The Latest Social Media Discourse(tm)
06 July 2023
Well, this is a bit of a longer one, so please bear with me!!First of all, if you were unaware of it:
1. I envy you;
2. I am genuinely sorry for bringing this up here (can't promise it won't happen again though, lol).
But as a quick summary, Twitter has been in a particularly dire state lately, to the point it actually doesn't function properly at times! And now, for some godforsaken reason, Facebook* now has this "Threads" thing, which is just... Twitter!! And this isn't even an exaggeration, it quite literally is the exact same thing, but somehow even worse!!!
No chronological timeline (meaning you have to sit through random bullthit / ads to find a post from someone you actually follow), excessive permissions, you need to have an account elsewhere to be able to use it (what?!), and all that fun stuff.
How rushed was this thing, after all? I highly doubt they'd spend more than a month on something like this.
I've been seeing a lot of people hopping onto it, and the only thing I can possibly think in this situation is just... why? Why would you ever sign up for a worse version of an already bad service?
Oh, I should mention that Threads isn't the only Twitter clone out there, there are many, many others, especially independent ones. And it's honestly getting really stupid.
People used so many different websites because they all had an unique thing to offer and they were all very different from each other! It's depressing to realise we have reached a point where the newer social media websites are just... worse rip-offs of already existing ones, doomed to miserably fail.
Y'know, it's pretty sad, yet incredibly funny to see like every single big-tech Internet service crumble into pieces throughout these last few years. It's sad in the sense of the current spaces people use to interact and even meet other people becoming less and less reliable by the day. Maybe soon enough we'll witness a new period of the Internet where there are more personal, community-based spaces for interacting instead of it all being under some big coropration's control. Very wishful, I know but we can all dream, right? It's not impossible.
There's this cohost thing, and from what I've seen it's... surprisingly decent, and it actually offers something different for once: it encourages making longer posts about all sorts of topics, and gets rid of algorithm-boosting stuff with the absence of numbers for likes and shares. Also seems like a very artist-friendly place, which is a pretty big deal.
In fact, I have been considering joining cohost, but I'm not too sure about it yet. Granted, more people would be able to watch my rambles thanks to the nature of the website, but... it's something I can already do right here. Besides, the attention is cool, but at the end of the day I just like writing my thoughts down, regardless of how many people will actually see it.
I started this website project around last year's february, and it's been fun, even if the audience here may be very small. Maybe eventually Neocities will release its final breath. Hell, maybe I won't be able to update this place for whatever reason, but until then I'll just... hang around. Hopefully you'll enjoy the ride as well.
...that was a strangely melancholy note to end this post on, but it sounds cooler like that.
*Yes, I know it goes by "Meta" now. Yes, I will deadname big corporations.
Robo Blasting
04 July 2023
I've been playing Sonic Robo Blast 2 these last few days. It's a game I've known since around 2015 (perhaps even earlier than that, can't really remember) during its 2.1 patch cycle. Back then I was only able to get to Castle Eggman's first act because it was just too hard for younger me, lol.I got back into the game by the time version 2.2 was released - witnessing the chaotic few hours before it was made available is the kind of experience you can only have once in a lifetime, let me tell you.
I'm currently going on an emblem hunt, something I never really did, and it's actually really fun!
I've also been toying around with some add-ons
- one of the coolest things about SRB2 is the sheer amount of stuff people make for this game.
In fact, I've actually started trying to make custom levels of my own with Zone Builder!
Not sure if this is ever going to be finished, but it'd be cool if it does.
I have a particularly terrible costume of not finishing projects. Not a particularly recent realisation, mind you - it's been a thing for as long as I have made stuff. There are many factors that might be influencing that, but it's a topic for another day.
In fact, there's a lot of stuff I want to talk about, contemporary or not. Even some things that wouldn't really fit into the Journal format. Maybe a "writings" section of sorts would be a neat place for longer, more polished thoughts about specific things. Who knows!
New month, new entry
10 June 2023
...and a new page as well! The Modules Directory page is something I've wanted to do for a while now, and it's finally done!!People constantly ask for download links for my modules or audio files, so I've decided to make a proper page where they can easily be found.
Aside from that, though, there's not really a lot of stuff I can (or want to) show right now, hence the general lack of stuff lately.
Oh, right, the Touhou 19 trial version! It's pretty good. Yeah, the initial release was... a bit troublesome due to how buggy it was, to say the least,
but thankfully a lot of those issues were fixed on a recent update.
The soundtrack is quite nice so far (I especially love the Title Screen theme), it feels good to play, and there's a decent amount of depth to its mechanics!
My main gripe with the game so far is the lack of a scoring system. Quite the weird decision, especially considering how much the Phantasmagoria games relied on it.
Still, it's not a complete dealbreaker in my opinion, and I'm looking forward to the game's final release!!
Sonic Superstars is also a thing! It looks like a genuinely good game!
...not buying it on release, though. Not for, like, R$ 300. No way.
That should be it for now. See you, and happy pride month! :)
...I almost can't believe it's June already...
It's still Touhou Project
29 April 2023
Well, it's fair to say UDoALG put me in a very big Touhou Project mood, to the extent of everything I'm currently making being related to it.On that note...
