One day as I got out of bed, with no warning or planning: I decided that I was going to get a demographic survey of individuals from VRChat's The Great Pug (one of the older and most well-known worlds from the game). So with the help of a couple of friends I put together a list of questions (plus a few I added later, for a total of ~50) in-order to try and see what type of people exist in the Great Pug. The questions are pretty broad in scope as I wanted to get a semi-comprehensive image of people; ranging from the obvious go-to's like "When did you start playing VRC?" and "How many avatars have you uploaded?" to more community and personal questions like "Are you part of any club/party groups?", "Have you done any online-dating in VRC?", and even some more 'random' questions that are more standard for demographic style surveys like "How many languages do you speak?" and "Are you currently in a relationship?".

The survey itself is pretty straightforward, with the vast majority of it simply being done by me wandering around soliciting people in the world so I can interrogate them for a little while; unfortunately this has come to a pretty big snag in that (especially as I've gone through most of the actively eager people already), it takes huge amounts of time-both for actually doing the survey and for just finding people interested in it; thus causing me to significantly overshoot my predicted end date...I've tried helping this a bit with a google forum that people can use instead, as well as a video advertising the survey and it has helped by providing a not insignificant amount of respondents. Though alas not as many as hoped so thanks to my own procrastination the survey has kind of ground to a halt, leaving it at a bit over 1/4 of the way through.

Not to mention that actual end goal of the survey, that being to make a YT video going over everything which I've got my own plans for doing--but I haven't even considered starting on that until I get the actual data collection part of things done...so suffice to say I unfourtunately don't see this finishing anytime soon.

Foremost, none of my proposed books thus far have any actual names, so 'Niir' is just what I have this one referred to as in my documents--same goes for all the other ones on this list too.

As for the actual story itself, the most basic synopsis I can provide is during the late 1980's a detective is kidnapped and executed by a gang, then finds himself waking up in Hell with a new body. It's been an on and off-project, having undergone almost a dozen full re-writes with a variety of inspirations forming it:

• The protagonist & his design was thought of as I was making a VRChat avatar
• The setting is based off of Hazbin Hotel's pilot episode
• MC's personality being something akin to a mix of Rorschach (from: Watchmen) and Johnny Dollar (from the radio-play: Your's Truly, Johnny Dollar)
• Story Style/Structure also based off the aformentioned radio-play

As it stands the story has I think about 100k words, though I've done literally ZERO proof-reading/editing for it thus far, as I'm just trying to get the thing written and thought of so I can go back through and fix it up (though I can already tell that I'll need to fully rewrite from nothing again). I don't remember when I started it, but it was before the release of the first season of Hazbin Hotel-so when I heard that it was coming out, I ended up hard-focussing into the story (as I'd kinda forgotten about it for awhile) spending just about all-day, every-day for about a month working on it (easily 14-18 hours per day). Unfourtunately as seems to be a commonplace thing, I missed the deadline having far underestimated the difficulty and time-consumption of the project and have basically just given up on any hopes of getting it out fast, instead just using it as a time-killer for when I'm out travelling for work. Nonetheless I've no intention of abandoning it, and may actually release a sort of public "pre-publication" when the first "arch" is at a state I'm okay with.

Back when it first got big, I watched a fairly large amount of Friday Night Funkin content--though eventually dropped off of it. Fast forward half a decade later, I went back into said content to both download some of the songs that I actually really enjoyed on their own, but also to go over some of the old content---just to see if I still thought it was pretty good...suffice to say I given surplus in both of those regards far in excess of what I was expecting.

The easy catch of it all was of course the music itself, since a surprisingly large amount of it is of great quality; but the real draw of it for me is easily the various OC's and settings people made for their mods. I certainly didn't have much interest for them back when I first took interest in FNF, but something about it just clicked on my revisit; probably something akin to nostalgia for that type of community (think older tumblr/deviantart/whatever host of other fandoms). The distinguishing factor that incited this feeling appose to the plethora of other people's creative works I think is just how they still in a-lot of ways (intentional or not), these mods seem to often really hold onto both the genuine creativity/expression of their authors, but they also retain aspects that are normally weeded out from alot of works in the form of stuff that would immediatly get labeled "cringy" or "edgy" [not undeservedly so]. Perhaps I'm just blind to alot of this stuff as I'm not really in any fandoms or areas that typically generate this content anymore, but even so seeing so much of this type of art-and at it's level of quality-really just snagged my interest far in excess of standard.

