Here we go again with a needlessly long and elaborate post no one is going to read past January. It’s the retrospective for 2023, and I want as many eyes as possible to see it since I put a bit of effort into it. Last year I broke down the retrospective into 2 audio blogs with 4 separate written sections going over everything. In hindsight that was kind of weird, so I’m going to consolidate 2023 into 3 sections instead. There will be an audio blog accompanying each written portion over a span of 4 months. I will be adding new content throughout the retrospective as a response or “reaction” to what I talked about instead of dumping all the new things at very end. So, if you see a random video link or image, it’s recommended you watch or visit it first before continuing with the rest of the retrospective. As always, I highly suggest you listen to the audio blogs as they contain a lot more nuance than the written portion, because I have to keep things relatively brief to avoid walls of text for readers only.
——————— January to April ———————
January is always stressful for me because I want it to be the most auspicious time of year. Deep rooted in my extremely superstitious beliefs, I tend to view having a bad January as akin to having an upcoming bad year. So, I do my best to be as polite, careful, and thoughtful for the entire month to bank as much good karma as I can. Obviously, none of this has any scientific foundation in reality, I just wanted to share the fact that I believe this to be true nonetheless. It’s why in 2023 I had a weird January, and why I feel like I had a weird year overall because of it.
My blog technically doesn’t have a “January” posting because the retrospective acts as it every year. I started doing retrospectives back in 2020 because it was such a fascinating time and everyone was at home wanting to hear other people’s opinions about anything going on in the world. Now 3 years later I’m keeping the tradition alive since I feel it’s healthy to reflect upon what has happened recently and glean what I can from it. I can’t say it’s made me a better person, but it definitely has made me a more sympathetic one - especially to the suffering of others. I do want to say that 2023 taught me a lot on being more focused on “those affected” than “those to blame” whenever I hear news articles talking about this or that. It also reminds me that I have so many visitors from around the world on this site, and I’m extremely thankful for all of them (including you) for sparing some time out of your day to care.
Artist is Secretly Saucy
Talk about a slow start to the year! February was absolutely a slow news month. Typically, the beginning of all new year’s is pretty dry in pop culture related content. I try and make up for this by showcasing an extremely talented artist (Secretly Saucy). The slower the news month, the better the featured artist of the month is. Think of it as some form of cosmic apology for posting a lot about nothing. Although I love my man David Goggins and who doesn’t like a good deep dive YouTube video about memes; there was nothing to showcase elsewise. Ishin was also (in my humble opinion) the crappiest Yakuza game I’ve played in a while.
Inconveniently at this time, my health also starts to take a turn for the worse and will considerably get worse in the following months. February was the last time all year I felt “normal” physically. I was going to be caught off guard completely with what was about to happen to me very soon. I always feel incredibly embarrassed when I look back on what I consider to be “sub-par” blog posts over the years. It’s because I get random spikes in traffic at any time on my site, and whenever the first time someone visits - they may be greeted with an extremely underwhelming blog post which will turn them off from ever coming back.
March was a weird one for sure. Over the years I’ve encouraged people to get outside and travel (if they can) because being on the internet all day leaves an unhealthy view of the world. Ironically however, I’m no stranger to a lot of content involving traveling accidents and failures at a catastrophic level. A lot of my distant relatives work in some form or capacity in military and logistics. As you can imagine, I’ve come across a lot of personal stories thus detailing some really crazy things happening in their line of work.
None the less it’s impossible to state how beautiful the world can be if you can get out there away from the major cities and explore some truly jaw dropping places. Make no mistake these are indeed tourist traps in themselves; but at least it’s going to local economies rather than nameless corporations. I rather have some grandma in Switzerland counting all the dollars she took off a dumb tourist (me); than anyone in a suit far removed from nature.
So, this is the month where things start going bad to worse for me health wise. I start to notice frequent bouts of me running out of breath in the middle of the day without any real explanation. I also start having random pains shoot across my stomach and my heart rate (resting) on average has increased by 10bpm. It’s alarming, and I eventually see a doctor to run some blood tests. Ironically this is not the worst month (since things have just started to turn really bad), but it’s a sign of things to come. I slowly start to ween off my usual exercise routine and begin to tone things down a lot. Eerily, I begin to revisit old hobbies of mine I haven’t done in ages including fishkeeping and collecting figures. I think I subconsciously knew that I was going to be indoors and taking things slow for the foreseeable future.