That's all I'm willing to share right now, but I will say this is the longest I've sticked to a game project (one week at the moment I'm writing this)!
Hopefully I'll be able to show a bit more of it in the near future.
Touhou Juuouen ~ Unfinished Dream of All Living Ghost[sic]
18 April 2023
Mainline Touhou Project games are announced every two years nowadays, and it's (almost) always on April, so the announcement itself was pretty much expected at this point.The
The game seems to be themed around both the Ability Cards (from Unconnected Marketeers) and animals (similarly to Wily Beast and Weakest Creature), which is a very interestng combination. I'm assuming the cards are going to have mostly passive effects on the gameplay, since you can only hold one of them at a time now. Bombs are present, too, which wasn't the case with PoFV.
As for the playable characters, the initial lineup we have is absolutely
The art is fantastic as well, I really enjoy how dynamic the poses feel here! Oh, and turning the bow on Marisa's hat into cat ears (hat ears?) is an amazing detail.
Look at Aunn. She's just happy to be there.
I am particularly curious about the music. Maybe there's going to be new themes for Reimu and Marisa (or at the very least new remixes)? Other characters' themes are probably going to be the ones from their respective games, though some of them might be redone in order to fit with the newer style.
Well, that's it for now. Definitely looking forward to what's to come from this game!
Purpose (and Super Mario)
16 April 2023
It's something I've been thinking about lately, and well, here's the fourth layout revision.Something I really wanted in the previous iterations was to make every page visually consistent with each other, but I have come to the realization that it's not actually a thing this website really *needs*.
Primarily because having to think of ways to make everything look *just right* while also making sure every page is just distinct enough from each other... is kind of a pain, but the main reason is this website's purpose.
You see, what I really needed was a place to better organize some of my stuff, maybe share some of my ideas, and that's it. Focusing so much on the layouts really got in the way of fulfilling this place's
primary purpose, and it kind of made me forget why I'm actually doing this in the first place.
Perhaps the "uniqueness" is lost (one could say the simplicity of this layout is, arguably, what makes it unique), but having something easier to maintain while also fulfilling my needs is all I could ask for right now.
In other words, I want to put more energy on the content itself rather than on the way it's presented.
On a completely unrelated note, I watched the Super Mario Bros. movie earlier this week. I'm being completely honest when I say this might as well be *the* single best videogame to movie adaptation out there, period. It's amazing how respectfully the movie treats its source material. It's completely a worthwhile watch if you have any sort of interest in the Super Mario series.
The brazilian TV of yore
And the nostalgia for a time one hasn't experienced
4 April 2023
Around late 2021 a video popped up on my YouTube home feed, as these usually do. It was a recording of 1989's TV Globo (a brazilian TV broadcaster) on a sunday night after a movie,
doing its good night ceremonies and a showcase of the following day's programmes a few minutes before going off air for maintenance purposes.
It was very common practice back then -- in fact, up until the late 80's, most, if not all brazilian TV broadcasters would cut their signal off every night. The equipment
responsible for transmission would heat up during the day, so giving it some time to cool down was necessary.
For some reason, it's quite off-putting to think of someone staying up until the dead of the night and having the company of nothing but the hissing of a television without anything to show.
After watching said recording, I found myself doing (fairly superficial) research on the topic. I can't help but think about how it felt like to witness such technology evolving so quickly from a spectator's perspective. I'd confidently say it's one of humanity's most notable achievements in communication.
With the ascension of the Internet, TV has inevitably declined in popularity as a medium compared to a few decades ago, but I think there's still some magic to it.
A (much needed) Monthly Update
12 March 2023
Long time no see!Aside from the lack of updates around here (oops), I'm doing mostly fine.
I've been in a bit of a Touhou Project mood lately (just so you know, it was Cave Story about a month ago, heh), especially because it's March - around a month away from a new game announcement, should the usual schedule be followed! I finally decided to put some time into learning PMD MML, which is something I've wanted to try for a while now, and I updated one of my old Touhou Project PC-98 covers with it! As someone who uses trackers pretty much all of the time, I have to say it's very refreshing to make something using a method that requires such a different workflow! It's surprisingly fun, too, I can see why some people would prefer MML over, say, trackers, as it does give you better control over stuff such as tempo and vibrato effects. There's a lot that I still have to learn about it, and I'm looking forward to that! After all, the learning process is a big part of what makes experimenting fun, isn't it?
Anyways, as for general life updates, I enrolled in college!! It's actually been around a month now since it happened. I'm still a bit nervous and not entirely used to it, but I'm confident that it's going to be an interesting experience at the very least.
That's it for now. I'll see you soon... hopefully?
Restarting
4 February 2023
Yeah. I did it again.I wasn't particularly fond of the direction the website was heading towards, so I've decided to just straight-up redo the whole thing.
This new layout partially comes from a place of wanting to have something I can actually call my own instead of relying on an already well-estabilished aesthetic. Aside from that, though,
the previous layout was just kind of inconvenient: it was annoying to browse through (especially on mobile devices) and screenreaders had a
really hard time with it due to the amount of icons required.
I'm rather confident that this update was ultimately for the better - I find this new style preferable for a website like this one.
Hopefully I won't end up changing my mind and building an entirely new layout within the next month or so, it's getting kind of inconvenient at this point...