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║ Back From the Grave ║
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Posted: 2025-09-23 11:22:34 AM
Updated: 2025-09-23 3:15:09 PM
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Good morning fellows of the flesh. Today is September 23, 2025. And on this day, I just want to say that things have changed drastically since I last was here in February. I hope I am able to contribute somehow to this website in a way that reflects my current interests while respecting what February me has established. But I in no way can pretend away all the changes I’ve undergone since then. A big reason that I am here again is that the view count is higher than any of my other Neocities websites. It could be that it is inflated since it is the only one that is fashioned after a Zettelkasten or digital garden with its internal links. Nevertheless, if there is interest enough even in the case of an inflated view count, it should not be strange for it to reinvigorate my curiosity and attention.
I guess we can start by talking about what has changed since February.
We can start with March 2025. After I left this website, from February 25 to March 20, I wrote in Obsidian and then moved to a local Hugo by March 27. And I have been writing in it up to now. By early April, I began what would become my main personal website, which I have been trying to accomplish for over a year already. It includes (but is not limited to) the following:
1. Media Enjoyed: manga, anime, Youtube videos, websites.
2. Fiction Works: Matthew, Mark, Katherine.
3. Art: Goblin, Neuron, Bird.
4. Music Enjoyed: NFmusic, Tallah.
5. Some Books From My Bookshelf: The Fixer, The Sound and the Fury, All the King’s Men.
5. My Comprehensive About Me Section: Life in my Writings Throughout Time, Rash Life Summaries, Physical Item Essentials.
6. Thoughts on My Identity: Christian Filipino middle-classers.
7. A Selection of My Facebook Photos: 2004 to 2005.
8. Favorite Web Fiction: Vainqueur the Dragon, Chrysalis, Beware of Chicken.
9. My Chiefly Digital Now: videos, artists, websites, random memories.
10. Childhood Interests: Flash games, films, shows, books.
By May 2025, I started my “Show, Don’t Tell” project. This resulted in three stories (Sapper, LoFB, and Delilah) and a total of 30,000 words. I also moved my cafe visits from monthly at the same branch to 1.7 times a week in a number of branches throughout the region. By early June, I started my collection of “show, don’t tell” vignettes, writing one a day, averaging 458 words each. And I have scheduled up to October 12 as of writing, which is 20 days from now. And when including those scheduled, it now has a total of 123 vignettes and 56,437 words. By August, I met someone who would become my closest online friend. By early September, after more than 4 years of staying upstairs in a closed-up, air-conditioned room all alone since July 2021, I moved my computer desk downstairs to the living room where the rest of my family is. I now sit beside the window where I can look at the sunlit, carless street through the open wicket door and can breathe the open air with much greater ease. I sleep here now as well.
Since all this context does not really make much sense if we don’t consider my life during and before February, I will explain my life before February. It was part of an era that began since May 28, 2024. This era was characterized by my jump of prolificity:
1. July 4, 2023: the start of my autobiography-journal, from which we get the August 2025 figure of 3.5 million words.
2. July 4 to December 23, 2023: Around 2,000 words a day (173 days)
3. February 13 to April 27, 2024: My 74-day-straight web novel serialization, amounting to 4,300 words a day
4. Post–May 28, 2024: More than 7,000 words a day. This was still the case many months later in February 2025, but started decreasing to 6,700 past March. Critically, February is when I created this site and then left it on hiatus after less than a week of activity.
This prolific jump was set off by two setbacks that occurred simultaneously the month before. First, my computer became temporarily unavailable because I spilled water over it, and second, I lost my C drive computer files. My younger brother accidentally deleted the Windows while working with Linux dual boot.
Given all this, we can conclude that February is situated between the May 28 “growth spurt” of 2024 and the April main personal website start of 2025.
Moreover, this February website is now being revived in this closure era. This closure encompasses my milestone of 3.5 million words and the confirmation of the definitiveness of my main personal website. This era began around August of this year. This closure means a lot of room to pursue “secondary”, non-essential, non-“damning” interests like this revival. In other words, I am no longer being forced to continue abandoning current pursuits that fail to fill that essential role, in hopes of trying everything until I one day find that thing. Now that I’ve found it and am now in withdrawal, I can retrace my steps to everything else, even while exploring new sparks with this closure self.
February is also the month that my Youtube channel was given back to me after it was removed by Youtube on September 10, 2024.
In the end, the total programmatically calculated word count of this website was 5,808 when I left it. But now, I will subtract from it when calculating how many words I will add to this website going forward.
So while contextually, much has transformed, a number of key aspects remain generally the same:
1. Prose: “academic” and visceral or primal, long, multi-clausal sentences, short, declarative bursts, lists and repetition, reflexive and meta-aware language. The “show, don’t tell” vignettes training only reinforces this with all manner of psychological and naturalist[1] sensory details[2].
2. Tone: cerebral, philosophical, anxious, overwhelmed, analytically self-aware (almost clinical), searching and resilient.
3. Methodology: metaphorical models, abstraction, dialectical and iterative inquiry, self-response, and qualification, quantiative self-analysis, the internal links.
4. Goal: expressing myself as a prolific writer, or perhaps a “full-fledged journaler.” The first and introductory note of this website uses this exact term.
In summary:
1. I'm back!
2. Things changed! And I've grown!
3. I'm still the guy!
Self-Responses:
1. how can they maintain coherence over all of this?
2. I mean behind this passage itself. It feels so much. It's bewildering that they can hold coherently given how personal all of this is. It is easy to analyze something in front of you, but not yourself and what you do.
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