Archive of 2024 | Leilukin's Hub Tumbleblog

December 2024

November 2024

Cassette Beasts…

I have beaten 50 carriages of Magikrab's Gauntlet in Cassette Beasts. In other words, I have completed "The Midnight Train" side quest. I was already around level 180 when I started the Gauntlet, while the Gauntlet starts at level 50+ and then gradually levels up as you progress, so it wasn't too difficult. However, due to the random encounter nature, bosses can catch you by surprise with their gimmicks. For example, one of the bosses I encountered was Poppetox, whose gimmick punishes AoE attacks due to the Effigies. I had Kayleigh with me when I encountered Poppetox in the Gauntlet, and both our starting tapes, Umbrahella and Decibelle, have the Echolocation sticker, which gave us the Multitarget status at the start of battle, so for 3 to 4 turns (Kayleigh's Decibelle's Echolocation sticker has the +1 Duration attribute) we took damage from our own attacks. Ouch. (Magikrab's Gauntlet spoilers below) There is also the boss for Carriage #50, Magikrab, who battles like an…

Permanent link to “Cassette Beasts: "The Midnight Train" Side Quest Completed”
Q & A about…

Bytten Studio recently hosted another Reddit AMA session on 20 November 2024, the day Cassette Beasts' Version 1.7 Gauntlet Update was released, this time on the official Cassette Beasts subreddit. I took the opportunity to ask Bytten Studio if they had any thoughts on the players' reception to the game's story ending: Do you have any thoughts about the players' reception to the game's story ending? I actually like the ending, but there are players who dislike the ending and are rather vocal about it, so I wrote a post on Tumblr to defend it (spoilers in the link obviously for those who haven't beaten the game). Jay Baylis, the writer and lead artist of Cassette Beasts, responded: I think it's always tricky to conclude a story - we had a particular idea of how the game would end from the start and the kind of story we wanted to tell, and I can see that it might not work for some players. I think that's OK - I'd rather that then write something that is safer or more crowd-pleasing that…

Permanent link to “Q & A about Cassette Beasts’ ending during Bytten Studio’s latest AMA in r/cassettebeasts”
Aren’t plushies…

Aren’t plushies beautiful? They were created so a sick child had something to hold. They were created so an adult living alone might have a friend to keep them company. They were created for a teenager to clutch to her chest as she cries. They were created to accompany a college student to his geology classes. They were created not for any material benefit, they don’t change tires, but to be loved. They were created for the purpose of love.

Permanent link to “Aren’t plushies beautiful? They were created so a sick child had something…”

October 2024

Permanent link to “Tried and Quitted Neko Atsume 2”
Permanent link to “Font Awesome's Poo Storm Icon”
In Praise of the…

(Cross-posting my Bluesky thread praising the writing of Cassette Beasts that began with quote posting and responding to Jay Baylis, the writer and artist of Cassette Beasts. By the way, Jay liked my post that quote posted him!) The writing is one of the most underrated aspects of Cassette Beasts IMHO. I love stories that are not afraid to explore mature topics, but are still ultimately optimistic. This is one of many, many reasons Cassette Beasts is my ultimate favourite video game. I love how the partner characters not only have distinct personalities with their own character arcs, but also how many of their arcs are also intertwined with the main quest. I also like the ending and IMO it is a good example of how a story can conclude in a bittersweet note but still make sense to the story, both in terms of plot set-up and the themes and messages. Players who dislike the ending may be a vocal minority, but they're vocal enough that I was compelled to write a post on in defence of the…

Permanent link to “In Praise of the Writing of Cassette Beasts”
In Defence of the…

(Originally posted on Tumblr) I may write a proper essay to elaborate my thoughts on this subject better, but for now, I want to state for the record that I actually like the ending of Cassette Beasts and I think it fits the story and theme of the game. Yes, it is bittersweet, but it is not a bad thing. A story being happy, sad or bittersweet does not inherently make the ending good or bad; what matters is how well the ending is set up, and how thematically fitting the ending is to the story. In my opinion, the Cassette Beasts ending achieves both. Cassette Beasts' story has set up from the very beginning that the player character's goal is to find a way to leave New Wirral, and that the people who are living in New Wirral, including all the player character's partners, came from different worlds, with no one knows how to go back to their world until the player character and their party do in the ending. It makes sense that the player character's party expect they may never see each…

