Thanks to ArticFox for sparking the idea while I was showcasing the site to him at 1 a.m, and also to Sudospective for pointing out some bugs she noticed with the dates when reading a post.

To put it short: I got desinterested with a lot of things, as I come to find out when I have too many things under my plate. To give you a perspective as to what's been going on...

• I'm currently working on Project OutFox, doing the Mac thingamajigs.
• I'm also managing the StepMania Archive, which is still for the most part manual.
• I've been making animations under the RykeShrk moniker, and that's been popping off.
• I've been on the hunt to get a stable full-time job.
• I've been studying how Metal 3/4 works so I can help out with future OutFox endevours once Apple removes OpenGL from macOS.
• I've tackled into the Vulkan API, and made some tweaks to a [Quake 2 port that uses it] (https://github.com/JoseVarelaP/vkQuake2).
• I've dove deep into GTA:SA modding and been continuing development on a V-Styled hud mod.

And you can pretty much call some of these distractions, cause now looking back, they pretty much are; but at the time, I thought of them as different escapades. Hell, I've even been having more fun doing animations than programming, which isn't really something that you should be thinking about in a job-like scenario.

Other things that have also kept me silent has been the many many adventures with my family, not that I have any beef with anyone, its just that I'm pretty much along for the ride for most of the feuds that occur. One of such events I showcased briefly on my BlueSky, since I don't really like sharing my life around, even right now. I know that I need to talk with people to just vent out what has been going on, cause if you just keep it to yourself, it can be very detremental for your wellbeing as you feel caged from being able to speak about it. I'll just leave that part as that.

As a way of distraction as well, I've been getting a lot more into VRChat with my friends, and those are really fun. As a word of advice: just hang out with your friends in VR, there's just no point going to public instances if at the end of the day you're going to be bombarded with misery.

Its funny, this is the second time I'm trying to write this out. The original one, "Biting more than I can chew", was back in May. That should give you some kind of idea of when I tried to go back, and then trouble started rising again, so I still had to be away. That original version also was a lot more out of rails...

Hopefully this can serve as an explanation as to why I just ghosted everyone. I know some won't like it, and that's understandable.

I made it at a time where I thought I could make the site look cool by being minimalistic, as I was going through this phase where I tried to be a minimalist on everything (which turned out to be way harder than it was, but I ended on a middle-ground), and thought that a single black background with image would suffice. To be honest, that kind of look fits better for the RykeShrk website, which I ended up doing.

So now, you'll see a more defined look here, with more flair that isn't in your face.

Hopefully later on I'll write up about what the hell I've been doing, I know some people have wondered.

The cause here is that I have an external drive that acts as my Time Machine drive, and with it, I usually have it plugged in every day to perform its routine backup. However, this day has had the drive mounting for several minutes, that I was wondering what could've caused it: A dead drive? Something about me trying to mount it on Linux? Maybe something about thermals? Turns out it was nothing of those, as after several attempts of trying to load the drive on different situations and recoveries, I've just let it run for a few minutes, and it finally shows up... as unmounted.

An overview of my external drive, both partitions (TM and Data) are unmounted after waiting.

After another 4 minutes, it mounts the data partition, but not the backup one. During this time, it locks up the OS really badly. If there's any program that interacts with storage, it WILL hang.

Data partition has mounted, and information has showed up.

After investigating, it turns out I'm not the only one having this problem. There have been multiple reports on the Apple support forums, and they're relatively the same: plugging an external hard drive is causing the system to spend a lot of time reading it.

Some people mentioned it could've been Spotlight doing an endless or very long indexing process throughout the entire drive, but I checked for activity during drive activity states, but nothing changed.

Here are some of the reports I've found:

• macOS Ventura 13.2 - Bug Fixes, Changes, and more #3
• Ventura not mounting my backup drive - Apple Community
• External hard drive takes forever to mount... - Reddit

Some of them even have some workarounds which involve restoring the OS, but I don't want to perform that unless I have a proper backup. After a few weeks trying to decide what to do, I ended up formatting the entire external drive... and that fixed it immediately. No joke.

So now, I'm waiting for my formatted drive to perform backups again. At least it works like it used to before.

Just have to wait the 5-6 local backups the Macbook made while waiting for the drive to do its thing.

Update: Before I performed the format, I've decided to check if 13.2.1 would fix it, but nothing.

