Ah, Sans the skeleton. Everyone’s favourite character. Funny bone man makes jokes, breaks fourth wall, and fights you. There’s countless fanart, AUs, a literal universe of content around him. Why does the internet love him? There’ve already been several character analyses of him, but I’ll attempt my own; I haven’t talked a lot about Undertale on the Undertale soundtrack, so I’m doing that justice now.
When the player first meets Sans the skeleton, he is presented as a typical prankster and comic. Your first interaction with him is literally one of his pranks. When you solve his and Papyrus’s puzzles, he’s just a lazy guy. When you enter their house, he doesn’t feed his rock, doesn’t pick up his sock, and doesn’t do anything else that rhymes with those words.
However, slowly, throughout the rest of the game, he starts showing more and more mysterious behaviours. The only difference between him and you in 9th grade is that he actually pulls off being funny and mysterious. He gets close to the game’s lore with Flowey, tells you about the ‘ in ‘dog, and most importantly, he talks about his promise to Toriel about you.
And of course, his boss fight in the Genocide route. An all-out battle where he reveals all the lore. Even if everyone focuses on getting 27 no-hit itemless runs in a row, there is a truckload of information about the lore of the game and his role in all of it.
I think he’s such a popular and memorable character for almost everyone because he defies a common character trope, that being a funny albeit lazy jokester, where Sans also is a lot more unassuming than one would think. However, I think almost every major character in Undertale follows this inversion; Undertale is meant to be a game of subversions, after all. Alphys is portrayed as the smark geek type; only to be shown to have anxiety and depression. Asgore is the mighty and powerful king, shown in his physical structure, only to have several character flaws. Why I think Sans stands out even more is because he’s memable, he’s relatable, he’s meant for the internet, in a way. Him, the unassuming and naive person who turns out to be far from it, contrasted with Papyrus… who’s just unassuming and naive. Sans is the perfect fit for the chaotic and random nature of the internet, and specifically Undertale fans. Him being the poster child of Undertale, the most recognisable, is both the cause and the effect. That’s why Sans is everywhere in the community.
I don’t really want ‘See you next week’ to become a tagline so I’m just leaving this blank
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You look around at your dimly lit room, as pale ribbons of moonlight stream through your blinds. As your eyes adjust to the darkness, you can slowly begin to make out the wooden corners of your bed frame, then your plushies, most of which you’ve had since childhood. Then, your cluttered desk across the room, with pencils and papers still strewn across it, a project you were going to finish tomorrow. You see posters hanging on the left wall your bed is pressed against, surrounding your window… A clock hangs on the far wall, its rhythmic ticking comforting you, even if it’s too dark to make out what time it is.
Your eyes and mind are still very much groggy, having just woken up in the middle of the night. As you regain your senses, you realise what day it is. It’s the 20th of June. Tomorrow (or today?) you have that party to attend, and then all those summer plans and projects still to come… You prop yourself up and try to look out the window to get a better sense of how late at night or early in the morning it is. The dim moonlight is a fair bit brighter than your room now, but your eyes quickly adapt.
Through the slits of your blinds, you can see outside, a world beyond your bedroom. Wanting to see more, you lift the blinds up and stick your head under them, pressing your cheek against the cool glass. The driveway and side garden is on your front, with a chipped fence dividing your house from your neighbour’s behind that. On the left, if you crane your head, you can see a good chunk of your small street, separated but not too far from the hustle and bustle of the main road. A grand orange tree looms over the sidewalk, the trunk twisting and snaking its way from your neighbour’s yard. You remember fondly when you and your friends would gather under that same tree and try to jump and grab oranges - only to come up a few inches short every time, before the neighbour saw what you were doing and grabbed them for you themself.
You open the window. Immediately, a rush of cool air blows past you and mixes with the lukewarm air in your bedroom. Summers here were quite hot, as it were. The gust bites at your nose and brings a few tears to your eyes, but you welcome it nonetheless. A flurry of sound enters your ear. The ambient sounds of the night surround you. The sounds of crickets cricketing, the rustling of leaves by some late night birds, and the hum of the city, distant but persistent.
A pickup truck enters the street, rumbling as it drives over the rocky road, the tools left in the back clattering. Its headlights illuminate large swaths of what’s ahead, bathing a small sliver of the world in light and colour. You recognise the truck as your neighbour’s from across the street. You remember when he used to drive the neighbour’s kids with his own to the park. Its gravelly rumble gets louder as it enters your view, before slowly fading as it slips from your sight and into the darkness of the night. A few seconds later, you can hear the sound of the truck engine winding down and the jangle of keys before that too fades away.
Suddenly, a dog, maybe one street down, maybe ten, howls. A lone, piercing howl echoes throughout the city, dimming out every other sound by comparison. The dog howls again, and again. Then, another dog joins in, this one sounding even further away somehow. Then another. And another. Until seemingly every dog in the city is howling and barking and yelping together, forming a chorus of howls in the night. And while you might have considered this a cacophony during the day, now, in the middle of night, it seems almost harmonic. So you embrace it. For about half a minute, you sit there, looking outside while the dogs continue their version of a lullaby. As you keep looking outside, you can notice so many more things that you haven’t paid attention to normally. Little droplets of dew on flowers and plants, one uneven plank in your neighbour’s fence, and most of all… stars. Not just the one or two you would see when the sun set, but dozens of stars, littering the sky and shining down on your street. You haven’t seen this many stars since moving to the city, but now, in the dead of night, when every light is off, you finally can.
Eventually, after the last dog had uttered their last howl and fell back asleep and silence returned to the night air, you draw your head back from the open window, leaving the nighttime world behind in favour of returning to your room and your bed. Looking around your room again in the slightly brighter blue glow coming from outside, you see your half-finished project still waiting for you on your desk. Your calendar with many dates circled and things written in red marker. The clock, which you could now barely make out to say 4:15. You think about all these things you have ahead of you, the things you are yet to do in the days, months, and indeed years to come. And as you lie down, the distant sounds of commotion and the city starting up for another day faintly entering your room, you think to yourself. Maybe all that can wait. Maybe the duties and events and responsibilities can wait for tomorrow. Maybe I can look outside the window just a bit more.
And so you do.
————
This is the beginning of the end of a long journey. 75% of the way through gives some sort of imminence, but then I realised that we have an entire 6 months left to our journey. So, in some ways, we still have a lot left to go. So I just want to reflect on what has happened since the beginning, and what’s left. I’ve been through a birthday, a car crash, two years of school, and a lot of shenanigans. I’ve also learned the basics of this whole Youtube thing, gotten the hang of things like Davinci Resolve, After Effects, and Premiere Pro, and learned more about myself and what I like and want to do, and really about what this is all about. But, there’s still a lot left to go, in the next 6 months and after. I’ve got another year of school in this journey, then college, then a job… Even though this past year and a half has felt like ages for me, I still have, like, 80 something percent of my life left to live. And honestly? I think that’s enough.
I am genuinely a lot more confident about my life and where I’m going, not just because of how much I’ve improved by now, but how much I can improve and how much determination I have to keep improving. Yep, it all comes back to determination.
A few days ago, on Summer Solstice (Oneshot reference?) I played Firewatch. I bought it during the Steam spring sale and never played it, until I realised I could save it for the first day of summer. Even though I am definitely no stranger to the game (I watched Markiplier’s playthrough… then Jack’s… then everyone else’s… the the theories and reviews)... when I played it, it was still really refreshing and… just amazing, really. It’s a wonderful game; I really do recommend everyone to play it. I just finished Day 1 and am gonna play it on and off throughout the summer.