Permanent link to “In Defence of the Ending of Cassette Beasts”
Permanent link to “Using static websites for tiny archives by Alex Chan”
A Syllabus for…

In recent years, there’s a tendency towards specialism and specialists, from the job market to identities to relationships to education and more. Conversations around university education, for example, tend to be focused on high-earning job prospects, rather than on developing multidisciplinary ways of thinking. The job market tends to favor people who have had a clear, laddered path to success. The prevalence of TikTok trends, which disappear as quickly as they appear, have viewers categorizing themselves within a range of attributes, classifications that are used as bywords for a personality: “clean girl”, “softboi”, “thought daughter”, “thot daughter”, “de-influencers”, and more. Curiosity for curiosity’s sake is not discouraged, per se, but it’s not clearly monetizable either, and therefore can be deprioritized. As a result, people are quick to try to categorize themselves based on interest or skill, as a way of telling the world who they are quickly, before an audience’s…

Permanent link to “A Syllabus for Generalists by Cristina Jerney”
“To try to not be…

“To try to not be more interesting but be more interested” literally changed my life perspective btw To do things not for the sake of coming off a certain way or fitting a certain aesthetic or to grab ppl’s attention more …. But to simply do them bc you’re curious and invested and would do them regardless of whether anyone was perceiving you or not …. That is literally the point I’m genuinely understating how important this lesson has been for me bc we literally live in a world that’s all about aesthetics and branding and how to package urself even if you’re not even an influencer… dating tips that advise you to “focus on yourself” “take on more hobbies to have something to talk about and be interesting” like what if you just did those things bc you want to …. for the whimsy ….. bc we have one life ….. and then the rest just naturally follows . What if being interesting does not presuppose the interest. What if that sabotages it actually . What if the only actual way to be interesting…

Permanent link to ““To try to not be more interesting but be more interested” literally…”
thinking about “you…

thinking about “you haven’t met all the people who will love you” and like!!! you also haven’t found all the things that will make you happy!!!! there will always be new authors and musicians and artists whose work you will one day discover and love!!!! there will always be new hobbies and skills for you to learn and feel fulfilled by!!! there will always be new things around the corner that will bring sudden and unexpected happiness!!!!!!!!!!!

Permanent link to “thinking about “you haven’t met all the people who will love you” and like…”
Permanent link to “Godot engine being the new target of the anti-woke Gamers(TM) crowd for…”

September 2024

Permanent link to “autocrattic (more matt shenanigans, not tumblr this time)”
I think one of the…

I think one of the more unfortunate consequences to creators being more interactive with fans is that a lot of fans/fandoms normalized this idea that creators have to explain/validate every headcanon they have. #i am so tired of people getting mad when a creator doesnt confirm if a character is gay/autistic/in love with __/etc #its okay to say “its open to intepretation” like why cant people just trust their own instincts and have fun #why does a creator HAVE to validate them

Permanent link to “I think one of the more unfortunate consequences to creators being more…”
Eleventy: Set…

Despite using Nunjucks as my default templating language in Eleventy, for a long time, I was hesitant to just put markdownTemplateEngine: "njk" in my Eleventy configuration file, because I kept getting errors in the terminal about the nodes of my articles or blog posts did not exist, due to a conflict with the official Eleventy Navigation plugin. Today I finally solved the issue by adding eleventyNavigation.key to my breadcrumb set up, so the Eleventy Navigation plugin would dynamically read my eleventyNavigation.key key for each post or article. Now I no longer have to individually add templateEngineOverride: njk, md in a post or article's frontmatter.

