2025 and Beyond

Guess who's been bad at updating this!! It's me!!

To be fair, it's... okay, well, no, I have no excuses. I'm just doing too many things and some things fall by the wayside here and there. (See also, me not getting a write-up about Hypnospace Outlaw up in time before the calendar hits 2026). It happens! I decided to not beat myself up about it, at the end of the day it's just two little personal sites for me to blast stuff off into the void and if people want to read them they can. No need to take it THAT seriously, right? (But I do like rambling about things so, like. I do want to do more of it, of course...)

Anyway, I've been mulling it over all month. Do I want to do a little look back at 2025? I even had a couple things typed out a couple weeks back and then I deleted them. It's another case of me being me and trying to minimize my presence at any cost while also internally feeling the yearn to forge stronger connections with people. Can't do both in good faith, you know? I don't think it works that way. If you can't bare your soul to others but want to feel worthy of having their souls be bared to you, is that fair? I'd lean towards no, or at least I would in my specific case. I can't speak for everyone, that's just how I feel about it.

So here we are!! Some of this is probably slightly rehashing things I've said here in earlier posts so sorry for the partial recap episode.

I guess we'll recap the easy stuff. Earlier this year in the summer I got fed up with the life I was living and came out as trans. I'd known for too long. I denied it internally because I assumed it'd be hopeless to "do" anything with that knowledge. Why bother? What good would come of it? Better to live life the way I have been as a boring hermit who works a boring 9-5 that they're unhappy with and spends the remainder of their day sleeping, taking care of themselves, and playing video games. It's easy!! Right? Just repress yourself forever and eventually it'll just work out. Anyway, of all the incredibly stupid things to snap me out of that was getting into exercising (I'd been WFH for a few years at this point, as an aside to this to let you know just how much I'd been cooped up) and then within like, maybe a week tops I had the clarity of mind to go "hey what the fuck are you doing" and kicked off what was, in hindsight, a very funny series of events.

I spent a while doing.. I dunno what I'd even call it. Testing the waters? Trying to sort out my feelings? I posted a couple of suggestive things about my status on Bluesky while working it out. In hindsight they probably came off as shitposts which was not the intent--yes, I am a person who loves a good laugh, but not in this specific case. Then of course as I've joked about here and elsewhere, the sudden moment came where I snapped in the middle of playing fucking Lagoon on the x68000 and just posted 'yeah fuck it I'm a girl now' publicly. Well, there were more words than that but I don't want to go find the post. I think less than an hour later I found the really funny Moon Shield glitch where if you kill the first boss, Samson at the same time as you die you'll game over and end up restarting the game with the Moon Shield, the final shield you'd normally get in the game. If you're curious why I have the dumb moon shield follower notification on my streams, now you know the lore.

Anyway, things escalated from there. I got a new microphone. I decided I wanted to get into vtubing. I decided to make the first game I'd ever stream Unlimited SaGa. Truth be told, I've always wanted to try the whole streaming thing because hell, I love playing video games and sharing that experience with people. I was just.. I dunno. Maybe being able to become true to myself helped me get into that? It's not my job--I have a 9-5 job already!--but I'm really happy that four times a week I can click the funny stream button and people will come in to chat and lurk while I play cool ass (IMO) old games and. I've said it before and I'll say it again, thanks for everyone who comes by to hang out even if it's just to say hello and check in briefly, or even if you're just chilling and listening on another monitor or whatever.

So it's been about 6-7 months of that to date. It hasn't always been great, sometimes. I'm not going to rehash the story in detail--some people already know, and I've mentioned it in a previous post, but I had a falling out with someone I'd known for damn near 15-20 years after they did something that broke my trust in a pretty massive way that I couldn't reconcile. How can I trust someone if they out me to a server of 100+ people after I basically all but explicitly mentioned to NOT say anything to anyone? I'm not too torn up about it since basically everyone I related the story to went "hey what the fuck" and no one tried to make me think I was overreacting about being mad about it. Maybe everyone was being nice to me, but I think they were being honest (and perhaps more importantly, I think their assessment of "hey, that's actually fucked up and you SHOULD be mad about it" is correct.

