raving ramblings of a fragmented mind

october 29th

Was yesterday. Happy birthday to ourselves.

It was pretty uneventful, but you know what, at least it wasn't some horrible life-destroying disaster like the last few times. I do still have plans to maintain this website, but I simply don't have anything else I can think of adding to it. I don't want to say it's feature-complete at this point, but there's no glaring problems with the site that I need to fix right away, so. I'm okay with letting this stay as it is for the time being. It's not like anyone really looks at this place anyway...

OCT-30-2024 6:46 AM #015

potential

Hello again.

I've not been able to update this in a long time. Among other things there's still the whole mental health issue but also uh you know, I moved to a whole different continent. Back "home". I am doing mildly better - I still get fed at least and I don't USUALLY have anyone telling me what I can or can't do anymore. I have a roof over my head. Things like that.
I also didn't have a decent place to use my keyboard+mouse until now so I haven't been able to do any web-related stuff. Hopefully that is going to change now.

I was expecting to have an entire essay written here explaining what's going on with me but honestly there just isn't much to say even after long periods of absence. Life goes on as usual. That is really all it is.

AUG-23-2024 10:22 PM #014

100 million years curse

Hey sorry I haven't been updating this at all lately. I have been affected by Life Things completely destroying my mental health and turning me into an empty husk of a person. I have not had any real motivation to update this site much as a result. I'll get back to it one day but for now I have to deal with being a mess for a while. Thanks.

JUL-21-2024 7:58 PM #013

quick update

Hello, it's Lyra! I'll be taking over as the webmistress for the moment. Most of the input will still come from Akane herself - I'll just be in charge of overall maintenance and actually putting the code down.

I've fixed some elements being stuck under the (very subtle) TV static effect that is present on the site now - everything should be accessible now. I've also whipped up a quick 88x31 buttton that people can use to link to this site now, if they want to - I can't believe it's taken us this long to actually do it.

JUL-08-2024 2:54 PM #012

lost in neocities

I've been thinking and even though this site is pretty well developed by now, there's a nagging feeling that it's still incomplete somehow. Like there's.. some other, more "finished" form of it that I haven't reached yet. Like what I have now isn't enough. I gotta do *something* with this.

My design philosophy may have something to do with it - I try to avoid using things I didn't make myself. Screenshots are fine, they're just screenshots, fonts are.. hard to make, and Youtube's dumb embedding policies meant putting music files on the site itself - but other than that, everything else is.. pretty much my own. The little blinkers at the bottom of the main page are all things I made myself - and while I uh, borrowed pieces of code from other places for a few specific places in this site, almost all of the code is mine. It's not so much copyright that I worry about - I don't give a shit about that, actually, my blood is at least 30% pirate - it's moreso that I want to know what makes me, "me". I want to make something that is representative of what/who I am. Using site layout makers, using gifs and images from other places - while convenient, it goes against the point of trying to discover my identity. So I gotta do everything myself. And that's not the easiest thing to do - I'm not particularly good at drawing, and I'm not that experienced when it comes to graphic design. So sometimes I have an idea that would be cool, but I end up being unable to execute because I don't see a way of doing it without just taking from other people.

Now and then I browse through the "Last Updated" websites here on Neocities to see if anything sparks inspiration. I've not really got anything so far, but it feels like these people have a more coherent idea of what they want to do with their own sites than I do.

And although this site is meant to be a sort of window into the kind of person I am, I also feel a pressure to have a reason for people to come look in here. I'm not having too much trouble on that front - 47,792 views at time of writing is... actually a lot more than most websites get on here, but I get the feeling at least 1/4ths of that is just me refreshing pages over and over as I'm updating the site. I also have not found much of any social interaction on here - okay, there's a few good reasons for that. For one, my Neocities profile was made private for the longest time in this site's 2.x days. I don't entirely remember the reasons why. But also, the fact that I keep redoing it, and removing comment sections also doesn't help. People have not been *given* much of a chance to actually talk to me. And besides, Neocities isn't really meant for that sort of thing either, is it? It feels weird to have a "follower" and "views" count on here - actually, it feels weird to have a profile in the first place. And I guess the existence of those systems in Neocities has me expecting things that I really shouldn't expect.