But now, I wanted to do a similar thing, with the current genre of music that's got me hooked: barber music. Don't really have a title for it, so I'm open for suggestions.

It's 30 minutes long, and features the following songs:

• Macroblank - コントロールを失う
• Macroblank - 私の後ろに立つ
• Macroblank - 私の壁に壊れた鏡
• Macroblank - 手ぶらで
• eternal judge - jack forgot his keys
• eternal judge - countdown

Alongside with this, you can now read the blog without any Javascript, so even older browsers can read this and it's faster as the server handles the processing.

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It brings me this feeling of liberation; I guess it could be the term? It's it hits hard, it's in your face, the distorted guitars bring you into this surreal world of emotions and questions, while the vocals attempt to explain it all in a muffled manner, getting obliterated by everything else.

I've created a playlist of the music that has hit me the hardest out of this genre.

Listen: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3wUAP31SkITUlvRXIp8MyU?si=a95f94424fe54e42

For the last 4-6 months or so, I have been using SMB for communication of files on a local server of mine that also acts as a pi-hole, but I always wondered about the hoops I have to do to make the drive compatible on different situations - most recent one being adding compatibility for SMB1 given a Windows XP VM that needed to access files to PIC programmer files - that at this point it makes trying to get native speed / compatibility a mess.

While watching videos before going to bed, I saw a video by Citrus Titus Tech that showcased NFS functionality on Windows, while describing the inconveniences of SMB along the way. At this point I never knew about this protocol, despite it being more compatible on Linux/Unix systems.

This could be a mayor upgrade for my server, considering the fact I don't have any actual Windows computer, only a M1 Macbook Air and a Macbook Pro running Debian, so NFS would fit right in.

Preparations

While researching this, I started to notice that the initial steps of the setup were similar to SMB:

• Create the folders that will be the mounting points that other computers will connect to.
• Give the appropiate permissions to the folder for the specific user/group.

I initially followed steps from this guide: https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-mount-an-nfs-share-in-linux/, which then transitioned to the Red Hat Linux Network Configuration section.

The Setup

After that, it was time to setup the exports file (/etc/exports), which is a simple file that contains the listing of the directories (or mounting points) that will be shared on the network. This just needs a couple of simple settings.

/TheDrive       *(rw,sync,no_subtree_check,root_squash)

And then the problem began at this moment. Both the debian machine and the Linux machine did not connect to the drive: the Debian machine just kept exclaiming "Invalid Protocol" under Dolphin, while MacOS just did not connect at all. So next step would be figuring out if the mounting of the drives requires a different setup. And then I noticed that in every tutorial, everyone would mount the drives with the 'mount' command, which is the same command I use to mount the external drives on the server. So, the next command came along to mount it. First on the debian machine:

mount -t nfs 192.168.100.25:/public /mnt/nfsdrive

And voila! I've got a file listing containing the files for the folder. However I cannot write to it at all. This is because NFS, is host authenticated rather than user, so if I was user "jose", but the mounts and folders were created by "root" and tagged as such, I will be able to read them as "jose", but to write anything to them, I must be "root" (This is best explained here). This was a simple change to perform, but then I hit another snag given the external drive, as the command always mounts the drive with the root user: however it was quickily fixable with the -o flag, which lets you assign the user and group ID to the mounting point, so I just added those.

mount -o uis=1000,gid=1000,umask=0000 /dev/sda2 /HDDDrive

And boom, the hard drive folder mounted as "jose", allowing me to write on computers that contain the same user.

Some security

Oh course, a little bit of security shouldn't harm when dealing with this network drive. If you've noticed above, I used *, which points to everyone. So everyone can access this drive, which is actually OK since this is also shared with family members, but I don't want outside actors, so it's time for a firewall rule.

ufw allow from 192.168.100.0/24 to any port nfs

And back on the exports file:

/TheDrive       192.168.100.0/24(rw,sync,no_subtree_check,root_squash)

The results

Immediately, I saw a mayor improvement on read speed across smaller files, it was night and day. I could finally explore my SM Archive local backup without having to wait 4-5 seconds for it to finish fetching the file listing back in SMB. Write speeds are relatively the same however once you start dealing with heavier files, but it really shines on smaller ones. I still have my SMB instance running alongside the NFS one for compatibility purposes, given that XP VM I mentioned previously and many other devices that aren't fully UNIX complaint like IPhones or TVs.