Really, that gets into a problem I've been trying to get better about this year... I've related it to some people privately in the past, and I actually don't even really like talking about this kind of thing because it feels like I'm fishing for compliments when that's extremely not the intent, but! I am a person who fundamentally assumes everyone is humoring me. Why wouldn't they? How could anyone actually care about me in any capacity when I'm some feral kitten picked up off the streets who's been around in certain parts of the community for a scant half of a year? It's a ridiculous notion to think that way. What, is there a time limit before you can be friends with someone? Before you can want to hang out with someone?

"Fiora, if you're able to say that, that means you've managed to disavow yourself of that notion, right?" I'm just going to smile serenely and stare out the window. No, I'm still pretty bad about it. But! I'm getting more comfortable around people and trying to act less like I'm afraid of saying the wrong thing or if I make one middling joke that people will hate me forever. It's getting better, honestly. Maybe it's just because everyone really IS that damn nice. People include me in things, people talk to me, I can talk with them about video games and other random life stuff... I'd like to be better at doing that with MORE people, though. I still have some people I consider very good friends I've met this year who I'm also like, "oh, no, they're too busy, I shouldn't reach out to them unless it's for something very brief they can help with or unless it's something I specifically HAVE to reach out for them for". In 2026, I hope I can be more trusting that I can just reach out to people to just talk about whatever instead of always waiting for them to engage me.

Anyway, things... have been good, I think. I have a beautiful girlfriend I love and who I'll never stop loving. She's my #1 fan and supports me in everything. I'm not sure where I'd be today without her, and I'm being deathly serious when I say that. I don't love my job, but... it keeps a roof over my head and lets me indulge in my hobbies. I've met entirely too many lovely people this year and I think I owe a good deal of personal growth to them. I was waffling about whether I want to start listing names, but this post would get too long if I start taking up time to name all the cool new friends I've made, so I've decided to make the worst compromise where I put it all on a second page that I'll inevitably delete when I get too embarrassed.. jk i got too self-conscious and removed it. I've got various things to worry about physically but right now I'm in the mindset that it's all fixable even if it takes time. I still experience incredibly high anxiety about my speaking voice since it's not even 20% of where I want it to be but.. eh. I'll figure it out. I'll get there some day, even if it kills me that it won't be as soon as I like.

All I can hope for in 2026 is to keep improving myself and trying to strengthen friendships with people. I plan to keep streaming for the foreseeable future since I'm genuinely having a really good time with it. I do want to get a bit better at THAT though since basically everything I have set up in OBS is all self-taught junk and I'm pretty sure people are silently looking at my set-up and being like "damn, bitch, you live like this???"... but!! That's fixable. It's all fixable. I want to get back to doing slightly more routine updates to my other site, but I keep being flakey. I gotta stop that. Surely, it's not that hard to set aside a single weekend every 1-2 months so I can just talk about a game I love and post some words on it that a few people will read and go "hey that's cool, maybe I should try that game too". I think I'm more or less... happy-adjacent with my routine these days. I say only adjacent because I do wonder if this is enough to satisfy me, but right now I think that it is. Maybe I'll feel differently later. I do want to get more into other things though... I feel bad that I don't really watch movies or read very much.

I think that's it. Things were kind of... I don't know if what I'd call whatever I was doing at the start of 2025 "existing". I was living, I guess, for certain definitions of the term. I was getting by. Everything's different now, and that's scary as shit honestly, but I think it's also been really good for me. Hell, I'd never have even wrote about this kind of stuff a year ago, honestly. At the end of it all, I have hope for the future, and I have an endless amount of optimism and love in my heart for all of my friends. I just hope that for as little as I've known some people this year that I've been able to improve their 2025 in some small way, and if not, I'll just try again in 2026. Other than that, I guess I don't have any concrete plans in terms of my personal life. I just want to improve myself however I can and hopefully become better friends with all the lovely people I already know. Maybe we'll see how I feel halfway through the year and if there's some other burning need lying dormant in my soul.

Thanks for reading, and sorry this got too long but.. I had a lot on my mind!! Forgive me...

