Year of Growth
Hey! It's been a while again, again. I've put off writing this for a quite comical amount of time. Spent all year thinking about how I was gonna go about doing it... tonight! No! Tomorrow! No! Next week! You know the rest. This is some behavior I will have to correct at some point.
A lot has happened since the last post, after all, it's been nearly 2 years. There's a lot I could and want to share here, but I wanna do this right — one thing at a time... oh, what was that. It appears ever since the last post, part of the population has acquired a fear of em dashes (I normally just use hyphens anyway...) Well, you probably know (perhaps from my social media) I have my opinions on the whole AI debate...they're complex and not one-sided, as things usually should be, I think. But still I would like to make it clear that no LLM technology or anything of the like was used to write or assist writing this post! I value genuineness greatly. If you are an user of any of those AI summarizer things, I can't and won't stop you, but I will be a bit sad. Oh, shoutouts to the AWAY collective!
Before I go on with the post, I want to say a few things... first, I really don't know if I'll be able to turn this blog into an email newsletter in a way I would like, but I think it's fine. I want people to come to the blog... read and even comment (which you can do right now!) but I'm also facing a dilemma. I want to write more for the blog, but all this time I've been making these posts with several "updates" and topics all at once, as a kind of, well, newsletter really, and at inconsistent times. Well, I want to hear your thoughts! Vote below on what you'd prefer: More frequent but shorter posts, each with a particular focus subject, or still the bursts of updates in one post every month or so?
Life Update
I don't know what would be the best way to put this, but like I said a lot has happened in my life the past year or so - In December 2024, I left my mother's house after having been with this side of the family for most of my life. My dad had moved to a new city, and I joined him. I felt that I really needed that environment shift. Staying at my mom's wasn't being good for me. I was getting stagnant. Without getting too personal, let's just say that for quite some time they've... been living in another planet, and I really needed to get back to Earth for quite some time. And so now I have.
The past year saw many developments in my personal life - more independence in general, something that my dad pushed for (and believe me, we don't mesh quite that well sometimes, but that is to be expected!), more confidence (being in a relatively more LGBT+ friendly environment definitely helps), health check-ups that I quite needed, etc. - and this December, I finally concluded high school, which I had dropped out from in 2017. Needless to say I got a pretty decent path ahead of me.
Financially wise, it's another story, and it's not the greatest, but I believe it to be manageable if I play my cards right. I want to do work for people - video editing (and creating as well, though for that I will have to subject myself to YouTube's algorithm, etc. you know the ordeal.) being the main kind of thing I believe I can provide well (If I get to finish my damn demo reel it would be better...) but also music and art stuff, which I should do more of to get back into the swing of things, and you can definitely let me know if you'd like to hear (or see) anything in particular from me! I can also do... other things, if you know where to look... am I hearing sleigh bells...? It's not even Christmas anymore! Ah, whatever.
Bear Blog
As you may or may not have noticed, this blog ain't on Tumblr anymore... At the start of 2025 I have migrated all of it to a fun new (and better) place. It's cool in here, I think, definitely a valuable project that you should give a look!
The Hanazuki Archive
In the past I have made efforts to save as much of Ninjin-related media as I could (Right now you can support its creators by buying their latest game - Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, it's sick as hell!!!) as the entire IP was basically jeopardized thanks to the pure capitalism hell that was the Warner Bros. Discovery merger (that, considering more recent events, was that even worth it?) so now, it rests in IP purgatory, out of control of its rightful creators, together with many, many other unfortunate creations. But even before that, there was another unjustly abandoned IP that I wanted to properly give some much needed love and care to - Hasbro's Hanazuki. It got to a point where the company basically pretends that it never happened. Hell, I'm selling stuff with their characters on it and they haven't done anything. It's that bad.
Now the fandom for this is definitely a bit more "existing" than Ninjin's, so there were already some archival efforts in place, but I thought we could do more, and better. Proper high quality MKVs for all episodes, and subtitles and multi-lingual audio as a bonus, if possible. So I, together with @rari_teh, scoured the internet to find anything we could. After doing a lot of pointless work with encoding and reencoding, trying to make use of a PAL version (25 FPS) of Season 2, ripping video streams straight from ABC iview from Australia, and I don't even remember what else, we came across a peculiar upload on archive.org that was hiding under our noses this entire time - an archive of basically everything you could possibly want that is Hanazuki-related... but all in French. Except... that was just on the surface. You see, we dismissed it slightly for a while when we found it as it was suspiciously described by the uploader as "Contains French episodes of Hanazuki", but in actuality those were, for some reason, multi-language audio track MP4s with nearly every dub (+ the original audio) ever produced for the show. What. Why was it labeled like that???? Now, those still had the "YouTube ending cards" text in French (Because believe it or not, Hanazuki used to be officially on YouTube) but that wasn't quite a big deal. It was still the proper show in 1080p with good audio, bitrate and everything. Thank you for your kind service (even if accidental...?), french archivist.
So I (re)muxed all of the material I was able to gather, and on top of that, I also tried to find a torrent for a DVD/Blu-ray of My Little Pony: The Movie, which contains the Hanazuki theatrical short film, to complete the archive. I found one and, well, you can now see it all in one place! ...until Hasbro decides that they care again, I suppose.