An additional note that I found out while trying to get NFS running on the MacOS client: If you mount the volume with sudo, that means that the mount is inserted as root, obviously. But this means that root is the user that accesses the NFS drive, which, if not mapped on the exports file, won't be able to write anything because of permissions, just like how the mount on the server side was mounted to root, not allowing to write on literally any device. So for this I swapped the root_squash flag to all_squash, which now also includes root to be squashed to a specific UID and GID provided on the export file. This was needed given the username on the Macbook has a different username, so I can just assign the GID and UID from the mounting step in here, and when it connects, it already becomes jose, and its ready to write!

This document is still in development, as it goes through the few months of playing this game and describing past experiences.

Links in this document to Youtube or Reddit will be going to Indivious and LibReddit instances respectively.

I'm planning on doing a video version of this document upon further completion.

 A couple of disclaimers

Hi, welcome to this document. There are a couple of things to mention beforehand:

• I've only played Ninjala for a total of about 25 total hours.
• I haven't interacted with the community at all to have more insight about how the experience is.
• I actually have no idea about the collabs except for a tiny bit of
• I've watched the Anime, but I haven't watched the 2D animated show fully to give it proper insight on the chapter "Hey, there's an anime with this game".

If at any point you would like to play some matches with me, you can ask me for my Nintendo Switch code via email (Or Discord if you happen to know where I am).

Also, if I have any kind of information wrong, please let me know! I still don't know everything about this game and I'm bound to mess up somewhere, so clarifications are appreciated!

 Introduction

Back in 2020, I had heard about this game called Ninjala, and initially I just passed it out as a Splatoon clone; an often common term that I see when people talk about this game, in which I'll try to demostrate that it isn't later on this document.

It was back on the news page on the Switch, which just had the trailer for it. I was somewhat excited for it, and decided to wait until release to play it. However, when the day arrived, I installed it, but didn't actually play it. I guess I felt betrayal or something about playing something that wasn't Splatoon (given at the time I was invested in that), however I can't be sure, I just had this feeling of concern. It wasn't until the start of 2022 that I decided to give it a chance again, after seeing some posts about Ninjala back on the news feed on the switch but also some images of the anime. I hadn't even known that an anime existed, so that intrigued me.

When joining, it was about the last week of Season 8, so what I decided to do is get the lite season pass, which only gets you until tier 30 with the prizes. Another thing that I didn't noticed was that, because I had made the account back when the game came out, I had a lot of mails and gifts waiting for me, regarding: server interruptions, player milestones, years of play, and other things. This definitly bumped my initial Jala to a reasonable ammount to start fully on the next season.

This led me a to a situation, which I also explained to a couple of friends that happened to be on the same situation: save on the Jala now, at least get the Lite Season Pass, to see how the game is like - as even the lite pass gives you unlimited plays - and then spend the full pass on the new season if you so choose. I did this process exactly, I was offered a small discount with this as well, as it was my first pass. I think it was about half the original price but I cannot recall well.

 Multiplayer and the internet infraestructure

The multiplayer is split into several categories, but it can be summarized into two: Free-For-All or Team Battle (For an exception in a bit).

 Free For All

Easily I've been playing this mode the most. It's dang fun, despite the often realization that some weapons may be buffed or not. I haven't felt the need to stop playing, I just kept having this smile on my face while playing. It's an (up to) 8 player match, where everyone just beats the shit out of everyone else, and you try to make the highest ammount of points. Keeping in track with what I learned on the first 20 or so matches, I've come to this conclusion:

• Drones are really important to get.
• The spear (or whatever you call it) is really fast.
• Range weapons are uhhhhhhhh, rangey.

So I ended up with a combination of just using the GRB Gears with the Ninjutsu reserve and Memoire mirror (that's how it's mentioned in English I think?).

 Team Battle

I've only played 2 matches on this one so far. It's basically the same as the Free For All, but now you just beat the shit out of the other team, while also there are a couple of extra drone spots on some maps. While it's fine in the concept, I'm still thinking why the execution leaves somewhat to be desired (at least in my perspective).

That brings me to an extra point that I want to bring which is the competitive aspect of the game. Surprisingly this game has one; but its so hidden it took me a few minutes to figure out how to even enter a competitive match. Now it's just second nature somewhat, but it can be streamlined with a side toggle on the matchmaking menu, instead of having to enter the "Ninjala Combat" menu and then picking the mode. (A.k.a it could be added as a button toggle on the menu itself which would toggle the modes on the quick options).