Still, it would be nice to find someone like-minded on here, as rare as that already is outside of here. Maybe I just made this site because I was lonely, and I wanted to leave a mark on the world somehow. Let someone, anyone, know that I existed, I was here. I didn't want to be known as the homeless person stuck in the wrong continent that no one could help. I wanted to be known as a girl with real dreams, real interests, as eccentric as they may be - a girl with real value. I wanted to be someone.






It's a shot in the dark. But maybe in the 4 months I have left, I can still find my purpose. I can find who I am.

JUL-01-2024 1:00 PM #011

what do you mean HTML has invincibility frames

I've updated the site a little - nothing particularly major, just a few fancier effects on the hub page and also I finally figured out what iframes actually do. Turns out it was a very convenient solution to a problem I was about to encounter with the game log - if I was going to list all the games I ever played, it would be a big fucking list, and that would probably lag your browser a lot. It already lags the Neocities editor - yes, by the way, I edited this ENTIRE website using nothing but the Neocities editor and heavy usage of Firefox's inspect element function - so I wanted to separate the list into chunks of 50 that you can click through. The problem was that at a time I did not know how to do such a thing - changing content on a page in such a manner sounded like a JavaScript problem to me and I don't know the first damn thing about JS. Fortunately, on a whim, I looked at what the hell iframes were because I kept seeing them everywhere and upon stumbling on the W3S tutorial about using <a> targets in combination with iframes, it's like a lightbulb turned on in my head. Implementing them was easy as hell and now I've finally got a functional page switcher, using nothing but HTML/CSS again. I am spared from Java's wrath once again.

JUN-28-2024 2:22 PM #010

controller binding nonsense

I added a secondary game page where I document everything I play, daily. It won't be terribly interesting.

I've been thinking a lot about how each game handles controls, keybindings, etc. and what we usually expect (or, I specifically expect, I guess). When it comes to the Deck, eery game seems this differently - some good, some not so much, some don't actually do it at all and you have to come up with your control scheme. This is just going to be mostly incoherent rambling so bear with me.

First off I just want to say, screw Nintendo and PS2 era Sony for how they do their ABXY placement. Yes it's how they did it since basically the beginnning but. The way Xbox did it, I generally consider to be the "standard", because almost every other 3rd party controller also has buttons laid out that way. Controllers have been mostly homogenized into that same, similar layout at this point, the only real major difference being where the joysticks are placed (Xbox and 3Ps place the left joystick on the upper half of the controller, and the right joystick on the lower half. Everyone else keeps both joysticks on the same level, be it top or bottom.) - but you have your usual 4 face buttons, D-pad, double joysticks, bumper buttons, triggers, and Select/Start. I will only call them Select/Start. I refuse to fucking call them the "Options button" or "HAMBURGER BUTTON". That's STUPID. You're stupid. They will never be anything other than Start & Select to me.

Beyond that though, what action should you assign to each button? This question can't be answered because, I mean, I didn't specify a genre so it could be literally anything, Let's take first/third-person shooters as an example, since they are a pretty popular genre, and one I play a lot. This can include anything from your generic Call of Duties to your Deus Exes or whatever. I'll just lay out what I usually associate with each button:

A - The default for "confirm", naturally. But also, usually for jumping, or for interactions.
B - "Cancel". I used to consider this the "melee" button (Halo), but lately it has made more sense to me as a "crouch" button.
X - Reloading, interaction, (un)holstering when held down.
Y - Swap weapons, weapon wheels when held down, or jumping if A is already used for something else.
LB - Honestly? Hard to say. Could be anything - usually some special action exclusive to the game. Active abilities?
RB - For a very short time this was the "melee" button for me (Halo again), but now it's the same deal with LB where it's a catch-all for whatever unique mechanics the game has.
LT - Aim. Block, for melee combat.
RT - Fire. Swing, for melee combat.
Select - Pretty much the button for opening your inventory, or map, or equipment screen... It's a general game menu button.
Start - The "pause" menu. Where the more technical stuff occurs, like saving the game, or exiting to the main menu, options...
LS - Sprint.
RS - Crouch if something else is used for B instead.
D-pad - Item/weapon shortcuts. Maybe also other miscellaneous stuff like switching shoulders in 3rd person, flashlights, etc.

