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This isn’t the kind of thing I usually blog about, but something’s been compelling me to write down my thoughts about nostalgia. After all, those who know me or what I’m about do know that it plays a very pivotal role in my life.

As a teenager, I used to be the type of person who lived strictly in the past. I even remember a particular car commercial I saw on TV at one point: A black-and-white close-up shot of a woman looking like she was straight out of the 1920s, saying, among other things, the line “Nostalgia is not glamorous”. I used to disagree vehemently with that kind of message, fully convinced that humanity’s golden age had already come and gone and there’d be nothing else on the horizon worth getting excited over.

Of course, I had a very myopic way of looking at things back then, as is to be expected from a child whose brain is still developing. But it probably also didn’t help that I had a strong emotional attachment to particularly the games and consoles I used to play growing up, born equal parts from a deep fascination with the past that my parents had lived through, as well as just my general apathy for the future due to a lack of aspirations (I was one of the only kids in my class who never had an idea for what he wanted to be when he grew up).

I’ve since had several experiences — especially in recent years — that redefined my personal stance towards nostalgia. Obviously it still informs many of the things I do: My active and sunconscious creative choices when making games, music, videos, or when writing in general. My interests and fixations, as well as the things I collect. Even my plans for how I want to furnish my future apartment (more lava lamps!). But I’ve also come to truly feel the “-algia” (i.e. pain) part of the word.

My most poignant memory in that regard is when I traveled to my childhood village in March of 2022, visiting my dad for his birthday. One day, I took a walk through the whole village, top to bottom, still knowing the place like the back of my hand from all the adventuring I used to do as a kid. But as I walked through the empty roads, with a song I’d recently finished composing playing in my head on repeat, I began to feel more and more like I was exploring the ruins of an ancient civilization I was once part of, left with only my memories of what used to be and will never be again. My friends have left, the local venues haven’t been used for any events or festivals in many years, and where there was once a treehouse by the creek, there now wasn’t even a tree anymore.

It got me thinking about how the word “nostalgia” was originally coined as the medical term for homesickness — I was definitely feeling beraved of a home I effectively no longer had.

I felt a similar twinge in my chest when I digitized boxes of old photos last month, most of them from before the turn of the millennium. It was surreal seeing depictions of my parents at a time when they were younger than I am now (my mom rocked that 80s-style perm), but my focus was much more on the backgrounds: Snapshots of what our house and the surrounding neighborhood used to look like. Wide patches of lawn before they got paved or otherwise built over, traditional-looking houses before their walls got painted all sorts of tacky colors... I didn’t even remember that our sofa had a wooden surface in the corner for placing items on, rather than the usual cushioning you’d expect. The house as it is now looks nothing like what it used to, with pretty much every room having been completely redone, made more spacious, but also a lot more barren.

Rediscovery of what was once thought lost and forgotten isn’t always a happy reunion, either. For instance, there used to be this show that ran every Saturday evening on a local radio station. As a kid, I lived for it, and even got two CD albums and a board game based on it. While in university, I didn’t have a radio of my own, nor was I aware that you could stream radio over the internet (which, with the tight bandwidth limits I had, wouldn’t have been a good idea, anyway, but I digress), so I was unable to keep up with it for a while.

I don’t remember entirely when it was, but I found out that the show had been taken off the air after its host had expressed support for a right-wing, anti-immigration movement that had been picking up steam around 2014 or so. Needless to say, I was pretty bummed to find out that a person who’d defined my childhood (and whom I’d even gotten to see live on one occasion) turned out to be this much of a nutjob, but I tried not to think much of it, opting to remember the show for what it was and separate the artist from his work... which lasted until I happened upon one of the albums again and gave it a listen. There were sketches parodying skinheads and Islamic terrorists alike, among a few other tasteless jokes that, to put it charitably, very much felt like products of their time.

At that point, all I could really think about was that the writing had been on the wall all along, and it had all just gone right over my head because of course it did. I was a child.

Speaking of radio, though, and to avoid lingering on such a depressing note, you should have seen me when I found a station that plays exclusively 80s songs. The chorus of (I’ll Never Be) Maria Magdalena by Sandra hit me like a truck after hearing it again for the first time in possibly decades. Something about the harmonics was haunting, bittersweet, sending me back to the earliest chapters of my life, back when my parents were still together. Similar reactions were had to songs by other artists of that time period, too: Camouflage, Eurythmics, Pet Shop Boys, Sade, New Order, Falco, the list could go on for ages.

For a while, it was this feeling of old, forgotten memories and emotions rushing back all at once. I did get accustomed to it the more I listened to these songs, of course, what with the novelty wearing off and all, but other time periods gave me very much the same feeling, too, especially the early 2000s, which are pretty much the pinnacle of childhood nostalgia for me.

Nowadays, I’ve come to follow a few people on Bluesky whose brand is to share glimpses into what things looked like in the time periods I tend to find myself romanticizing. The aesthetics themselves are definitely desirable, at least — there’s a certain warmth to it, as well as reminders of the strong personality that the cultures of the 90s and early 2000s were oozing with. Adopting those aesthetics for oneself kind of feels like becoming part of a counter-culture to the minimalist (or, if you ask me, outright sterile) design language of the 2020s, reminiscent of a cold, uncaring, dystopian world where it feels like you only exist to be exploited for your labor and personal data, where creativity and self-expression are at best stifled, at worst offloaded to and bastardized by AI.

It’s easy to forget, though, that things weren’t always sunshine and roses back in those times, either. Humans are good at conveniently suppressing the bad things they’ve experienced, so couple that with childhoods usually being relatively carefree (compared to later stages in life), and it’s not hard to see where the “everything used to be better in the past” mentality comes from.

All things considered, although you could say I’ve been burned by the reality that the past wasn’t entirely how I remembered it, or that I’ve had to grieve for times and experiences of which the only remainders are distant memories, the past is still precious to me and I still embrace my nostalgia for it. I just do so much more responsibly now than when I was younger, because I know that what I hold dear now will inevitably fade away eventually... but all that means is that, like my slogan — “Creating Tomorrow’s Nostalgia” — indicates, I just have to continue making memories for the future.