Permanent link to “Eleventy: Set Nunjucks as the Default Markdown Template Engine”
Alternatives to…

Charcoal Gray | Hex #121212 Dark Slate Gray | Hex: #191919 Outer Space | Hex: #252525 Rich Black | Hex: #0A0A0A Coffee Bean | Hex: #1B1B1B Dark Gray | Hex: #212427 Oil Black | Hex: #0C0C0C Obsidian | Hex: #0B1215 Ebony | Hex: #222428 Black Chocolate | Hex: #100D08 Gunmetal | Hex: #1D1F21 Smoky Black | Hex: #101720 Oxford Blue | Hex: #212A37 Eerie Black | Hex: #232023 Jet Black | Hex: #161618 Iridium | Hex: #181818 Arsenic | Hex: #11181C Charleston Green | Hex: #212124 Dark Gunmetal | Hex: #222428 Jet | Hex: #2A2A2A Black Olive | Hex: #242526 Midnight Blue | Hex: #212121

Permanent link to “Alternatives to Using Pure Black for Text and Backgrounds”
Permanent link to “Nunjucks' built-in `wordcount` filter”

August 2024

A Cassette Beasts…

When I was searching for Cassette Beasts on Marginalia Search in hopes of finding more Cassette Beasts stuff on the independent web, I came across Boiling Steam's review of Cassette Beasts. The review is generally positive, but I disagree with most of its criticisms. One of their criticisms of the game, however, stood out to me: Lastly, the game features some stronger bosses called the archangels - they have a very different look than your regular monsters, and they feel out of place in the game, design wise and tone-wise. When you fight them, it feels like you stepped into a horror game, very far from the pokemon-y atmosphere of the rest of the world. That may be the biggest design flaw of Cassette Beasts. This bothers me greatly, because this goes beyond disagreement, as this argument crosses into the "completely missing the point" territory. The Archangels are intentionally designed to be weird and not looking like they belong. They are eldritch horrors, and Cassette…

Permanent link to “A Cassette Beasts review that completely misses the point of Archangels”
Permanent link to “Leilukin's Hub Cassette Beasts Shrine on Marginalia Search”
I dont understand…

I dont understand the insistence that fanfic writers have about being considered "real writers"[...] [...]i think the crux of the issue is this: you cannot take criticism. which is the bare minimum you should be able to do as a writer. because think about it, what else do you gain from being considered a "real writer?" what can you realistically GAIN from it? you can't submit your fanfics to competitions, can't be nominated for an award, don't get your work studied in classrooms, you can't even sell it etc etc. the one thing you legally should be ABLE to do is take criticism, and yet so many fanfic writers refuse. like even if you're like fuck the competitions, fuck the awards, fuck getting paid for your art, even if you considered all of those things as the pinnacle of classism (which we can argue about until the sun goes down i suppose), if you are not willing to take criticism about your fanfic/writing then, how are you any different from a toddler holding a…

Permanent link to “I dont understand the insistence that fanfic writers have about being…”
Permanent link to “What applications can be automatically installed at Hostinger?”
Thunderbird's…

Thunderbird has randomly failed to log in to my Outlook accounts so many times it is annoying. I searched the web and found this article, "Thunderbird Has a Problem With Outlook, Hotmail, and Live Email Addresses". I followed the article's suggestion to change my Outlook accounts' authentication method from normal password to OAuth2, which seems to finally solve the problem, at least I hope so.

Permanent link to “Thunderbird's Problem with Outlook”
Permanent link to “Reached 15 posts, 15 follows and 15 followers on The Dragon's Cave”
Using Laragon for…

Since when I started dipping my toes into PHP by creating the Cassette Beasts fanlisting and subsequently my fanlisting collective, I have been using PHP's built-in web server to preview my PHP pages. However, a major drawback of PHP's built-in web server for my PHP development was that when I used the web server to preview my fanlisting collective, the CSS stylesheet of my Cassette Beasts fanlisting will not get applied. Therefore, I have been searching for alternative development environment software for PHP. I tried out XAMPP, but it was not well-designed for developing multiple PHP projects; I even tried out Docker, which was overkill, especially since my back-end web development skills are not developed enough to be able to make use of Docker yet. Finally, I discovered Laragon, which gave me what I needed: lightweight, fast, and easy to switch between different PHP projects. As a result, I finally decided to settle for Laragon for the development of Leilukin's Hub's PHP websites.