 Special Events

Fron time to time, the game gives out these special events that are time limited, but offer some mix up with the general play of the game. So far I've played through 3 of them: Soccer mode, Last Ninja Standing and the one where you are the uh, I don't know what the beast you become is called, the one where you transform when you have the spear weapon thing, and you go chase the other ninjas like hide'n'seek.

Easily enjoyed the Soccer mode, knowing full well its just like Rocket League, but you have to walk to it, so in that sense its just regular soccer? I don't know at this point. Most of the matches always ended up being a 2v2 match, but when full, oh man it is fun.

Connections and Matchmaking

I mean, if you've played the game on either modes (Global or Regional) it's the same deal. Due to the matchmaking part of the game not being really well balanced which I think its in part to the smaller userbase that constantly plays the game, you can end up in situations where you're up against players that are about 5-15 times more leveled and experienced than you. There really isn't much it can be done here unless new players come into the game, and try to make the matchmaking on those new players not as messed up as the ones coming to level 25-30 for example.

If the server can't find enough players in a certain ammount of time, then it just fills the rest with preset players; a.k.a the main characters of the game. Note the players already marked as ready.

There were also connection problems that just made me question how the game prioritizes actions. However I did find this Ippon funny.

In the end, if you want matches, play on Global. If your internet isn't great, play Regional and hope other people in your continent play too. While in this chapter, I would invite you to experience these 30 seconds of pure dumbness from me.

 Let's talk about Season 9

Season 9 is insect themed, which I didn't really expected much being on setting, but it somewhat fits. I will say, given this event I was really mesmerized on a particular item as it reminded me of old fun times with my friends, and a Megaman Zero character. I ended up buying it after staring at it for 10 minutes, leaving me with no Jala.

However, eventually I did return back to a stable earning while participating on one of the Matsuri events they held, which are events where the daily missions are tagged with insane exp rewards and you can just switch the ones you don't want to do at any moment.

Also in this event, was the "re-introduction" of the WNA Resort. Apparently this was already shown before but it was still unfinished, and it still somewhat is? It's even only available for a limited time. I'm really not sure how this resort's development history goes, however it is being used as an alternate hub where you can meet up other players that are also in it. I must say it does have some nice spots for background shots.

Update: It has been closed again, but they've assured it is opening officially next season.

Image: Closure annoucement and reopening announcement

In this island you can interact with players in there to view their profiles or join their game lobbies, which is a really good idea to find people to play with, and check up if you can be up to the task. I kinda wished the transitions between said menus wasn't as long so it doesn't feel you're just standing there while checking their stats/room. Maybe just have a quick info pane about their stats that doesn't show their character model rather than fetching back to the Player Information screen that is inside the system options?

A fun thing I tried to do here, is trying to get to the flying platform that was on top of the map, figuring it should've been solid, to then succeed, only to find that there's a portal there where it explains it's the Sky Lounge, and it was under the waterfall this whole time.

There was a WNA Cup, I participated in it, didn't go so well that I ended up in about 4000th spot, one of the matches was actually one of the screenshots shown above.

Currently I'm not even done with all of the season's contents. I'm only at tier 66, so I still got plenty of things to do before declaring I've completed this Season.

But definitely, the biggest thing introduced in this event has also been the controversial aspect of this season.

The Ninja Gum Lab

This will take a moment to explain. During the reveal stream for season 9 (Dev Diary #22), the Gum Lab was teased as a way for players to research attacks and to perfect their Ninja-Gum, by "increasing its damange, reducing its cooldowns, and more"; which is something the Shinobi cards already did for some specific weapons or tactics. However this one is applied as a permanent upgrade to either every attack or cooldown in general or to specific weapons, thus the categories shown above.

Do I think this could work? Maybe but I'm not even sure; especially considering that there's a bundle to buy research points on the store, which brings the pay to win aspect into question. It is worth noting though that these bundles are only one time purchases, so it's likely they know the situation this could fall into.

There is no shortage of concerns from players about the potential mess this could bring for player balancing, specially for newer players.