If you ask me, every stage of time has equal importance. The past informs decisions you make in the present, and provides a safe retreat for when things get too much to handle — a little escapism is perfectly healthy, after all. The present is what you can actively control, and what you obviously have to try to make the most of in order to live a life that’s fulfilling, whatever your personal definition of that word may be. And the future is what gives your life purpose, as your aspirations and the goals that you set are what keep you going.

And I, for one, have come to the realization that, ever since I entered the workforce two years ago, I’m actually looking forward to my future for the first time in my life. I want to continue developing games, compiling music albums, expanding my website, making videos about games with strong personal significance, move into my dream apartment, and so many more things that I would never get if I simply kept living in the past.

At the same time, of course, I still want to pay homage to and share the experiences that molded me into the person I am today, and use my creativity as an outlet to show the world what I’m all about. Not just for myself, either — I want to give others things to look forward to and things to look back on fondly, as well.

Hopefully what I wrote makes sense.

Hello, Popfan here!

For those of you who have been following me on Bluesky (or even keep up with this blog without following me on social media, as unlikely as your existence may be), you may have been seeing me talk about a “website relaunch” from time to time, especially more recently so over the past two months. Well, needless to say, by the time you’re reading this, you’re looking at the fruits of my hard labor already!

It’s been a long year-and-a-half-plus, too. I’d originally gotten started on it way back in October 2023, primarily wanting to rewrite all the code to make it more maintainable, but also improve the frontend in various ways. Naively optimistic as I was, I thought I’d get the whole thing done in a couple months, but even aside from the fact that I no longer have all the time in the world nor the best mental health, rebuilding a project of this caliber from complete scratch in a way that adheres to my newfound professional standards is... a pretty damn involved process, actually.

For a refresher on what that’s been like, see the posts under the “Website” category. Picking up from the tail end of 2024, I’d spent a few days in January doing a bit of necessary busywork in order to lay the groundwork for being able to re-implement the blog at all: Since it has a completely different URL structure wherein a given page template corresponds to many different URLs, I needed to modularize the code for checking URL integrity and getting the correct page templates.

Once that was done, I did... a whole lot of nothing for several months. I don’t entirely remember what happened, but getting sick with the flu for the entire second half of February didn’t help, nor did the anxiety attacks I’d started suffering from as a consequence of that. My job performance was likewise suffering as a result of the pressure I’d put on myself, and, all in all, it took about two months to work through all that and get myself back on track.

So late April was when I decided to resume working on the website. By that point, everything was done except for the blog, and while I could find a lot of code (PHP and CSS alike) that I wanted to refactor, I told myself I’d just save it for after everything is done and live, and just treat the blog as independently from the rest of the site as I could. I eased myself into it by doing a microscopic amount of work each day — we’re talking as little as a single CSS rule per day. After all, better to get a tiny amount done every day than no amount for weeks or months on end.

Come early May, though, and things began to snowball hard. Watching things come together little by little did wonders for my motivation, resulting in me spending the weekends just locking in and pushing dozens of commits — sometimes even that many in just a single day! I was riding a wave of euphoria the likes of which I hadn’t experienced in a long time. Certainly not since the year has started, at least. My momentum was back in full swing, I was making mad progress on one of my passion projects, the finish line was starting to become visible on the horizon... life was good, and that motivation and ability to perform also carried over to my job, further bolstering my confidence and self-esteem.

Of course, as is the case with strong emotions in general, good or bad, they may feel like they’re going to last forever at the time, but they do come to an end eventually. It was quite sobering when I started feeling myself going from “absolutely fantastic” to just “pretty good”, but fortunately I didn’t let that stop me. And why should I have? Things were still going extremely well, and tangible progress was being made on all fronts. After months of downtime and feeling like complete dogshit, I wasn’t about to just let all of that go again, especially with how lengthy a process it is for me to build up momentum in the first place.

In any case, last Tuesday was the day I’d finally completely reconstructed the blog. The days that followed were dedicated to miscellaneous cleanup work in order to prepare for the eventual rollout that upcoming weekend. Of course, like I said, all of that is done and ready by the time you’re reading this, so let’s quickly go through the changes and additions that are relevant to you as a visitor.

Appearance: The overall identity is still the same, but text and spacing have been made a little bit larger overall, and colors were adjusted slightly to better conform to WCAG contrast requirements. It’s still not perfect, particularly with the background gradient for the headings, but I’m already in the concept phase for how to make it work better while keeping the visual changes as minimal as possible.

Accessibility: Special care was taken to ensure that every page of the website is fully operable with a keyboard, and users of screen readers should theoretically also be catered to. Again, it’s not 100% perfect yet (non-blog pages in particular might still be missing some vital components), but it can’t be any worse than the previous version, at least.

Music page: Embeds for Bandcamp, Soundcloud and YouTube have been removed because they’re a privacy nightmare. Instead, albums now show a static track list, their price, and a link to their Bandcamp page. The other playlists have instead been replaced with a custom audio player built entirely from scratch. I actually wanted to make one of those during the last overhaul back in 2021, but had ultimately decided against it because my skills with Javascript just weren’t up to snuff at the time. They are now, though, and while the code is still kind of a mess, I hope it all works.

Games: The games overview itself is now a list view because a grid view simply didn’t make that much sense with a library this small. Means I can show a bit more info, too; long-time fans may see similarities to the pre-2021 design. The pages for each individual game now have overhauled galleries, courtesy of an external Javascript library I fell in love with at my job, and embedded videos now have to be clicked before the YouTube iframe gets loaded in.

Blog: Mostly still the same as before, although I still have plans for the future, primarily revolving around adding pagination and a search bar. Those will become increasingly important the more posts I end up writing, since otherwise we’ll end up with massive pages. Other than that, I’d also like future blog posts to have more types of content than just plain text. Subheadings and images, for example.

There are new pages planned, too, of course. For instance, a page dedicated to links, or one for guidelines... though I’m also still thinking of writing up a sort of documentary on Endless Blue, given the significance of that game idea to what was once known as Team Gaijin Alex. I’m not the type to just forget about my roots, after all.

So... now that the website has been relaunched, what comes next?

Well, first things first, a much-needed break. Which I know means losing all my momentum and having to start slowly building it back up all over again, but as you may remember, I actually got sick very shortly after finishing and releasing the update to my Sokoban clone last year. I’d like to avoid a repeat of that if I can help it, especially with how hard I ended up tunnel-visioning on this project towards the end.