Another thing I started is drawing every day. As you know, I am not a very good artist, or even a good artist, or even an artist. Which is weird, because most of my friends are artists, and also because most of the fandoms I’m in are like, mostly artists. Games like Pressure have tons of fanart, don’t get me started on how many Murderdrones OCs I see when scrolling Tumblr, and EPIC the musical literally depends on animators to make animatics to bring the story to life. So… yeah, I feel like a bit of an outlier not knowing how to draw. So, starting earlier this week, I started drawing every day. The first day, I binged beginner drawing guides and tips for about an hour while drawing and redrawing the same damn circle, before finally deciding to keep it for once and starting to draw my own face. At first, it felt really weird, but as I kept adding details and refining it I got into the flow pretty well. It took me about another hour to finish the drawing and to stop changing little things every time I said it was ‘done’, but I think the end result looked pretty okay with where I’m at in art. It still has that little bit of uncanny to it, like one of those Greek statues you see at a museum (the best and weirdly accurate way to describe how it looked).
The second day, I drew one of my many OCs (all of which have even either been in my head or written in stories). Their name is Coda. They’re an astronaut robot… guy, and they are my oldest OC. The mechanical bits were both easier and harder to draw (somehow) than what I did the previous day, but it ended up working out. I also… drew a hand. A single hand. And that took more time than drawing the face somehow. Hands… I can tell they’re going to be a problem. However, I think another problem of mine is that I like to do things in one or two takes. This entire entry, including the story, is all written in one take, no editing for the most part. When I’m writing a longer and more complicated story, I tend to make a storyboard first before going in and writing bits and doing a second pass and fixing things, but for most things a single take works. And that’s a problem for at, where you have to have a basic structure before starting to add anything.
Anyway, that’s where I’m at today. Pretty good, but I still have a lot to do. And I have the determination to do it. Once again, thank you for reading this whenever and wherever you are, whether you’ve been here the whole time or it’s your first entry. Even though we might never see each other again, even though we don’t know each other, I’ll be with you for 26 more weeks. Happy summer solstice, happy summer, and remember…
This is the end of a long journey. For two years of my life, every week, I wrote a journal entry, about myself, Undertale, and the world, and posted it online for others to see.
I can't believe we're already at the end. Even though it was very awkward at first (and still is sometimes), I always made time in my week, no matter what I was doing, to write for this little journal, whether it was ten minutes or two hours. ...Except for entry #11, we don't talk about that one. I revealed a lot more than I ever wanted to over these two years, but there's still so much more that I want to say. I want to touch on a few things, but let me start by doing what I do every entry and telling you how my week went.
The less important thing, somehow, is me getting a new 3x3 PB single a few hours ago, actually. This was the scramble: D R F2 U D' F U R U2 F L2 U2 F L2 B2 R2 L2 B D2 Amazing cross, easy F2L, and a PLL skip. And the time was 13.37 to boot! I realise that I could've done it much better, but with a time of 13.37 I feel like it was destined, so I'm actually very content with this. I'll beat it in due time anyway.
Yesterday I walked a marathon. I've been planning this for a few weeks now, looking at the terrain, how many Geocaches there were, how many cities I would visit, everything. The idea is that it's 26.2 miles for 2026. I did this to prove myself, and also to be one step closer to one of my big goals in life - to run a marathon. This one was purely walking, and I managed it in a time of 8 hours, 44 minutes, and 13 seconds. It was, by far, the hardest physical challenge I've ever been through. The first 8 miles or so felt easy enough, by 15 miles I had walked further than any other journey I've been on, and seeing how far I was from my house, I really wanted to quit. But slowly and surely, over the next 11 miles after that, I made it back home and saw some amazing holiday lights. It might seem pointless, but the whole point, as I saw it, was to just see what I can do, push myself to the absolute limit. And I think I did it. And along the way, I saw hundreds of people, whether they were just a stranger walking past, the cashier at the In-N-Out, or a man at a golf course who showed me where the water was. Each and every one of them saw me with kindness and compassion. I only told one person, the man at the golf course, what I was doing that day, but even with the hundred other people who saw me as a complete stranger they'll see once in their life, they chose empathy. I was on a bus to get to my starting point for the marathon, and along the way, the lady sitting behind me pulled out a roll of toilet paper and gave me a bunch. She called it 'stranger love'. I was a bit confused at what kind of message she was trying to send, but found it kind anyway. The man at the golf course, when I told him what I was doing, wished me all the luck he had. That night, right after I finished the marathon and was dying to get home, a woman stopped me on the street and asked me to help her. She had a large pole with a sale banner stuck in the dirt and wanted to get it out. I, through my tiredness and several minutes of cooperation, eventually got it out, and she was unbelievably happy about it. Through the whole ordeal, she was calling me 'mijo', which I don't know if that's exclusive to your own hijos but made me feel warm inside nonetheless.
The first thing I wanted to talk about today is sonder. Sonder is 'the profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passing in the street, has a life as complex as one's own, which they are constantly living despite one's personal lack of awareness of it.' Every time you visit a mall, every time you're stuck in traffic, every time you're on a plane looking down at the city and see millions of little lights, you're seeing millions of humans with stories as deep and profound as your own. Every single one of those apartment lights or cars or faces has their own life with their own pride and joys, their own firsts, their own tragic losses, and their own last moments. I think it's both wonderful and sad that we can have so many stories being told at the same time, but are unable to listen to all of them. Moments when I realise this suddenly give me so much clarity about life and humanity, I want to stay in that moment all the time. They make me feel so close yet so far to the rest of humanity, a tangled web of people and ideas all in the center of their own universe, connecting in ways we were lucky to see. A few weeks ago, I locked myself in the bathroom, turned off the lights, and just started... crying. Crying for humanity, crying for everything happening around the world at the time. I was crying for families being reunited and other families spending their last moments with someone. I was crying for war and peace and how eight billion of us are telling stories on the same planet. I was crying for myself, for my family, for the city, for all of humanity. And it felt... really good. I think if everyone cried every now and then, not because of a break up or death but just to cry, the world would be a lot more understanding. Sonder is such a feeling that I can't even begin to describe how it makes me feel. ...So I'll stop. Try for yourself. Look outside the window. Every building, every car, every tree, every star in the sky... it all means something.
I want to try and be vulnerable again and talk about my greatest fears. As a kid, I was scared of a lot of the 'normal' things to be scared of - the dark, spiders, Barney, etc. And while I've mostly gotten over them, there's a new fear that I think is now worse than all of them. It's not death, or clowns, or grass. It's forgetting, and being forgotten. Dementia strikes me as absolutely terrifying. To me, it looks like slowly losing everything you know and love, until everything becomes unrecognisable and you're left with yourself, until you lose that too. It's the slowest of deaths, killing someone in months or years. And once it's almost over, what do you have? Nothing, really. It's like you're back to being a baby, nobody can understand you and you can't understand anybody. The alternative is worse, understanding everything perfectly but not being able to say anything back... I mean it with all sincerity that I'd rather be stabbed a thousand times, burned at the stake, drowned, anything other than getting dementia.
And my other fear, what happens after you die. How quickly will I be forgotten? Everyone, no matter if you're the most famous singer or president or if you're Jesus of Nazareth himself, you will be forgotten, in a thousand, a million, or a billion years. And that's scary. I want to actually have done something in the short time I have, I want to make sure people know the things I have done this life. And hell, it's working. You're reading this. You're probably miles apart in space and months or years ahead in time, but you chose to stop here and see what a random 16 year old in California has to say about life and death and his hopes and dreams. Being forgotten is the ultimate death - after it, it's the exact same as if you never existed. You become a silhouette when your body goes, and when all memory of you goes, night comes and you join the billions of other silhouettes in a sea of lost identity. I think, deep down, we're all scared. As a species, we humans are so scared of dying and what happens after that we invented religion. We invented things like heaven to comfort us, a man-made belief that everything will be alright and they will take you home. We invent things like reincarnation to tell ourselves that there is more you can do and that you should be kind to everyone because they might just be yourself in a few lives. But, deep down, even though I'm religious, I'm pretty sure it's all a lie we made, because we're scared. We all have a fear of dying, it's built into our genes. It's just that we got too smart and started wondering what happened after.
