July was fucking horrendous, so I didn’t have a ton of hope that August was gonna be any better. Though there were things to look forward to, at the very least. So that automatically makes it better… or that’s what I choose to believe. Though this post will be less about what’s been going on, and more about random topics I’ve been wanting to explore. That said, let’s talk about August.

What have I been up to? Well, much like last month, I’ve been mostly focused on work. I’ve been given quite a few things to do, mostly design related stuff. The entire experience has been kind of a pain in the ass, I must say. I spent way more time than I would’ve liked trying to get things to work, to the point of frustration. I constantly felt like I was delaying the entire team and that my work just wasn’t good enough.

Eventually, I ended up hitting a roadblock. Despite my attempts at trying to solve it by myself, I just couldn’t do it. I even spent time outside of work trying to see if I could solve it. But no dice. And so, I had a work meeting, where I showed off my latest progress and I mentioned the roadblock I faced. We came to the agreement that one of my teammates was gonna do the complicated stuff, while I’d take care of the UI. I finally got to upload my changes last week, so they’ll now have to be checked by my other teammates who are more experienced. I know for a fact that my code is messy, in fact that was partly why I had such a hard time getting it uploaded. And now I have to solve other annoying things… ugh. I hate working with code, it’s so needlesly complicated.

This month also marked the birthdays of two people who mean a lot to me. My mom and my friend. For my friend, I ended up getting her some more Snoopy figurines… much like in previous times I’ve had to get gifts for her. Kinda predictable, but at least she did really like them. I also threw in a Pocky as an extra. For my mom, I did do something more elaborate, I got cake and some chips so we could all eat together. And for the actual present, I ended up getting a fancy electric oven with a built in air fryer. It wasn’t cheap… but hey, she did like it. Sadly, it’s wider than I expected, so we can’t fit it into the space where we have the other one.

My brother has been struggling a lot lately, out of nowhere, he started to feel depressed. From what I’ve gathered, he seems to feel stressed about school and the future, to the point where he’s refusing to do his duties at school and we have to go pick him up. The psychologist at school (they do have one, interestingly enough) has told us about how he’s doing, and we’ll have to take him to therapy during September. It worries me that he’s also going through mental health struggles much like I did as a teen, but I’m hoping that things can indeed be sorted. I completely understand how stressful it is to be pressured as a teen/young adult.

The weather has been super weird too, one week is sunny, but the next one is raining. Apparently this means that next summer’s about to be super hot, which I’m dreading. I guess it does make sense to have this weather that flip flops between hold and cold, now that we’re making the jump to spring. I have a bit of a love hate relationship with spring, it’s when things start to look up, but it’s when my allergies begin as well. Although these past few years, they haven’t been too terrible at least, so I’m hoping it won’t be as big of a problem this time. Of course, only time will tell.

Overall, this month didn’t push me as hard as July did, but I can hardly say it was pleasant. Work has been annoying, and there have been weeks where I feel irritated for no good reason. Almost like everything around me gets on my nerves, some months are worse than others on this regard. That’s about it for the general things, now let’s get straight to some random topics I wanted to touch on.

Y’know, watching the World Cup made me realize something. I don’t actually hate soccer as a sport, in fact I thought it was decently entertaining. Granted, I’m not exactly like, a hardcore fan or anything, and I still don’t care much for it outside of these sorts of events. No, the thing that actually pisses me off are the fans themselves. It’s a level of toxicity that is really hard to quantify.

And by soccer fans, I mean the ones in my country. They’re the type to take the sport too seriously, probably more than the players themselves, and they say it’s because they’re extremely passionate. I can understand liking something so much, you just can’t help but express yourself. But once you start doing things like leaving a mess everywhere you go, raiding buses by threatening the driver, and beating each other up just because of some stupid ass rivalry… is it really about passion anymore? It’s one thing to enjoy something, but it’s another to be a careless prick who has no regard for anything or anyone around you.

I hate soccer culture where I live, it’s so trashy. These people seem to love living in complete misery, since they like to paint things like walls and lightposts with the colors of their favorite team, as a way to “mark their territory” or something. And it looks fucking horrible, almost like they have no eye for aesthetics. It completely cheapens the look of a place. Some city halls have been trying to do something about it by painting over those things, only for the officials to get death threats because of it. And it baffles me that the government isn’t doing shit about it. Are they afraid or what? And society as a whole seems to want to accept it rather than villifying it… for some reason. We’re so backwards man.