After my break, though? My idea was that I’d work on my album next, followed by starting development of Mukai 2 in earnest. However, I took a lot longer with the website than I was expecting, and part of me would like to have Mukai 2 done in time for the 10th anniversary if that is at all possible (it’s extremely unlikely, if we’re gonna be realistic, but a guy can dream). I’m still not entirely sure how I’m gonna go about it, but I was thinking of doing both simultaneously, actually.

I know, I know, stretching myself too thin is a bad thing, but hear me out:

Work on the album would require getting my feet wet with writing music again, something I haven’t done in over a year (seriously, I haven’t written a single thing for all of 2024, nor 2025 up to this point). Game development, on the other hand, spans several disciplines. For instance, I’ve actually been making a lot of progress on the game’s script, only missing a few endings by this point. I’ll also need new assets: graphics, music, sound effects.

So what I could do is prioritize writing music for the album, but also make sprites and other graphics for the game on the side, such as if/when I’m starting to feel a creative block coming on or I’m otherwise too frustrated to make any headway with composing. That way, I’m still making the best out of my time, and by the time the album’s up for sale on Bandcamp, I might have already amassed enough sprites and other assets that I can start actually putting it all together without needing to rely on placeholder graphics that fail to give me a good feel of how the final product would end up looking.

Whether that’ll actually work out for me remains to be seen, but after how long the game has effectively been dead in the water, I just want to give myself any head start I can get, and the only reason the album is still a priority is because a) it’s the smaller project of the two, and b) it’ll be a good opportunity to experiment with the direction I’ve been wanting to take my style into.

But that would be it from me for now. Once again, thank you guys so much for your patience and support. You’re probably not getting that much out of the new website, but I hope you understand that it was something I simply had to get out of the way for my own sake in order to make it possible for me to even continue maintaining it properly.

Here’s hoping that I’ll be able to deliver more of what I’m good at soon.

Another year coming to an end... Hopefully 2024 has been treating you guys well enough. In my case, it was definitely quite eventful, even if you might not be able to tell from my activity. So let me walk you through the things that have (or haven’t) happened, and what my plans for 2025 are.

Things actually started off pretty strong, what with me releasing the update to my Sokoban clone in early February! If you haven’t checked it out yet, I’d wholeheartedly recommend that you do so, if only for all the secrets and easter eggs I’ve crammed into it.

Unfortunately, I must have given it 110% for a little too long, since, shortly after releasing the aforementioned update, I started getting sick a lot. At the worst of it, I ended up out of commission for a couple days at a time every other week, usually on or around the weekends. It was quite the problem for my job, too, since I was missing for so many days. I tried a few different things, like changing my diet or exercise regimen, or even taking antihistamines, but what ultimately helped me get back on track again ended up being daily multivitamin supplements, of all things.

Even to this day, though, my health is kind of a tightrope walk. Granted, it seems to be getting more manageable, but I still need to be careful not to overwork myself, which is easier said than done because I can tunnel-vision so hard that I completely lose sight of my physical and mental needs.

Sickness aside, work on the website relaunch began in earnest in late March this year... and is still ongoing, despite my initial prediction that it’d only take me a few months to complete. Turns out it’s so much more complex than I could’ve ever anticipated, and while there’s little that’s left to do before I can get started on reconstructing the blog, I expect that the blog is going to be a major undertaking unto itself. It’ll probably take me at least another few months.

Also doesn’t help that I’ve had a lot of overall downtime (such as from June to early September, and there was hardly any progress made from mid-October to late December, either), without which a go-live within 2024 might just have been in the cards, but oh well. I have recently (as in, roughly a week ago) started to challenge myself to get at least a little bit of progress done each day, though, even if it’s just two minutes. Hopefully that’ll help get things back on track again... and it does look promising so far, so fingers crossed!

A major highlight of the year was — as acknowledged in the previous blog post — the fact that the 500 million bounty for chain of lucidity was claimed at last, and that, in turn, seems to have snowballed into the genesis of a small but devoted Mukai fandom, which I couldn’t be happier about. Shoutouts to Sins, Errhed, ALePH_D, and PressEtoAscend for being effectively the ambassadors of that one game I made six years ago that’s still waiting for its sequel. Once again, thank you so much for your support, as well as your saintlike patience with the glacial pace of my creative output!

Said small fandom also made me realize another aspect of my brand: my coverage of retro games that have strong emotional significance to me. It was brought to my attention that I have a very personal, passionate, informative, and I suppose humorous way of presenting these games, as exhibited by my gaming blog, my Full Playthroughs series on YouTube (for which I’ve managed to make four new videos this year!), or even the occasional streams for longer-form games, in which I could interact with my watchers directly — or, as was more often the case, have them interact with each other while I was deep in concentration with whatever game I was playing at the time.

What I’m trying to say is that this is something I hope to be able to continue doing, going forward, not least of all because I’ve been told it’s comfort material (and, I mean... even I like rewatching these videos from time to time). Time will tell how I’ll be able to get them slotted into my schedule, but I likely won’t be able to put them out on a regular basis anytime soon.

Other than that, though... well, I’m ashamed to admit that I haven’t composed a single track this entire year. I’m hoping that’ll change next year, since I’ve still got an album to finish — it and the website relaunch are the only things still in the way of me starting development on the second Mukai game... which I feel like I really owe to you guys at this point. Unfortunately, perfection can’t be rushed, and neither can “good enough”, especially when you’re suffering from crippling perfectionism the way I am.

That also means that my plans for 2025 haven’t really changed from my plans for this year: Get the website done, then the album, then start development on the game, sprinkling in playthrough videos here and there to maintain at least some semblance of output. My biggest problem is still my lack of efficiency, and this year in particular I’ve felt especially limited by my mental reserves; managing all of this alongside a full-time job still isn’t easy, but this is gonna be my life for at least the next 30-40 years, so I might as well figure out how to make it work for me without constantly burning out in the process.

And with that said, I wish you guys a happy new year. See you back on the road in 2025!

