Hi, everyone. A belated “happy holidays” and “happy new year” from me. Sorry for the lack of blog posts recently. With holiday obligations and the amount of work I’ve been doing on the site, I wanted more time to myself. The downside is I’m now overwhelmed with things to talk about.

I’ll start with the most obvious: I now have paid hosting! I found myself increasingly annoyed by all of the WordPress features I couldn’t utilize with my free host, so I bit the bullet and paid for some cheap annual hosting. I could also buy a proper domain name, but I struggled to come up with something more clever than what I’ve got now. Oh well. It beats a random assortment of letters and numbers.

The number of features afforded to me now is staggering, and I’m still trying to figure them all out. I was finally able to change my style to something I wanted from the beginning, which is a black background to contrast with lighter text. I find this to be easier on the eyes, and my site is obviously reading-intensive. I still want to experiment more with the visuals, but I’m focusing on the site’s content.

If you don’t keep up with my home page feed, you may want to know that I wrote two new reviews for horror manga stories. I’ve done much more writing than just that, but it’s contained within drafts. I keep finding more and more material from old websites I’ve frequented, and it’s going far back enough to the point where I don’t necessarily want to publish them without revision.

Things are going well with the missus. We finished my Banjo-Kazooie replay on New Year’s Day, which felt appropriate. And earlier today I finished playing Banjo-Tooie with some friends. It was my first time 100%ing the game. Or it would’ve been, if the Canary Mary race in Cloud Cuckooland wasn’t fucking impossible. It’s literally the only thing I’m missing. We celebrated with a multiplayer session of all minigames. Sadly, I was perpetually in second place there. After we finished that, we played Pokémon Stadium 1 and 2’s minigames. I lost in 1, but dominated in 2. Good times.

Other than that, I’ve been playing a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh!. No particular reason. Just scratches some itch right now. In Master Duel I played a lot of Melodious once the new support dropped, then I went back to Solfachord. I’ve only just started to build White Forest, which seems like a fun archetype with a lot of potential. Hopefully I don’t regret my investment. The format is still horrible, but the occasional Tenpai player losing to Bloom Diva almost makes it worth it. Almost. In Duel Links I continue to suffer due to my favorite deck being Thunder. Their skill is now horribly outdated, and they struggle greatly with field presence thanks to the completely broken skills of Voidvelg and Cyber Dragon. I really hope something changes. The format hasn’t felt this lopsided to me since Rush’s early days in DL. I’m also back to playing Nightmare Troubadour so that I can write a review on it. It’s a pretty bad game, in my opinion. I’m at the point where I just need to run around and collect cards, but the pace of the game makes this pretty agonizing. More on that whenever the review drops.

I’m about to start a review series for the G.G. Series Collection. It’s a compilation of games, and I figure I can publish reviews for each one individually as I go. The first review is nearly done. I mostly just want to attach more screenshots. More details on that game when the first review is out. It will probably be this week.

I’m also adjusting my blog post time again. Supposedly WP blogs get the most traffic on Mondays at 11 am EST. It’s now my plan to write these posts on Sunday (every two weeks) and then to schedule them for that window. Sorry for being so curt this week. I barely got this post done, but I didn’t want to fall too far out of my routine. I’m so overwhelmed with stuff on the backend of this site and expanding my career. It’s not an exaggeration to say most of my time actually goes to this site, even if some days that work doesn’t show due to it being within my drafts or what have you. For another example of this “invisible work”, earlier today I was looking into options to index my site on search engines. First time learning everything, so theoretically simple tasks like those take extra time.

As I’m installing a lot of plug-ins (first time having access to them with new hosting), it’s possible for technical issues to come up. One such issue, that I don’t think is related to plug-ins, is with page loading times. My new host just doesn’t seem to be as fast as my free one was. Unexpected, but it’s not so terrible that I regret my purchase. It seems that when 404s happen, the pages are quick to automatically reload and display things as they should. I’m a bit worried it’ll make new readers bounce off my site, but I don’t know if there’s much I can do about that. I installed plug-ins to help with caching and that supposedly makes a difference, but the 404s have yet to be completely eliminated. If anyone sees any technical oddities or has advice on any of these topics, feel free to let me know in the comments (provided you’re not a bot.)

That’s it for this week. Thank you so much for watching this site evolve over the past almost half-year now. I feel like progress has been steady, and I’m excited to see the state of things another year from now after all of the grunt work is done. To my other half: I love you. To everyone else: you’re all right.