🖥️ New websites and a social media break

How is it March already? What happened to February? What happened to blogging at least once a week in 2026?? Don’t worry about it, it’s cool, try not to think about it.

This is gonna be a kind of quick-ish post blowing through the last month and a half of various life updates! Hold onto your butts!!

# Social media disconnect

I am on a social media break! Again! For real this time!! I have the Tusky and Bluesky apps uninstalled from my phone, I’m logged out on desktop, and have LeechBlock set up so I can’t access the sites for more than 10min at a time (e.g. when I need to log in to check for important messages, etc.). It’s only been a day so I still keep compulsively opening my phone to scroll through my feeds only to remember, oh right, I can’t. I’m going to see how long I can stand this before finally caving. I hope I hold out longer than I have in the past…

In the meantime, I’ve been trying to get in touch with folks via messaging apps and such. Remember my New Year’s resolution to get better about staying in contact with people and replying to folks in a timely manner? I figured it’s about time I actually put some effort into doing that. If you wanna talk, I’m on Discord as renkotsuban and on Steam, or you can also just e-mail me.

I’ve also started hanging out on forums again! Forums are like social media but without insufferable reply guys driving by to ping you with a bunch of obnoxious "well actually"s! (Well, usually. If you go to the good forums, like I do 😎)

# Website reconnect

# Everyday Dream: a Hirayasumi fan site

I finally decided to get my Hirayasumi fan site in a “good enough” state to upload and show to the world. Presenting: Everyday Dream! It’s still very much WIP but I figured that if I at least upload the main site, I will be encouraged (read: shamed) into actually working on it. Here’s a little peek behind what my process was like:

This is the basic, barebones version that was more or less sitting on my harddrive since at least 2022. At the time, the manga was on break and I wasn’t sure if it was going to come back. The anime and drama had not been announced yet, and I don’t think it had been localized to any other languages either. I wanted to make something to let people know about (what I thought was) a very niche, cool, slice of life manga.

In January of this year, I decided to finally start working on the site for real. The manga had long since resumed publishing, the live action drama had finished airing in December, the anime was announced and in the works, and Viz was cranking out the popular English localization. I had missed my opportunity to talk about a relatively unknown series, haha. That’s fine though, it means more people can actually know what I’m talking about now when I gush about Hirayasumi!

With this version, I wanted to make the title text (“everyday dream”) stand out more against the header image, so I played around with the CSS filter property for the first time to make the header a little less vibrant and changed the text to a dark green to try to make it a bit more legible. I still wasn’t satisfied with the legibility, so I kept tweaking different settings.

I figured the best way to really make the text stand out from the header image was to just make the drop shadow as thick as possible to give it a good separation from the image. I also just made the text black instead of dark green to really up the contrast.

I thought the plain yellow background was a little boring, so I made a little transparent background .gif using the butterflies in the center of the header image. Unfortunately, yellow butterflies against a yellow background makes it hard to tell what they are at a glance, so…

…I swapped around the colors of the page background to green and the main content background to yellow. Also dropped down the title a bit lower relative to the header image to be less in the way, made the navigation bar a darker green to increase the contrast of the white text menu items.

I also wanted the page to look a little more hand-made and fun, so I started making “clip art” of little images from the manga to stick all around the pages, and added <ruby> tags for both furigana and rōmaji on names. And voila! That’s what’s up now!

As I said, the vast majority of the site is still a WIP. I’m planning to put up manga chapter summaries, character profiles, and maybe look up some Shinzō Keigo interviews to translate. I used to love making fan sites like this so getting back into it in 2026 has been a lot of fun.

# Nice Gear Games blog

I’ve also made a blog for Nice Gear Games! I am really behind on updating it, aaaa! But you can see it now, ooh ahh.

(Sorry, I forgot to take screenshots as I was making it so no behind-the-scenes talk 😔)

This is a little more straightforward. I wanted a place to dump all of our news and updates in one place instead of scattered across all four corners of the (online) world, and have one nice RSS feed to throw into your reader. I am currently behind on updating it (d’oh at the last entry being two weeks ago). I need to get back on the bandwagon!!

We’ve started a silly blog series called Shiritai Yōkai Shōkai to gush about different yōkai and how they appear in Hamayumishi. Daikon’s written a bunch of stuff for it, I just need to translate it and gather all the relevant screenshots and finally update the site, aaaaa. I’m on it!!

# Henry Time

All right, I was going to blog more updates since a lot of stuff has happened, but I need to come back another day because I am quite pooped. I shall be back soon! Hopefully! Let this at last be the start of my Blog Posting Era!!

To close things off: may you be as happy and comfortable as this cat when the floor heater is on.

Talk soon! 👋

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