Hey, remember when I said last December that “you’ll be hearing from me no later than late January”? Well, guess I was about half a year off on that prediction, then. But in my defense, this year so far has been kicking my ass, and the summer heat that’s been robbing me of the energy to do much of anything is only the tip of the iceberg.

In any case, let’s go through things one at a time, since, despite that, a lot has happened this year so far.

First things first, I’m making the (very late) announcement that, as of 4 April 2024, the 500-million-point bounty on chain of lucidity was finally claimed! Congratulations to Sins, who is now the lucky owner of one of the only 25 physical copies of COL in existence! It was quite interesting, seeing various people over the years express intent in – and even put some effort towards – achieving this kind of milestone, and all I can say to that is: Thank you all for still enjoying my game, even almost six full years after its release. I see all of you, and your enthusiasm and fascination mean the world to me.

You may also recall me talking about my Sokoban clone. Well, in a rare case of me being able to (more or less) meet a deadline I set for myself, I did actually get the update done and published right at the start of February. Check out the game page here in order to download it, and do please take the time to read the new HTML manual in order to get an overview of all the things that were added.

If you remember the order of priority I’d listed for my other projects, you’ll know that productivity streams were going to be the next thing I’d set up. Except... that never really happened in the end. I’m not entirely sure why, either, but I guess I just ended up not feeling the need for them, particularly since work on the Sokoban clone had already given me my momentum back at the time. Of course, that’s not to say they’re completely off the table, but at the moment, getting them factored into my schedule isn’t quite the no-brainer it used to be. If I feel the need, I’ll start doing them. If not, then not.

Which brings us to the next item down the list, and the proverbial elephant in the room: the website relaunch. It’s... actually kind of the main reason behind why this update is coming in so late (although the aforementioned ass-kicking by life still played a significant role, don’t you worry): See, at this point, with all the professional experience I’ve gained from my job, the website in its current state is such a spaghettified mess that I didn’t actually want to touch it any more. The idea was that I’d leave it as-is until the new website is ready, then write a comprehensive blog post about everything that transpired. But then a few months turned into the better part of half a year, and it was still nowhere near done, which kind of forced my hand.

So let’s talk about how that’s going. I’ve basically been reconstructing the entire framework from the ground up, switching from procedural to object-oriented code in order to make things as streamlined and modular for me as possible, thereby improving maintainability. That’s a lot of jargon to say that I’m starting from scratch with new experience to make it easier for me to add to and tweak the website once it’s live.

Once the basic framework was done, I reconstructed each page, one at a time. Done so far are the Index, History, About and Games pages, with the Music page being the one I’m currently working on. Since Soundcloud and YouTube embeds are a nightmare for consent management, I’ve decided to replace them all with a custom audio player. Actually, I’d been wanting to create one of those for several years now, but felt like my skillset was too lacking at the time. Well, now I’m a professional web developer (in training)... and it’s still really hard and time-consuming, but at least it’s doable. It’s just that it’s still what I’m stuck on, not helped by the fact that I haven’t been able to find the time to make much progress in the past several weeks, which I’ll get into in a bit.

The original idea was that the relaunch would be live by the end of May. Then I changed it to having the audio player done by then. And now? Honestly, it’d be lucky if the whole thing got done within the year at all. For how much time and headache it’s supposed to be saving me in the long run, it sure is being a pain in the ass to write all the code for right now. But at least the frontend will go through some much-needed improvements, too. Mostly minor visual adjustments, but also some much-needed tweaks for accessibility. Probably not a huge deal for most of you, but certainly important for my standards.

Just bear with me a little while longer... or however damn long it’s gonna take still.

Aside from that, I have indeed been able to find time recently to do a little bit for the second Mukai game. Mostly just some small-scale planning and writing, though. I can’t fully commit myself to it yet, since I want to keep my priorities in check, but it at least helps keep me mentally stimulated enough to prevent burning out on doing nothing but website work (both as my job and as my hobby) for months on end.

So much to my projects, at least. This is the point where I tell you all about what else I’ve been up to all this time, starting with... me getting sick. A lot. Ever since I released that update to my Sokoban clone, I would wake up with a cold at least once every couple of weeks – or, in the worst case, every other week. I was taking days off from work left and right because of it, and while my performance didn’t suffer, I was still feeling pretty damn ashamed of myself. I tried changes to my workout routine as well as my workload, but none of it helped. It wasn’t until just a few weeks ago that I decided to try taking daily vitamin supplements that my health started improving again. Needless to say, though, that really threw me out of whack, and I’m still trying to find my groove again to this day. Of course, the physical and mental stress that the summer heat is exerting on my body isn’t helping much, either, so it might not be until at least September or October that I’ll be truly able to fire on all cylinders again.

On the bright side, though, I got me some nice things to put into my room, such as a second lava lamp and a small CD rack. The lava lamp has orange wax to complement the blue one I’ve had for years, but it also happens to provide a much brighter, more vibrant light, and I can keep it running for much longer before needing to turn it off to let it cool down again; in fact, I can leave it running nearly 8-10 consecutive hours, more than twice as long as my blue one!

As for the CD rack, I’ve just always wanted to have one, since I do have a few CDs to put on display – music albums, physical copies of Touhou games, and, of course, my own personal physical copy of COL – and, up until it arrived, they had to be kept in a cardboard box in my wardrobe. Now they’re within arm’s reach, and I can use the top of the CD rack as a surface to put items on, such as...

...potted plants! I’ve opted to go for artificial flowers, since those obviously don’t require any maintenance, and live flowers have never survived for very long in my care, but whether they’re real or not, that extra pop of color in my room sounds like just the thing I need. They haven’t arrived yet, but they should over the next couple days.

Other than that, I’ve actually purchased a new set of dumbbells with variable weights: Each dumbbell can go up to 20kg (in 5kg increments), and they can also be combined into a barbell, which not only expands the variety of exercises I can do at home, but also means I’ve got a lot more room upwards now before heavier weights become necessary. Unfortunately, again, I’ve been severely erratic with my workouts due to first my recurring colds and now the unbearable weather. Did I already mention I hate summer? I did? Well, now I did again.

