This year I decided to take the plunge and fully dedicated to creating my own website ^.^
For years I’ve been meaning to make a “space” of my own to document my hobbies and interests. I’ve hovered between many socmeds and websites across the years, but taking the reins and making that space myself was truly the answer I’ve been searching for. I love having complete creative freedom to decorate my page, plus the mega bonus of having no algorithm or audience to curate to! Though I greatly appreciate every visitor that stops by my page and drops a message, every message, your words truly warm my heart ♥
Initially I started off on neocities but decided to switch off to teacake in order to utilize webdev systems such as FTP and PHP! Although I’ve been spoiled greatly by finally having a front end compose page to create my posts, I hope to practice CSS and make unique static pages for my various side projects eventually.

For a good decade or so I’ve struggled greatly with maintaining relationships and accommodating my behaviour to better suit the personalities of other people. Recently I’ve had a massive moral upheaval that conflicted with the personal belief systems that many of my long time online acquaintances had. Trying to create new friendships that share the same beliefs as me ended up nothing short of a disaster when I realized that I am incredibly unsocialized and had no idea how to navigate a friendship in the face of conflict. Although I’m very fortunate to have never truly been alone in all my years of living, I did spend a good chunk of my life feeling “lonely” after going through a very much self inflicted period of social isolation where my only connections to other people were via social media acquaintances (or oomfies in layman’s terms).
Despite having a curated friend group in social media, I never got to really know my acquaintances beyond what they share on their account and the interactions we have inbetween posts. Sometimes we interact on apps like discord, but even then I was only really there when an acquaintance wanted to share about themselves before quickly leaving to talk with their other, much closer friends. As much as I appreciate learning more about other people and hearing about their daily lives, its one thing when you’re only really brought into question when other people are asleep or busy and you just happened to be the only one available. It also didn’t help that during the brief stints I’ve had in social media I could never stay too long due to my eccentric personality and tastes. I quickly became obsessed with numbers and maintaining followers, and my self esteem would plummet should my posts lose engagement when the fandom I’m into loses traction or I decide to post about something else. At that time, I began to prune and conform my personality to suit an algorithm, to keep my true desires and interests locked behind a private alt for me to divulge in secret.

To summarize a big turning point, nearing the end of 2024 I decided to go scorched earth and ghost a majority of the acquaintances I’ve had after a particular friendship breakup. I quickly resolved myself to a life of solitude, planning to only maintain the bare minimum of social interaction to prevent myself from going insane….. which didn’t last long at all since prior to that point I’ve created a rag-tag group of acquaintances who happened to play the same game I was extremely fixated on and I felt really bad about ghosting them shortly after the conception of our static group for end game raiding. These acquaintances grew to be wonderful gaming friends who have gifted me with many laughs and fulfilment this year! From this I’ve learned to take my friendships easy, and found that there is much more fulfilment when your hobbies, conversations, and interests are reciprocated. With this renewed courage, I decided to reach out and contact many of the webmistresses I have taken an interest to while lurking the smallweb and have met so many wonderful, lovely, witty, and talented women who have been such a delight to converse with. For the first time in a long while, I don’t feel lonely anymore! I have something to look forward to when I open my PC!
I am happy because my friends like me! 

I will forever cherish the laughter and jokes I’ve shared among my friends this year— To create inside jokes, memes, and art is among my biggest passions, and nothing fills me with more joy than to have my creations resonate and bring laughter from other people! I’ve also began to write stories again and shared them with other people! I also love hearing stories from other people too, whether it be fictional or daily excerpts of their everyday life! I also ate lots of tasty food!

Nah, I’m not giving myself enough credit haha. I think the biggest thing I did was finally take initiative for myself and to prioritize my feelings, needs, and beliefs first. Although my motivation fluctuates most days, and I struggle to maintain consistency with taking care of myself, I have been getting myself out of the house and being more mindful of what I eat.  I also found that I’m much more sociable and extroverted than I give myself credit for!

Getting to play my favourite game of all time with friends an being able to discuss the story, make fun of it, and create memes + artwork have brought me so much joy this year! I also got to create lots of ocs, stories, and art to share and converse with others as well!! Wahhh I’ve forgotten how wonderful it feels to really unapologeticaly ramble about my interests!

I’ve been trying to keep track and monitor my health more closely this year, but I’ve completely flaked out and gave up near the end of the year! I’m slowly regressing back to a sedentary lifestyle but aghh, I need to be more consistent with my daily walks and water consumption.

After many years of procrastinating I’ve finally obtained my drivers license! Although I greatly prefer commuting via bicycle and wish my area had more means of public transportation, such avenues aren’t available in the winter time and my province has incredibly brutal winters and windchills that make it really difficult to stay outside for long periods of time.
It feels so good to drive on my own and play my own music in the car, though I have to be careful to remain focused since I tend to space off and daydream stories when I’m listening to particularly intense music.
Achieving my license makes me feel 5% more like a fully fledged adult!

I think my favourite personal testimony would be the time a friend said in jest “how do you even think of these things” when I made a very outlandish and specific shitpost to a one off comment she made. I need to start documenting my memes more since I usually make them in the spur of the moment and walk away with lots of swag. My job here is done (puts on sunglasses as I walk square into a door frame) 

I’ve said this multiple times within the questionnaire but truly, starting my own website has definitely improved my life for the better. I’m finally free to discuss whatever I want with no obligation to curate to an audience or algorithm and I’ve met many friends who like me for who I really am!
I actually don’t care much for the technical aspect of webdev itself if I’ll be completely honest LMFAO….. I only input the bare minimum that will make my site function and I pretty much use pre-built CMS like wordpress to do most of the heavy lifting of my site. I mostly enjoy the creative freedom, customization, and design process of website creation the most!

