While I was in Japan (a thing that I should probably write about), I finally snagged myself both a Famicon and a Famicom Disk System. Upon returning to the states, I wanted to verify that the machines I'd flown several thousand miles back actually worked... as you do. I won't go into all the details of me figuring out if the thing worked or not (that'll be saved for the upcoming first episode of Hakk's Lab), but I did run into a rather interesting phenomenon during that time. Enjoy the provided content below.

This has absolutely nothing to do with the broken English phrase that's become common parlance. If anything, it's kind of a riff on my mother's post from today.

In re-writing this blog, I spend a lot if time reading old entries. I've done this before, but I was looking for something more particular this time around. As mentioned, I'm in therapy and introspection is high on my mental processes, so I was trying to identify if there was any particular point where things seemed to change. Indeed, there was a general trend of increasing self-deprecation, but through all that, I began to notice a particular mentality.

I needed to do a lot of things.

Needing to draw more. Needing to post more. Needing to bike more. The list goes on.

These aren't things I need to do. These are things I want to do. Nobody's demanding these things of me beyond myself. The things I actually need to do are quite few: eat and breathe. Everything else is some sort of societal standard or internal pressure.

In telling myself that I need to do these things, I mentally set myself up for bigger disappointment when they invariably don't get accomplished. Part of that ties into the Three Ps mentioned in my mom's post, namely the need for that thing to be perfect, procratinating until the stars align, and being ultimately paralyzed from doing anything at all. That right there is the reason my YouTube channel dreams are on hold while I wait for my garage to be done but that doesn't get done because it needs to be of a certain level of good.

It's time to stop needing to do things and doing them because I want to. And if it doesn't happen, well... maybe there's a reason.

I need to stop worrying so goddamn much is what I need to do...

I missed yesterday, so... damn. To be fair, there was a rather deadly Oscars drinking game involved. It's helped bolster the feeling I've been having that... I actually kind of miss not drinking. To that end, I shall just try to drink less. Also, not whiskey.

But, that's not today's post. Nah, today I'm not sure what to write about, so I'm just going to post the thing I did write yesterday, namely the one year lookback for my RedditBooru/AnimeBracket Patreon. For those not aware, Patreon is a crowd-funding site where people can donate to creators on a per project or monthly basis. Over the years running these sites, I've had many people ask if they could donate money, and generally, I turned those down. But, I actually calculated the server costs one day and decided that Patreon would be a good way to offset costs. It's been way more successful than I had imagined and I'm very touched that folks are actually willing to monetarily help out these little projects of mine.

But enough actual writing, time to exercise my copy/paste abilities.

One Year Later

It's now been one year since I started this little Patreon, and I want to take a look back on the last year, both in continuing to be completely transparent about the costs but also what was achieved. Finally, I'm going to outline my plans for this year.

First off, costs. Instead of shoe-horning a spreadsheet into this post, here's an actual spreadsheet with the breakdown. TL;DR - Patron support over the last year covered one third of all hosting costs! And this was with two additional servers being brought on and bad software on my part literally adding hundreds of dollars to the bill. Adding that thumbnail server has ultimately saved money.

So, here are the things that were accomplished since February of last year:

AnimeBracket

• New home page design with featured popular brackets
• New elimination round admin tools
• Code made PHP7 ready (even though it's running on HHVM)
• Lots of various small fixes

RedditBooru

• Entire site is SSL enabled
• Thumb generation was made its own service, massively reducing costs and adding stability
• Better image sizing for gallery pages
• Browser extension updated for Chrome/Firefox
• Lots of various fixes

Future Plans

AnimeBracket definitely has the lions share of things immediately planned. Here's what I'm thinking:

• Ant-cheating measures. Things got really bad towards the end of last year with people submitting hundreds of votes from bot accounts.
• The ability to rollback brackets to previous rounds. I would've liked to have finished this last year.
• Open up AnimeBracket to non-anime brackets by adding categories and moving to new site

And for RedditBooru:

• Mod tools. People have always been a little confused on how to get their subreddits indexed and my leaving reddit has exacerbated that a bit. Additionally, giving mods the ability to set the config options I do by hand is probably a good idea.
• The number of indexed subreddits is starting to create some UI issues, so I need to take a look at that

So, that's a look back and a peek forward. Thanks again so much for your support and I look forward to what happens in the upcoming year!

Yes, "prototypal" is a word and, no, this post has nothing to do with JavaScript or object oriented programming. Instead, it briefly touches upon the one thing I'd love to do that's not JavaScript or object oriented programming: YouTubing.

If you'd dropped the term "YouTuber" on me even a few years ago, I'd probably give you a funny look and call the notion of a career making YouTube videos dumb. But, these days, it's not only viable but getting more common. From movie critics to people who build goofy shit to folks who just test and review mouse traps, YouTube is like a television channel where anybody can have their own program without being beholden to the 23 show format of yore.

To that end, I enjoy building things and I also enjoy making videos, so this seems like a logical place to pour my talents. The , of course, is figuring out how to advertise yourself to the masses. Because, on a channel where anybody can have a show whenever they want, getting lost in the weeds of a trillion hours of content is pretty easy to do. One way to help separate yourself from the chaff is simply to have production value. God knows I love production value and criticising those things which don't have it.

During my month long stay in Japan, I actually spent a lot of time in various Doutors scribbling out ideas in a sketchpad I'd purchased. This ranged from visual designs to project ideas to show format and all sorts of nonsense. Sitting in a Google doc, I have outlined the entire first season of this show. Of course, that all is a hell of a lot easier than actually, y'know... making a show. Still, earlier this year, I filmed a "look and feel" prototype video that now brings us full circle on this post.

Will I ever get around to actually realizing this? Who knows. I'd certainly like to, but I've got another outlet to install in the garage first...

Look at that innocent seeming outlet. Sure the wall is a bit dirty, but... it's just an outlet, right? I went through quite a process to make that happen.

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