University is starting again after summer holidays. Before I get too busy to write any blogs, here is a summary of everything I've been up to so far.

I made a Discord server!

Telegram used to be the primary way for me to share anecdotes about my life with my friend circle. And so, after I deleted it, I only had Discord left for reaching out to other people. I have a MINDHACK server where I often chat with my friends and likeminded people, but... It's MINDHACK themed, I can't just turn it into a buddy-buddy talking zone whenever I feel lonely. I would need a separate place for that. So basically, my loneliness was the first reason I wanted to make a server for myself.

The second reason was that I wanted a casual, yet somewhat organized environment for me to share my OC lore. Discord is, of course, far from being organized. But it allows the creation of separate channels, which is good enough for casual lore discussions.

So... Yeah, I have a server now. So far it's helped me get better mentally. I don't mention this often, but I enjoy company of other people. I want to talk to others, to hear and be heard back. And a server is, like, a perfect place for a circle of people to chat with each other. I invited my friends over, and now I have everyone joining in on conversations and commenting on what I say about my characters! I was also able to spend my 21st birthday playing Jackbox there, and we had a full lobby of players at one point. Damn, I missed having more than 6 people in Jackbox at once.

You can get the invite link by DM'ing me basically anywhere, if you want to join.

I made a wiki on Miraheze!

Toyhouse and Discord are not enough. I need to have a whole fucking wiki for my characters.

Toyhouse has rich HTML customization and is nice for quick and dirty character introductions, but I can't use it for keeping all the lore. I don't know why, I just don't view Toyhouse as a fitting place for that. When it comes to other sites for character archival, I find them severely lacking compared to Toyhouse. CharacterHub has even less HTML customization and I'm repulsed by Unvale's design. As for carrd or rentry or anything similar - no, I refuse to use them for reasons that are too pretentious for me to mention.

My two favorite formats for preserving information about anything are Google docs and wikis. So once I found out that Miraheze allows creation of small, personal wikis I decided to try and apply for one. And yes, my application was accepted!(*￣▽￣*)

The two things I found difficult right away were customizing the CSS and making templates. I know CSS, but I never worked with pre-existing classes and ids before, so I had to use other wikis' CSS for reference a lot. As for templates... Well, I tried to upload a template from Login wiki and then I realized it had like a hundred dependencies. Don't do this. If you want a simple template, like a message box, borrow it from the Dev wiki, they have less dependencies... Also you do not need to borrow the documentation for every single one of them.

My wiki is still very much barebones, although the foundation is complete! I'll be slowly working on the character pages and on giving the main page more flair. The one thing I still haven't figured out is customizing the mobile view. I'll get there eventually.

"But Peer, why not use this site for keeping info on your characters?", I hear you ask. And that's a valid question, since Neocities allows theoretically infinite customization and full control over the flow of the page. The answer is I'm too lazy. I don't want to come up with a layout. Plus my site is static, so if I want to change something minor I'll have to manually upload a new version of the page. A wiki, on the other hand, is interactive - I can make any changes and publish them quickly; and that's important to me as I tend to make typos or suddenly get new ideas.

Anyway here is the wiki, if you care. If you want to vandalize it please make it funny.

Tried out coding for Toyhouse

I've been meaning to make custom HTML profiles for TH for a veeery long time, but my attempts never resulted in anything good looking. Until now, that is! Coding for Toyhouse similarly involves working with native classes, so I already knew what I had to do - look for the necessary documentation and inspect other people's codes.

So this time, after some research and experimenting, I was actually able to make something! I am quite proud of myself. Function is more important than flair to me, so the code I made is compact and serves the exact purpose I made it for.

You can see the code in action on my Toyhouse.

I called it "Trilingual", because that's what it is! It's supposed to have a description for a character in three languages at once. The code could potentially be edited to have the tabs be used for something else, but I have no need for that. I always found elaborate profiles with a hundred tabs unnecessary.

The code is mobile friendly too, although the chibi covers half of the trivia box, which bothers me a lot. I could just hide it for mobile, but it's really cute... Another problem I encountered is sizing the <div> with the image that is below the tabs. I couldn't figure out how to make it size itself automatically, so I had to use a very specific height for it. Hehe...

Games I played this summer

The first one I played was Celeste. It's been on my "this seems like something I'd enjoy, so I'll probably play this someday" list for a very long time, but I decided to give it a go in June because I was bored and wanted to play a challenging platformer again.

