from this series, and man... It's so scary it's beautiful. It is something I had imagined before: The universe is so, so big, and we are so, so tiny, but what if there's something even greater than out universe? Maybe there are many more universes out there, which may or may not be similar to ours. And what if, these universes are actually tiny atoms, that form into something even greater? With this idea, it goes on forever, I sometimes sit down and daydream thinking the endless formation of the world, does megalophobia describe this scenario?

Despite I still haven't understood the video, I must give credit to the creator on how they made the visuals. With the stuff going on, you know that something is definitely happening, even though the objects and entities feels so alien, but that is what makes this series so interesting to me. The creator managed to make something so incomprehensible and yet it feels like there's a set story. And the designs, it feels familiar to the biological world we have, except none of it feels natural, feels real... how did they even come up with this setting? Combined with the use of old music, it makes the environment feel even more chilling.

Pretty sure if I keep rambling, I'll just repeating what I've already said. Maybe you can go watch the series yourself, or watch the analysis videos if you don't understand.

If you remember my old blog post, you might remember me mentioning wanting to write a blog about my height, but didn't because I got subconscious bout my body. I think I can do this topic again, more light-hearted this time.

I am 169cm tall (5'6 for those who don't use cm for whatever reason), which is decently tall in the view of Hong Kong people, and maybe Asian women in general. I think I got this from my mother's side, where the younger siblings are taller than the older ones, and my aunt (the youngest daughter of my grandma) is very tall. While I have seen girls my age taller than me, it is quite common for me to be taller than my peers. During secondary school, when I was (forcibly) gotten into girl guides, I was the tallest member among the team.

I always thought that me being tall is funny because I prayed to god to make me tall when I was a kid. Before the cousins on my mom's side was born, I was the youngest cousin, and I was quite insecure about it... for some reason. Being in a christian primary school, I was taught to pray to god whenever I have problems and worries. So one night, I prayed to god, "While I can't ever be older than my cousins, I want to at least be bigger than them". And it seems my growth was very fast, my relatives kept talking about how tall I am, and even saying I got taller than my cousins. While my relationship with god isn't that great, I should probably thank them (who said god is a guy?) this once.

However, there isn't a lot of perks for being tall aside from asserting dominance. One, you can't play in those ball pits with cool mazes if you get too tall, even if your age should be allowed. I was a big fan of these ball pits, so I was extremely bummed that I'm not allowed to play in these. Second, you might get picked on for standing out. Well I didn't necessarily get picked on for being too tall, but my classmates did complain about the unfairness when we were playing basketball (I wasn't very good at it anyways). I also got called tall but awkward at one point, so there's that. But honestly, I'm quite satisfied about my current height, my sister did say my body proportions makes me look better in long dresses.

Fun fact, I made Lavender to be the same height as me originally. My height was 168cm max during secondary school, but I was measured to be 169-170cm tall in other places (like hospitals), so I decided to take the average, which is 169cm tall, funny number nice. I feel connected to Lavender a bit, in terms of personality and also physically. While I firmly believe she looks way stylish than me, I drew her body type is me kinda similar to mine, I think I got into Lavender's POV in one of my dreams and I had a hard time telling if I'm still me or her because our bodies feel the same. And somehow, I keep forgetting that she is quite tall considering she's about as tall as me, because she's often drawn next to Cosmos, who is wayyyy taller than her. I feel like she might be considered tall in universe, and maybe even be taller than most of her old teammates!

I should also talk about Jaspers, who is inspired by my awkwardness and my tallness, but that has already been discussed. So now I just imagine his young self sitting in the corner with watery eyes because he couldn't play in the ball pit for being too tall :(

While I thought that I have already mentioned my common theme in dreams (I actually used the filter functions to search for dream-related blogs, wow it is useful!), but it turns out I haven't, how shocking. There are several types of dreams I might have:

1. Chill dreams

Nothing much special happens in this type of dreams, I just kinda vibe around. In this dream, I usually walk around in malls, or travel to places, like Japan (for a while my dreams kept taking place in Japan, man I miss the food there). These generally don't feel the remarkable, when I look at my past dream notes in Discord, I barely have any memories about them.

2. Adventure dreams

This is the type of dreams I love the most, it often revoles around me flying or climbing tall buildings while being chased by something. While it sounds dangerous, it is the type of thrill I sometimes crave, and often times, the dream ends with me surviving, or even me commiting murder or other crimes (flashback to the arson dream in first part of 2024)! Well, there are times I still end up in a horrible disaster, like getting into a tsunami or being euthanised, but you know what, dying can be kinda entertaining lmao. Often times, I will get some kind of superpower, including flying and climbing powers, like I mentioned. Other superpowers I have gotten are time reversal powers (It's kinda like going back to a certain timestamp while watching a video), but this one is slightly more rare.

3. Nightmares

Despite my past, I somehow doesn't have much nightmares very much. Even if I do, it's either unrelated to my trauma, or I feel so detached emotionally from whatever event that resembles my past, it doesn't affect me that much. It ranges from seeing my Jehovah Witness teacher (I feel guilty for ghosting her), to being hated by my classmates/teachers/whoever. Sometimes it can scare me a lot and ruin half of my day, but it is not common enough to be a concern.