Unsurprisingly, all this has made me wanted to make my own content in line with this; specifically in the form of my own character-based rythm game. Why would I go into trying to make a game instead of a mod for FNF? To be honest a large part of it is simply that I just thought that'd be cooler and a good part to learn off of, though another two parts are divided (about 70-30) between wanting to have it setup a bit differently from how FNF does things, and because of some of the negative stuff that happened around FNF itself which called into question its survivability/longevity in my mind.

¶:With the set dressing out of the way, and me not really feeling the need to elaborate on the specific visions I have for the game; I can jump straight to the progress of the project. Painfully, I'm then to admit that it's heavily stalled as while I have been able to actually make a functional rythm game in similar style that is fairly functional with alot of the things I do want, such as:

• Text Based Song Reader
• Realtime or Pre-made Audio for Notes
• Character Selection for Player & Opponent
• Realtime Key Changing (Ex: Song can change from a 4 key to anything from 1-9 key)

I do believe that I could certainly also get a bunch of other features I want added without too much issue. But this all has been fairly irrelevant as I've been stalled due to a very sizable issue...Music [and art] is really hard. I knew going into it that I sucked at art and had no useful experience with music, but I figured that I'd be able to learn it, albiet slowly, and add it after I got the foundation of the game setup. Alas I've been shown that what I had was an unbelievably optimistic outlook as while I could concievably get to a "good enough" standard with the visuals to continue on, the audio...which is arguably the most important part of a rythm game, is absurdly difficult and nothing short of black magic as far as im concerned (except I might be able to make sense of actual black magic!). So in other words, until such a date that I actually set aside who knows how many hundreds of hours to get to an ok spot with both music and art skills, the game has basically been indefinitely stalled; or more realistically, entirely cancelled-as much as a I resent to admit such.

hehe

Out of all of these, I suppose I should speak the most about this one for obvious reasons; though unless one would want me to talk about each specific page on here, then I don't actually have that much to say beyond the initial inspiration/concept of it as a whole-and even that is pretty sparse to be honest (or maybe I've just gotten worse at talking?). Whatever the case, the story is pretty simple: I'd heard of neocities a number of times here and there, but never really looked into it at all. I wasn't alive-or at the very least wasn't using the internet at the time of the "old-web"; instead being more-so surrounded by the age of the tumblr or YouTube channel (not at their inception of course, but when that style of content was still newer---long before the obscene levels of popularity the latter has achieved). Adding onto that is that fact that much of my time has been spent around/involved with people from that time-and inturn the products meant to reference things like that (not just in web use, but especially in regards to games-notably of the retro-shooter variety). So it's no surprise to find that through this sort of...second-hand vicarious living that my interests are heavily entangled with a sense of nostalgia for an era I wasn't really there for. Mix this with a strong disinterest in most modern media/sites, and everything comes to boil in this love for anything that seems retro-esque (plus the mix of 2010's style edge).

Ultimately this wouldn't actually amount to much on the website front for some time though, both as a mix of pure laziness, degredation of skill (not having done any webdev for awhile), and having no actual use behind the site (not that any of these issues have really been changed--save for maybe the 2nd to a minor degree). Nonetheless I did at least attempt to make a site, thus creating the proto-version of Screaming Scissors on a complete whim (though not hosting it on anything but my own device).

Eventually, I would actually come to visit this neocities on a whim while in a Discord call with a friend, wherein we then spent a couple hours just browsing miscellaneous sites [especially you, uncannyvalley!] and overall falling in-love with the entire concept (as my friend had appearently never actually heard of neocities or anything similar). Nonetheless it had then been agreed upon that we would both make sites on here; finally giving me the actual motivation to actually and do something more than just a home-page for Screaming Scissors (which thankfully gave me a quickstart foundation I was able to essentially just copy over). There has been no real plan behind the site, thus why its really just kind of acting like a diary or home of reviews for various media---as I don't really care to talk about much here nor do I have any content to post other than random opinions.

Alas, I've come to find out through this (and starting an actual diary) that any desire I have to talk about myself is far weaker than the desire to sit and do absolutely nothing. Doubling down on that is the fact that the aforementioned friend ended up dropping out and abandoning their site, as well as just overall becoming too busy with other things to have any interaction with anymore. So I've kind of been left without any push nor pull factors to work on the site aside from a minor gnawing in the bottom of the mind that just keeps saying "You need to do something, anything 'productive'"; productive being defined as working on any of the projects you see defined here on this webpage (plus a few I've been too lazy to post on here...go figure).

It's anticlimactic but I really don't have anything to say on the plans for the site other than the obvious sections that exist but are unfinished. If for no other reason than I've got no plans, just kinda stitching things together at random---deleting some and keeping others depending on how they turn out.