Permanent link to “Using Laragon for My Local PHP Development”
Mastodon is Not…

I will never forget that one of my earliest experiences on Mastodon was when I joined Fosstodon way back in 2020 and witnessed my notifications being flooded by trolls or users from right-wing instances, all because my avatar contains the Philadelphia Pride Flag, which one of the trolls literally described as something only "SJWs" use. So yeah, the idea that Mastodon is better than Twitter is only true if you join instances that actually block troll instances and has explicit anti-bigotry policies. I still do not regret deleting my account on Fosstodon. Jerry Bell's long toot talking about the bigotry and troll problem of the Fediverse (archive.today version) I discovered today is so important.

Permanent link to “Mastodon is Not Inherently Better than Twitter”
Permanent link to “Firefox's Enhanced Tracking Protection and Cbox”

July 2024

Gitea repository of…

Decided to create remote repositories for my tumbleblog and fanlisting collective on 32-Bit Cafe's Gitea instance, so in case I lost my local repositories, I can still pull from a remote copy. My tumbleblog's repository is public at https://git.32bit.cafe/Leilukin/leilukin-tumbleblog However, my fanlisting collective repository is private, since it contains sensitive data such as passwords.

Permanent link to “Gitea repository of Leilukin's Hub subsites”
Permanent link to “Leilukin @ The Dragon's Cave”
Please stop begging…

Every time when I see a Pokémon fan complain about The Pokémon Company or Game Freak being cowards for not making their favourite gay ship canon, I want to tell them: "Please stop begging for corporations and corporate franchises to give you scraps and instead play Cassette Beasts which has actual unambiguously canon LGBTQ+ characters, and you can choose to pursue a gay romance yourself too".

Permanent link to “Please stop begging Pokémon to give you scrap levels of queer representation”
Permanent link to “Eleventy Configuration File Organisation”
Permanent link to “Leilukin's Hub Has Migrated to Hostinger”
Permanent link to “Chyrp Lite's Twig Cache”
Permanent link to “Switched to Harmonoid”
Strawberry Music…

Just found out that updates for the Windows version of Strawberry Music Player are now only available to sponsors. ☹️ From their home page: Access to macOS and Windows releases are currently restricted to sponsors, a 5 USD monthly sponsorship is required. You can sponsor strawberry through Patreon for direct access to new releases. If you are sponsoring through GitHub, Ko-fi or PayPal, please e-mail support AT strawberrymusicplayer.org for access to the downloads URL on the left menu. The reason macOS and Windows releases are closed to sponsors is because Strawberry have mainly had one contributor/developer over several years. Maintaining releases for macOS and Windows is a lot of additional work, and requires hardware and build environments, building and maintaing all libraries Strawberry depends on, and we also have to pay for a Apple developer account for signed macOS releases. Oh well, guess I am going to look for another open-source music player on Windows for playing local music…

Permanent link to “Strawberry Music Player releases are no longer free of charge”
Permanent link to “Thank you CSS `overflow-x: clip`”
Permanent link to “Thanks to 32-Bit Cafe's FreshRSS instance, I can finally sync my feed…”
Permanent link to “LGBT and Marginalized Voices Are Not Welcome on Threads”
Permanent link to “Leilukin's Gitea repository mirrors on 32-Bit Cafe”
Migrating the…

In my previous post, I talked about how the Obsidian community plugin Remotely Save convinced me to switch from Notesnook to Notion for my as my note-taking software, as the plugin mitigates the main disadvantage of Obsidian compared to its competitors of inability to sync notes across multiple devices without paying for a subscription. Similarly, I have begun to migrate the majority of my Notion notes to Obsidian thanks to Remotely Save. It helps that Obsidian actually has an official Importer plugin that supports Notion notes. I enjoy having more control over my notes in my own device, by being able to directly edit the source of my notes.

Permanent link to “Migrating the Majority of My Notion Notes to Obsidian”
Aboard the Obsidian…

Migrated my Notesnook notes to Obsidian and Standard Notes and deleted my Notesnook account. Notesnook is a decent note-taking software if you prioritise open-source and privacy-focused software, though I have always found its note organisation system rather clunky. I am officially boarding the Obsidian love train. Shout out to the Remotely Save community plugin in particular for enabling note syncing without paying for the official Obsidian Sync, and convincing me to switch from Notesnook.