And yes, I really liked the game. The main story is not that hard actually. The hardest part for me was Chapter 3 because I'm bad at navigating through moving obstacles. The rest was doable. I can respect that, as I also played platformers that are nigh impossible to beat for an average person, like The End is Nigh. I'd say that Celeste would be a good introduction to harder platformers, not to mention that it has accessibility settings.

If you played the game, you know that the real challenge starts if you decide to do B-sides. I only did half of them, but I wish to return to complete all of them (as well as the C-sides) someday.

Celeste's message resonated with me as well, so maybe it's a good thing that I only played it 6 years after the release. It probably wouldn't have hit as hard if I played it before.

This game lets you put images from your computer on a billboard.

The second game I played was the demo of Myths are 100% True. I absolutely adore it!

The controls are a huge improvement from Čeda, mostly because of a constant running speed and a better dash. You can accelerate by dashing on slopes, and this makes you go super fast like WOOOOSH, very satisfying to look at. The game takes one of my favorite elements of a platformer and makes it even more dynamic.

The "combat" part is creative, and it works in tandem with the movement. You use a camera to take pictures of myths, and I liked dashing into groups of them to get tons of points. I remember Leather talking about how early iterations of Slavija weren't particularly interesting in their gameplay, so it's nice to know that he eventually settled on the cool concept of taking pictures of enemies.

Mudeth did an amazing job on the soundtrack as expected. I'm a huge fan of Like a Locomotif, and I played it on repeat as soon as it was uploaded on YouTube. If the music theme of the first boss is such a banger, then I can't wait to meet the others in the full game.

I'm not good at analyzing stories, so I can't give you a full-blown analysis or anything, but I can tell you that I respect this game for taking its stupidity seriously. The story is silly and fun, and I like silly and fun stories that don't question themselves.

If you like fast-paced platformers and whimsical stories, you should definitely play Myths are 100% True demo and wishlist the game on Steam. I can't recommend it enough.

Is there Drama?! No context for this one, play yourself to find out.

The last game I played was In Stars and Time. I still haven't finished it, but I'm more than halfway through, I think. This game is pretty long, so I already formed an opinion on it.

Most things about the game are great, but let's start with the gameplay. I have a hard time playing turn-based RPGmaker games because of how repetitive and unengaging their gameplay can be, but ISAT managed to keep me interested with its gameplay flow. The story is about being stuck in a time loop (this is not a spoiler by the way), so a lot of things change over time even if you go through the same places. It was pleasant to see all the minor changes that occur with every loop.

And, of course, you learn more about the world and the characters the futher you progress through the story. It's surprising how much worldbuilding there is, with just two locations! You start out knowing basically nothing, clueless as to who your teammates are and where the hell you are; but as your playtime increases, so does you knowledge of what is going on. I was invested in the mystery of The King and time loops; I figured some things out before the characters did, but there were things that I couldn't guess, so the story isn't 'predictable'. As for the characters, the one I grew to like as I found out more about them was Bonnie. I didn't think much of them at first, but now they are in my top 3. The other two characters I like are Odile and Loop, although they were instant faves for me because of their design and personality.

The art. Oh, the art. This game's style is amazing! Every main character looks unique, especially in their faces. There are a lot of portraits for dialogue, menus, and battles. Even 20 hours into the game I occasionally see something new. And I want to mention the monochrome color palette. As a monochrome liker I respect it.

I only have one complaint - sometimes the dialogue reads like fanfiction. Like, one of the lines was a literal keysmash. I'm not a fan of this kind of writing. But this is just a pet peeve, not a criticism. I highly recommend this game!

This site

I decided to go back to using Javascript for the left sidebar's navigation menu. I can't bear to edit it every time I add a new link. I'm so sorry noscript users, I have failed you. I will switch to using plain HTML again if I make a separate layout for blog posts sometime in the future, though. Heavily debating that. (⁠｡⁠ŏ⁠﹏⁠ŏ⁠) I feel like I've learned a couple of things from working on a wiki and on Toyhouse profiles, and I might apply this knowledge in the future, when I finally get to renovating this site again.

And I've added a Commissions page! YES, you can now OFFICIALLY buy ART from ME! Please be gentle though, I have very little experience working with foreign customers, teehee!

Until next blog.