What I have been able to stay consistent with, though, is the touch typing practice I started doing a few weeks back. I found this old DOS program on a Windows 95 laptop my dad let me have a long time ago, and this year I started practicing with it earnestly for the first time (as opposed to just doing it for a while until the novelty wears off). Now I’m by no means a slow typist, but I figured that, hey, maybe if I master this typing style, I’ll be able to break through my wpm ceiling more consistently. Guess we’ll see how it goes, though ironically, I’m writing this blog post with the typing style I’ve been using all my life.

And that’s... pretty much all I can think of. Not much else to say, and there probably won’t be much else to report until at least a couple months from now. I wanted these to be a monthly thing, but that’s kind of hard when you lack the energy to get enough things done that are worth talking about.

Oh well, hopefully by the next update log, I’ll have finally relaunched the website.

2023 is slowly drawing to a close, and with it the 10th year of Retrograde Road’s existence. A lot has happened in that time — far more than I could feasibly remember off the top of my head. Hell, I’m already struggling to list all the noteworthy things that happened this year.

Relatively speaking, though, not a whole lot actually happened in terms of finished projects. I wasn’t even able to finish my new album before the end of the year, like I was hoping I would. What did happen a lot of, however, was personal growth: Somehow, this was the year where my mental health improved rapidly, and it’s all thanks to the realization that I need to take the initiative in dealing with the things I’m unhappy about. It wouldn’t be appropriate going into too much detail here, but suffice it to say that, had I not given myself that push, I’d still be unemployed and miserable.

Of course, there’s still a lot to work on — my confidence for writing music is still in shambles, and I’ve yet to find the time to hone my drawing skills — but all things considered, I’m a lot more optimistic now than I was around this time last year. I can do all of this, even if it takes time.

So let’s talk about my goals for 2024 instead!

First things first, I definitely still want to get my Sokoban clone done and ready again before all else. I genuinely didn’t think it’d take this long, but it kind of turned into more than just a porting and refactoring project. At this point I’m straight-up adding new content to the game, new features. Christmas festivities may have held me up a bit, but I’m determined to get it all done early next year, preferably within January or February.

After that, it’s time to start doing productivity streams — and with them comes work on other projects, starting with the refactoring/relaunch of this very website. I might even be in a bit of a race against time there, since the blog’s calendar widget bugging out makes me feel like it’s inexplicably falling apart at the seams. (I’ve disabled the widget for the time being, in case you’re wondering.)

Then, once that is done, it’s back to working on my album, full steam ahead. Maybe, with any luck, I can manage a 2024 release, after all, but I don’t want to make any guarantees because never once have I been able to actually stick to a deadline I set for myself.

And then, finally... work on the second Mukai game, after so many years of nothing. It’ll be a true test of everything I’ve learned, and I’m already looking forward to sharing its development with you all. If all goes well, I might get to start working on it in late 2024 or early 2025, but again, nothing to set your watches by.

It’s not much this time around, but that’s all for now. I wish you guys a happy new year, and you’ll be hearing from me no later than late January.

The season’s changed once again, snow has fallen, temperatures are in the negatives, and Mariah is on every radio station.

And on that note, I’ve once again got to deal with moisture seeping through the wooden window frames. It gets particularly bad in the case of the one window in my bedroom, where usually the entire glass pane gets covered in moisture every morning, but the other windows have at least some on the bottom and sides, too. My mom ended up buying an electric window cleaner for precisely this occasion. It has a squeegee attachment as well as a vacuum specifically for liquids. I wasn’t too impressed with it at first, but after figuring out the trick to it, I found that it’s quite the helpful asset, after all.

Regarding the rest of my life since last month, work has been pretty fulfilling as always. I had an employee interview last Monday where I was pretty much showered with praise and overwhelmingly positive feedback the whole time. It’s still hard to believe that I’ve made this much of a name for myself after only five months, especially after going all my life being told that (or at least feeling like) I’m a failure and that nothing I do is ever good enough. Maybe that’s why I was pushing myself so hard the whole time — simply not wanting to be seen as a dead weight.

The stress I’m putting on myself has been affecting my physical health negatively, though. Just the other week, I ended up having to take a sick day because I was simply too exhausted to go to work. It made me realize just how out-of-shape I’d gotten, and that something would have to change if I wanted to have energy for my hobbies and creative endeavors. As a result, I started doing cardio again, half an hour every other day. I recalled reading that it helps both with relieving stress and improving my stress tolerance. I’m nearly two weeks into my new routine, so we’ll see how it goes.

I’ve started journaling near-daily again, too — even outside of writing these monthly logs. I used to be pretty on-and-off about it, but it’s generally been a great way for me to process my thoughts and provide some much-needed self-organization and accountability, so I’m glad I’m on that again.

Speaking of self-organization, the lack thereof as well as my general lack of energy (prior to restarting my workout routine, at least) has left me with precious little opportunity to work on the things I’d like to work on. Even during my vacation last month, I didn’t actually get that much done in the end. It’s honestly pretty vexing that I can’t seem to bring myself to do much of anything, even when I have all the time in the world.

It got me thinking... What could I do to keep myself motivated, or at least accountable for long enough to get my momentum going again? My first thought ended up being productivity streams, much like the ones JynX has been doing, where I’d just sit there in (mostly) silence for an hour or two working on stuff while viewers could use that time for their own activities. I’m not sure how many people would actually tune in, but then again, it’s really not about the viewer count, anyway. It’s about me getting stuff done.

And then I thought about how to lay out my stream. For various reasons, I’d rather avoid showing my actual screen (not least of all because I might be working on stuff I’d rather not reveal until it’s actually done), so I might leave some kind of footage running instead, like how JynX has his marble game. When I wracked my brain over what I’d have that’d be similar enough to be suitable, I thought back to my old Sokoban clone that I coded way back in 2016 (though I released it in 2018). I figured that, since it’s got at least 100 levels, I could modify it to play itself and then use that as the idle footage. After all, there might be something both relaxing and satisfying about seeing a messy level get gradually cleaned up.

I wasn’t too sure if it’d be worth the effort to port the game over to GMS2, but then I ended up getting started on it literally the next day, anyway. More on that later.

The other question was a matter of how to schedule those streams. Obviously the weekends would be a good time, but it’d be great if I could do them during the work week, too. Ideally in the mornings (so between 6 and 8 AM UTC+1), since that’s the time I’m trying to set aside for productivity, anyway. Evening streams (between, say, 5 and 8 PM UTC+1) would be a viable option, too, but only on non-workout days. Either way, I suppose we’ll see what (if anything) ends up happening.