Permanent link to “Aboard the Obsidian Train”
Permanent link to “Cassette Beasts Fanlisting and My Fanlisting Collective Launched”
Earned 32-Bit Cafe…

As part of my effort in participating in personal web spaces, I joined 32-Bit Cafe on both its Discourse forum and Discord on 15 June 2024. I feel at home at 32-Bit Cafe, since it is a community that promotes building personal websites, but without necessarily focusing on old web nostalgia. I have also making new online friends and acquaintances through 32-Bit Cafe. After half a month of activity on 32-Bit Cafe's Discourse forums, I earned the "New Member of the Month" Award for June 2024! [Image Description: 32-Bit Cafe Discourse forum system message that reads, Congratulations, you’ve earned the New User of the Month award for June 2024. 🏆 This award is only granted to two new users per month, and it will be permanently visible on the badges page. You’ve quickly become a valuable member of our community. Thanks for joining, and keep up the great work! End description.] [Image Description: 32-Bit Cafe Discourse forum's "New User of the Month" award badge, with the…

Permanent link to “Earned 32-Bit Cafe "New Member of the Month" Award for June 2024”
Permanent link to “Had to factory reset my smartphone because it had the issue of shutting…”
Fandom is not…

Fandom is not uniquely toxic compared to the past. I see a lot of people like "oh fandom used to be-!" but I'm here to tell you that no: it didn't. Look at one of the great Harry Potter wanks for examples: MsScribe made multiple sockpuppet accounts to bash a ship she didn't like, and to stir drama about what would now be called "purity wank." The war between Harry/Hermione and Hermione/Ron shippers was so fierce that entire websites rose and fell according to the tides of battle. I remember fierce struggles between the original "shippers" (Mulder/Scully) and "noromos" (anti-shippers) in X-Files fandom in the nineties. I've gotten "flames" (harassment) for "making characters gay" in the Stargate and LotR fandoms. Sporking used to be a thing, for gods' sakes! Fandom has always had toxicity, and the levels/flavor of that toxicity has been different depending on what fandom you've been in, but the general level of wank has not…

Permanent link to “Fandom is not uniquely toxic compared to the past. I see a lot of people…”

June 2024

Permanent link to “By creating buttons for them, my fanlisting collective and Cassette Beasts…”
Permanent link to “Made great progress in styling my upcoming fanlinsting collective. It is…”
Permanent link to “Made huge progress in building the Cassette Beasts fanlisting by…”
Just learned that SSL intermediate certificate and certificate chain are not supported on InfinityFree's free hosting. Unfortunately, this causes tumbleblog's feeds at https://tumbleblog.leilukin.com/feed/ unable to be validated due to the lack of intermediate certificate or certificate chain in its SSL certificate. In addition, InfinityFree implements a security system in free hosting that blocks RSS readers from accessing an InfinityFree website on free hosting. Therefore, I have to use Feedburner to proxy this tumbleblog's feeds into https://feeds.feedburner.com/leilukin/MhnSDOYh3GC to make them readable by feed readers.

Permanent link to “Just learned that SSL intermediate certificate and certificate chain are…”
Permanent link to “Kind of sucks that Notion requires you to pay for a subscription plan if…”
Previously, I set up a contact form for my upcoming Cassette Beasts fanlisting with InfinityFree's PHPMailer contact form code. Now, I finally succeed in implementing PHPMailer into all the fanlisting's functions that involve sending out emails, such as emailing new members after they submit the join form and when they get approved, as well as emailing me when a new member applies to join the fanlisitng or when an existing member updates their member details. Furthermore, I managed to add the rest of the features of BellaBuffs' contact form, such as spam detection, into the Cassette Beasts fanlisting's contact form as well.

Permanent link to “Previously, I set up a contact form for my upcoming Cassette Beasts…”
Today I learned that InfinityFree's free hosting plan does not support the PHP mail() function, so an external email service is required to send email from an InfinityFree free plan website. As a result, I ended up spending a lot of time in setting up a contact form for my upcoming Cassette Beasts fanlisting by using PHPMailer, based on a contact form page built with PHPMailer that is provided by InfinityFree. since I am new to PHP.