I’m grateful that for all the negative things that have occurred to me in my lifespan, they were not that awful in retrospect and I was able to survive it. I mean this in the most positive way possible but things are much capable of being worse and I am grateful to be in a safe, comfortable, and pleasant living condition. I should make the most out of these blessings and thank each gratitude accordingly. On a lighter note, I’m very grateful for all the friends who had to sit through my 2 hour manifestos or walls of text, I’ve accumulated a lot of thoughts in my many years of isolated pondering! Thank you for being patient with me!!!!!

I achieved a lot, I laughed a lot, I created lots, and I smiled a lot! Although I’ve had my ups and downs and made some embarrassing blunders across the way, for the first time in a long while I’ve actually greatly, seriously, really enjoyed living!

I pretty much already relive most of my memories through mindful reminiscing, but if I were capable of experiencing a day down to the physical sensations, sights, and feelings, it would.. I dunno! Probably the week I travelled to Florida for the first time and experienced Disney world and Universal also for the first time! If I could only pick one day it woudl be the day I went to Universal! I’m getting my moneys worth for the ticket and all the merchandise I bought, ahh I love themeparks!
Visiting Diagon Alley and seeing all the people dressed up in house uniforms was such a magical experience— I even got to ride Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey twice thanks to the fast lane tickets we splurged on! Unfortunately I didn’t get to try butter beer since me and my sister pretty much pooled all our spending money onto a single wand, but it was super fun to wave it around the many interactive attractions!
If I ever get to visit universal again I hope to coordinate my dress to my house colours, Slytherin!

I made a matcha cheesecake for my birthday and I’ve forgotten how delicious the recipe was! It’s my go-to cake when I’m making something homemade and its super easy to bake with no oven time required! You can find the recipe here; its from one of my favourite cooking channels HidaMari cooking. For my birthday cake, I slightly tweaked the recipe by adding the entire 250g of cream cheese rather than 200g and skipping the white layer/matcha glacage step. I usually add the matcha glacage but for the pattern I was going for in my cake I decided to exclude it.
My favourite meal at the moment would be store bought fried fish, more specifically this corn meal breaded tilapia that my mom bought me. I’m not sure where she got it from and I dream of eating it again….. it pairs so good with rice and fried okra!

I finally got around to reading Annie on my Mind during some downtime in my college course and I quickly engrossed myself enough to finish it in a day. It was a book that I read on and off for about 5-6ish years now, and I guess I had a hard time sitting through the story since I was experiencing a myriad of conflicts when it came to pursuing romantic relationships (that’s a completely different tangent for another time…..)
Its only after a lot of self reflection and personal acceptance did I finally appreciate the story for what it was and the dynamic the two protagonists had in developing their relationship. Annie on My Mind is known as one of the earliest young adult novels to give its lesbian couple a happy ending. I can only wish to share this book with a friend I once had who mourned the lack of positive lesbian representation in media. We don’t speak to each other anymore, but I think of her often.

Originally this question was supposed to be for a favourite TV show, but I scarcely watch TV shows in the first place, never mind if I even watched any for a single year, so I scrapped it and replaced it with video games, which I do play a lot of. Although FFXIV could easily take the spot as my favourite game of all time, a new game that I’ve played and enjoyed a lot this year specifically was dark souls 1 and 2 equally! Although DS2 has a negative reputation for its sluggish combat, engine issues, and artificial difficulty, the game is visually stunning, and Majula along with its OST is among my favourite DS areas in the entire series (though I’ve only played two of them so far.. who knows how this will scale to the other games LOL) Also the rat king covenant fucking rocks even if the covenant gimmick is pretty much obsolete in an offline copy of the game.
DS1 is simply iconic and an absolute master in meta storytelling and world design— The giant mushrooms have to be my favourite monster design of all time and I look forward to getting my ass beat by them when I progress through ash lake in my replay (I completely missed it in my first playthrough unfortunately!) and nothing will beat the pure relief when I realized I’m actually capable of progressing the game and that I wasn’t as bad at I thought when I first played the game, got stuck in the tutorial level, rage quit, and refunded the game LMAO. I decided to try again, this time on a hypothetically pirated copy in case I decide to rage quit again and give up on the game, but I actually managed to progress the game! Even if I died a lot and said progression was really really slow in the first place. Unfortunately I accidentally corrupted both of my files when I attempted to transfer my games over to a hard drive to save space so now I have to play both games from scratch again. I’m not too mad since I get to reexperience the story again and go through areas that I skipped during my first playthroughs. What I certainly DON’T look forward to is having to remake my characters that I painstakingly created all over again AUGHHHHHH.

Sewing and drawing are long ongoing hobbies that I’ve pretty much been doing for most of my life, but coding is a recent thing that is a mere stepping stool for the REAL hobby which is blog posting!!!!! Lately I’ve been drawing for fun more often and rekindled my love for simplistic little doodles,! Wahhh I love creating things for friends!

I plan to make an in-depth curated list of my favourite songs of the year but for the sake of simplicity, I’ll simply list out the top tracks of all time on my last.fm which I only started tracking this year:
1) After school strategy – MINC (ft. Hatsune Miku)
2) CINDERELLA – SUI UZI
3) Kyoto– Skrillex
4) Arcadia – SUI UZI
5) A Drowned Body Wants To Be Lovey-Dovey – LonePi (ft. Hatsune Miku)
6) Bathtub and Neon Tetra – REISAI (dongdang cover)
7) You Can Fly – SUI UZI
8) Doppleganger – Kazumasa Hashimoto
9) KARMA – Alien Stage
10) Loveit? – biz×ZERA (ft. LOLUET)