Reddit Post: "Gonna talk about that "Ninja Gum lab" feature, because it genuinely scares me"

Reddit Post: Let's not forget that The Resort is open for a couple of weeks and is in beta

YT Link: [Ninjala | Gmod] Ninja Gum Lab is a Joke

 Hey, there's an anime with this game

This section includes small general summarized spoilers for the Ninjala Anime ep 1-12.
If you'd like to skip this section, click here.

Yeah, there's one. Technically this is the third attempt they've done to make a series that explains the story of Ninjala, previously being a 2D animated cartoon, and even before that, months before the release of the game a CGI toon, created by Marza animation Planet, ModelingCafe (subdivision of Cafegroup), VISUALMAN TOYKO and The Monk Studios. However, at the end of 2021 it was announced that a new Ninjala Anime was being produced by OLM, Inc. which would air in January 2022, and it's good. Currently at the time of me writing this, there are 12 episodes, with the 13th happening the same day I'm writing this sentence right now.

If you want any info about airings and stuff like that, they have an entry on the Anime section in TV-TOKYO. Usually the youtube uploads are about a week after the original airing.

The mayor thing I've noticed with this anime is a lot of the episodes (until the 10th) are retellings of what happened on the 2D animated series, like the first episode of the 2D show is Van's origin story, which is retold in episode 3's "Awaken, Young Van!"; or Lucy's origin episode, being the second on the animated show, and episode 4 in the anime. I do find interesting that the show never had an episode that showcased Burton and Rebecca perfecting the Ninja-Gum, which is what the CGI episode and the Anime did as their first episodes.

I would say my favourite scene has to the the chase between Jane and Ron with the Oniwabanshu, on episode 8. It has a noire-style feeling with the calm but unapologetic jazz; which reminds me of stuff like L.A. Noire, alongside the cherful students from the academy admiring the fireworks providing a stark contrast to the current events, while both of the undercover ninjas are being chased with a cliffhanger to top it off for the next episode.

Would I recommend watching the anime? Yeah. It's got its highs and lows, the pacing is a bit weird in places, but you can get through it, and do mind there's a couple of filler episodes, like ep. 9 where it's just Lucy and Emma fighting some thugs.

I know it's meant to imply that Lucy can make some friends even in her manic personality, but the mayority of the episode just felt like retelling the traits of some characters and just let them do things.

 What about Splatoon? Would that kill interest in this game?

This is the important question that I had while making this document. I was in the camp at the beginning of the idea that, this game was basically just a Splatoon clone and nothing more, and that I would just wait for Splatoon 3. However, the thing to address is:

• While I am knowledgable on the lore of Splatoon, and have collaborated on Splatoon content in the past, I have never played any of the games, however I have seen plenty of footage of the game, and even seen live events of matches to understand the mechanics.

What I'm saying is this: while Splatoon has its unique elements that define a team-based third person shooter, I really don't think it can knock out this game from the userbase. Slowly over time this game - just like any game with some unique elements - gains a passionate fanbase that always supports the game over to watch it grow and succeed.

Right now, Ninjala is somewhat seeing a small renaissance in its userbase and player interest, with a lot of people coming to the game to play for the first time, and even returning players that left the game a long time ago because they got tired about the grinding. The assortment of fan content is slowly but surely getting there, with people making drawings of their their characters, animations in GMOD, hand-drawn coming along, custom game modes, podcasts, and other things.

Even recently I've seen people merging both fanbases together in animations or custom content, as if they were on the same universe, and honestly, it fits right in. There shouldn't be conflict with these fanbases, they can co-exist, grow and mature.

 Conclusion

Ninjala is a good* game. If you have a switch and Switch Online, give this game a go, it is quite fun. Sure, the grind is going to be somewhat taunting at first given the ammount of rewards it gives you at the start, however, once you've got enough Jala to get at least the Lite Pass (which is at a discount when its your first time), that'll be your rocket to fully experience this game without the inconveniences.

The game can absolutely last, it has a really distinct style and combat system that brings some fresh take on the brawler genre, and Splatoon isn't going to be the one taking it down.

*The Gum Lab will absolutely need reconsideration given the mayor pay to win factor it brings to the table, and the sheer fact that skill always beats, and the grinding to obtain these research points are basically dependant on when Gunho currently wants them to add them, like every Anime broadcast on YouTube or via mail.

Another factor is the weapon balacing, as I've seen that people are keen about how certain weapons are quite unbalanced, however I do not know the difference between them yet as I haven't used them all.

