2025年5月に投稿された記事

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.