:: 日记

Listening to: 安和桥北 - 宋冬野 (album)
Last read/watched: Dr. Stone (anime, season 1)
Feeling: Mixed

School ended last week. The school year flew by fast, so I feel sort of weird about the entire thing. Luckily the last day ended on a high note. I was running on a sleep deficit, but I had enough motivation to cheer for my friends when they recieved achievement rewards in the end of year speech. For lunch, the class got together and ordered pizza. A not insignifigant amount of classmates were leaving this year, so we took a lot of photos for the memory.

We sat in for the older student’s graduation ceremony at the end of the day. On social media, when people graduate they make a big show of it, with a massive auditorium, 10 photographers and have throwing graduation caps and stuff like that. Only 5 or so students were graduating in our school this year, so the ceremony was really small in comparision. The ceremony was barely over 30 minutes, and the entire time I had the feeling I was intruding someones private meeting, because a lot of the speeches that were very personal. It felt weird being there, and weirder thinking about how my end of year ceremony will be like that too. My school is considered a pretty medicore one considering its tutition costs, most people only join for half a year while searching for other schools to transfer to. I thought I would be the same when I joined, but at this rate, thats for sure not happening. It annoys me, so the thing I have to work on right now is becoming content with being an average person.

I can avoid feeling too existential though, cause I got a lot of fun things planned over the break. I’m going to pick up a couple new games, and improve at some of the ones ive been putting off for school. Things kept messing with website progress before, and now i get time to really focus on it. I’m also going on a month long vacation a bit into the break, I’m very excited for that.

Listening to: FLATLINE - Bladee
Last read/watched: --
Feeling: Indecisive

This year my mental health hit a new low. I failed to get 50% class attendance this semester, and may not be able to move on to the next grade. At this point, I feel like it would be a good idea to take a year off school to sort out my issues out before continuing.

I’ve gotten a lot of opinions on whether I should drop out. Responses range from “why can’t you just, I dunno, come to school normally?” to “I’ll support you either way, though I would prefer X/Y decision.” to “schools useless, it’ll be easier to study from home.” I feel very mixed. It seems exessive of me to ask for an entire year off just for personal life issues, and I don’t want to lose the few real world friends I have. However, I also need to seriously deal with my issues, and so far, school has just gotten in the way of that.

I have some regrets about switching middle schools a couple years back for the same reasons, and I feel a lot of pressure to make the right decision this time. Whatever decision I make, I’ll stick to it 100%. No stewing over mistakes.

For site updates, I just got added to the psycho helmet webring! Once I move things around the widget will fit in nicely. I’m also working on setting up the replacement guestbook with ayano's comment box widget. It’s been pretty challenging for me. I keep inputting the wrong info since I don’t understand the javascript. Reminds me that I should really get serious about learning js…

About the last blog entry, the coding commitment I’ve made is going alright. I still ocassionally overshoot the 2 hour goal and let working on the site take priority over more important tasks. For the most part though, I work on the site a ittle bit at a time now. It’s a lot more managable, I’m having fun tweaking my old code.

crazy to think i’ve been on and off working on this website for almost 6 months now. This year has been a total blur.

Listening to: Let’s All Love Lain - TOKYOPILL
Last read/watched: Mob Psycho 100 (anime)
Feeling: Dizzy

I took a break and vanished for a month. I worked on the website in bursts, not consistently, so I burnt out strongly as my offline life got more chaotic. I’m getting ever closer to being a hikikomori due to my mental state, so updating my website got pushed aside.

Funnily enough, how much I enjoyed coding was what stressed me out about this website. HTML and CSS developing into a strong interest of mine was unexpected. I already had other pre-established personal goals, and discovering this new thing that I very much enjoyed threw the tedious balance of interests in my head out of wack. Along with many other major life events getting in my way, I really was planning on never updating again and pretending like I never discovered this hobby in the first place. Unluckily for my repressor brain, a website I liked ended up being deleted by the author which got me thinking about HidingSpot again.

Almost every Neocities personal site goes through long periods of inactivity. It was unrealistic to assume mine would be different. I'm not upset; small roadblocks like this are another chance to learn and improve. I have now committed to spending at least 20 minutes working on the site every day (and to work for not more than 2 hours every day, to avoid overexertion). Adding to the site every week was too ambitious, so updates will no longer be weekly.

I found this from ooops.lol’s mini-manifesto motivating:

“In a web where human creation is often sullied by profit and status, these oft called dumb or meaningless sites are so pure.
Gentle porch lights in a dark, deceptive city.
Turn yours on, let us know you’re home.”

I still have things I want to do with this website. Coding is fun, no need to overthink it.

Site wise, I'm thinking about merging a couple of the pages to make the site more compact. A lot of the code on the website needs tweaking and image loading times are not satisfactory. I want to catch up on /medialog. (I've read Fujimoto's Fire Punch recently which was awesome.) It'll be nice to switch up the site button too. And 123guestbook is shutting down, another problem I'll need to deal with. It'll also be nice to make the website less reliant on a repurposed premade layout. I think I have the skills for orignal pages now, even if coding still takes an unresonably long time. Also, this site has little purpose outside of being a code project, so im figuring out how to merge this site with my other interests so those dont get sidelined. Much to come!