Morality exists outside of religion, hell, animals have morals when they help members of their own or a different species. But what makes humans different then? Is it our intelligence? Dolphins, monkeys, even birds have similar intelligences in certain areas. Is it using tools? Nope, animals have us there too. No, what I really think separates us humans from animals is one ability. It's our ability to do useless things.
Every animal has gone through tens of millions of years of evolution, picking out the most valuable traits in an organism and helping them pass on their genes to ensure that helpful mutation spreads. And yet, mankind has come in in the last 15 thousand years and has, in the blink of an eye, invented farming, created civilizations, connected the entire world, altered the nature of his world, and very well has the chance to end it too. 15000 years is an eternity, but a short one, compared to the billions of years Earth has existed for. Now, how does doing useless things separate us from animals? Back in the cavemen days, we were very much still animals, hunting and killing and protecting the family to pass on genes, acting on pure animal instinct. But now, now we've dedicated entire industries to useless things. For example, the study of physics. How does knowing how the universe works and breaking it down into fundamental atoms help us live longer? It doesn't, we're just curious. How does spending millions of dollars, hiring actors and editors, and releasing a movie help us live longer? It doesn't, we're just creative. How does adventuring into jungles and ice caps help us live longer? It doesn't, we're just courageous. How does waging war, doomscrolling, going on a cruise, and stepping on the moon help us, individually or as a society, live longer? It doesn't, we're just full of love, hatred, greed, boredom, and a desire to do something with the time we have. But hey, maybe it's not so useless after all. Researching fundamental particles can help us find a breakthrough in science, technology, health, and maybe can help us live longer after all. Going to the movies makes us feel happy, helps us bond with family or a partner, and maybe can help us live longer. Exploring remote corners of the world can help us find new plants and animals and maybe can help us live longer. And it'll get clicks on Youtube.
And this isn't a bad thing. This is what sets us apart, the fact that we no longer have to kill or be killed, the fact that 99% of our population isn't farming or hunting and the rest of us can live a life better than our grandfathers, who lived a life better than theirs. Maybe we're not progressing in evolution's eyes, but we certainly are in our own eyes. And maybe that applies to you too. The fact that you're here, the fact that you are born in this time and age, it all means something. You weren't born with a purpose, but you were born to find that purpose and make it whatever you want.
In summary, life maybe doesn't suck, but we're all gonna die. I hope after reading this, you can feel some levity - after all, if I only made you sad I'd have to balance it out with some amount of happiness - or some other bizarre mix of emotions that makes us human, and I hope it stays with you and appears whenever you need it. Take this token of appreciation from a stranger you'll never meet again, or see in person, or even know the real name of. Humans are pretty cool, actually. And, no matter when you're reading this, have a great day, week, year, and life, and
Happy late Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa, Festivus… and anything else you celebrate! I bought myself five entire cubes (and one lube) from TheCubicle (All of my orders have been from them so far), a 4x4 (I already had one, but it was in pretty bad shape, as in, two of the corners are broken and fall out every solve bad shape), a 7x7, a Megaminx, a Square-1, and a Mirror Cube. Oh, and some Silk. All of the puzzles were in the $10-$20 range (with the mirror cube being $5 thrown in last minute purely to get free shipping) because I’m not exactly going to use up all of the benefits the flagship cubes give (read: I’m not that good). Hell, I’m still using my non-magnetic 3x3 as a main. It’s first on the chopping block to be replaced, though. More about cubes later. The best thing I got this year was a certain game… A game I’ve been wanting to play for a very long time. As in, a very long time. ;)
Anyway, I’m going to write about what I did this year in this entry instead of next entry because then I’ll probably wax poetic about life and stuff. The two big things that happened to me this year were me really picking up Geocaching - this time last year I only had ten finds, now I have two hundred and thirty, and restarting cubing. Before this year, I only had a Rubik’s brand cube, a broken 4x4, a surprisingly-still-functional 2x2, a pyraminx held together by sheer hope, and a 2x2x3… Now I’m pushing 20 cubes. (two were gifts, one was a prize my friend got from sitting through the dentist, and the other is The Orb.) I’d be very surprised if I drop any of these hobbies in the next decade, they’re not leaving far as I can tell.
Also, since you may have put this together by reading the last entry (which I didn’t mean to make sound so much like a rant), I just turned 16! Which is great, because 16 is my favourite number, so this is bound to be my best year yet, right…? Anyway, as always, my birthday party was lumped in with Christmas… the good news is that I get straight money instead of gifts, which I find much more convenient… the bad news is that most of that money ($500 [it’s a big family and I just happened to be the youngest in the entire family so I’m basically the youngest sibling for the entire family], mind you, no laughing matter) is going towards my college fund… the good news is that, in college, I’m in a whole different place and I can find way more Geocaches.
god first thing I’m gonna do when I get a car is drive it to find more Geocaches
Anyway, moving on to… conlanging?! I haven’t heard that name in ages… My first conlang that I teased but never really mentioned is kinda dead now. In-world, it’s supposed to be an equivalent of some niche, internet-lang about the size of Toki Pona today, so it’s a bit of an IAL and an artlang and everything combined since I can’t make my damn mind up. The hard part was sourcing words from around the world, in a way that languages with more speakers would have more words in my conlang. That got hard very fast. Anyway, now that I’m trying to build a world around the Minecraft server (which is, unfortunately dead at this point), I want to make a more naturalistic conlang, and, like I said, want to really simulate the evolution of it. Wow, I really am surprised I’m not autistic.
By the way, speaking of the Minecraft server, for years now that was played on Education Edition on the laptops (thank god not Chromebooks) we could use at lunch. Now, turns out, you can’t load an Education Edition world into Bedrock Edition, unless you fiddle with the NBT data. …I was never able to find out how to do this. UNTIL NOW!!! That’s right, the server’s in actual Minecraft now, now we can download all the mods we want!!! Except… there is this charm about it. Two years without any shaders, modpacks, datapacks, textures, anything, really. It’s the purest of vanilla servers there is out there, probably. And never once did I budge and type a single command… even when my friends were literally on their knees begging me. Which I am proud of, it was very funny to see them like that. Y’know, now that I’ve sunk more hours into this server than my main survival world, I might as well just make this my forever world. Like what Dan’s doing now!
About that big project I was talking about... yeah it's not happening. I was planning to make a '2025 in X minutes' but it just didn't feel fun to work on. Funny thing is, I tried to make one last year, but that fell through as well, so I started work early in January so I'd be ahead... And then didn't touch it for 11 months. It's kinda been a weight on my shoulders, having do to the hard work of putting it off to the next day and convincing myself that I could still have it done in time, so I'm just dropping the act here. Anyway, I released a video with, in my opinion, a killer thumbnail, but it's basically just the junk drawer with all the projects I scrapped this year. God it feels so much better to have that done in some shape. ...Maybe 2026?
Well, now that this journey is coming to an end, I suddenly realise that there is, in fact, a lot more that I want to tell y’all. So lemme just… where is it… aha!
Welcome back to Underrated Roblox Games 2! Where I give you, you guessed it, some niche, underrated Roblox games. The cutoff, as always, is 500 concurrent players or below. Now, without further ado…
Sushi Gambit
‘September 4th, 1992. You're cursed to run a sushi shop nearing bankruptcy with up to 6 other eternally tortured souls; with the goal of staying in business for 14 days to be freed. Times get tough, so you may need to resort to less ethical food sources...’