I think a common theme present in almost all my dreams is flying and going to nostalgic places. Most of the places I've dreamt about resemble places I have been to are places I've been to and somewhat enjoy. While there's a location I'm not sure is frequent in my dreams, but it is often present in dreams I feel more memorable. Sometimes I will visit the more rural areas of Hong Kong in my dreams, even though I don't go to these houses that often IRL. In my dreams, they are like in this photo but taller and built on mountain sides, perfect for me to climb from wall to wall, it was very satisfying.

(I also feel like drowning may be a semi-common theme, like the arson dream and another dream where my city got flooded by tsunami, but it isn't frequent enough to be a remarkable theme.)

And here's something more sensitive to me, I dream about my crush a bit too much recently. Despite not seeing him for years now, I still haven't gotten over this. I remember seeing him in a dream the first time, I was quite excited, and woke up feeling happy about being with him in my dream. But as the amount of times increased, it feels kinda... demoralising? Everytime I wake up after that, the realization of it not being real hits me quite hard, especially if the presence of him was very realistic when I was dreaming. So everytime I wake up after this kind of dream, I'm always like "Oh god damn it, I fell for it again". Man if only I got the courage to ask him out and not worry about him hating me after this.

So, a message to my head, dream god, Lavender, whoever's in charge of my dreams, can you please give dreams that are fun like flying around buildings, and not seeing my crush in my dreams just to crush my soul after waking up?

I never understood people who drink alcohol because "Alcohol is sweeter than life". If you want something sweeter than life, just get candy? Like it is sweeter than both alcohol and life. But for some reason, I kinda understand it now, just unrelated to alcohol tho.

I always fear the day I have to find a job, while it would be nice to finally fend on my own, I'm very scared if I will be mistreated in working environments. For majority of my life, I have been yelled at many times, saying I'm not good enough, and that I will get yelled at my boss when I get old. So I kinda associated that getting a job equals to being yelled at every day, and instead of learning to improve my personality, I only learnt to fear my future.

I'm already an adult, and a few years until I graduate from uni. That will mean I need to get job experiences, and yet, my heart is far from ready. I have gotten through homework, school, and even most fears of talking to people. I have tried so hard, and yet I'm not good enough to be a functioning human being. My family is already noticing how cowardly I am, how I always run away from my future. I feel guilty, for disappointing them despite them trying their best to keep me well.

Despite how lost I'm feeling, I don't want to give up in life. There's so much I want to do, like working on my OCs, talking to my friends, and maybe find more interests I might enjoy. Life has so many wonderful things, if I give up now, it will mean leaving behind the things I love. But still, it hurts my head so bad, thinking about my future, when I'm already worrying about my lack of irl friends, and the difficulty of homework. It feels my mind is pulling my head apart. So now I'm just sitting in the study room in my school, leaning onto a wall as I sit on a sofa.

Oh wait I almost forgot about the alcohol thing I mentioned. I kinda just sat there, but I remembered, there's a test next week. So I opened up the notes to study, which has a lot of math, it's just cache stuff. For some reason, it feels more soothing, despite how much I hate studying. Did the numbers somehow numb my pain? I think I understand more why some people like math now.

Apologies for the lack of organisation, I don't know what I wanna say either.

I am somewhat uncomfortable about the topic of crushes, because people tend to have a very exagerated response to romance and stuff. Like if I mention I like someone, or at least find someone interesting, people will be like "OMG [Real name] HAS A CRUSH ON XXX I MUST TELL THEM". And the more I deny it, they will get even more excited, and if I start blushing, they will immediately assume that's the truth. But the problem is, I blush not only when I'm flustered, but also when I'm uncomfortable.

Cringe warning: One time when I was on the train, someone offered me a seat and we started chatting somehow, but I was quite nervous about talking to a stranger, why is he talking to me?? He pointed out that my face is very red, not sure if I'm overassuming stuff but his tone sounded like he's accusing me that I have a crush on him, but in fact, I was very nervous, uncomfortable even. If the definition of having a crush is blushing at/being flustered around someone, I don't think I enjoy crushes.

Well the above example is the extreme negative example, but what I wanna say is that people make too much of a big deal around the topic of crushes. Like gossiping is fun to some people, but as an sensitive person, it really makes me afraid of talking about this topic, and that makes me really clueless about attractions and stuff. But being on the Internet, I think I'm more comfortable talking about it.

While I find most people average looking (they look similar anyway), some people stand out to me, and maybe even pretty looking. I consider them to be my aesthetic crushes, not as important as romantic crushes tho. While I only have 3 max romantic attraction in my life, I have quite a handful of aesthetic crushes. But lately, I'm getting an unrealistic worry of an unlikely scenario, what if someone (or even said aesthetic crushes) knows I think they're pretty, and immediately assumes I want to date them? Like everything I would try to explain would only make me look like I'm in denial (especially if I'm trying to reject them while blushing). In fact, I'm pretty sure I'm not comfortable having any romantic relationship with people I don't trust enough, I can't really understand starting dates with strangers.

It is a good thing that nobody would even want to come close to me in real life as how social-repellent I am, but perhaps that idea came from my fear of being misunderstood, and my dislike for romance stories. As I end this blog with the content very messy, I'm considering if I am demi-romantic as well.

P.S. I can't believe I spent so much time thinking whether the hypothetical situation of being Kabedon-ed by an aesthetic crush and being nervous counts it as romantic crush, like I'm pretty sure that is called being uncomfortable, not being in love. Man I should NOT use TV shows as reference for crushes.

