Today marks the first anniversary of this website! Well, sort of. More accurately, this is the one year anniversary of me writing my first article and starting to set up the HTML of what would become this site, as I wasn’t able to publish it until several months later. In any case, I figured I’d use this milestone to reflect on the site in addition to 2025 as a whole since it’s conveniently positioned just a few days away from New Years.
Even before December 2024, I’d been thinking about creating a website for a long time. I was tired of social media’s toxicity and had deleted all my accounts, but I still wanted a space where I could document my thoughts. However despite really liking the indie web aesthetic, I was hesitant to properly start as I have a long history of coming up with ambitious coding projects only for them to fall through when the going gets tough (that’s what happened to the TI-84+ Assembly thing, I was in over my head and found out the hard way that ASM is not for me). The impetus that got me to cross the gap from wanting a website to actually making one was watching Digimon Tamers. I tried it essentially on a whim because I wanted to give Digimon an honest chance after writing the franchise off as a Pokemon ripoff for most of my life, and its story / characters ended up gripping me like a vice. I was completely blown away by its quality. After finishing, I decided to start a media log so I could preserve my thoughts on it as well as my thoughts on any future shows I watched, which provided the foundation the rest of the site would be built on.
In the following months, I continued writing reviews of media I consumed as well as “slice of life” blog entries. The layout through January 2025 into February was incredibly basic. Just a handful of pages in pure HTML that listed the links to the articles (that consisted of black text on a white background with an absolute minimum of customization). As winter wore on though, I slowly started implementing basic CSS, with the layout getting gradual updates and changes over the next few months. The big change occurred sometime around late spring or summer (I don’t remember exactly when). I wanted a genuine theme instead of continuing with an updated version of the basic layout I’d started with, and I ultimately settled on making the site look like a journal, as I figured the whole thing was my metaphorical online journal, which is the look I’ve stuck with since.
A year on, I’m glad I created and stuck with this site. It feels immensely satisfying having an online space that’s 100% my own. I use Google and I’ll admit its automatic AI search helped me resolve some CSS confusion when I was trying to create the journal theme, but all the text is purely from my brain, and I feel proud thinking about how much snazzier everything looks compared to the beginning. It’s also gotten me a ton of writing practice, and I now have permanent records of my thoughts on any piece of media I’ve consumed throughout this year (or at least the vast majority, there were a few I didn’t write articles about due to various reasons).
On 2025 more broadly, it’s been a mixed bag. I was very into “new year, new me” at the start, but most of my personal issues are still present. I made meaningful progress towards my New Years resolutions, but I didn’t fully achieve them, nor was I as consistent as I wanted to be. A lot also happened in my personal life. In January, I was a 17 year old high school student living at home, while I’m now an 18 year old college student who lives on campus most of the time. It’s exciting to be in this new stage of life, but it also feels bittersweet knowing that I’ll never ever be a high schooler or child again. I’ll never have another prom, graduation, or senior photo. Those doors are now permanently closed, and I have no choice but to move on into the future. In that spirit, I want to try and live more in the moment heading into 2026. I still want to become a better artist, Spanish speaker, and lose more weight, but I want to go about it in a more chill way rather than beat myself up every time I’m not absolutely perfect. In addition, I want to massively enhance the site. I want to add an RSS feed, finish remodeling the category pages so they look polished like the media log’s, start posting some projects and art, and hopefully get more eyes on it as well (I currently only have ~3500 views on something I’ve easily put 30+ hours of work into sadface).
That’s about all I have for now, 2025 has been messy and stressful, but I’ve learned a lot of lessons as well. Hopefully things go a little smoother in 2026!