Yep it's murder! :D This game is a nice twist on the 'sushi shop manager' microgenre. As always, it features the usual: seating and serving guests, buffing windows, mopping up messes, going out into the streets at night with chloroform spray and a knife... wait, something's not right here... How are they mopping up messes from a carpet floor?? In all seriousness, the gameplay is not lacking. The different minigames that pop up, like pressing buttons rhythm-game style to wash the dishes or physically moving your mouse back and forth to move the sponge make simple chores fun to play. Hell, I spent hours washing dishes just to get good at typing the letter prompts quickly, watch this: qrefrrefferqqfreeqe wasn't that fast?? Oh, and the chloroform minigame. That's cool too. To kill people, you can either 1. use chloroform, leaves no trace but is hard to master, 2. use a good old fashioned knife, though it does use up a lot of stamina, or 3. hatchet. Quick, easy, though terribly bloody. Don't worry, you can get clean clothes and a perfect smile at the surgeon :) The atmosphere is amazing too - the dim LED shop sign, the occasional snow and thunder, a vague grimy feel to the whole city, the cars in the street running NPCs over... Besides that, this is another game with limited lore - basically dripfed to you - while you're trying to piece together the larger whole. The entire thing - running a sushi shop and killing people for their 'satchels of meat' - is just some kind of purgatory? Very interesting, to say the least. 8.5/10, this was amazing to play at night during spooky month. The game is somehow more cosy than scary...?
Spontaneous Generation
'Be the last subject standing against an onslaught of chaotic events in this minimalist building game set in the void of space.'
What an inviting way to get people to play your game...! This is another one of those 'plate survival' games, except one thing sets this apart... the fact that you are in a ship. in space. How much cooler can it get?? Oh. Right. There's a big Artifact in the middle. Think, a cube with a Roblox logo on all sides, and in the middle is the pulsing glow of light... And it's summoning random events. As they happen, you can get items to help (or harm) you, blocks like thrusters, lasers, and teleporters to upgrade your ship, abilities like astral projection, jump smash, and... thinking?, and can navigate in three dimensions to form alliances with others or wage war on them. The textures are super minimalist, standard building blocks are simple cubes, and the rest of the items have simple textures that are by no means unpolished but get the job done with as few pixels as possible. As the game progresses, events come faster and faster, and suddenly your ship is being boosted to the far end of the map, then laser strikes are called in, then you get a... stellated icosahedron? And there's also a face block that expands every time you feed it... What is this game, exactly? Well, let me just check the wiki, which I didn't know existed until when I was learning more about this game... Yep, it's confirmed, another game with limited lore that makes you wonder what the grand scheme of things is. Brilliant, I'll take three! The wiki also has hundreds of pages and ones of active editors... It's a work in progress, alright? In all honesty, the people who play this game manage to create the most impressive contraptions in the midst of blocks being blown up, orbital strikes being called, and all other hell. They're talking about platonic solids and how to make nukes while I'm just trying to steer towards some scrap metal. The game is a very special twist on the plate survival genre, and the atmosphere (or lack thereof, it's space after all) make the game so much more fun to cosy up to on a rainy evening. 9/10. Lucky for you, they just added a new update that includes mobile support!
Crazy Stairs
How wonderful, the game that needs a description the most doesn't have one. Well, this is a game, as you can probably guess, about climbing stairs. Don't click off yet, there's more to it. You're tasked with climbing a tower of stairs. There's a grid 5x5 at the base and 20 floors tall, of landings. Each landing can have a stair up and down each of its 4 sides. This is starting to get hard to visualise, but just think of the stairs in Harry Potter. And just like those stairs, they shift every now and then, some stairs moving, others appearing and disappearing. It is your job to climb them. Now, you can either be a normal Muggle and have no powers - boring, if you ask me - or, you can become certain roles, each with their own ability. Maybe you'll be a Patron, who can build stairs, or a Wicked, who removes them, or a Keeper, who simply moves them, or- there are over a dozen classes in this game, each with their own sets of abilities that change the game in some ways, shrinking and warping stairs until the whole thing looks absolutely hideous- I mean, unique. So, when you reach a dead end, what you do depends on your class. A Patron would just teleport themselves up, or summon new stairs, a Keeper would move the stair they were just on up a floor, and a Thief would place a stair they stole five floors down. The fun, now, comes in what happens when you play in servers. Maybe you make a stair and your friend moves it to where you want, or you rig some stairs to give other players mana to cast more spells, hell, the game has VR connectivity, where those players fly around the map and give normal players either a helping hand or a slap on the wrist. And the speedrunning strats, oh the speedrunning. My best, after more than 100 summits, is 78 seconds, and it required an insane amount of optimisation. Can you beat it? I mean, there's only one way to find out... 7.5/10, the game may not be for everyone but it certainly is for me, I love revisiting this one every now and then to see if I've still got it. I do!
Robots VS Humans AND Creature CHAOS
'The game... It's back!!!'
These games are lumped together because they're both a revival of an earlier game from the days of pre-pandemic - Build to survive the Creepers. It's one of those 'build to survive the _' games, but this one is super special for two reasons. One, the entire map is everyone playground, so instead of being separating in these pathetic building zones, everyone can build a base together, usually leading to some crazy skybases. Two, instead of the enemies being NPCs that are pretty easily thwarted, you are the enemy. After everyone's done building their epik base, a few of the players are respawned as Creepers, which is when the game really begins. Creepers want to kill all the humans, and humans want to survive. These two features alone easily make it the best in the genre. I discovered the original game early on in the pandemic, and, to be honest, it was tons of fun. I made quite a few memories as my team fended off creepers from our castle, or, on the other hand, seeing my explosion take down an entire skybase. All was good... until the game got removed mid-pandemic for copyright! I couldn't find it then, and the game faded into history... until now!1! Recently two new legally distinct games sprung up titled... well, you read them already. Of the two, the first is a bit more popular with 500 concurrent players. Both are pretty much the exact same as the original, with some Minecraft block textures changed around and the Creepers obviously being replaced. They do live up to the original's legacy pretty damn well, if I do say so for myself. 9.5/10, everything is perfect. Except for the fact that you can purchase OP items, we could've left it at the base game...
Azure Mines
'You're in charge of restoring an old mining facility back to its former glory. Massive randomly-generated caves, tons of detailed hand-designed ore, a unique tycoon element, a robust building system and in integrated level progression sets Azure Mines far apart from previous mining games on Roblox. See for yourself!'
This was one of the core Roblox games I played as a kid. It's like other mining games, and it probably isn't the best, but man this one will always be special for me. Being taught the ropes from better players, and then becoming one of the pros myself... The mine has different layers, at 300, 500, 1000, 2000, 3000, 4000... Each layer has a new challenge. Maybe you stumble on Zombies that'll run off with your arm (not nice), maybe you'll be in pitch darkness, maybe you'll have a paralysis demon following you...? Instead of talking about the game (why would I do that, it's not like I'm rating them or anything), I'll leave you with a few memories I have from it.
One time, when I was still super new to the game, I discovered a glitch that someone else had done. You see, the entire underground isn't generated yet; it's only when you mine a block when the game generates the new blocks under and next to it, so the parts of the underground not directly exposed are actually empty. Now, if you place blocks in just the right way, you can cause one of these blocks to not generate, and you'll be able to walk outside the tunnel... and into the void. Here, you can see every path and tunnel someone else has found... It's like spectator mode in Minecraft underground, except the extra stone isn't invisible, it's just not there at all. Now, the tunnel some people had glitched out of kept going, so I followed it. ...And followed it, and followed it. I eventually got to the end, and I had walked so far out of the map that I couldn't see anything other than the tunnel I had got into and the blue skybox all around. I was alone... at the edge of the universe. This triggered one of those, just, awe-inspiring moments in my little brain at the time, even though it's just a blue sky and a random grey tunnel. Anyway, I wanted to keep going, so to see what would happen, I mined the very last block in the tunnel I was standing on and, would you look at that, it spawned five more blocks next to it. For some reason, this felt weirdly unsettling to me (and I would later fear the blocks doing that for some reason) but I kept going. And going and going and - oh, I just fell off and died. Still, it felt like I was uncovering some kind of ancient secret the elders passed down to me to know.