That's what makes the most sense to me. This is of course never exactly the case in any game because, again, everyone does things differently. Let's look at some of the weirder examples of what games do.

Prey. The Arkane game. That one has Steam Deck integration - that's awesome! Their default control scheme though, is... Um. Just- just look at it.

B for crouching and LS for sprinting are about the only thing that makes sense here. A for.. SWAPPING WEAPONS? Not even fucking jumping? Hey I just realized - Where's the fucking jump button? Oh. It's the right stick click. Yeah no, fuck that. Crouching has two different buttons though. Psychoscope has two different bindings as well for some reason, and X does not make any sense at all for such an action. Interaction/Reload is one of the back buttons?? That's horribly inconvenient. L2 for Psi powers makes sense, since you don't actually aim with any weapon in this game. L1/R1 for leaning makes sense, but I have not found it to be terribly useful in the game itself. Select/Start are for the menus, checks out. The left trackpad and D-pad do the same thing for some god forsaken reason - what's with all the duplicate bindings in this fucking layout?
What else did I miss? Oh. Right. WHY ARE THERE *FOUR* FLASHLIGHT BUTTONS?????? What fucking hidden power does the flashlight have that I somehow missed for it to require FOUR different buttons assigned to it??? This layout is a fucking mess. I don't think whoever made this has ever actually played a video game.

Here's a MUCH better layout. Everything pretty much makes sense to me here - RS click is for Psi powers. Note how I don't even use the trackpads or the back grip buttons here - you can use this on a regular cheapass controller! The game does not nearly have enough actions to justify the use of the extra inputs that the Deck includes. The back grips, while it's great to have 4 extra buttons, are also rather awkward to use and not something I'm used to after all this time. L4 usually gets reserved as a secondary Sprint button because I hate having to click the sticks so much.

Prey's set of actions is pretty conventional all things considered. What happens when we go to something, like, oh, I don't know... Red Dead Online?

Low res image shamelessly stolen from Polygon's article on a similar topic. I'm not sorry. This isn't even the full scope of controls anyway.

RDR2/RDO is a case of a game where there's TOO MANY interactions possible to the point where no matter if you're playing on a controller or a keyboard, everything is going to feel awkward.
A is for sprinting, like in every other modern GTA-like of Rockstar's. Mashing makes you go faster. That's fucking annoying actually, why do they still do that shit? I hate doing that.
B is for... reloading? Well that's new to me. At least it's still a face button and not something ridiculous like, I don't fucking know. Mapping it to the D-Pad. Nothing will ever be more ridiculous than 4 flashlight buttons I think.
Y for vehicle entering/exiting - yeah, that checks out for most GTA-likes.
X is for jumping. That's also the case in other Rockstar games. I still think it's kind of stupid. It shouldn't be X
The D-pad is a fucking mess. You have like twenty different possible actions there, strewn randomly. Whistling for your horse, aiming towards the sky (for what? is that a singleplayer thing?), the catalog, the Online menu, your satchel, first/third person switch, weapon zoom, iron sights, radar settings, area info, and a bunch of other crap are assigned to the D-pad alone. I'm not even going to talk about the horse controls. Fuck the horse controls.

There is a point where too many actions are a bad thing, and when you only have so many buttons to work with, you are going to end up with some REALLY weird shit. I'm not even gonna get into how Rockstar designs their games in their first place. RDO has maybe the worst menus of any game I've ever seen. There's so fucking many. There's an unnecessary 2-second fadeout in between each menu. It's so fucking frustrating. It doesn't feel good to play and yet I wasted 300 hours on it anyway.