I’m also planning on streaming primarily on YouTube, simply because I can schedule my streams there in a way that’d allow subscribers to see them coming up in advance. If I can figure out how to dual-stream to both YouTube and Twitch, though, I might do that. Hopefully you’ll look forward to my streams when (or if) they start happening.

Now, about that Sokoban clone... For some reason, I’ve been finding myself extremely motivated to work on it, to the point where I would get out of bed and have breakfast as early as possible just to maximize the amount of time I get to chip away at it before needing to get ready for work. In a way, it’s actually become kind of an addiction — at least for the first few days; it’s kinda tapered off to normal levels again by now.

Progress has been pretty rapid so far, too. After all, it’s just a matter of rewriting the same code (or rather refactoring it, now that I have those extra seven years of experience and I get to make use of features GMS2 has that GMS1 didn’t at the time). The startup sequence, menus, and core gameplay loop are all done, and I’ve even implemented a setting for switching to a double-res set of graphics (even if I’d say that the blocky, lower-res graphics still have a certain charm to them).

Something else I’ve implemented, which I’ve been hinting at in the third of these update logs way back in 2021, is a training mode of sorts. You get infinite attempts and the ability to undo your moves (each undo rewinds to just before you started pushing the last crate you touched, though there’s no limit to how far you can rewind), but your records won’t get saved. However, you’d still be able to unlock new levels in this mode.

And, of course, the aforementioned autoplay feature has been implemented, too. The hardest part about it was the solutions themselves, actually. I grabbed step-by-step solutions from an FAQ for the SG-1000 version, but roughly a dozen of those didn’t work for various reasons: either I made mistakes when copying the levels (and, much to my dismay, all of those mistakes are present in the current v0.50 release of the game, meaning the SG Pack is literally impossible to complete as there’s one level where there are more crates than dots), or the FAQ itself inadvertently provided simplified versions of the levels. I ended up having to download JSoko in order to help me work out solutions for the latter, and its auto-solver wasn’t even all that useful, since in most cases it would simply get stuck forever. Because of that, I had to solve most of the levels myself, looking at the solutions for the incorrect levels from the FAQ step by step, and deviating from there where I needed to in order to account for the actual levels’ more constricted designs.

But at the end of the day, it’s all working now, and the broken levels on my end are all fixed, too. As a matter of fact, letting the autoplay solve all 100 levels back-to-back would take well over six hours. I’d say that’s plenty of time for productivity stream footage.

There isn’t too much stuff left to do, either. The biggest fish are the in-game editors, of course. The rest is fullscreen support, storing records for least steps and pushes on a per-level basis, better input handling (as well as some QoL changes for the menuing), bilinguality, secret levels, secret win animations, and some other stuff I can’t think off the top of my head yet but will probably stumble upon as I do the other things.

And that... might’ve been one of the biggest updates in a while, actually. I know I didn’t say anything about the website relaunch or the album, but that’s because the Sokoban clone has been where all my resources are being put into right now. I want to get it finished up so I can use it for productivity stream footage, and then I can use said productivity streams to work on those other two things (and other stuff later down the line).

Until then, stay warm (or cool, depending on where you live), and you’ll hopefully be hearing from me again one more time before the end of the year.

...Oh, by the way, I meant to mention this a lot sooner, but I’m on Bluesky now. Here’s my profile if you want to give me a follow!

I promise, I wanted to get one of these out last month to keep with the once-a-month schedule I’d set for myself, but then I just... didn’t find the time for it. Granted, it’s not like a lot happened in September, anyway.

But anyway, hope everyone’s been well. Summer has finally ended, at least this side of the equator. And with this month came and went my birthday, too – I’m 28 years old now. Not getting any younger, so it’s all the more important that I make as much as possible out of what time I have left.

...And, fittingly enough, I actually have the rest of the month off from work, starting from my birthday last Saturday, so I figured, hey, might as well use all that free time in a productive manner. So with this month’s log, I’d like to update you not just on what I did, but primarily on what I’m planning to do.

First talking point would be that new album I’ve mentioned before at at least one point in the past. So far there’s still only four tracks done, and I haven’t written anything else in months. A lot of that is due to what I can only describe as crippling anxiety at the thought of composing anything. In particular, it’s instrumentation that tends to cause me the most grief, since I often struggle to find good instruments to use, and it quickly discourages me from continuing to try.

I think I may need to do a better job of planning the complete instrumentation for a song in advance. After all, my own discography already provides me with plenty of references for what does and doesn’t work, not to mention what’s my signature style. I just need to get over that mental blockade, and there’s no two ways around just chipping away at it bit by bit. If all goes well, I might have a new song done for the album by the end of the month, as well as the momentum to do at least half an hour of music stuff every morning before work. A 2023 release obviously isn’t in the cards anymore, but it’s still my biggest active project to date, so the more consistently I can make progress towards it, the better.

Something else I’ve also hinted at in the past was my intention to relaunch this website. And, well, work on that has officially started! I’m currently in the process of rewriting everything from scratch to revolve around object-oriented PHP, applying the knowledge I’ve gained from my job. The goal here is to modularize the code, splitting it off into smaller chunks to make things easier to expand and maintain. This means PHP classes for everything, which also meant having to write a class autoloader. That one wasn’t too much trouble, but the ever-evolving nature of my code’s directory structure means having to constantly redefine namespaces, which is kind of a pain.

And finally, there’s my gaming backlog. Surprisingly, despite having bought the game on day one, I still haven’t actually beaten Tears of the Kingdom yet. Not that I’m not close – in fact, all that’s left to do in the main story is beat the final boss – but I’ve been trying to at least do all the shrines and sidequests before putting an end to things.

Other games I’m currently playing through are Ecco the Dolphin on the Mega Drive, and Aztec Adventure on the Master System. The former has passwords for me to save my progress with, but the latter is a single-session slog taking upwards of an hour to play through fully, and while I have reached the final stage once by now, it’ll take at least a few more attempts to learn and get through it.