I upgraded my pickaxe to one that mines three blocks at a time in the direction you're facing. Problem is, it 'voids' the last two blocks, AKA doesn't send them to your inventory and basically deletes them fro existence. There's this really rare ore that has a 1/1,000,000 chance to spawn, called Ambrosia. You can see where this is coming, can you? Anyway, I was mining straight down, as always, going so fast to the point where I could barely recognise the ores going past - when I saw it in the corner of my eye, a pink and yellow ore. That's the one! I rush up like, 15 blocks and try and get it - before I realise I'm using the pick that has a 2/3rds chance of getting rid of it forever. It's too late, the blocks break and... oh, I'm fine. I mine another set of three blocks and expose the Ambrosia, hiding on the fourth one. I count my blessings, get the block, and continue down.
As a child, I yearned for the mines, and eventually, I formed a little group of friends who also wanted to explore the mines with me. We went on little trips over the next few months and found many a ore in the deep. Of course, this couldn't last, and the gang started disbanding... except for one guy, who really wanted to stick around. We, and his little brother who joined in, we in it for the love of the game, mining like nobody's business. It's been a few years and I haven't really mined with him. In fact, I haven't even seen him online...
Wait, what were we doing...? Oh, games. Well, today we have a special buy 5, get 1 free deal, because this one has about ~1.2K concurrent players, but it's so good I just had to add it:
The Ultimate Robloxian
'The Ultimate Robloxian is a chaotic multiplayer party platformer where players build the stage as they play. Each round, new obstacles and platforms are added, turning simple maps into wild and unpredictable death races. Will you create a safe path, or trap your friends for the win?''
This game has you pitted with fellow players to as you all try and make it through an obstacle course... while also building set obstacle course. That's right, at the start of each round you'll get to place down an item, be it a moving platform, truss, laser cannon, or a menacing turkey, to try to either create a path for you or hinder everyone. Then, everyone is thrust into the game, where a simple mistake means you're out for the round. What's better, killing others with your trap awards you points and gets you closer to victory! The premise is good enough, but the items you can place make the game a lot more complex. a campfire, which... sets you on fire, slowly killing you. But, it also increases your speed and therefore jump distance. A UFO with a tractor beam that sucks you towards it, killing you when you touch it, but also serving as a way to get that extra bit of height... After five or six rounds, the pathway becomes so cluttered and littered with traps that it requires a comically long or tedious route to avoid everything and still make it to the end. The game is in 2.5D, with the traps being put on the board in two dimensions, but you being able to evade them in three. Additionally, different maps have special modes - red light green light, rising lava, or low gravity, each having their own bits of chaos and strategy. My advice, and don't tell this to anyone, is to go for the trap on the first round, preferably a paintball gun as close to the spawn as possible. This will net so many trap points on unsuspecting people, just, uh... watch out for it yourself, dying to your own trap doesn't award anything. 9.0 game, simple premise but different and addicting each time. The aesthetics and music are also top-notch, as for the rest of the games listed. I'm pretty sure these ones are original, though.
Well, that was a lot. How about we move on to cubing? These are the PBs and goals I have for next year:
2x2
PB: 3.88 on 17 December
Ao100: 8.97
Notes: I bought this cube a long time ago, I still remember learning the Ortega method for the first time in fourth grade? This cube has been through a lot. Underwater, hand sanitizer, lotion, literally anything I could use as cube lube… Surprisingly still turns pretty well. I don’t practice this one a lot, mostly because it’s too fast to really be ‘fun’ to grind, like scrambling is half of the time here… Also, the next step up from Ortega method is to learn 50 algs… no thanks
3x3
14.14 on 13 December
Ao100: 21.71
Notes: Sometimes I’m really in flow state and I average ~18 seconds. Other times I can’t get a sub-20 solve for 5-10 solves. Almost every day though, I get at least one solve in the 15-16s range. My goal next year is to be solidly sub-20, as in I’d need a good excuse to have a solve over 20 seconds. Also, Ao5 and Ao12 PBs were both set yesterday (17.57 and 18.62) which I’m very proud of!
4x4
PB: 59.87 on 25 December
Ao100: 1:25:14
Notes: Centers are solved in 12-17 seconds. I don’t check if the colour scheme is right, just fix it in 3x3 stage. Edges are paired by 35-50 seconds, and 3x3 stage takes almost 30 seconds without parities. My goal next year is to get more sub-1 solves. Crazy that the WR solves the whole cube before I even do my centers…
5x5
PB: 1:50.88 on 21 December
Ao100: 2:23.69
Notes: I absolutely smashed my goal of getting a sub-2 solve. After two weeks of shaving it down by a second or two at a time, I suddenly locked in and shaved off 11 seconds in that solve. I’ve had a few sub-2 solves since then. 4x4 has taken a bit of the spotlight ever since I got a new one, but 5x5 is cool too. Depends how much of a sprint/marathon I want to do. Centers are done by 35-40 seconds, edges are paired by 1:30-1:45, and 3x3 stage is ~25s, thanks to one (or two?) less parities. My Ao5 PB is 1:58 from yesterday, and I think I can get my Ao12 (2:07) down to sub-2 next year too.
7x7
PB: 7:12.10 on 26 December
Global average (58 solves): 9:26.97
Ao12: 7:55.60
Notes: No idea how much I’ll improve with this one. I still have a lot of downtime during centres, especially with the last two centres and my doing too many commutators. Edge pairing goes a bit better, but last two edges does get a bit confusing. First center is done by ~50s, second by ~1:45, and all centres are done by about 4:15. Edges are done by 6-7 minutes. 3x3 stage is a lot slower on this one mostly because I can’t use the same fingertricks, meaning I have to use 2LPLL except for the PLLs I’ve memorised by moves like the A perms. I think I can get a sub-6 minute PB by next year.
Square-1
PB: 50.93 on 21 December
Global average (54 solves): DNF
Ao12: 1:43.70
Notes: 4x4 but more make or break. I’m using my own extreme beginner method with four algs, maybe I can learn a better method if I’m feeling it, but this puzzle really isn’t my type. Limited movement, also it slips from my hands more times than I’d care to admit. It was surprisingly easy to learn the parity alg, though. It also feels like a sort of parity when consolidating the edges to turn the puzzle into cube shape. Sometimes I get all 8 edges together, sometimes it’s 7 and 1 and then I have to mess with it some more. No goal, really.
Megaminx
PB: 2:58.23 on 24 December
Global average (33 solves): 4:52:52
Ao12: 3:52:58
Notes: This one feels more like an endurance race than even the 7x7, mostly because it’s all F2L, whereas the 7x7 at least has centres, edges, 3x3, etc. I also do the last layer in four steps, EO, CO, EP, and corner permutation. This one, along with 7x7, are the ones I’m improving at quickly, so I can’t really tell where the floor is going to be. I spend a bit less than a minute doing the first first two layers, and then spend quite some time finding edges during the rest of the F2L. How the WR is half a minute, I can’t imagine. Maybe I can get a sub-2:30 PB this year? Then again, last layer takes up 30s by itself…
Skewb
PB: 4.74 on 28 November
Ao100: DNF
Ao12: 17.12
Notes: I don’t really like practicing this one for the same reasons as 2x2. It’s a shame, because it’s a pretty good cube too… Maybe if I go to some comps, I can win two half-a-skewbs… I do want to learn the next method, because I’m still using the beginner’s…
Pyraminx
PB: 11.74 on 3 March
Global average (37 solves): 28.02
Ao12: 21.94
Notes: I stopped solving this one. Same reason. Meh, this is a pretty good platonic solid, but as a cube it really lets me down. Also, this is probably the worst quality cube I have, I’ve had it since 5th grade along with my 2x2 and old 4x4, but this one really sucks. I think it was $5? Also, I’ve abused this cube a lot. Like, using it as a D4.
3BLD
PB: 7:23.98 on 11 November
Global average (11 solves): DNF
Notes: This is the one I’m most scared of to practice, mostly because I can’t tell when/how I messed up. I had 10 DNFs and one successful solve, and that was all I wanted apparently. I want to try again sometime. My only goal for this one, really, is to get more solves done. And maybe a Ao5 PB that’s not a DNF.
FMC
PB: 70
Notes: I just did a normal solve two minutes ago to say that I did FMC. I don’t. It looks really interesting though… Me looking at FMC now is the same kind of awe as my friends seeing me solve cubes. No idea how it’s done, but looks pretty cool. I wanna learn next year.