I honestly don't even really have a point I'm trying to make here. I guess I just wanted to ramble about the troubles that you come across when you have the ability to change your controls at will, and making the generic dual-stick controller work with unconventional games e.g. consoles that *don't* have that, games of more esoteric genres, etc.

JUN-22-2024 1:50 PM #009

oh shit it's happening

Hey look. I finally did the thing... uh. sort of. It's still very unfinished but hey look!! The game log page is up, finally. This will take DAYS to complete unfortunately for me.

JUN-09-2024 5:43 PM #008

new shit

I updated the resources page to have a similar layout to this page.

Also a new page has been added to the hub! Possibly the last one, since it's a little more all-encompassing.

JUN-08-2024 9:43 PM #007

MORE BLOG EXPERIMENTATION

It's funny writing these things as if anyone will see them for the 5 minutes they're up before I nuke it off the site completely because I thought of a different idea. Will this blog entry be one of the lucky ones and survive???????

It's also funny how the first entry said I wouldn't put the blog in a separate page but then I fucking did that anyway 4 months later. I can't decide how exactly I want certain things to be visible on this website. Ideally I'd love to have people know that, hey, a new blog entry is here! But the logical way of doing that would require, I don't know, far more expertise in JS than I have (which is none), storing cookies so there's actual stored data to go off of (has the user visited this page since X entry was added, etc.) and. That's too much effort.

The other problem is - I don't know if anyone reads these. I have no way of knowing. I don't know if anyone even visits my website!! I have no object permanence and even if my viewcounter says it's at like 600,000 or whatever, I'll just assume it's always been like that! So making such a fuss about this is ultimately pointless and dumb if no one's going to see it anyway.

The other other problem is that me not having anything of substance to say on here is also still true. Sometimes writing a post strikes my fancy now and then but I never end up doing it because of... executive dysfunction among other things.

THe other other OTHER problem is I cannot make up my mind on HOW I want to do this. Being able to freely edit the HTML, and the way I generally update this site, means it's impossible to be consistent with how I do this. What if I end up having MORE to say immediately after making a blog post? Well I could edit it rather seamlessly and it'll be like the extra text was always part of the post which is nice I guess. And making a separate entry for every little damn thought I have would just make it a horrendous mess. But it still feels weird and wrong to do that!! But it's the only method that makes sense to me with how much I feel the need to revise what I say.

That was the last thought I had. For now.

JUN-06-2024 10:08 AM #006

[unnamed]

new "resources" page added, where i'll write about technical shit that frustrated me once due to lack of any real information on the internet. also i've skimmed through the other half of my liked songs and the music page now has a count of 117 tracks. more to come, maybe. also the comment section is back.

MAY-30-2024 --:-- #005

[unnamed]

i haven't entirely forgotten about this site. i just haven't felt like doing much until now. the music page is up - technically it's feature complete but i've only skimmed through 50% of my music library so far. i am only picking very few ones that stand out to me at the moment - i'll start being a little less restrictive later on, maybe, after it's done.

MAY-11-2024 --:-- #004

[unnamed]

the links, about and gallery pages are active. small adjustments here and there.

MAR-05-2024 --:-- #003

[unnamed]

CLAIRE: when i decided to work on this again it was when i was too sleepy to do much of anything so all you get is a different looking index/main page. good night

MAR-03-2024 --:-- #002

[unnamed]

hello again. welcome to something new but also still the same

i've decided to make the blog a thing that's just part of the main page - it was not important enough to have its own whole-ass directory, also i genuinely just do not have that much to say and weirdly i felt the pressure to have SOMETHING on there every day. older entries will be clumped together in a separate page still. other than that - look around if you want. this site is 50% being recreated from the ground up, 50% salvaged from the old assets. if i remember to work on this place, everything will be up and running again before too long.

FEB-02-2024 --:-- #001