I just finished watching Blue Lock Episode Nagi, it is the BLLK spinoff in the POV of Nagi and Reo, from the beginning they started playing soccer, to the part they got seperated at the beginning of the second selection. I wouldn't say the animation quality is anything too special (It's a bit better than the animes), and a lot of content from the manga is cut away, however, the movie brought me back a bit of the passion I had for Blue Lock a bit.

If you never watched Blue Lock, imagine Battle Royale mashed with soccer, and being an egoist is more important than teamwork. This is by no means a realistic depiction of soccer, especially the fact the players often don't want to be a supporting player, but the absurdity is what got me so interested in this anime. First of all, I loved suvival-themed stories (I mean, I was a Danganronpa and YTTD fan), the fact I get to watch 300 players risking their future soccer carriers to get a chance to become the best striker in the world is really entertaining (And to think my favs characters, Chigiri and Barou, might get eliminated someday... Oh man I'm excited). Second of all, their performance during the games are quite unusual, while I don't know much about real life soccer techniques, what I certainly know is that normally you don't play football like a game of tag and kick the ball into a player's face, or betray your teammates, or get the opportunity is eliminate a player by your own hands. The battles are so intense, I'm not sure if it is a common feeling watching sports anime, but god I love it.

While I have already mentioned it in my blorbo list, I really love Chigiri and Barou's story. Chigiri is a speedster who got his ACl (ligament on the knee) injured, and never got the courage to sprint again after the accident. But seeing Isagi's desperation to save himself and the team from being eliminated, this reignited Chigiri's passion. Seeing the moment he starts running again with a speed faster than anyone else, it really got my heart pumping fast. And man seeing Chigiri smiling for the first time in the anime made me so happy, I love my panther boy.

And Barou... Man he's so cool. His initial appearance didn't interest me that much, he just looks like some generic antagonist meant to be defeated by Isagi. When Barou got humbled by Isagi during the second selection match, I thought this will be his end as a character, nothing more than a stepping stone... But I was wrong. Instead of being Isagi's pawn to pass him the ball, Barou uses Isagi as a cover to blind his opponents. Barou is the darkness under Isagi's light, as he devours the light, Barou becomes stronger, scoring a goal that sates his hunger. From a character that I was getting annoyed at, to my possibly all-time favourite character, Barou is truly a character that stands out from the cast, such a shame he isn't conventionally attractive, some people overlook his character a lot. Moreover, even in the manga, everytime he appears in a match, he always does something very awesome, I never thought I would hold myself down trying to not squeal in the middle of a night reading a manga. Also he's clearly gay af for Isagi.

If I get a penny for a Blue Lock character with red color scheme, has the word 馬 in their name and is associated with a animal in the felidae family, I'd get two pennies, which isn't a lot, but it's strange it happened twice. And the fact my other top favourite characters (Pomegranate Cookie and Hollyberry Cookie) also have red color scheme, makes it a four character team with red color (Red Weezer). But there's more, not only they have weird similarities, they actually interacted in the story, a lot in fact! Especially during the matches after Chigiri and Barou got separated from Isagi, they had to work together a lot, and we get to see Chigiri's more playful side with Barou.

You see, Chigiri has a laid-back lifestyle, he tends to take his time doing his own stuff, causing others having to wait for him as he dries his hair. He doesn't really listen to others much, even if he is being ordered by someone older than him. Barou, however, has a stricter lifestyle. He always keeps his belongings tidy and clean, follows his timetables firmly, and isn't a fan when someone disrupts him from doing so. You can see where this can go wrong between the two, while Chigiri's bed has all his belongings scattered all over (and some on the floor), Barou tries to keep everything tidy as he reprimands Chigiri and Nagi, and well, it's not like Chigiri is going to clean up that quickly. And on the field, it feels like Chigiri is more playful and cat-like when Barou is around. Seriously, the times Chigiri actually meowed or rawred is when he is playing with or against Barou, he isn't beating the cat boy allegations.

Speaking of dynamics, what I also love about Blue Lock is how close the character act sometimes. Like I have said before, I get annoyed by the trope where two characters accidentally touch hands or smth and they get shy like "KYAAA I'M SO EMBARRASSED IT'S NOT I LIKE THEM OR ANYTHING", like shut up it's just physical contact, nothing to be shy about. But in Blue Lock, players does stuff like head pats or back hugs or even jump onto another player's back when they get really excited, even if they only had started to work with each other, they have all these physical affection, and it is so refreshing and cute no matter I ship them or not.

For Reo and Nagi, despite not being a couple, they are very close together. They spend a lot of time playing soccer and hanging out, Reo even offers piggyback rides when Nagi is too lazy to move. In daily life and on the field, they are basically inseperable, well up until second selection. The moment Reo meets Nagi, he sees him as a treasure. When Nagi asks to leave him to join Isagi's team, despite being so proud of Nagi's growth and wanting to be supportive, he is just too afraid that Nagi would leave him forever. Feeling abandoned, Reo's soul got crushed, he was then seen depressed for the entire round. Pretty sure most people who watch the story up to this point question "Wait, were they dating, and did they just break up?"

The animation is nowhere being good, as many people pointed out, it is like watching a PowerPoint presentation. But for me, before seeing the comments about the animation, it didn't really affect my experience of enjoying the story. Seeing anything moving and colorful makes me understand the story easier than reading static pages to be honest. I don't really want my sister to be aware of the animation though, I'm afraid that once I mention it, it will break the illusion of the anime, and my sister will fail to unsee the awful quality (or maybe she already did but never mentioned it).