Crazy to think that all of the events (that I do regularly) I have gotten PBs for in the past two weeks. In fact, in the last two weeks, there were three days where I set three WCA event PBs in one day, and only two days with no PBs. Woah. Then again, three new puzzles will probably help.
Next time I’m buying cubes, which is probably going to be when I run out of DNM, I’m probably gonna get a 6x6, FTO, maybe a Kilominx, and then we’ll see. Oh, and I’ve been eyeing the X-man Tornado. Matter of fact, I was going to get the very best Tornado V3 Pioneer before I realised buying multiple cubes would probably be better. Clock kinda takes up a lot of valuable desk cubby space and I don’t really think I’ll have much fun solving it, but we’ll see. (also the qiyi clocks are pretty pricy in my opinion, I don’t see why it should cost more than magnetic cubes?) And then 6x6 is just a 4x4 on steroids, harder centers and harder parity. I feel pretty content with the cubes I have though, enough to switch it up every now and then, but not too many where I don’t use a puzzle for too long. except for pyraminx i hate pyraminx
And finally, after about 5000 words this entry and 55000 words this entire journey, I want to wrap it up in a neat little bow and say thank you. Yes, you, I am breaking the fourth wall and thanking you, whoever you are, for reading this. (The neat part is, if you didn't stick around and read the whole thing you wouldn't know that I'm thanking you) If you've stuck around for the whole journey or if this is your first entry, thank you for taking time to look into the wild mind of a random stranger on the internet. Even if none of this made sense because I'm writing at 10:50 PM right now or because my hobbies are too cerebral, I hope you appreciate it. No matter who you are or when you're seeing this, I hope you have a wonderful life. And for the last time on this account at @undertalecheckpoint...
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¡Hola mi gente! Toda esta entrada la voy a escribir en español. No soy hablante nativo, pero ya he hablado sobre mi habilidad de hablar español y quiero mostrarles. Disclaimer: voy a traducir muchas palabras mientras escribo este, pero creo que la mayoría de lo que voy a decir puedo decir sin la ayuda de un diccionario.
A ver, creo que mi nivel de español es bastante para sobrevivir en, a ver, el distrito federal, pero la gente en México tendría que aguantar mis errores. Incluso voy a decir que casi puedo hablar español con fluidez. Pero, cada vez que tomo un examen para descubrir mi nivel de español, las dos fases primeras son bastante fácil de pasar, pero en las fases B1 y B2, empiezan a, like, mezclar las palabras en las frases? Ya sé que, en español, el orden de las palabras es muy flexible, pero entender la frase, al menos para mí, es mucho más difícil. Creo que esto es la cosa que tengo que mejorar después. Aun no puedo entender español muy bien a menos que es mi maestra or something pero con subtítulos puedo distinguir las palabras mucho más claramente.
Recuerdo que, en la entrada #37, les dije un poquito sobre como aprendí español, pero acabo de recordar otra historia de hace unos años y les quiero contarlo. Estaba jugando el juego Outlast en Roblox, y, por alguna razón, mi username era ‘Cyän’ con el umlaut solo porque quería sobresalir. Anyway, esto no es importante para la historia, pero me uní con un server e iba a decir algo cuando me di cuenta de que todos los otros jugadores estaban hablando en espanol. De repente, decidí que ya no quiero sobresalir actualmente, y empecé a hablar en español. Hice todo lo posible para mezclarme, e incluso agarré unas frases que seguían diciendo, pero en retrospectiva, creo que saben que no soy hablante nativo, o, al menos, no vivo en latinoamérica desde la primera palabra. Pero, me trataron muy amablemente, actualmente, y si se dieron cuenta de que era impostor, no me dejaron saber. Aunque no gané la competencia, me quedé hasta la ronda final, y les animé con mi español chapurreado.
Voy a acabar esta entrada con unas actualizaciones que pasaron. El otro día, logré un 2:06 5x5 solve, y literalmente ayer, rompí dos PBs con un 2:03 5x5 single y un nuevito 14.14 3x3 single. Aqui esta la scramble: F2 D2 B2 D2 R2 D2 R D2 R F2 R2 D2 B' U' F2 R' U' B2 F' L R Pero, lo extraño es que no puedo recrear mi solve. Eh, no me importa mucho porque sé que voy a romper mi récord otra vez. Justo hoy logré un 14.28, pero no puedo identificar nada único en este scramble. U L2 U' R2 D' F2 D2 R2 U L2 B2 L2 B' D F U' F R' D' U2 B2 U Creo que mis soluciones se están haciendo más complicados (específicamente para el cross y F2L) y no puedo recrearlos tan fácilmente.
Anyway, eso es todo lo que estoy dispuesto a escribir ahora. No es tan largo como lo usual, pero hice lo mejor que pude. ¡Nos vemos la próxima semana!
Currently slightly very sleep deprived because I spent about 8 hours at a birthday/sorry you have cancer party. I’ll explain what that is next year. Anyway, Iron Lung is coming out!! I hope I can get all my friends together to at least consider watching it so we can make plans, but, hell, we can’t even make plans for Christmas break in two weeks. Anyway, regarding the film, between the people working on it and the early screening reviews, I do think it’s chalked up to be something amazing. But, I do think that something they could do wrong would be to lean into the whole ‘ocean of blood’ thing too much, but knowing Mark, there’s probably going to be a lot more lore embedded into the movie.
Status update on my 5x5 goal: I got a new PB a few days ago, 2:07.75. 7 more seconds to go… On the car ride to the party, my solves somehow weren’t that bad, I actually had a solve on track to be sub-2… and then I messed up F2L, alright, I can still get a new PB, and in a car, no less… and then I messed up the PLL… and ended with a 2:15. I guess it wasn’t meant to be… Oh, and earlier today, still-sleep-deprived me got another insanely lucky 3x3 scramble… and got 14.51 when my PB’s 14.45. I literally could’ve picked up the cube faster and would’ve gotten a new PB. …
I… don’t really have anything else to say this week, and the entry’s already overdue, so instead, here’s a bunch of poems that I’ve written over the years (the many years I’ve been alive), and a bit of critique after. The first few are… really something, just to put it nicely.
2019: “The Battles at Concord and Lexington”
It all started long ago,
When General Gage had to know,
That John and Samuel were at Lexington,
Toward the direction of the setting sun.
So he gathered a group,
700 in the troop,
And they started marching in Boston.
In Concord, they planned to find weapons,
Hidden by the Minutemen.
But, Paul Revere,
Luckily he had to hear,
about the plan
to arrest the men
That were now in Lexington.
John Parker, the leader of the Minutemen,
sad to stand their ground, and then,
a battle was faught [sic], but when it was soothed,
The British went on, but the weapons were moved.
And the, that’s how we’ve been taught,
About those battles that were faught.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, eat your heart out, amiright?
…okay this is pretty terrible. But then again, I was, like, ten.? I don’t think I even knew that chocolate milk didn’t come from brown cows. Anyways, this was for an assignment, and I don’t even remember what I got, but… I can guess. I will give myself a little pat on the back for one thing, which is that finding ‘Lexington’ and ‘setting sun’ as slant rhymes was actually pretty good. Then again, it looks like I only knew what slant rhymes were, because… oh boy those rhymes are looking tough. And the few actual rhymes, like soothed/moved were so forced. And then obviously, the biggest problem, there’s no meter or rhythm or any kind of consistency in how long a line is. Moving on…
2020: Duolingo Rap 2 (Original by Iris_Songs)
Hello y’all, I’m part of the crew,
And this is Dulingo [sic] rap number 2
I ain’t good at this, nor am I going off with a bang,
But if I try hard, I can do anythang, now,
The original was made by Iris Yo,
And let’s just do this, 3 2 1, GO!
Lemme tell you what you need to know
About this language program called Duolingo.
You choose a language to-o learn,
And then Lingots you will earn.