Artist is Eversor
Whenever things start to slow down, I start to do the equivalent of a “clip show” in which I go back in time and recommend things I’ve spoken of in the past. With the few metrics I actually can access about my site, most folks visit a page once or twice in their life before moving on and never going back. So, it stands to reason that I can actually dig up some old stuff and post it again without many folks noticing at all. With that being said, the only real important update in April was the mention of the game Princess & Conquest. It’s one of the better indie titles developed in the last few years that keeps getting updates and keeps adding content with all the spirit of the original world building in mind. It’s great stuff, and much more in-depth than meets the eye at first glance.
At this point in time, I’ve been diagnosed with a potential case of AMS (abdominal tear). Problem is that my doctor (at the time - I’ve changed since) didn’t want to give me a CT / MRI test due to concerns of unnecessary radiation exposure. He’s just going by his instincts. He tells me to see a GI doctor just in case and maybe a cardiologist (because of the abnormal heart rate). I can’t tell you how frustrated I am at this point both because of the symptoms (a lot of pain) and the fact that even though I have pretty fancy insurance; the doctor that I have is kind apathetic. I’ve up to this point have been seeing him for over 5 years consecutively. Coincidentally, it will be the last time I visit him this year and potentially ever. I make appointments to see both a GI and cardiologist at this point. They each can see me at the end of June (me making the appointment at the end of March by the way). Fun times ahead.
——————— May to August ———————
Artist is Viejillox
If February was my crappiest month, May might be one of my best of 2023. I was on a roll this month with awesome content overall, and still think anyone visiting this site for the first time should re-check out May’s blog post. During this month I had stumbled upon the gigantic video format known as the “iceberg”, which dives deep into any topic from top to bottom. I came across the ATI site which is a source of information for a lot of “creepy tubers” doing videos. And I had two extremely talented artists to showcase that month, including two of my favorites of all time Viejillox and 4riasensei.
One important thing I highlight in May is the importance of supporting and using FOSS (free and open source software) applications if they are available. FOSS software is always generally made with the user experience in mind, and never have any major drawbacks other than a little bit of a learning curve to get over initially. Blinue/Magpie is a pretty niche type of FOSS, but it’s useful to have in your toolbelt if you happen to play retro based window games or even modern games if you need to upscale. It even works with some video players as well, giving you better fidelity than “stretch” rendering which can be sloppy.
Remember the entire sub-plot for 2023 is my gradually worsening health condition. I get blindsided (pun-intended) when I suddenly for no reason whatsoever out of the blue, loose vision in my right eye for two days in May. My vision will suffer in my right eye for the upcoming months all the way until October when it finally recovers a bit; but May and June are the worst of it. I am diagnosed with RVO from my retinal surgeon, and thankfully I don’t have to operate on my eye… for now. The surgeon states that if things get worse in the year (spoiler: it doesn’t) then we may have to go in. All of this is happening while I’m partially crippled by my AMS I mentioned in April.
June was a weird rambling blog. During this time, drama was making the rounds with folks in pop culture. Allegedly AI art was going to be the “wave of the future” and apparently a lot of artists took issue with it. I was interested in hearing what both sides had to say, and unfortunately it wasn’t pretty. I’m not going to continue further with my commentary, and everything I said in June still stands. All I have to say is that AI isn’t the boogeyman people make it out to be, and it’s going to be a long time before it replaces actual artists in any capacity. A lot more nuance in the audio blog for this section.
So, the final piece of the puzzle shows itself in June regarding my health conditions. I find out that on top of AMS and RVO, I also have Costochondritis. You can imagine I’m not in a good place physically or mentally at this point. I do my best to soldier on and get better, but it’s going to be a long (and expensive) process. I learn more about the US healthcare system this year than I ever had up until this point. Jokingly with all my friends and loved ones, I officially declare 2023 the year of the medical deductible. Physical rehabilitation and treatment begin in earnest for all three conditions.