For now, season three and the current chapters didn't make me feel much things, mostly because the current matches and U-20 are just normal soccer, nobody's lives are at risk, and technically the risk of Blue Lock terminating doesn't count, because the story will not allow that to happen. I'm still waiting for another elimination, I wanna see more players' hopes and dreams being crushed, I hope some of them includes players tht we are semi-familiar with. But before it gets to the part that popular characters are at risk of being 'locked off', I don't think it will get me as excited as the beginning of Blue Lock. I'd also assume I'm just bad at reading, my brain can't comprehend static images very well.

Feeling the passion for this series again makes me miss having fixiations on things other than my own OCs, I got to look forward to the future because I get to think about when my fav characters get to appear and what they are going to do. Man I should watch Blue Lock again, and not interact with Blue Lock fandom, like why does the fandom care so much about some micro-celebrity drama on Twitter?

In the early days of enjoying random media on the Internet, I slowly realised characters sometimes share the same voice actors. For example, did you know Ki-Bo from Danganronpa V3 share the same VA with Natsu from Fairy Tail (I loved Fairy Tail as a child)? I had a lot of fun making random connections between characters from different series, like what if Shirogane Tsumugi cosplayed as Cinnabar? Wouldn’t it be fun?

I used to do a lot of research on the VAs of the characters from my favourite media, it is often the first thing I do when I get into a new media that has voice acting. And sometimes I get to discover that they share the same voice with characters I knew from my childhood. Like Yellow from Houseki no Kuni, their VA shared the same voice as Kohaku (I think that’s his name) from Jewelpet, like it was so mind-blowing to me, a character I’m fixiated in has a voice actor that used to voice in another media that I was fixiated in!

And it is not just what character shares the same voice as who, I get very interested about the songs that voice actor sang too! In basically all the medias I had fixated on, the fandom always creates a “Character singing Karaoke” video, it is a compilation of the characters’ VAs singing, it always entertain me, whether if the character interests me or not. One of the most memorable ones is Hollyberry Cookie’s Korean VA. In Cookie Run Kingdom, Holly’s voice is kinda deep, and with a hint of sweetness added (How you do describe a person’s voice?). But in a music video of another game called Epic7, the character, who shares the same voice as Holly, sounds like a cute idol you would imagine. The difference is quite shocking, but the song is kinda banger, I still listen to it sometimes.

There is also a video of CRK Korean VAs celebrating the first anniversary, and when Pomegranate Cookie’s VA shows up, despite the voice being very similar to how Pome sounds in game, it doesn’t feel as intimidating. I was quite amazed, like did the voice actor turn on the aura of intimidation when voicing Pome?

I admire voice actors a lot, I remember hearing a quote a long time ago in Chinese communities, “Voice actor are monsters”. This is actually a compliment, because voice actors sometimes have a great range of voice, they somehow manage to voice different characters that sound completely different, it feels so humanly impossible, hence calling them monsters. Voice actors do a great job bringing characters to life, I feel like sometimes they help me enjoy a character more than I expected to.

However lately, because I haven’t found much new interests in shows or games, I have less opportunity to make voice actor jokes. The last time I get to do that is when I got into Blue Lock, did you know Barou shares the same Japanese VA with Dark Choco Cookie from Cookie Run? Their color schemes even match, isn’t it great? I drew Barou in Dark Choco’s outfit one time, while Barou sees himself as an all-powerful king, Dark Choco is a prince… who got banished from his kingdom. Well Barou might not be too happy about that. Also, I heard that Shidou and Sae share the same voice actors as Gojo and Geto respectively (Never watched that anime so I forgor that name), there’s a meme about “Are we together in other universes?” Well that applies to them I guess.

Being interested in your own OC lore, kinda means you have to create content on your own. And chances are, you probably don’t have VAs for them, at most you might have voice claims for them. But TBH, it isn’t as fun making VA jokes if I’m the one picking VAs for them, what’s funny about these jokes is that two characters are connected despite the tiny probability.

But anyway, I’m kinda stuck on giving my OCs voice claims anyway. The most I can imagine is Lavender having the same voice as Pome’s Korean voice, and for Cosmos in her human form, it’s probably Holly’s Korean Voice but I’m not as sure (I know I know, two of my fav OCs having the same voice as two of my fav characters). I’m considering giving Cosmos’ Cometling form the same voice as Ruby from Jewelpet, Cantonese dub, but I’m still ok the fence. As for the other characters, I’m still figuring them out. My memory for human voices is better than memory for faces, but it’s still not very good. Maybe you guys can suggest some examples, maybe I can remember some characters I’ve heard, and I will have a better idea in what the voices my characters have!

On some point of my life, I had a theory that if god existed, the reason they made it this way is because they are just an author, like many of us. It's not like they wanted to make humans suffer because they are an evil god, they might just wanted to explore whatever they want to in their story, similar to how story creators make characters go through the worst things for character growth. I sometimes imagine if this theory is true, I think to myself, "What character am I?"

I doubt I would be a protagonist, because protagonists usually have a lot of things happening to them, and I don't really have anything special going on in my life, it is just go to school, get food, draw, code stuff, and sleep. At most, I think I might be the side character that appears along the main characters, I might appear occasionally, show a bit of my personality and background, but it rarely goes deep into my character, and those people who always get attached to insignificant characters might get curious about why I act this way.