Permanent link to “Today I learned that InfinityFree's free hosting plan does not support the…”
On Bullying

(Content Warning: Bullying) This Tumblr post about bullying by froody (web archive version) has the most accurate description of the bullying I had experienced in most of my secondary school years that traumatised me into adulthood until I went into therapy I have ever come across: bullies on TV are always dumb brutes and not the evil geniuses of emotional manipulation that they are in real life. being given a wedgie and having your lunch money stolen is nothing in comparison to a classmate quietly creating a taboo against speaking to you that they intend to enforce against all the other kids. it’s nothing like continuous cutting comments from people you thought were being nice to you. that way that the work of one kid can make you feel like every person on earth silently hates you and that you are dirty, disgusting, worthless, creepy and useless. that you can have friends but many of them will not speak to you at school for fear of the social consequences on their end. how that…

Permanent link to “On Bullying”
Permanent link to “"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin”
Accidentally…

I just made an embarrassing mistake — for a brief moment, I accidentally deleted this tumbleblog's files from its server on InfinityFree, causing this tumbleblog down. 🫢 I was trying to learn and test how to create a fanlisting with BellaBuffs, and attempting to upload the BellaBuffs files to another subdomain of leilukin.com on InfinityFree via FTP. Prior to this, I was trying out Erin's fork of Enthusiast, but I encountered a critical issue: whenever I tried to add a fanlisting I joined, the entire home page of my fanlisting collective went blank. The reason I ended up deleting this tumbleblog's files by accident was that I did not pay attention to the current remote location when I connected to it via FTP on WinSCP — I thought I was in the folder of the other subdomain used for fanlistings, and I wanted to delete the Enthusiast files from the fanlisting subdomain, but turned out I was actually in the folder of this tumbleblog. I only realised my error after visiting tumbleblog…

Permanent link to “Accidentally Deleted This Tumbleblog's Files While Trying Out BellaBuffs”
Permanent link to “Moonstone Island: All Spirits Explained”
escapist media in…

escapist media in general is an ongoing fascination for me. media written with escapism as a main priority typically requires very little thought from the reader - the whole point is to kick back and live vicariously through a fun story, after all. they're narratives written to prioritize reader comfort. but because they are written to be as unchallenging as possible, they often come with a set of underlying assumptions that can be just fucking fascinating to unpick. like yeah, why IS it assumed to be escapist and indulgent to enjoy colonial wealth without thinking about it in regency fiction. why IS the self inserty female protagonist, who is assumed to be as universally relatable as possible, written to be sweetly naive and sexually inexperienced. why does this "queernorm" contemporary world replicate patriarchial structures exactly but just with Gay People Allowed. why are these ideas assumed to be easy and comforting? can the writers not imagine anything better than the…

Permanent link to “escapist media in general is an ongoing fascination for me. media written…”
Finally, at long last, after 13 years, Ace Attorney Investigations 2 is getting official localisations outside Japan! It took Tumblr mutuals’ reblogs and posts to make me learn that Ace Attorney Investigations 2 is getting an official English localisation. It feels surreal that AAI2, which came out in 2011, gets official releases outside Japan 3 years later than The Great Ace Attorney duology, which came out in 2015 and 2017 in Japan and then 2021 outside Japan.

Permanent link to “Finally, at long last, after 13 years, Ace Attorney Investigations 2 is…”
Hello, Chyrp Lite!

I have been considering the idea of creating a microblog or tumbleblog for my website. The main site of Leilukin's Hub already has a blog, but I also want another blog for shorter or more casual posts to document my thoughts and various stuff I find interesting or inspirational, especially ones that I am not sure how or where to put in the main site of Leilukin's Hub yet. Tumblr has served me adequately for this purpose, which is one of the reasons it remains the social media platform I am the most active on since 2011 (yes, this means I have been on Tumblr for 13 years at this point). However, one of the reasons I eventually decided to create my own website was to not relying on social media to share my creations and interests. Therefore, an ideal Tumblr-style microblog for Leilukin's Hub would be self-hosted and sharing the same domain name of leilukin.com. After struggling to figure out how to implement a tumbleblog for Leilukin's Hub, I finally discovered the ideal blogging engine…

Permanent link to “Hello, Chyrp Lite!”