Things are pretty mundane in July as I’m too medicated and tired to really find anything groundbreaking to post. July is when I begin my search for a lot of things off the beaten path because I have a lot of time on the computer since I need to take things easy. I begin to post spicier stuff on my mini news section (which in 2024 will be removed - more on that later) and try to encourage people to visit it. For my normies, I start to link extremely long videos in hopes that they enjoy (and get used to) the long form content I start to watch myself. July also of course is the beginning of summer for most folks here in the Nothern hemisphere, so I imagine folks could care less about what I’m really posting and are probably more outside than usual. If there’s anything truly interesting in the entire month of July, it’s the mention of an application that allows you to use videos as wallpaper for your phone. Hence why you see the lovely girl above, and she’s actually my current home screen mascot.
We close off this section with August and an android game recommendation in the form of Aeon Fantasy. If you didn’t visit the mini news section, you would have no clue it existed. AF is probably one of the better games of 2023 to come out and it is allegedly getting a global release (censored and uncensored) sometime in 2024. As of right now the game’s servers are CN/TW based and there’s no real reliable way to purchase items without some grey market involvement. During this time, I experiment with posting “image links” which are images with the link typed on them. My relationship with Squarespace has been nothing but spectacular and I want to stay in their good graces by not violating their TOS. So, with that in mind I have to make sure any links to clearly adult orientated sites cannot be hot linked (clickable) on my site. AF doesn’t have any wiki or official Discord, so keep that in mind if you play it you’re strictly on your own.
——————— September to December ———————
September is a rather uplifting month for a variety of reasons. I revisit one of my all-time favorite YouTuber Whang! and recommend one of videos as I always do. As a matter of fact, I’m posting another one now for this retrospective above. Whang is literally the embodiment of me in an alternate universe where I actually have talent and resources to run a channel like his. If you’ve been living under a rock for a while and haven’t seen one of his videos, I highly suggest you do. He’ll probably be back in 2024 as well. Not much else happens on the main blog for September, but over on the mini-news site I let folks know that my YouTube channel itself starts to experience weird behavior in the form of mysterious deleted posts. In hindsight, at this time I believe YouTube starts to silently roll-out its new AI algorithm to detect and delete content. A few months later they make it known to the public why they’re doing it, but back in September it was really only known to content creators on the platform. In protest I post a bunch of pictures that were rejected in my weekly posts as well as retroactively deleted. Little would I know later on down the road it would bite me in the ass harder. Thank god for Squarespace.
Artist is Krokobyaka
Since March at this point, I’ve been pretty miserable in terms of my physical health. Repeated doctor appointments, and an unnerving sense of dread every day when I wake up wondering if I’m mostly staying in bed today. By the end of September, my RVO is cleared up and I’m discharged from my specialist as “recovering”. That means I no longer need to see him and we’re just going to monitor the situation annually. My vision returns in my right eye about 85% and I get used the slight impairment. That leaves my AMS and Costochondritis to deal with until the end of the year. Things are slowly getting better, but it’s an extremely slow healing process. Starfield gets released by the way and I finish the game in like 3 days straight. It’s horribly disappointing as well.
October was a strange month, because there was a lot of controversy making the rounds from unusual places. Typically, I try to stay upbeat and talk about things rather uplifting and useful to anyone that visits, but it was hard to ignore some of the news. On the (somewhat) mainstream side of things we had the entire Unity debacle which ultimately ended up having the CEO of the company step down a few weeks later. But on the fringe side of things, we had stories like complete human trash making the rounds in Japan, as well as large YouTube channels being called out for various things. It also didn’t help when another YouTube influencer double standard goes largely unpunished once more. For the only story I really had any real interest in, Vyris (indie Vtuber) does a pretty fun summary of the aftermath in her video above. I also recommend you watch her 2-part series on Sexualization in video games as it’s refreshing to hear a woman’s point of view on the topic that actually engages in the content as well. My wife literally shares the same exact opinions (with Vyris), so it was nice to hear a kindred spirit in video form.
Artist is 柾見ちえ (masamichie)
By the time October ends, there is light at the end of the tunnel. My strength slowly starts to return, and my day-to-day activities are not as hard to get through as they have been for the past few months. I have a newfound appreciation for all the little things people do for one another on a day-to-day basis, and how much of a struggle it can be to feel unappreciated when you do something for someone. I realize that the last 5 years of physical training have essentially been washed away, and I make peace with it now moving forward.