If I am perceived by fans of whatever this show of life is called, I wonder what kind of character trope I am? Am I the shy girl who stutters every word and blushes a lot? Or the cold character who avoids social interactions and is kinda mysterious? Or will the fans get to see the nerdy side of me where I ramble about my OCs a lot on Discord? It likely depends on who is the protagonist, and if it is someone other than my Discord friends, I will definitely get mischaracterised a lot, because most people IRL describe me as the really quiet and shy person... Man why am I so bad at talking about my interests to people?

I wouldn't say I am very likeable as a person, but I can imagine there are audiences interested in me as a character (seriously, there are people who like the monk dude from Blue Lock). Will they get frustrated because I haven't gotten any character development or new lore for many arcs? I mean, at least they might get to know about my "tragic story", but I feel like it has been overdone so much, people won't feel too much empathy anymore, especially how my backstory ain't the worst.

I feel like my appearance is quite ordinary, unremarkable even. And to be frank, I think majority of humans look kinda boring, and I always mix faces up. So I think what if, humans get to have colorful hair, and everyone is in an cartoony/anime artstyle and has more shape-variety character design that makes them stand out from one another? Perhaps this is possible if the show is set in the internet's perspective, when everyone has their appearance depending how they act/feel. Thinking about this makes me want to redesign my sona a bit, while I think it's good, I think there are improvements that can make my sona feel even more like me. I always felt like there should be an animal version of me, probably long like a borzoi but has ears like my sona's, and it doesn't really have much survival instincts, it just likes frolicking around and stuff... Is this a normal thing internet geeks sometimes think of or am I being suspected that I'm a furry? I think I strayed from the original topic too far lmao

Life gets boring really quickly, especially when you can't find any close friends for a long time. I feel like imagining myself as a character in a story is some sort of coping mechanism to pretend life is interesting. My brain talks a lot, sometimes it will pretend to be the narrator and describes how I am being perceived by people, for the better or worse. And also, if I think god is just a creator like I am, I feel less mad about them making me suffer for the majority of my childhood, I mean, I did the same to my OCs too! But at least, can you give me some character development? It is getting dreadful here.

First of all, I commissioned WomeGa55 to draw Cosmos, ouh Cosmos my beloved.,

School started for around one month, and somehow I'm already getting sick of it. I remember the days I used to think I could make some friends at school, but no matter what school I'm in, my social skills aren't good enough to make any good connections with people. There isn't anything that motivates me to go to school, kinda sucks really. I miss my old friends, I miss them a lot, I'll be back :(

Also recently, I realised my stomach might have gotten weak, well it isn't really my body to blame, my eating habits just kinda suck. In July, I bought a cake for my sister's birthday, but because she happened to be busy that week, she didn't have time at all to eat the cake, so I have to eat it all by my own. I wanted to eat it for lunch, but upon finishing one slice, I got quite sick. I'm surprised even if cake is food, it isn't really good at filling me up.

In other incident, I decided that I wanted to eat waffles for lunch, but after eating half of it, I quickly got sick, like what happened last time. I realised my stomach cannot handle desserts for meals, I'm pretty sure I was able to eat them when I was younger...

My stomach has also gotten weaker at starvation, if I starve for too long, my stomach will start hurting, and it won't stop even if I eat something afterwards. This is an experience I had today (I had to skip lunch because I had no time to eat noodles, and I don't want to eat convenience store food), and this had happened multiple times before. Man, I have gotten older, haven't I?

I was a Ipad kid with unrestricted internet access, and after I got a phone, I basically get to see everything social media shows me, including stuff I shouldn't see at that age. But I wasn't aware of the inappropriateness of seeing this shit, and I don't like the feelings of my parents checking my every move, so yea, I never let them see my browser history.

When I was younger, Facebook was my main social media, and being connected by our favourite Minecraft Youtuber, I made many Facebook friends. I also followed many pages and people that are ever so slightly related to my interests (anime and drawing). With the number of my follwing probbaly over 1000, there's quite a lot of stuff on my timeline.

But with the timeline is messy, I often stumble upon things that I don't want to see. For some reason, people just love to post suggestive or outright NSFW content on public posts. I really hated seeing these, I get jumpscared very hard, and I proceed to scroll away, not remembering to block whatever person who posted that.

In Chinese, 開車 is a slang for sexual stuff, but the direct meaning is just 'driving a car'. The first time I encountered this word, is when an artist posted a post with a caption, with this word. I was like, "Huh, did they draw the characters driving a car?" I opened the comment section, where they hid the artwork, nope, that's the two characters banging each other. Every since then, whenever I stumble upon NSFW stuff unwillingly, I just imagine myself getting into a car crash.

On Facebook, people kept talking about how Twitter (which was my main social media) was their place of looking NSFW stuff. They joked how opening Twitter in public is never a good idea, as the timeline will immediately expose their deepest fetishes. And I was like, huh??? The total number of times I accidentally stumbled upon sexual content on Twitter is probably less than 10, and for Facebook, IT'S LIKE ONCE PER MONTH. I have no idea how people manage their Twitter timeline, but god Facebook timeline algorithm sucks so hard. And currently, Facebook keeps showing me random 'funny' comics (reality they might be boomer memes or just outright sad comics) or random garbage ads.