From the questions that he asks you,
Make sure to not get one askew.
It also teaches you lots of words,
Adjectives, nouns, and also verbs.
You can spend Lingots in the shop,
To buy power ups (there aren’t a lot)
If you are active you get a wildfire streak,
And lots of lingots (but that takes a week)
Once you mastered a language, jump and shout,
Now you can travel all about.
You can talk with friends, who live miles away,
Or you can show off to your friends, hey
Thank you for reading this Duolingo rap,
Now you can clap.
That took me all day,
Now I’ll be on my way!
…The worst part is that this wasn’t even for any assignment, this was just on my own. This was back in the day when Duolingo had things like ‘forums’, ‘the waterfall method’, and ‘actual learning instead of AI’. Crazy, I know, AI wasn’t even a thing in 2020. (/s) I tried so hard to fit in with ‘y’all’, ‘yo’, and ‘ain’t’. ‘Anythang’ deals psychic damage every time I look at it. I tried to be better at rhythm and meter here by doing that ‘to-o’ trick, but that… doesn’t magically make it better. The rhyming is better, but it’s just the normal one rhyme at the end of the line trick. I also apparently forgot what slant rhymes are.
2021: Equal rights rap
Basic human rights; they're something we rarely think of
But with all these protests, our nation's on the brink of
Having another civil war, Hey, what is this for?
It shakes us down to the core, more and
More streets full of gore, that's for sure
To shore, there’s a ton of violence
C'mon, listen up, lemme give you my two cents
Riots full of people being a nuisance
Having no sense, wanting more cents, and we're
On the fence of being a bent society
How do we fix this thing?
People keep getting canceled just for existing,
it goes on and on, this phenomenon
Has no ends, will not mend, tears friends apart,
breaks people's hearts, that's just the start
Peace or love? You can never have neither.
Slashes relationships faster than a cleaver
To survive, you need to be better than clever.
But it's as impossible as sleeping in the Nether.
Look, I need to make a confession,
I don't know how to get us out of this mess, son.
No, it’s not a lie, jut [sic] don’t ask a single question.
It’s only just a suggestion.
The problem at the table is that
Many various people are unable
To understand that varied personalities are able
And capable to be unshakable when faced with faces
That face against justice, just as some blindly distrust science
Stand with us in silence, while officers silence us.
Their anger keeps growing like a pest,
Sucking out all hope and zest,
Overwhelming us with stress
To not feel it you would've been blessed
Most of you may have guessed that
The best we are are guests to some;
No less than messed up and dumb
But lest vexed and numb faces fight family and friends
News flash: This storm does have a calm end.
Don’t get too hasty,
cont
Violence is not the solution.
Violence was never the solution.
Violence violates vigilance and valence, but violence has virality.
The media vitalizes violence, not mediative or medicative
Fight anger with anger, and you get
…and then the rest is a bunch of two or three lines floating around connected with ‘cont’. This is actually a very big improvement from last year, but… some things are still left to be desired. I mean, for one thing, I actually learned what stanzas are, and some of the lyrics are actual bars, like there’s multiple rhymes, wordplay, meter… Honestly, 12 year old me was ONTO something. My main grief with it is that… the story isn’t moving anywhere, I just kept thinking of new rhymes and had to squish them in without realising that a rap is supposed to… actually go somewhere. This one was also not for an assignment or anything, I was just inspired by what happened in 2020.
2022: Until Tomorrow
*meant to be read slightly melodically*
Peaceful springtime morning,
Birds and creatures chirping,
Nature’s chorus unbeknown,
The forest’s all they’ve known,
Working in harmony, singing the sweetest melody,
Bear cubs scouting, thick shrubs sprouting,
The feel of the surreal breeze of the trees,
This would be the greatest place to be,
Until tomorrow.
The workers marching in,
Their belches and their grins,
Construction’s all they’ve seen,
So close to nature, yet so far,
How could this have been?
Working in harmony, building a pharmacy,
That can’t cure the ails of the snails,
Or the scared squeals of the despaired seals,
Pipes rerouting, burly shouting,
Animals mourning their loss in the late morning,
This would be the worst place to be,
Until tomorrow.
Humming with a side of song,
Slinging a tied bag along.
The group’s here to fix the drea-
ry mess of what’s left, bit by bit.
Yellow and grey soap spread over the pond,
Filter the mess so the ducks can swim on,
Working in harmony, restoring equality,
Removing plastics from turtles, picking elastics from bird-holes.
Bear cubs sneaking a peak,
The fauna gazing at us carefully,
The joy of today’s fixing, mending,
Even though yesterday’s breaking, bending,
There was a better way to coexist.
For now, the forest’s quiet.
The animals are silent,
Wondering if history will repeat itself.
But tomorrow, the animals will emerge from their holes,
Tomorrow, they will happily chirp, buzz, and growl,
The forest will become alive again,
But the sun must set first for a new day to begin.
A new start, a new chance,
For now, the animals will have to wait…
Until tomorrow.
This one is very… cerebral? As in, I think I’m getting around to the whole ‘how to deliver a story through a poem’ but I sacrificed a bit of rhyme for it. Also, ‘meant to be read slightly melodically’? I had a very specific melody in mind when I wrote this, and apparently that note was enough to make any person know exactly what I had in mind. I do like the motif of ‘until tomorrow’ I put in there, though.
2024: ‘Two Days into College’ and ‘Passing Through’
(Two Days into College is in Entry #91)
‘Passing Through’ is meant to be sung by two people, originally I had one in blue text and one in red, but I’m not gonna spend a half-hour re-formatting it, so you’ll have to guess.
Can't the future just wait a minute?
All the headlines are already out of date
Am I ahead or behind now?
Out of time now?
Will I be fine if I find the rate
At which time starts to fly?
Why can’t I put it on standby?
It’s always
making or breaking
For my own sake,
Why can’t I ever retry
And here we arrive
It’s 1:45
I’m alive and I’m trying to survive
But maybe it's time
To let time pass through
Look at the sky at night
All the stars shine until the end of time, their light
Is like a million bright spotlights
Maybe not quite
Or is that right?
We’re astronauts all our lives,
Is that fair?
We’re sailing through
We’re neither here nor there
What's ahead? No one knows
At least we’re going somewhere…
My life’s just begun
There’s a million things I haven’t done
So maybe I should take a step back for once
Then, maybe it's time
To let time pass through
I can’t just decide which side
Is right or wrong, the
decisions cloud my vision
But when a door has closed
Another
Opportunity arose
So maybe it’s
Time for change
Move on
Let bygones be gone
Just move on
‘Cause the best’ll come last and
The past is vast
Let’s move on
Time is everlasting
It’s an evergreen
tree we forever water, it climbs
to the sky, neverending
Cut the metaphor
Like I said before, it’d be better for us, just trust the-
stream, take a moment and hold a sliver,
Feel the sands of time slipping by,
Know that the flow all goes to the ocean
The world out there is wide
There are always unlimited things to find
And we live to all cherish it
Before it perishes
It’s right there, it’s quite rare, so take care, ‘cause
It can leave you behind
Backtrack too much and you’ll be out of time
Just put your worries aside
And come along for the ride of your life
I notice the time as the bell now strikes two
So now it’s my time to let time pass through
Not passing by,
but passing through
‘Till the last goodbye
Just passing through
Right, if you’ve been in the same niche as I have last year, these are supposed to be duets of the actual ‘Two Days into College’ and ‘Passing Through’ online. Now, I fixed my problem with telling a story… and replaced it with not being able to make the actual melody/song. Now, with Passing Through, I made up a story about how the person (maybe me, maybe Kaden the songwriter) instead of having a monologue, is having an angel and devil sit on their shoulder, and how the devil is more pessimistic towards the start but ends up agreeing with the angel towards the end, and the angel is this (perhaps overly) optimistic guy who also likes a good metaphor about life, which drives the devil insane. Anyway, the part how this is supposed to be a duet over the original comes into play when Kaden sings ‘every quarter to two’, and I/we(?) sing ‘it’s one forty-five’. And by the end of the song, ‘the bell now strikes two’, implying that our narrator just had a 15-minute panic session. Very nice detail if you ask me :)
Now, I think Passing Through has the better story and cohesiveness, but Two Days into College… man that one has some actual bars. Especially the part where Aimee (the songwriter) is talking about how ‘i’ve done wrong or i’ve done right’ and ‘i try my best to try my best’ in the quick four-syllable lines, I really had fun making them rhyme. Here are both of them:
I’m making waves
Or making way
Cuz’ I just can’t wait
For another day
So I save the date
And say today
It's fine, I'll figure it out some way
My SAT
And that diorama
My essays three, try out for the drama
So hasta la vista
And sayonara
‘cause the past has passed
Y no hay una mañana
I will say both of them do have some pretty good rhyme schemes. Very cool.