Incidentally, I have a Trello board to keep track of my backlog with, but as of writing this, there are no less than 34 unbeaten games on it (not all in progress, though), so... honestly, putting any significant dent into it would be a full-time job unto itself. Doesn’t help that I prefer to do my Mega Drive and Master System gaming on console, rather than emulator (if I can help it), and the consoles are hooked up to the living room TV, meaning I can only play them while my mom’s asleep or at work, since she’s occupying the TV all day otherwise.

You may also notice that anything involving drawing is conspicuously missing from this list... but, to be fair, I feel like I already have my hands full with just about everything else. As much as I’d love to get back into drawing again, there are other things I need to get on top of first, and organizing myself is never without extreme amounts of effort and vigilance.

But I think that’s also the extent of what’s worth talking about this month. Here’s hoping to another update a month from now, preferably with good news about having been able to make some good habits stick again.

Work has been getting a lot more doable, too. I find myself able to stay for longer hours and get more done with less breaks necessary, although how long I actually stay still depends on what tasks I have queued up, as well as just my mental state that day in general. I've had to leave early on at least a few days because I just couldn't concentrate, for instance. Overall, though, my work tolerance is definitely on the increase, and recently I found myself thinking that I genuinely love my job and that I really wouldn't wanna be doing anything else. Hell, today my boss even pulled me out of a meeting just to praise me for how well I’ve been doing. Mind you, I’ve only been at this job for two months and I’m still in training.

Of course, more hours worked also means less time to myself at home, especially since I refuse to compromise on my 8 hours of sleep minimum for what are hopefully obvious reasons. As such, I've come to the realization that I need to do more to make my mornings count.

First of all: Productivity. It goes without saying that I don't have the time to complete three tasks a day like I used to have, but that doesn't mean I can't at least do one, so I've set that as a goal for myself. I can still use Saturdays and Sundays to get more tasks done, after all – assuming I have the energy after a tiring work week.

Secondly: Fitness. While I've yet to find the time for complete workouts again, I've at least begun to do a few pushups every day. It started off as just 5, in order to wake myself up, but by now I'm pushing myself to do 15 in a row and looking to increase that number further as the reps get easier.

And third: Commute. The time I spend sitting in a bus can definitely be put to good use, too, such as by drafting up blog posts like this one. Using this time productively will be especially important a few months from now, since work is planning on moving its base of operations to a more remote part of the city, practically doubling my commute time as a result. It'll feel like much less of a time loss if I can make the most of it.

That said, if all else fails, I can look forward to a new work laptop sometime in hopefully the next few weeks, which would enable me to work from home if need be. Not that that's necessarily something I'd want to make a habit out of, given that I feel like the office environment is definitely doing its part to boost my productivity.

In other news, the 19th mainline Touhou game came out earlier this month, and I managed to get a Lunatic 1cc in it after just a few days. Given the brokenness of Reimu, I was also trying to shoot for LNN for a while, but decided to put that on hold for now because it was starting to stress me out. Maybe if I come back to it after a few months...

I'm also noticing that these update logs are starting to be less about my creative stuff and more about how I'm doing at work. Granted, I've been having fairly little time and motivation to pursue the former these days, thanks to the latter, so I'm afraid this is just how it's gonna be for the foreseeable future. However, given my lack of activity on Twitter, that still makes these posts my most significant and comprehensive sign of life, and it's not that I don't want to find the time to write music again... especially since I still have a whole album that hasn't seen any progress in forever.

We'll just have to wait and see what the future brings, I suppose...

So, as I mentioned in my previous update log, I’ve started my apprenticeship this month. Four weeks under my belt already, going into the fifth, and I’m only slowly getting used to the fact that working five days a week doesn’t leave you with a whole lot of time for other things. As exhausting as it is, though, I’d say it’s going quite well. My coworkers have had nothing but praise for me so far with how quickly and efficiently I’ve been getting my tasks done (once I have a clear idea of what needs to actually be done, anyway, and figuring that out tends to be the lion’s share of the work already).

That said, I was still off to a pretty rough start. 40 hours a week right out the gate isn’t something I was able to accustom myself to at all, and it kind of culminated in a mental breakdown towards the end of week 2. The week after, I had a talk with HR and they reduced my hours to 30 a week, but I intend to slowly work my way up towards a full 40 again over the next few months while I work out my work-life balance.

One step towards said balance happened to be a change in my sleep schedule, with me now waking up at 5am instead of 6am like I used to. The reasoning being that, after work, I’ll usually be too exhausted to want to do much of anything, so that time is kind of wasted, anyway. Better to have it early in the day where I could potentially put it to use for creative endeavors, once I’ve got a tight and consistent morning routine going again.

And on the topic of creativity... yeah, you can probably guess that I haven’t gotten much of anything done this month. Work leaving me with too little time or energy isn’t even the only reason, either — I’m actually once again finding myself with crippling anxiety at the very thought of working on music, and I’ve yet to break through that again. It’s not like there’s any such thing as an elaborate strategy to magically melt it away, either. It’s just gonna be a slow process of chipping away at it bit by bit until I’m back in the groove again.

As for drawing, honestly no dice there, either. Again, my motivation’s been kind of nonexistent for the past several weeks, although YouTube’s algorithm has ended up showing me some art YouTuber content that’s kind of made me wanna try my hand at it again. Maybe if I find the time and the weather’s good enough, I’ll go outside with a sketchpad and a pencil and do some life and nature sketches, seeing as most of what I’ve been doing this year so far was cold hard practice and study.

I may also consider refactoring my website again. Turns out that working with websites for a living gives you a lot of insight into best practices for all sorts of approaches, and I’d definitely like to make my own code cleaner and easier to maintain at some point. That’s a low priority compared to art and music, though.

And... that’s pretty much it already, actually. Apologies for the rather anemic update, but I suppose it’s to be expected that not much would happen this month. Well, lack of noteworthy updates plus having a sudden crunch period thrust upon me right after my lunch break, which you can imagine sapped me of just about all my energy reserves for the day. I almost didn’t think I’d even get this done before August.

I’ll be honest: I probably would’ve written this a whole lot sooner if I hadn’t gotten it into my head that I wanted to move away from Wordpress and create my own custom blog. But on the bright side, I can at least say that a lot has happened since January — a lot of really good stuff, in fact.