After that burnout, I moved on to SM5 theming, and the rest is history.

Given that people really wanted to use these themes, and so the fact that I've even showed several of them previously on a video on my channel, I decided that it's better late than ever to finally release the themes as they were. Again, they're incomplete themes, so you may experience crashes, freezes, missing items, and many other things.

ENTER

I've been creating content for almost a full decade now, and there have been a few moments where my work has innovated others, such as themes, modfiles, and coding practices, but I've never really asked for anything in return; And right now, I really think I shouldn't. While a lot of people really like my work, I don't see enough value to give me something in return.

It's funny considering that a lot of people in the past have told me to open some kind of way that people can support me, but I never did. My stuff got more popular, and those same messages got more scarce, but noticeable. A lot of times, people keep saying something like "Oh, imma buy you a new mic or something" during my streams, and I just kept thinking if its either a joke, or a genuine action they might perform.

There were two reasons that I opened the ko-fi: The moving situation and me thinking that it would be worse that I've expected initially, and everyone else that I've usually hang around with that also make content like this, have donations set up and everything. I obviously don't know if they have gained anything after opening said donation options, but I shouldn't be the seeker into finding about how they're doing it.

So far, I've just earned money by working on side jobs and the savings money my family gives me every week, and I think it'll be enough until I graduate. Will I ever open up for donations then? Eh, maybe not for the next few years, unless I get a job.

I had planned to make a video similar to what I've done back when I turned 18, but I had the thought 3 days before this so there was no way I was going to do something similar to that given all of the stuff I now work on these days.

But anyways, now I want to reflect on what has happened this year. It has been an interesting one, aside from all of the stuff outside. For example, the StepMania Archive has grown and it has served quite a bit for people who want to play old versions of the game and look for older themes, which I'm glad for. One use I do wish it could be used for is research purposes, given the archive now contains quite a bit of history of StepMania for the past 20 years, but haven't seen it put to good use during the archive's 3 years of existance (started on december 2017). Maybe it has been lack of advertisement for the website or something, I'm not sure, but I don't want to do that.

Another thing I've started to see is a ridiculous ammount of people getting introduced to the game, and that is wild but also fun. It's been lovely talking with people who have asked about how the game works and everything, and detailing descriptions about how much they can customize the engine.

This brings me to OutFox, and man, it's still a blast to work on this, even though most of the time is taking out everything that the older devs have done because most of is either deprecated or doesn't even work on modern systems. We're still at it though.

Would like to appreciate kkclue for (semi)-introducing the engine to their audience, it was like a extremely brief moment that the game was introduced, because it focused way more about the controllers that you could use with it, but it showcased the engine. (Also thanks for the shoutout buddy [even though it was just a fine print on the description], 'preciate it)

Another event that has happened, I've started to get my feet back up with my university grades, like massive improvement. I finally got rid of the classes I was dragging since the start of my carrer, and I can catch up with the rest. It is quite the lesson I've learned now that this is done, where I spent the first year and a half of university just messing around and doing other stuff for my porfolio (like the animations, and the themes, although would you even call that portfolio worthy?), that has caused me to really not pay attention to classes upon that time.

Uh... other things... um...

duh...

I've uh...

I mean, I began to get better on blender, as you might've noticed on the images in this website. Haven't done anything mayor with it however, as I'm still working on the skeleton for Copy, and it's facial structure; but also because I haven't really gotten any ideas to animate.

And then uh...

I got some games for my switch, but I can't really play them because I work on OutFox.

Have I really not done that many things this year...?

huh. Well then.

This topic has been updated, so please check out the note adressing this.

This topic has been rambling my mind for the past 2 weeks, and requires some explanation.

Recently, it's been more inevitable that I'll be moving to a new place in order to get away from my father given he's not respected the ruling we did to stop with his drinking or more specifically avoiding theraphy sessions to stop drinking (It's an ongoing thing that we've been trying to get him to do for almost a decade now).

Now at this point, my mother has been looking for spots, and there are finally some candidates to choose from that are quite nice, but the rent prices might be a bit steep given the fact that they're apartments and most of them don't cover stuff like water and electricity. At this point, given it's going to be my sister, me and my mother who are going to move out, we don't really have a stable way to generate income, as my mom's been the one who's supported at this expense.

I still don't know the exact time when we'll perform the move, but just in case, i've decided to open up for donations to help with this.