From all the social medias I have used, I think Instagram is the best, it always show me stuff I actually enjoy (hampters), and rarely show me stuff that disgusts me. However, it still isn't captivating enough for me to post frequently, at most I will share close friend stories, because my closest friends use Instagram :> If I want to share stuff about myself, I will just share them here.

Last night, a Discord friend sent a link titled "What football will look like in the future" (link: https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football/). Normally, I do not care about football, sports isn't my thing unless if it's about Blue Lock. But he said in the message "OH HELL NAH THIS STORY ALREADY FUCKED UP", and that got me curious, like "How bad can an article about football go wrong-"

Recommended to read after you finished the story yourself: Opening the link, the page appears as a normal article on first glance. On the very next second, the text suddenly grew in size, the text became so large the text completely covers the screen, turning it into full black. After that, the story starts, showing a calendar, with two characters, Nine and Ten sending messages, often months apart.

Ten is the one who first messaged Nine, asking them if they can hear her. Nine was very confused, not knowing their own identity, name, past. The only know they have just known is the mysterious being named Ten who just contacted them, and it took months for Ten to reply Nine again due to power perservation. It was extremely heart-wrenching to watch Nine begging Ten to reply for many days, like Nine knows nobody else, and they were so lonely and afraid being alone for so long. When Ten replied, she asked Nine to follow specific instructions, like using the magnetometer, and doing nothing to recharge for over 27 years. Nine was quite confused about the instructions, like not knowing what a magnetometer is or accidentally sending a message during the recharging time.

For the last instruction, Ten asked Nine what the average wind chill during the 1967 NFL champion ship was. As Nine finally replied the correct answer, which is negative 48 Celsius, a quantum link establishes between Nine and Ten, now they can talk to each other in real life, and oh there's another guy, called Juice, he's kinda carefree and enjoys being silly.

When Nine asked what they are, Ten told them to use their camera, and it is revealed that these three characters are actually sentient space probes. As Nine was overloaded with confusion, Juice brought up a football game would be starting soon, which leads to the main story of 17776, a world in the year of 17776, where everyone is immortal and all crisis have been solved.

I don't know much about American football, but honestly, you don't really need that deep of an understanding of football in order to enjoy the story, because the main theme of this story is the existenial dread of being immortal for eternity, exploring what would people do to cope with the boredom of being alive forever, and that time is infinite, and mystery is finite. And yet, the story feels kinda beautiful, there are small interactions of characters talking about their memories in life, or maybe talking about the history of a landmark, these may not be big, but charming nonetheless.

This story is very easy to read for me, I never liked reading like I have said in the blog in August, but in this multimedia format, and people talking quite straight-forwardly, my brain can understand the story very quickly. Man, I haven't read anything so good for a long time.

I will keep this brief to avoid spoiling too many stuff, but it is a great read, it only takes a little more than two hours to finish, with a few chapters in video format. Even if you are not a fan of reading long text, I think you will understand the story quite well!

Update: I just finished the sequel 20020, this time, it centers on the aspect of football game more. With the massive amount of time people have, a ridiculously massive football match is held, with 111 teams playing. It might take a while to decipher what's going on more compared to 17776, especially if you don't know football rules and terminology. But when you understand, you quickly get attached to the characters. The story focuses on a married couple a lot, they bicker a lot but they love each other, and they even do insane strats to move the footballs around. Like, wow, this story actually got me invested in a football game...

If you have been checking out my site for the recent days (I hope you didn't, my site was a mess), it had gone through a few major updates here and there, I sure worked a lot.

There's always something bothering me in my site, which are the iframes in the art gallery and blog page. I used this because I felt like putting so many elements in one page may cause a lot of lag, so I split the images or blogs into a few sections, and users can choose which section to view using buttons that control the iframe. But the major issue is that, the iframe window can't really do fit content, and I have to make it a scrolling window, which is very inconvenient for mobile users. I did not have a solution at that time, so it was stuck for many months.

Few days ago, I came up with an idea after learning images won't load if you put loading="lazy" in the image attributes. After adding this attribute to all the images, all the sections are hidden except for the first section. When you click a page number, the section of the corresponding number will open, then the images will load. I feel like this will cause less lag too, though IDK about other users because now the gallery contains a bunch of elements and image tags.

Few days ago, I came up with an idea after learning images won't load when it's out of the user's view if you put loading="lazy" in the image attributes. After adding this attribute to all the images, all the sections are hidden except for the first section. When you click a page number, the section of the corresponding number will open, then the images will load. I feel like this will cause less lag too, though IDK about other users because now the gallery contains a bunch of elements and image tags.

Other issue I have with the website is how the tooltip will not show on the newest art. For some context, every time I upload new art here, I only update the art page, and the index is untouched. It is achieved by using the fetch() function, when the index page loads, it will get the content from the art page, and put the elements I want to into the new art section, and same goes the new blog section. But the problem is that the tooltip code runs faster than the fetch function. Since I'm kinda bad at explaining, I came up with a short story.

"In a school, the teacher (Javascript) checks each students' (Elements involved in the code) attendance, confirming the people who are present. Suddenly, a student (The fetched elements) dashes into the room, apologising to the teacher for being late. However, the teacher refuses to check the late student's attendance, the late ones will be considered absent."

