About me

Hello here is a page where I will brain dump some random things about myself.

Drawing setup

My setup has gone through many changes over the years. I currently use a Wacom Intuos Pro with Krita on a Windows machine. In the past, I've used a Cintiq 16 (not Pro) on CSP on both Windows and Linux. I decided to stick with only Windows because I play too many Windows-only games and dual-booting is kind of annoying. I'm also in the process of learning Krita because I don't like the CSP pricing changes. The switch from screen -> non screen tablet was because leaning over constantly for hours while drawing was hurting my back :')

Favorite anime

I used to watch anime a lot more back in school, but I don't do it as much anymore... I've gotten new hobbies, but I swear anime actually did peak in like 2011. (Maybe that is dating myself.) Here are some favorites, in no particular order.

Fate/Zero -- This was the first Fate anime I watched! Sorry I'm a secondary, but I read the VN right after, and I recall still liking the anime more. The music is great and the plot is pretty epic. Sure it's also kind of stupid, but isn't that the Fate plot in a nutshell? I haven't rewatched this because I'm scared I won't like it anymore because I was pretty young when I watched it the first time.

Haruhi -- Apparently zoomers don't watch Haruhi these days... What a shame, it's a fantastic anime. Disappearance holds up as well! The writing is quite good for LN standards, and the characters (sans Haruhi) are quite likeable. My favorite character is Yuki. I watched 1, 2, 8 of Endless Eight, so maybe I'm not a real fan.

Welcome to the NHK -- I watched this one in high school and found it pretty gripping. I liked how it was very relatable to ota-NEETs. I haven't rewatched this one either, but I have a feeling I would still like it... I hope.

Shinsekai Yori -- Apparently this show was based off a real novel, which is why the plot is actually pretty good. I marathoned this show over band camp. I really liked the world building! Squealer did nothing wrong.

Monogatari series -- Okay I know this is technically not a single anime, but this series is so formulaic that I'll just count it as one. I didn't like this series the first time I watched it, but I decided to rewatch it on a whim, and wow, it's a genuinely fantastic series! I think I just got filtered the first time around because I was too young or something. The writing, while not perfect, is definitely heads and tails above other similar shows. The character design is fantastic. Love the music.

Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 -- This was one of the first "real" anime I watched after stuff like Dragon Ball or Naruto because I googled "top saddest anime". This show did indeed make me cry. Apparently not that many people have heard of it. I am also afraid to rewatch this one.

Madoka -- Everyone and their mother has seen this show, but it's good. Great writing, great characters, great music. What more could you want?

Video games

People often assume I play a lot of video games, but I really don't. I just don't have enough time nowadays to sink into something like Earthbound, which, while long, is a soulful and fantastic game (that I never finished).

I also started playing Persona 5, and I quite liked the approximately five hours I've played of it so far, but then I run into the issue of not having enough time to commit the 50+ hours upfront to play the game. However, when I try to play in chunks, I lose too much interest and context between sessions that I end up never picking the game back up, which is why I'm still stuck at the part right after the first dungeon.

Don't get me wrong, I do love those long and immersive games, but I find that the 9-5 job simply leaves you with not enough time to play them. What I could do is drop everything else and only play video games after work, but there are so many other things I want to do as well!

It seems that one solution that the market offers for this problem is a category of games that only take a short amount of time every day, gachas. But I can't keep up with the new gacha that comes out every couple of months! The only gacha I play right now is Blue Archive, but I'm pretty casual. The art is nice and the girls are cute.

I played a lot of Maplestory when I was a kid. I never got beyond like level 50. I really liked the social aspect of it, which I keep trying to find in modern MMOs, but MMOs are another category of games that don't respect your time.

Funnily enough, I often like making games more than playing them! In a way, game dev is like the ultimate sandbox game. I love exploring new game dev technologies. I've used Flash, GameMaker, Unity, Godot, RenPy, and others. You can check out my most recent games at my game studio website. Unfortunately, due to the lack of time issue mentioned above, the game dev work has been put on a bit of a hiatus for now, but perhaps I will get back into it at some point!

How I made this website

Whenever I made websites in the past, they were all frankenstein'd StackOverflow answers and flavor of the month frameworks, but this time I wanted to commit to actually learning HTML/CSS/Javascript! I don't want to learn a new JS framework every couple of months just to be able to make a website, and, really, do I need React for my STATIC personal site? The modern internet is way too bloated!

So this website was made with all HANDWRITTEN code with zero frameworks. I manually wrote the CSS instead of importing bootstrap. I did use StackOverflow for the image expansion Javascript, but I (more or less) understood the code and modified it for my needs.

Things were going fine and dandy but after a while, I got tired of reinventing the wheel for stuff like hamburger menus on mobile. I also ran into an issue with disabling scrolling on iOS Safari with the overflow: hidden stuff. It turns out preventing scrolling on the image expansion modal is really fricken annoying for some reason, and I could not figure it out without resorting to some complex Javascript. Also, my layout kept shifting when the scrollbar disappeared and reappeared, and I would have to do some manual offset calculations in Javascript to fix that too. And then I realized: wow, people kind of already solved these problems for me with libraries.

The next time I'm making a website, I'm just going to use a framework.