In general, it’s things like these that turn me off from ever participating on things like fandoms. They always give off the worst impressions and drives people away from potentially new interests. I’ve always preferred to enjoy things by myself, once you strip the fans away from the picture, things suddenly become much more enjoyable, don’t they? That’s how I was eventually able to get into K-pop, for instance. If you were on Twitter around 2019, you probably saw these annoying ass fancams in completely unrelated posts, I’m not sure if this is still a thing today.

If their goal was to spread the word about their interests… well, that bullshit failed on me. I always ended up having that impression that all of those fans were like that, and that the media was overhyped and not worth consuming. When I began to listen to K-pop in 2022, I realized that it was more my thing than I thought, and since then I have never been the same man again. I realized that the media was never the problem, it was always the fans. They take things way too seriously, and forget that celebrities are humans just like you and I. They’re gonna make mistakes, sending death threats to them over the smallest things is just… batshit insane. Jesus Christ, you people are not well.

So yeah, as long as I’m willing to ignore fandoms and enjoy things outside of online communities, I end up enjoying things the most. And the less I’m exposed to these questionable individuals, the better. On that note…

August always marks a month of important decisions, and this time I decided I had enough of Instagram. At some point, I realized it was an awful place to be in… it’s a platform that thrives off negativity, I’m convinced it pushes that shit to you on purpose. And somehow, it always shows the stupid negative comments first, browse through any post’s comment sections and they’re always the first ones. If you have Instagram, give that a try: enter a random post on like, Reels or something, and then check the comments. Surely it’s not just me.

All of those things make it so that I always want to argue with people, just to refute their bullshit. And that’s just not healthy, man. And I’m 100% convinced Meta doesn’t give a shit. I mean, their reporting system is a complete joke for one, you can report something and almost every time, all you get is “we couldn’t do anything”. No, you chose to not do anything. Don’t give me that shit that nothing could be done, I know that’s not true. The constant frustration has led me to just get rid of my account after all, so by early September it should be gone.

It’s because of the nonexistant moderation that it seems like being a complete asshole is completely normalized. Oh, but then they throw a fit because you said a word they didn’t like, which I know is not exclusive to Instagram (for instance, on YouTube my comments get hidden very often for seemingly no reason). It’s still extremely irritating, which is why I’d much rather post stuff on my blog rather than having a massive corporation try to censor me for the smallest things.

I hate how social media’s like these days. You’re constantly walking on eggshells just to avoid getting banned, and with AI based moderation, this is only getting worse with time. Which is why I’m now moving away from the big platforms, the only ones I really use now are Discord and (kinda) Tumblr. My X (or Twitter, whatever) account is just used for lurking on things I’m interested in, though it’s also an objectively horrible place to be in. Ah well.

So… yeah, I’m gonna make my online presence far more lowkey, and hopefully I’ll be able to free up some mental bandwidth so I can start socializing again, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for quite a while. I don’t like being asocial, even though I sometimes have to in order to keep myself sane.

August also marks two years of this blog’s existence. I thought about making a commemorative post, I decided against it in the end. As I’ve mentioned it in the past, this website wasn’t going to have a blog originally. I just thought of it as a way to introduce myself to the world, while talking a bit about my interests. It wasn’t until I did away with my SpaceHey account in 2024 that pushed me to have an outlet to express myself.

And so, the blog was born. Something I like about having a self hosted site is that I don’t have to rely on external services as much, specifically things like uploading photos and such, so it’s a lot better for posterity in case my accounts get deleted on my other platforms. This has so far been my most successful attempt at making a blog, every other attempt prior to this one has died off in a matter of months. So the fact that I’ve been able to keep at it for as long as I have is an achievement for sure.

Now, I haven’t really posted as much as I’d like, and that’s mostly because coming up with ideas for posts and their content is rather difficult. I don’t think of myself as being very creative, and my inspiration to do these things is… spotty, to say the least. The only consistent thing about my posts is that I get them out once a month, y’know, these monthly recaps. And sometimes I’ll throw in a one-off about a topic that interests me.