As I fiddled around the code, this is what I think I should do, but I had no idea how to make the fetch() code run faster or make the tooltip code run slower. I had no choice but to ask r/neocities Discord, not expecting someone to answer... But someone actually did (Thx xerrabyte)! He suggested to get the tooltip code by putting it in the fetch() code instead of directly putting it in <script>. Oh my god, how did I not think of that, it is GENIUS! After I added the tooltip code into a HTML file (idk how can I make the code convert js file to text) and put it in fetch(), it actually worked! Now that's a major problem solved...

With the art gallery and fetch() issues solved, I moved my eyes to the last problem: Blog page. The blog collapsible buttons are shown in the iframe, and even if I make it like the art gallery, the codes will be so fucking long with all the buttons and text becuase it contains two years worth of ramblings and it will only keep growing. The only other solution is to use fetch(). However, this page is even more heavily reliant on Javascript, and the issue similar to the tooltip problem will happen again.

Initially, there are a few codes responsible for the blog contents: Tooltip, Collapsible opening, and Getting the blog date on the title and putting it to the bottom of the blog content. And everytime I replace the blog window with fetched content, the js code will not update unless I do something about it. Something interesting about this is that if the tooltip code is executed more than once, it will not show the title content, and it only shows as blank. So not only I need to refresh the code, I have to make sure the refreshed code doesn't interfere will the non-blog content elements( (like the draggable contents).

After briefly fixing the code and it works well on the surface, I was like, "Hm... what if I add EVEN MORE JAVASCRIPT???? THAT WOULD FUCK UP THE LAYOUTS AND CODES EVEN MORE????". The new codes I'm talking about are the filter system and close buttons in the collapsibles. For the filter system, I have always wanted to do that, and I thought it was not possible for me, but I realised my understanding of coding has grew significantly ever since last year. And the close button is for another problem I have about my site, I always don't like how I need to scroll back up to the button to close the content, especially when the content is extremely long, I always wished there's a button at the bottom of the content that can close the content without needing me to scroll up for a long time.

It is quite easy to explain how the close button code works, I just inserted some elements after the paragraph with the class name "date", and with you click it, it will send you back up to the button, and the code turns the height of the content to 0 and untoggles the button.

And as for the filter system... I figured I will need a tag inclusion options and tag exclusion options. For the tag inclusion options, the checked tag names will show all the blog titles that contain the tag. If a blog's tags are not in the checked options, it will be hidden. I figured the code can work by having each blog buttons contain a value, the number being the number of tags it has. If a tag checkbox gets unchecked, the value will deduct by 1, and the display will become none when it reaches 0. But if the unchecked tag is checked again, the value is increased by 1, hidden elements with the checked tag will be visible again.

For example, a blog contains only the OC tag, if the OC tag option is unchecked, the blog will deduct 1 mark, and since it reaches 0, it will be hidden until the OC tag option is checked again. Consider another blog with the tags OC and Life, while the OC tag is unchecked, the Life tag is still checked, and it's value is not 0 yet, so it will remain visible.

For the exclusion tag, when a tag option is checked, all blogs containing said tag will be hidden. The code works by having all blog titles with a seperate variable value of 0, when a tag option is checked, blogs with said tag will have the value increment by 1. Unlike the inclusion tag, when the value is larger than 1, it will be hidden.

For example, when the OC tag option is checked, the blog with only the OC tag will get the value increased by 1, and it will be hidden. And for the blog with the OC and Life tag, despite the Life tag option not being checked yet, the value is already 1, and it will be hidden. If I check the Life tag option, the blog with OC and Life tag will get a value of 2, still hidden from view. If I uncheck the OC option, the one with only the OC tag will be unhidden since the value is 0 again, however, the one with OC and Life tag still has a value of 1, therefore it is still not visible.

There are a lot of stuff going on in the background, like how I need to delay some functions for the fetch() but it is kinda hard to explain everything, especially how this page code is a mess here. As I'm writing this, I noticed the tooltip is broken after switching the blog sections, I gotta fix that too, sigh.

Being a kid who got picked on a lot, I resented my peers a lot, drawing them as characters who get beat up by the hero, or imagining them dying in fire... Well I still remember the story about dying in the fire quite well. I imagined a girl who was so obssessed about makeup, when her apartment was caught on fire, she didn't want to escape without her cosmetics, causing her untimely demise. It was supposed to make fun of the "other" girl, but now I remember it, I just imagine someone shipping me and the imaginary girl, like those memes on Twitter.

This story was reworked a bit when I created an skeleton OC based of this story, I wanted to portray makeup in a better light, but I never showed it to anyone due to the lack of content. But with my sudden inspiration burst in probably an unideal timing, I finally can share this!

Warning for character death by fire/smoke

From Annie's earliest memories, she had always loved makeup. When her parents moved their eyes away from her, the carefree toddler quickly picked up the vibrant lipsticks and eyeliners, doodling all over her face. Knowing how much she loved painting on her face (and the fact it was too difficult to stop her anyway), her parents bought face paints and cosmetics for Annie, slowly teaching her the basics of makeup. And as she got more clothings, she learnt how to match them into the perfect combination, developing the perfect look. Her skills developed more and more, yet her love for dressing up never faded.

Despite the worries of her teachers and peers, her love for makeup was not caused by her insecurity of her appearance, but her awe for the endless possibilities of her face. She saw herself as a blank canvas, a medium to express her feelings. Makeup is an artform, that's an idea deeply rooted in her passionate heart.

As she grew up, she was faced with a grim reality: living isn't exactly affordable. It was like the difficulty stepped up a few levels the moment she became an adult, saving up money for essential items was already hard, how could she spend money on nonessential ones like cosmetics?