Media I've Been Consuming
Even though it's been a while since the last post, there hasn't been way too many games, shows and whatnot that I've consumed for fun, I was probably focusing on other (stupider and autisticker) things. But a few are extremely notable and worthy of mention, so here it goes...
Hilda (Finished)
After it got a movie, Season 3 came a bit unexpectedly, but it thankfully did not overstay its welcome, even though most of the conflicts set up in Seasons 1 and 2 were resolved with the movie, in fact I would say it only added to everything that was already established. This show is unbelievably comfy, atmospheric and just... Good and I could rewatch it as many times as I can and not be sick of it. Alfur's entire existence reawakened something inside me that was last seen during my childhood when I was hyperfixated on Stuart Little - you can probably draw the parallels. It's hard to say if Hilda is my favorite cartoon from the 2010s, or if it's OK K.O., but given that a good chunk of it came out during the 2020s, it might just be fair to consider it my favorite 2020s cartoon instead.
Deltarune (Chapters 3 & 4)
I mean. What could I even say about this that hasn't already been said by everyone ever? I just wanna see what kinds of Tricks Tony is cooking up for this year. Tenna is funny, basically Spamton after taking his meds. I love the cuptains.
The Amazing Digital Circus
Same as Deltarune, what can I even say. Though this is fresher in my brain thanks to the latest episode. Gooseworx is an evil genius.
Shoutouts to the Brazilian dub full of recognizable and talented voices (and cool/weird/intriguing adaptations of jokes).
Only tangentially related, but I still haven't watched the final Murder Drones episodes. At this point I should probably rewatch the whole thing.
Cyborg Kuro-chan
Oh boy. This was the brainrot of last year for me. Still kinda is. I've already known it for quite some time now, but never properly sat down to give it a honest watch, and I just... fell in love with how just batshit crazy it is. It reminded me of my own stupid video series, Silvia. And I love the art, the characters, the animation... despite its silliness and absurdity focus, it isn't afraid to have some form of worldbuilding, too.
Unfortunately for me, there is, much like it was with Calimero (1992), a language barrier problem for me... a kind soul was able to provide fansubs for the anime (It's not the best especially having been made with a Spanish fansub as a base, but it is more than serviceable) but it ends at basically the halfway mark of the show.
At one point I will take a look into similar creacher™ anime, such as the (infinitely more popular) Keroro Gunsō (Sgt. Frog), as well as do my best to preserve anything I can find related to this series, and be able to watch the rest of it (by learning Japanese...?)
Oh yeah, this anime also has a partially lost English dub (and not even made for the US or anything)! It's... quite something. Some years ago I have watched a couple episodes with this dub, and I had described Kuro's voice as "a mix of Jerry Seinfeld and Four (BFB)", that's all I will say.
There is one unfortunate thing about this franchise, though, in that all of its videogame adaptations just kinda suck ass and don't quite capture the same energy of the anime (but they do have pretty bangin' music). Perhaps... one day I could try to change that...? (As if I didn't already have a 10+ year old still unfinished fangame to continue lol)
Silvia Goes Worldwide?
legal
On YouTube, you win some, you lose some. Through some monkey's paw kinda business, they finally rolled out to (almost) everyone their multi-audio track feature that they have been "testing" for a few years now. But that also came with the* Very Fun and Not Awful* bonus of fully auto-generated """"dubs"""" that you have to explicitly opt out of, and it is absolutely plaguing the site now. Combining their (admittedly, definitely improved) transcription AI with machine translation (that is likely being powered with Google's LLMs rather than the typical Google Translate tech) definitely couldn't go wrong whatsoever, no siree.
In preparation for this though, I thought I could do something fun. What if my Silvia videos were dubbed...but "actually"? I already have translated them to English, by hand, just enable subtitles. Now, most of Silvia is made with crusty Text-to-Speech voices of the past decade(s), and sometimes me (as Mariola). Elevenlabs can, funnily enough against its "mission", decently clone existing TTS voices with most of their characteristics, "robotic/artificial" inflections and such. Elevenlabs' current main model is also multi-lingual, so I thought... Silvia in... Spanish? Japanese? *Chinese?! *Silvia finally speaking her actual "mother tongue" would be both cool and hilarious. So now that's a long-term goal. Now I don't know Japanese or Chinese (nor am I that great at Spanish), but I will at least try to be sure that any machine translation at least comes out understandable and making sense enough going back and forth. If it's a little crusty, it'll just add to the bootleg nature that Silvia is already meant to have, so no downsides there :)
Miscellaneous
I had a few other topics that I wanted to write about, but... I took so long to write this, that some of it is not even super relevant anymore. Topics like... where Internet Browsers are headed to (and Mozilla couldn't be doing Worse), the moral panics surrounding generative AI, how I've been comfortably using Linux a lot more than Windows lately, the "American chaos" of current day social media (and people not being able to discern "real" problems from garbage that doesn't matter) just to name a few. But eventually you might see them, just gotta be in the right mood.
Conclusion
Have a good 2026, fellas. I haven't made the traditional end-of-year collage pic this time... honestly I don't even know if it'd even have a lot of stuff in it compared to last year (and this blog hasn't even seen last year's image!) but maybe I'll still do it eventually. Don't be surprised if it happens to have some particularly banana-y edits, nor if it says "Sloppy new year!".
Check my socials (Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Tumblr) for the latest stuff as always, and I'll see you in the next post, hopefully not taking 2 years again.