After some extremely devastating events happening to me right at the end of last year as a result of my own actions, I came to a realization that had been long overdue: My unhappiness with myself and my life was, more than anything else, my brain trying to tell me that I had to sit down, think about what exactly it is that I feel unsatisfied with, and then actively take steps to change it instead of just wallowing in misery and learned helplessness.

As soon as I fully grasped that and began to get the hang of forcing myself to act, things suddenly began to improve drastically, and I found myself accomplishing things I didn’t think I was even capable of. Fast-forward to today, and it genuinely feels like my mental health is the best it’s ever been since at least 2018, if not 2002. Having a sense of agency over oneself truly does wonders for one’s mental and emotional well-being.

So what have I been able to do with that newfound mental fortitude? For starters, I’ve done a lot of journaling on what helps and hurts my productivity, and finally came up with a plan that works for me: In addition to a small, daily to-do list of roughly 3-5 items, I’m also keeping a priority list of sorts now. I use that to keep track of mid-to-long-term tasks, categorizing them into ones with deadlines and ones without, and keeping detailed notes for each of them regarding what I need to do, what problems and roadblocks there may be, and what my first/next steps should be towards getting closer to completing a given task. And when they’re done, I move them to a section for finished tasks at the very bottom of the list, noting the date at which I completed them. It can be quite encouraging, watching that bottom list grow over time.

This system of prioritizing tasks and looking at them one step at a time has also resulted in a huge step forward with my life! I’d redoubled my efforts to send out job applications, and I can proudly say that, after nearly two years of freeloading, I’ve finally been hired somewhere! For the time being, it’s a three-year apprenticeship at a web development agency, but chances are good that I’d be taken on as a proper employee after I’ve been fully trained, and even so, I’d already be making a not-insignificant wage. I start next month, on the 3rd of July. Wish me luck!

Let’s talk a bit about my other creative endeavors, too, though. Progress on my album, for instance, is currently at just under 30%. I can’t say I don’t love what I have of it so far, but I would’ve liked to be further along than I currently am. Burnout and fear of failure have been ever-present companions slowing me down considerably, and with the added prospect of 40-hour work weeks starting from next month, a 2023 release is looking increasingly unlikely... at least for as long as my process of composing remains as inconsistent as it currently is. I’ve already figured out other conundrums in my life, though, so I’m sure I’ll figure this one out eventually, too.

You may also remember me talking about getting back into drawing by doing figure sketches back in January. I feel like I’ve been making quite a lot of progress since then, slowly getting to grips with the finer details of human anatomy, one body part at a time. Granted, my execution is still lagging behind what theoretical knowledge I have, but I’ve been fortunate enough to find a good mentor who knows how to keep me motivated and has an extremely keen eye for details. Maybe I’ll even end up producing some new illustrations sometime this year. We’ll see.

Some of you may have caught on to my recently-rekindled interest in the acquisition of foreign languages, too. For example, I started teaching myself Spanish last September, and while I’m certainly nowhere near fluent yet, I still find myself capable enough to hold conversations in it already. It’s made me want to pick up some other Romance languages, too, with my current focus being on French and Portuguese. That said, I do still want to expand my Spanish, as well as break through the plateau I feel like I’ve been stuck on with Japanese for several years now. And in the future? Who knows? Maybe I’ll pick up Swedish and Finnish again, maybe I’ll dabble in a completely different language. Either way, the dream of being a polyglot lives on.

Any other plans, then? Well, there unfortunately still isn’t much leeway for working on the second Mukai game — my art skills are still lagging behind, all my time spent on composing goes towards my new album, and without assets, there’s not much point in coding anything yet — but I have been thinking of another project to maybe work on in the distant future.

As a kid, I used to love working with RPG Maker. There’s this really crappy game I somehow completed start to finish with RPG Maker VX within its 30-day trial period, and aside from that and possibly dozens of other game projects I started and then dropped within a week, there’s one idea that I actually put some legitimate thought and planning into before I started working on it... Of course, I never finished that one, either, but even after all these years, the premise still holds a place in my heart, and I’d love to revive and expand on it. Plus, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at creating an RPG engine in Game Maker. I think it’d be a fun challenge.

That’s about the extent of what’s been going on over the first half of this year, I’d say. I remember when I used to want to write these logs once every two weeks... and while I highly doubt that I can get enough done in such a short time frame to make it worth writing about, the idea of making them a regular thing is nevertheless an enticing one. Maybe once a month, specifically somewhere during the final third of each month? That could work.

As of writing this, it’s 12:48 PM, on the 16th of June 2023. I’ve spent a little over half a month working on what you’re seeing here now: Retrograde Road’s all-new blog, with all the necessary code for it handwritten entirely by me... and I honestly couldn’t be prouder of what I was able to achieve.

But why make a new blog in the first place, you may ask. Wasn’t the Wordpress blog perfectly fine?

Well... yeah, it was at first, but the more I used it, the more I realized just how limiting it was in terms of features and customizability, at least with what wasn’t locked behind a paywall. And so I figured that, rather than pay money for a service I was only using maybe a few times a year at best, I might as well start from scratch and create a framework exactly as I imagined it, with all the bells and whistles I could ever want.

Probably the main feature would be that each individual blog post now comes with its translations built-in, rather than requiring me to write a wholly separate post for each language I want to translate it to — even for just English and Japanese, that got pretty tedious to navigate. Now, if you change the site language in the top right of the page, it’ll change the language of all blog posts, too! (Except for the ones that don’t currently have a translation in that language, in which case they’ll default to English instead.)

Although, admittedly... that, along with the light/dark mode switching, may be the only real advantages this blog has over the old one. Which isn’t to say I can’t and won’t be implementing more stuff over time. This project is definitely still a work-in-progress, and it can only get better from here. Not to mention it’s made for some insanely invaluable coding practice. Honestly, ten years ago, I never would’ve thought I’d be making websites of this caliber in PHP.

So will the old blog go away, then? No, of course not. I can’t say I wasn’t considering copying all the posts to here, but I decided it’d probably be for the better to keep them where they are for archival purposes. You can still get to the old blog via the navigation menu above, so it’s not like I’m trying to bury it, either.

That said, if you’re reading this, let me know what you think! Obviously I’ve never written an entire blog before, so I’d greatly appreciate some good feedback.