And finally, last but definitely not least because that would mean I really failed, here’s a poem/rap that I made last year for English about the best city in the world and the one I live in, Long Beach, California, since I might as well fully doxx myself at this point.
2025: I heart LB
There, on the horizon
Where the azure waves meet the cyan sky,
Keep your eyes on it
What lies on it is a little town I call home
A little down on the road, between LA and the coast
Y’know it’s the most beautiful-est city I have ever seen
Serene and marine, it’s like living in a dream
We’re getting close now, but trust me, soon you’ll see that
LB will be the G.O.A.T. city to be at
But first, step off the boat and onto the west coast
We got the best coast all the way from here to Mexico
We got rollin’ waves and golden shores, and sure,
We’re no LA, but hey, we’re nowhere near as poor, now
First stop, docked on the boardwalk, the Queen Mary,
First off, listen up, a little talk if you care, see,
According to rumor, they say this place is haunted and scary,
But just get a room or two with a view and there we
Can spend a weekend with plenty to do on the contrary
It’s true!
And we got more to see today, so just follow me
All the way to LBCC
You see, it's no UC, but it's got the same beauty
And between you and me
There's so much to do, so much to see
In these roads and streets, they're home to me
Cuz we got all we could want here, all we could need here
If you’re so fond here, why not just be here?
Hey!
Where ’ya looking?
Over there?
Oh, no no no!
Don't look to the northeast!
Don’t you dare!
It's the worst and the least neat city over there
Where smog fills the air and no one cares to
Spare a fare or share, it’s no fair
It’s the place where [----] goes down
The place where every face is a frown
Where downtown, the only thing that awaits you
Is the feeling of hearing your thoughts drown
In the sound of traffic that surrounds you
It’s the place where Lady Luck couldn’t hand ‘ya less
It’s Los Angeles
Over there, they be shootin’ and lootin’
Them brutes and vandals caught up in violence and scandals
They’re a nuisance, and my two cents
They’re out for your cents and dollars,
It makes no sense, sometimes you just gotta holler
And while they’re out fightin’, you’re stuck on the I-10
In a traffic jam, man, it’s manic and panic
It’s chaos without no plan, it’s a disaster
If only the cars could go any faster
So let me allay your fears
And steer you away from LA and into the clear
Cuz here we’ve got museums and aquariums,
You see ‘em, and there we unwind
And pass the time, it’s a pastime
If you’re on board with the idea
Then come aboard and you can see a
Whale or two on a sightseeing cruise with the crew
And if you’re bored, you’ll learn
There is Ferris Bueller’s house
On the streets there’s murals all about
This amazing town, just look around
At the greatest city in the world
That we're living in right now
LA don’t stand a chance to me
The answer’s LB
Understand it’s the king
Rock bands on the scene
It’s grand to me
The best sand I’ve seen
Between land and sea
It makes me wanna…
Do a poem
Not really much commentary here, the work speaks for itself. And because I’m too tired to write anything else. This one was for an assignment last year where we had to write a persuasive poem, and my god I think I nailed it. I mean, what else is there about Long Beach that I didn’t put? Besides the homeless people, that’s just… kinda everywhere in California. And I mean, references everywhere, we got Hamilton, Epic, Little Shop of Horrors (first and only time I heard the phrase ‘Lady Luck’) and even Shrek. Also, my geography apparently sucks because LA is to the northwest of LB, not the northeast. Really makes you wonder how I don’t get lost Geocaching. And it actually tells a story! It’s a tour guide walking you through LB! And each section kinda has its own flow to it, and the fake out at the end (I tried my best to make it sound like ‘dance and sing’ at the end) it’s just *chef’s kiss* in my opinion. That is, until I do something next year and immediately see what I did wrong here.
Welp, it’s the last month of this journey. Five more entries to go…
A few random updates first: I’ve been getting back into Minecraft again, building out random parts of my base I’d overlooked and just renovating parts in general. I’ve been focussing on this wizard tower slash outpost slash home of the local eccentric wizard dwarf. I’ve had the shape done for months now, but I kept changing the material from stone to blackstone back to normal greystone again. I landed on normal stone with some mossy/cobble/bricks variants thrown in there for block vom- I mean, texturing. I still kept a bit of blackstone at the base of the build and made it look like it’s grabbing the tower and holding it in place? It’s hard to describe, but I physically can’t add an image because I’m scared to death of the consequences on my Google Doc. Oh yeah and there’s three huge floating amethyst crystals around it. That too, that’s normal. The hardest part is really trying to make the interior, I’ve never made anything in such a small space (the base was 16x16 and gets smaller going up) and with such a weird shape. I think I pulled it off pretty well, though. I leaned into the whole asymmetry thing when making it, and I think it worked well. After all, a crazy guy’s supposed to be living in here. In other news, I moved my bed into the crazy wizard’s tower because I didn’t have an actual bedroom in my entire base before.
Another thing: huge improvements with cubing. Like, a whole half a second off my 3x3 PB. Like I said, capital H Huge.
Scramble: U2 F2 U2 F2 L2 U' L2 R2 B2 U F2 U' B F L' B' F2 D B U L
Inspection: x2 y y' y
Cross: L2 F' L'
Pair 1: y' R U' R'
Pair 2: y' U' R U R' y' L' U L
Pair 3: y U' L' U' L U' L' U L y' U R U' R'
Pair 4: y U2 R U' R'
2LOLL: F R U R' U' S R U R' U' y x' R' U Rw U R' U' Rw' F R F'
PLL: U R U' R' U' R U R D R' U' R D' R' U2 R'
14.45 seconds
I’ve actually gotten quite a bit better at F2L (I solve a bit less than half of all pairs into the back now), but in that solve I was just panicking trying not to mess up the solve. I should get around to learning F2L shortcuts… Meanwhile, my 5x5 just suddenly got a lot faster, probably because I actually tried to lock in during edge pairing. I can get my centres done by :45, and my edges paired by 1:55. Just last week my PB was 2:19, before dropping to 2:14, 2:13, 2:11, and to 2:09. My new goal is to get sub-2 minutes by the end of the year. Can’t be that hard, right? …right?
My extended friend group is doing Secret Santa this year. There’s just one rule, obviously being that you can’t give away who your secret santa is. You can just give hints. So, I’m planning to pull one person in the group aside per day and give them a painfully obvious hint to who my secret santa is, and then ask for help as to what I should get them, with the promise that they won’t tell anyone else. Except, there’s no twist to that, so I’m going to tell each person that my secret santa is a different person each time. So when it comes to reveal who your secret santa is, everyone thinks they know but also nobody actually knows, so it’s still a surprise and I still get to cause some chaos. Oh, and I’m also trying to weasel out who everyone else’s secret santa is, through doing the whole ‘answer no to every question’ and finding their tell, and also through me revealing my own fake secret santa. One or two times I’ll say their secret santa and they’ll be sure to tell me.
Oh, and one last thing… I started some social media channels for me. Like, in person, my face, my voice me. This is mysterious pseudonym me right now, and while it is cool, I do want to try to make, I dunno, skits and singing and stuff because why not?