Regardless, I’d like to thank everyone who’s been reading my blog posts. I sure hope my posts aren’t overly rambly or whatever. Make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed (link in the sidebar) so you can get notified whenever I post something new. And yes, I’ll get around to answering comments… please go easy on me lol.

Quite a few things, as a matter of fact… first of all, the plushies. My favorite out of these has to be the angel bear.

Next, the toy cars…

Here’s one of the things I bought from Japan, this is “The ReVe Festival 2022 – Feel My Rhythm” by Red Velvet. This is one of my favorite releases from them, so I was thrilled to find this version for very cheap. It’s in great shape and the CD (curiously a mini CD this time), plays great. It came with all these goodies (sadly no photo card):

And speaking of Red Velvet, I bought something so goddamn stupid, I still can’t believe I actually went for it. This is a “fan signal” lip balm, which I got simply because it looks like a miniature version of their light stick. It was brand new, although the box was pretty beat up. To my disappointment, it doesn’t taste like much of anything, unlike other lip balms I’ve tried. But hey, it does make for a cool collectible.

I also got one of these, an original PSP component AV cable. This allows you to connect your PSP to a TV, it works on the 2000 and 3000 models. These aren’t super common where I’m from, much less the official ones from Sony. It works perfectly too, it just needed a bit of cleaning.

Next, these are the gadgets I bought. Eight of them this time.

• Motorola Moto X 1st gen (2013): I already had one of these, but it was in terrible shape. This one looks a hell of a lot better, and it works great, it just has a bit of burn in on the display. This phone was innovative as it allowed you to use Google’s assistant thingy even with the screen off. Yes, that was considered exciting back in 2013.
• Nokia E71 (2008): A business oriented phone with a full keyboard, it feels heavy and well built. Although mine has some dirt under the screen, which I’ll have to figure out how to clean. It does work just fine though, this is my first Nokia Eseries device.
• Motorola M702iS (2006): This is the Japanese equivalent to the internationally released RAZR V3xx, which was an improved version of the V3 with better specs. This is effectively the same phone, but it’s designed for the Japanese market. It works fine and it’s in okay shape, interestingly it has English as a language option alongside Japanese.
• Siemens AX76 (2005): A basic little guy, it’s so basic, it doesn’t even have a camera. While it does turn on, it’s in really bad shape, the back cover doesn’t stay in and the keypad has a lot of issues. I need to find parts to fix this one. Much like the other Siemens I found a while back, this one is full of downloaded ringtones.
• Qtek 8015 (2004): This one’s pretty interesting, this is a device made by HTC, known as the Typhoon. It’s a Windows Mobile smartphone and it’s pretty compact, it also features a sliding keypad thing for scrolling up and down. Unfortunately the battery is completely dead, so right now I can’t really test it. I definitely wanna see this running someday, though.
• Nokia 6015 (2004): A basic phone from the time, kind of a boring one if I’m being honest. It does at the very least have a color screen, so there’s that. This one is in alright shape and it turns on, although the keypad has issues, the keys either take too much effort to press or they register multiple presses at once. They’re also very mushy.
• Siemens C65 (2004): Yet another Siemens, it has a camera and all that. This one is a bit worn, but it does work just fine. And yes, just like the other Siemens phones I’ve obtained, this one is also full of ringtones. It’s so weird that it’s happened three times lol.
• Nokia 3200 (2004): A cheap camera phone from the time period, it’s very similar in features to the C65. I had a similar model, but this one was in slighly better shape. Still really scratched up and with a degraded battery, but it does appear to work fine. It’s full of ringtones too.

And finally, just some random trinkets I got.

And that was August, not horrible but hardly great. With this month out of the way, I can now start thinking about September and all the things it has in store. Mostly the national holidays, since that’s what most people in my country think of, myself included. I’ll be going to an aunt’s house to eat (and I’ll be eating a lot, it seems). Aside from that, my boss will confirm when we’ll be having our yearly company meeting, too.

Oh, and I also ordered an interesting device online. It’s a failed early 2000s handheld console, which will be the subject of a blog post. Hopefully I’ll get it out this month, we’ll see about that though. And maybe you guys will find it as interesting as I do, I dunno. That’ll also be the first time I do some kind of game review.

Anyway, for now… that’s all from me. See you all in the next post.