"So like, why *did* I start a blog anyways?" and more!

So I'm a tiny bit late but one year (and a week) ago, I posted my very first blog post on this site. I was at a low point around the time that happened and, while things weren't perfect, a lot has happened since where I think I've undergone an insane amount of growth as a man. Hard to believe I was still trying so hard to impress that one former friend and I still don't have the gall to reply to that one teenager who found my imminently-unfortunate-unbeknownst-to-me-but-pretty-much-everyone-around-me-knew-and-tried-to-warn-me story endearing. As I mentioned in the most, er, second most recent post where I cooked up a homemade tulpa, I'm well into summer vacation after wrapping up junior year and things are pretty boring. Haven't had too much to write about that wasn't some tinted rosy purple prosy yap session on nights where I'm tired and wanna vent. That being said, though, I wanted to share a story about why I made a blog in the first place to celebrate the occasion because I think it makes for a good blog post. So, lemme take you back, way back, back into time... to 2024...

I go on nostalgia trips pretty often. Whether it be music or old games or stuff I have lying around that I've kept since I was a kid, it's fun to indulge in my treasure chest of guilty pleasures. One of which, an old flash game I was never allowed to play but played because I wasn't allowed to play it, was called :the game:. No, it's not the game that you just lost, but a doofy little Newgrounds flash game that revolves around chucking your character in increasingly complex ways. Every time you do it, you progress to subsequent levels each with their own themes, the majority of which are the developer poking fun of whatever was politically relevant back in 2008. Obviously when I was younger I didn't understand the complexities of why Bush is Hitler's strongest soldier or why touching a leaf named "marijuana" caused your game to slow down, but I was young, so it was still funny regardless. So, sure enough, a year ago I decided to play through it and its two sequel projects late at night cuz life sucked and I didn't have much else to do. It was honestly a lot more funny now that I could understand all the jokes and references and whatnot and it all made me curious... what is the developer doing now? My curiosity got to me, and sure as shit, I did what I like to call FUCKIN AWESOME 9000 IQ HYPERTECHNOLOGICAL RESEARCH!!!!

I clicked on their profile. 

What immediately jumped out to me that the developer, Nutcasenightmare AKA Nicky Case, is 29 (30 now. lol old) and they transitioned (hell yea) and had links to their Twitter and a website that came with a blog. Here's the link to that website in case you wanna give her some well-deserved love. The twitter was inactive, but the blog portion of their website still had plenty of posts on it. It gave me insight into what they were thinking at the time, how they're doing now, their interests, etc., and it really made me wonder. I had been on the hunt for a place where I could freely express myself in a place where only people I want in can see it. I've lived my entire adolescence and budding adult life constantly being judged and looked down on and pestered and given "feedback" and all that shit and it always made me long for a place where I could be myself true and proper. I tried a private discord, that didn't work as the people around me were volatile and whiny and one called me a raghead when I said I wasn't completely on board with Kamala Harris (my fault!) and people who constantly got on my nerves that I tried reconnecting with getting on my nerves, so much so that I had to purge the shit out of the server and lied to people telling them that I had deleted the server. Around the same time, I decided to make a private Twitter account. I still use that, actually! It's nice whenever I just wanna showcase pictures from my walks or wanna fire off a small thought here and there, but Twitter is by design if you're a major yapper like myself cuz then you have to break everything down into these piecemeal dollops and are exposed to absolutely unhinged shit and negativity because Twitter is being ran into the ground by the second baldest retard on this side of the Twitter feed. I even tried BlueSky! I stopped trying BlueSky!* I felt like I was in an honest to god quagmire when it came to trying to find a place where I could express myself in the long form. The idea of a personal blog like hers was exactly the kind of spice I needed. Now, I'm not technologically literate enough to set up a personal blog from Nicky's GitHub link or from one of those fancy make-your-own-website sites, so I combined my knowledge of golden-age internet revival projects and my longing for a place I can honestly and earnestly express myself and decided to set up an account here on SpaceHey. 

My old blog was... a bit rough. I have some knowledge of HTML so I cooked up some hot booty with a mustard yellow foreground and a blurry upscaled PNG of Ka Brownsville's Descendants of Cain album cover (may that legend rest in peace btw) as the background with the aforementioned album playing in the background. After I set up a rough outline for my blog and made that first pinned post, I got to work on making the blog look real nice, kept updating it over the next few months with new posts and layout changes, and here we are. I'm glad to be here! Every now and then I'll read up on other blogs and I'll see all the weird drama that goes on, and while I am definitely too old to partake in the sludgeshucking with the rest of you as a grown ass man (Note: This user is 20 years old as this is being written.) and find it all to be a little silly, I think it's cute that such a niche project has developed into having its own hectic subcultures and groups and communal villains. It feels like a low-stakes version of the kinda shit yours truly had to deal with at your (probably comparatively younger) age, reader. 

Thanks for being here over the past year and a week and reading along with my very occasional life updates!

...

Oh yeah, I haven't gotten to the "more" part of the title. I wanna talk about the project that readers who don't know me personally are probably confused about, but by this point if you've been reading up I don't think I need to give you a crazy detailed recap. I work on a Doom mod. Last March, I completed and finally released the biggest update in the mod's history! Not only did I cap off every single class I had planned for the game, but I completed one of the biggest milestones in my eventual path to completing the mod for good and permanently retiring. It felt kinda bittersweet even if I was still extremely happy and proud of myself for doing something that felt so far off into the future that it didn't even feel real to hit that upload button. That feeling of relief and sadness didn't really last long as sure enough not even a day later I'd have The Megamans up my ass like a                                                         clamoring for another update. Hell as I'm writing this I got a bunch of them bickering in a discord channel right now. It's admittedly a little hard to express how I feel about it because all I have left is a bunch of fixes in a file and one more update and I'm done. Don't really know where I plan on going after I'm done, expect a blog post when the time comes, but I'm growing increasingly more aware of how little time I have left on a project that has taken up an absurdly large portion of my life. And that's... kinda scary. I'll leave it at that for now, as usual if you wanna catch up with me my discord's "prfly" if you're just now reading this and wanna add me, but I got work in the morning and it's getting late so peace!

*yeaahhh im sorry BlueSky kind of sucks if you're younger than 28 and don't laugh at cat GIFs and r/PoliticalHumor bottom-of-the-barrel sludge                       its disappointing because I do like how peaceful it is but it really does feel like a stomp clap hey hugbox where there's no interesting discourse to talk about beyond that fucking political climate i hate