I Made a Video (Internet Nostalgia Incoming)! | 31/AUG/2024

Hey, long time no update.. Like two years, almost. Oops..

Ok, I swear to God I haven't been doing nothing this entire time, I've just been taking a break from my usual website creation things to spend time with my loved ones and work on other projects that I've been putting off forever. One of which is a video about the founding of my online chat space of choice from my teenage years, Habbo Hotel.

For those of you who are unaware, I've been a huge fan of Habbo's art style for the last twenty years or so, having first signed up waaaaay back in March of 2001 when Habbo first made its way to the English speaking market from Finland, and as a result, I'm one of the few people left from this era who actually somewhat actively participates in the Habbo community from time to time. A few friends of mine who joined Habbo a little bit after me (between 2005 - 2008) have asked me on several occasions over the last 10 or 15 years if I'd ever consider writing a blog/archive covering the early/founding years of this stuff, and in more recent years, people have asked me if I'd ever consider doing a video about the topic for YouTube.

Why now, you might be wondering? Well, as grim as this is going to sound, in the last 5 or 6 years, several older Habbo users have passed away, and it got me kinda thinking recently about how long I'm going to actually keep putting this thing off for. A Habbo friend I've had for the better part of 20 years now passed away at the first half of 2024, and it honestly shook me a bit. I was talking to him one week, and literally a couple of weeks later, he was gone, just like that. Although I'm not planning on going anywhere any time soon myself, life just kinda comes at you as a bit of a cunt sometimes, and you never know what might be just around the corner, so I decided in that moment that I was going to stop putting things off that I actually want to do, and just do them while I can. This video is one of them.

Although I'm not a professional videographer, or YouTuber, or editor, or whatever, after some help from a couple of friends, I've put together something I'm honestly incredibly proud of, and if you could check it out, that would be massively appreciated. Comments, likes/dislikes, feedback, whatever, all would be appreciated. If you want to check the video out, you can do so below, or by clicking here.

Bet you weren't expecting this (PEELOPAALU) | 25/NOV/2022

Ok, so here's the gist of what this blogpost/newspost is about: I am heavily considering starting my work on Peelopaalu again. Earlier this year I decided to take a bit of a break from updating the website, but after a lot of consideration, I'm now thinking of maybe getting back on the horse and giving it a go again. I'm in a much clearer headspace as of now, and this last week I have thought a bit about maybe doing something with Peelopaalu sometime in the first half of 2023. What this something is though? I don't know yet. Maybe I'll randomly just start updating again as I used to, maybe I'll change something up, I honestly have absolutely no clue right now.

Now I've put this out there, I have a few things I absolutely need to get some feeback on before I go any further with this. If you could email me, Tweet at me, PM me on Newgrounds, or just get in touch somehow, I'd really appreciate it if I could get some thoughts on the following:

1) Should I keep the project limited to being indefinitely hosted on Neocities, or should I expand beyond this to allow for more features (search function, tagging, etc?) This would potentially come with costs, so I'd need to find a way to make this worth my while if I go down this route.

2) Should I bring back Peelopaalu in its current form at all, or should I reset the directory/collection to 0 and start building links again from the ground up? Why would I even consider this, you may ask? To ensure quality over quantity, prune mass-amounts of dead links, and clean the directory up.

3) Should I cull the obituaries page? Why? It takes time to update it, check for an archive.org link, and it generally slows down updates by quite a lot. Pruning dead links and replacing them with new ones without commemorating the old (and dead) ones keeps updates coming without delays. This comes at the cost of the directory randomly gaining/losing links at random spots on the list. I am also considering removing the obituaries page in favour of leaving dead links on the main directory and just highlighting them in red to signify them being dead. What do you think of this?

4) Would anybody be interested in me abandoning legacy Peelopaalu in favour of a deep-web/dark-web/onion-links version of the site? It would still be hosted on the clearnet, and would link to a mix of SFW and NSFW content, but everything I link to would be 110% legal and not morally reprehensible (so yeah, no linking to the obvious sickfuck shit people associate with that part of the internet, of course)

5) None of the above? If nothing here does it for you, what's your idea? I'm open to discussing this with you via email or whatever. Just drop me a line. I'd love to hear what you want to see from me and Peelopaalu as a site in the future!

Thanks for checking this blogpost thing out, and thank you very much for continuing to follow my spaces online. This blogpost was originally written for my personal website (s.neocities.org) but will be (or maybe already has) been posted both there and on Peelopaalu (peelopaalu.neocities.org) in hopes of reaching a wider pool of people.

I hope to hear from you soon!

Site Updated, Been Sick, Working on Stuff, a Question | 11/NOV/2022

Jesus Christ, it only took me like a year of inactivity to get my ass in gear and get shit done. I've been off work this last week with what is either a SUPER fucking nasty chest infection or a touch of COVID, but either way, it seems to have enabled me to actually do some stuff today I've been wanting to do for the last 6 - 8 months (yeah, yeah, I know.) So what's changed?: The "other stuff" page has been split into the new "Get in Touch" page with all of my profiles linked on it and the sort of "projects that aren't projects" page I originally planned to use "other stuff" for. Currently, there's only one thing on there, maybe that'll change, maybe it won't, we'll see.

Oh yeah, I also added mine and my wife's sticker store to the "Projects" page, considering well, y'know. It's a project. My only ongoing internet project at the moment, actually. If you're into My Little Pony, or more specifically, 4chan's /mlp/ board culture? Maybe give it a look. If you're not into that sort of thing? Also cool, give it a look if you want, don't if you don't, either works.

I also wanted to ask, while I'm rambling on about nothing. Would you guys be at all interested in seeing me post blogposts showing my process for repairing old electronic wristwatches? I'm not sure if anyone reading this is aware, but I've always had a thing for watches, and this last year I've gotten very into tinkering with very broken Tissot Seastar 2030 calibre and 2031 calibre powered models from the 1970's that I find on eBay. So far, I've successfully managed to repair 3 severely damaged examples and bring them back from the brink of death with no repair manuals or any prior experience working on watches outside of doing direct movement swaps, so I think what I've learned could potentially be useful to someone else going into this with no prior experience like I did as these movements are VERY poorly documented online outside of one excellent website I found here. I dunno. Figured it could be something fun and different for me to share on my site, but if nobody is into it, then that's cool too - I'm more than happy to just continue doing that sort of stuff IRL and keeping what I do online seperated from my other hobbies. Here's a pic of the first watch I managed to bring back from beyond the grave for anyone who might be potentially interested in seeing how the whole process works:

Tissot Seastar ft. an in-house designed Tissot 2030 cal movement from approximately 1973. (before service and restoration)

Tissot Seastar ft. an in-house designed Tissot 2030 cal movement from approximately 1973. (after service and restoration)

Dunno if you dudes would be interested in seeing more of this type of thing + a detailed breakdown on what I do and how I do it, or if it's just not for you, but hey, give me a shout via email either way and let me know. I'd be happy to hear your thoughts!

As always, feel free to email me if you have any suggestions, feedback, or just want to say hi for whatever reason!

I hate writing. | 03/NOV/2022

Can someone please do me a solid and explain how to go about writing a blog? I despise writing, but I have niche interests I can rant endlessly about but absolutely no drive or know-how when it comes to putting a blog about these sorts of things together without immediately becoming demotivated and burned out on the idea. Anyone have any ideas on how I can get over this? Writers block is an absolute bitch. This is why I quit writing green for /mlp/ years ago.

Feel free to email me if you have any suggestions.