I'll also possibly open up for theme commissions or maybe start making more music to put on bandcamp, given I practice music theory a bit more and get the hang of it to make my music more listenable. But I'll make an announcement about that once I'm able to do it, given I'm still doing university stuff.

So, if possible, maybe consider it?

 Personal Site

So, a couple of things have been done to my personal website, like for example, the Current/Past works page now doesn't break awfully on Safari. Turns out it's the only browser in existance (that I know of) that stretches the elements from a flexbox by default, which I still do not understand to this day.

 Archive related changes

It's now Open Source.

Yep, the archive is now open for everyone to contribute and send over new entries or fixing stuff or whatever.

Keep in mind, I'm still not exactly planning for automation of the whole thing, in fact I was recommended not to do it, because of the problems later with integration and scheduling and maybe Github making a hickup at times, so it'll still be manually updated by myself when there's significant updates.

 Mailing List

So, the original StepMania repository (The one from SourceForge) had a Mailing list which contains the emails exchanged of conversations with the developers, commits and bug reports, and it has such a massive ammount of history inside of it, so that is also getting backed up. It's a slow process so far, given that SF doesn't provide a way to mass-download the archive of the Mailing list, only to the administrators of the project - which I know by this point are long gone from the project - so I decided to do the next best thing to perform this backup process, scrapping each entry from the list.

This process was a bit tricky, given how bloated the SourceForge page has gotten, so a bunch of elements had to be taken out, but it also turned out that a bunch of those elements had deeper and deeper divs which just made the process more convoluted to get rid of. In the end, I ended up with a good starting point to then convert each entry as plain text. I could've made each entry markdown so they can support links, but I'm keeping it safe for now given that the attachments from the mails can contain sensitive and possibly dangerous files, some examples of those are Aug 2003, where a bunch of the emails were spam and A LOT of malware in many forms (wav, exe, png, and others), and an email circa 2002 where someone just posted a picture of themselves as a kid. I still don't know the reason why that picture was sent on the developer channel, but its there.

 (WIP) Table sorting

I'm working on adding support for sorting on the tables for the Builds Archive, so it should be possible to sort each entry by date and name, to make it easier to find elements on each category.

 Listen

This album was pretty much an accidental find, and well, I don't regret it.

It's a pretty small album, only having 4 songs, so pretty much an EP by that point, but man, the songs here give out a vibe similar to haircuts for men, desert sand feels warm at night and 2814.

1.- ダンス d a n c e

So, we begin with your typical vaporwave-kind song, with some sample mixing. This is followed along with some small snares to give it a bigger enviroment. The song doesn't get shy to emphasize the drums, so it makes them center stage mid-song.

It is somewhat repetitive, so it's best fitting as a background song.

2.- ドル $

This was the song that I got when randomly playing the radio, and it hooked me. I can recall how I found it.

I listen to Nightwave Plaza at some days of the week when I want to listen to some chill or vaporwave music, and they have a ranking system where its categorized by date type. I picked the weekly listing, and I accidentally picked this song, it was entry #45 I believe, I would've exited because I didn't meant to pick it, but I decided to preview the music, and the guitar... oh man the guitar...

As soon as I hear that riff and the tuba (i think...?) sound making a highlight and rising note, it just felt special. I spent about an hour trying to find where I could search this song, and couldn't get anywhere because the songs were titled on Japanese. But after a bit of studying, I found out that it was enough just translating the artist name, Loft Tapes.

As I mentioned at the start, the guitar riff that constantly plays in this break-style chill track in a style reminiscent of Haircuts for men, just hits quite a nice feeling, like a late sunset, returning home from maybe chilling with some friends, just thinking about what you've done throughout the day.

3.- 遺灰 a s h e s

I'm not exactly sure how I would describe this song. It still has this feeling of the second song, but a more disturbant kind of sound, where it has deeper sounds with rougher keys, which might make a bit weird a first but you get quickly used to it.

4.- アメリカ a m e r i c a

Amen breaks with melancholic voices? Yeah, it can work. Not exactly the best song, but it makes me relax.

This entry is mostly just a test so i can see how it can look like on other browsers, as I was quickly pointed out about possible incompatibilities with browsers and their methods to asyncronous load when perfoming the operation on Javascript rather than PHP.

I would like to Moru for providing these points and suggestions about how to deal with this kind of thing lol.