It goes without saying November was a shit show for normies and cave dwellers in terms of dealing with YouTube. I promised myself I wouldn’t rant about YT this year because I didn’t want the site to focus on my problems and just share content with all of you. Ironically, YT removed the context of this being a “me” problem and became everyone’s problem overnight. Since my recommendations made in November are still valid, I highly suggest you revisit the blog to see what tools you can use to bypass the absolutely stupid decisions made by YouTube in the past few months. Thankfully A LOT of alternatives have popped up since I posted that blog, and you have more options now at your exposure.
Somehow my channel still exists in this universe and I’m not sure what unknown pact I made with an Eldrich god was signed. This brings up the topic of why I created the Mini-news section of my site, and to a lesser degree the Weekend Synthwave portion as well. My goal was to keep my channel somewhat alive with community posts over the last year so that people could still discover my site and my subscribers could have something to look forward to (even if it wasn’t a video). With the way things are now, I think I might just have to keep the community section alive at a bare minimum and try to increase posts in general over here. To that end I personally believe it’s time to retire both the mini-news section and weekend synthwave in favor of something new. I’ll try and post once a week to this new yet-to-be-named part of my site so that it can drive more traffic over.
Artist is Hido
Alas we come to the end of the retrospective and some overall thoughts to close out the year. For the rather inconsequential news, I want to let everyone know that I never actually quit playing Nikke. My wife enjoys the game, and we actually have an account that we play together on. Whenever she doesn’t want to grind an event or is busy, I take over for her. To avoid some cryptic possibility of being banned somehow, we make sure to keep the game only installed on two devices of hers and never sign in or out unless necessary. In other words, I’m still playing the game sporadically on her PC or iPad. Thus, I still am involved in the game, just not super serious enough to really talk about it. Outside of Aeon Fantasy and Haze Reverb, there weren’t a lot of gacha games worth mentioning this year (that are of my tastes) elsewise. I have a few rants to get off my chest too about releases this year, but I’ll save that for the audio portion.
During mid-December, The Proper People (awesome guys) released an urbex video that really hit home with me. I grew up in the exact same era that offices shown in the video existed, and my father (working in real estate) had similar places he brought me to. In other words, a lot of the layouts, design, furniture, and atmosphere were identical to the ones I use to visit as a kid. Although not as grandiose as the TRW building, my dad’s workplace had all the similar trappings - and it was a shot right down memory lane for me. Nostalgia hit hard for me in 2023 because I had a lot of time on my hands to reflect upon my life up to this point. It pains me to realize that 20 years ago to the day, I was some starry eye kid sitting in a classroom in college trying to stay awake.
Probably one of the best videos made on “life advice” for 2023 goes to YouTuber exurb2a. If there’s one thing I want to clarify with anyone visiting my site; I never believe romantic escapism is healthy. It’s good to unwind, decompress, and take stock of your surroundings when appropriate in life. It’s very good to minimize your stress and find peace when you can. But these things should not be mistaken for shirking your responsibilities or substituting movement for action. Hobbies are meant to further enrich someone who is fulfilled and secure for example. They are not meant to be a replacement for a person’s ideology or identity. So many I’ve seen attach themselves to an idea not of their own, or a cause not of their creation. That’s when emotion takes over logic, and “the cause” supersedes “the self”. At the end of the day when you rest your head to sleep, ask yourself what you accomplished today and not what you did. More importantly, what was done for whom and why. If things don’t make sense, or you don’t like the answer - then change. We’ve just begun a new year, might as well make the best of it.
This ends the 2023 retrospective! I hope you enjoyed the lengthy read and content. I will be removing both the mini news section and weekend synthwave on the site starting February 1st, 2024. I will adding a weekly update section that will encompass both instead to make things clearer. I also will probably be posting less on YouTube than I already am and will be directly folks over there to the new section on the site. Finally, I do have plans to run another Kickstarter later in the year so that I can upload videos again, but we’ll see how it goes. Everything said and done, let’s hope 2024 is a productive year for both of us!