Nevertheless, she had a dream. There's a set from a well-known cosmetic company she had always wanted every since she had laid her eyes on it, even under the tough financial situation, she did not want to give up. She worked harder at work, rode bicycle instead of going on public transport, and ate cheaper meals, just to save as much money as possible for her favourite cosmetics...

And finally, her hard work paid off. From her shopping bag, she took out a box wrapped in a pretty pink wrapping. She gently removed the packaging without giving it too many tears, and she looked at the cosmetic set in her hands, her eyes shined in hope and joy. The next morning, her co-workers were greeted with a beautiful woman, her looks not too flashy, but eye-catching regardless. Was it because of her new makeup kit or her luminous happiness that made her shine so beautifully?

In a seemingly normal day, she returned to the street across apartment complex she lived in, only to find out the building is on fire. Neighbours gathered outside the gates, mumbling in distress. Annie stood still, processing the view in front of her, but it did not took long for her to start moving again. The people catches a glimpse of a woman in office attire running past them, they watched where she was going, as they realised her very destination was inside the burning building. The neighbours yelled, "MA'AM, DON'T GO THERE! IT'S DANGEROUS!" Annie's steps unfaltered, she had only one thing in her mind that moment:

She avoided the fires and obstacles on her way, somehow she was able to reach her own apartment. She opened the door to her bedroom, sighed in relief when she saw her box of cosmetics unharmed. She cradled the box in her arms, rushing out of her apartment door to escape from this fire. However, luck was not on her side this time. As she hurriedly reached the lobby, she was met with a thick layer of fog and raging fire all around. It was so hot... and she could not breath... As she attempted to go the other way, debris collapsed from above the ceiling, blocking her path and nearly crushing her. Annie was completely blocked, the panic she was feeling only sped up her lungs breathing in the smoke. She collapsed onto the floor, it felt like her skin was melting from the fire, and yet she held the cosmetic set tight despite being unable to protect it from the blazing heat.

"If only I can continue my passion just for longer..." Her sight slowly blurred, fading from the shining inferno, into the dark, dark nothingness...

She felt a strength grew in her, her exhaustion was no more. She felt like she was surronded by debris, and yet she felt strong enough to move her body. She struggled her limbs, climbing up with all her might.

It did not took her long to see the light again. With her head popping up from the ground, she was surprised to see it was night time already, how long did she pass out for? All of a sudden, she heard a blood-curdling a scream. Her sight shifted to the origin of the voice, noticing a woman and her child in front of a grave, looking back at Annie in shock and terror.

"Zombie!" The child shouted as he pointed at Annie, whose torso was still under the ground. Before she could ask anything, the mother shiftly grabbed the child's hand, running away together. "Z...zombie?"

"You are definitely a skeleton, not a zombie..." A new voice was heard behind. "Wait, are skeletons just zombies without flesh?" A girl, presumely around her age, walked to her view as she eyed Annie curiously. She reached out her hand, "Do you need help?"

"Me? Skeleton? What do you m-" As Annie pulled her right arm out of the dirt and reached for the stranger's hand, it had finally hit her. Instead of soft flesh under peach-colored skin, what's left of Annie's arms was dry, ivory bones. She frantically looked all over her body, left arm, chest, shoulders, they were all bones.

The skeletonized girl froze in shock, "Wait... Am I dead...?" The stranger nonchalantly replied, "Considering your state right now, I would say yes..." She then glanced over the tombstone behind Annie, which she didn't even notice. The tombstone wrote, "Annie Lam (1979-2004)". "...For many years, in fact!"

The skeleton shakily moved her hands to her mouth, "I...if I have been gone for this long... then...", her voice trembled as she spoke, "My life... my home..."

"Even my cosmetics... they are all gone?"

"C...cosmetics?!" The stranger's face became dumbfounded, that's something she could not imagine hearing, like what kind of people would care about something this trivial first??

Annie adruptly started brawling, her cries so loud perhaps they can be heard from all corners of the cemetery. It was like streams of water were about to come out of her eye sockets despite not having the ability to create tears, not even the calm stranger was able to stand this.

"HEY HEY HEY STOP CRYING FOR A SECOND", the stranger shouted out, temporarily silenting the crying Annie. "I don't really know what happened to you, or why you got resurrected, but I believe not enough time had passed for your belongings to be thrown away... Maybe y'know, someone kept them safe?"

"Or maybe... um... You might get a lot of trouble if you walk around this street alone looking like this... so maybe you can stay in my home first..." The stranger awkwardly asked, "I've got plenty of makeups you might like... it's not like I like doing makeup anyways... So maybe you can use mine for the time being...?"

Annie stared at the the kind stranger with her glimmering eyes(?), completely still for a moment. And in the very next moment, it was like a water balloon exploding, Annie bursted into tears (if she could) as she pulled the stranger into a tight hug, letting her feelings pour out. "Th...thank you..." Her voice trembled with emotions.

Socialising isn't exactly Ivy's strong suit, but it was not like she would want to let this lost person alone in the streets, especially the fact she's a skeleton. "Never thought animated skeletons are real, but that's pretty cool nonetheless!" Ivy thought to herself as she accepted Annie's hug, placing her hands onto her skeletal back. She couldn't help but imagine, what kind of chaos will happen next?

Names may be changed in the future, but I think this story is kinda neat! I hope you guys enjoyed it, now I will go eep.