A funny button and other things

Oops. It's been longer than I intended and I haven't gotten the things done I wanted to do as of last posting... I sort of realized I've spread myself a bit thin but most of that is in projects we'lll call "personal enrichment" so if I'm still having fun with them, that's all that matters.

To be clear, that's mostly like... my game braindumping over at Mirage Library, updating this site in general (layout tweaks, learning more about html so I can make it look betterererer), I've been watching voice training videos so I can begin the long and arduous process of, well, sounding the way I'd like to sound. Add to that work, staying consistent with working out, still needing to sleep, wanting to stream, wanting to play other games in my own time... it's busy!! It's busy!! But it's all good things!! So it's like, the good busy where at any given point I can poke and stuff and I'll have Something to do.

The one thing I can't stand is boredom, or worse, being bored and alone because everyone is sleeping or up to their own things. So having a bunch of things to do takes care of that issue nicely. I can do things in solitude just fine, but it's when there's nothing to do and no one to talk to that we begin to enter the bad place.

Things are still going nicely. I briefly crashed out last week over something (you can probably guess what it is if you look at what I posted last time and note what also got mentioned in this post) but... so it goes. I decided to make a little button for this site with all of my amazing creative skill and image editing prowess, by which I mean I cropped a headshot of Wind I from Enchant Farm and slapped my name on it with a particular SNES font I like and gave it a thin blue patterned border that probably doesn't look very good. But it's a button!! You can use it!! It's on the left hand side of the screen!!! Wow!!!

somehow i had one typo pointed out to me in this post and noticed like 3 more after the fact so clearly i need to type these in a proper editor or something first oopsssssssssssssssssssssss (okay, i'm on a new keyboard too. that's the main issue.)

Misc uninteresting life stuff

I posted about this... wait, two days ago? I think it was two days ago. And I didn't explode. Yippee. I hate talking about myself in general so maybe having a site that like 5 people will read and I can put all my unfiltered thoughts is a good thing.

At the end of the day, I just want to chat with people, play cool games, eat good food. I mean, yeah sure there's other personal goals here and there (I kind of laughed when I saw how much a few months of consistent exercise and the most mild dieting did for me, because frankly, holy shit??) but those are just kind of... going well without me putting much effort into it, you know? Things are good!

Literally, my only top of mind worry right now is that I want a voice I can be happy with. I am not there yet. I dunno how long it'll take to be there. It's an annoying feeling wanting to claw your own throat out when you talk but I'm hardly the only person dealing with that so I'm not gonna get too dramatic about it. It's just a thought.

I do feel a little bit spoiled. About the only really "bad" thing to happen to me since shit kicked off was having someone basically completely out me to a server with 100 people against what I thought were pretty explicit instructions. (Weird how "hey don't correct anyone on what to call me" turned into "actually, definitely make sure to link my stream to the entire server which clearly indicates I'm now openly trans and while making sure to use different pronouns than what everyone else knows me as", but hey, m-maybe there was some kind of misunderstanding there??? Yeah, probably not...). And I just simply don't talk to the person responsible for that anymore because I clearly can't trust them, so that's done, no longstanding drama or feuding or whatever. I initially worried I was overreacting but then I stewed about for a bit and realized it was a pretty fucked up violation of my privacy, so...

That's about it. Honestly this is 90% to test that I know how to make a new post without blowing something up lmfao. Maybe sometime next week I'll talk about some other less exciting things I've been playing (think like short little mini-paragraph write-ups, maybe one screenshot per game max) if there's anything fun to say about them. I also need to make a funny lil button for the site because I understand that's the good and proper thing to do with your site. The people yearn for little buttons that link to your page. I like little buttons. It's a perfect fit. OK BYE

Introduction

Hi. I’m the idiot formerly known as Jowy. This post was initially written a while ago (about two months!) and back then I hadn't started changing my handles anywhere... but... we're past that now, so I rewrote some things. In short, now I just go by Fiora. But it's cool if people call me Fi or Fio or whatnot because nicknames are cool, imho.

Anyway, I'm apparently easily convinced to do stuff that seems like it might be vaguely fulfilling in a way, so here we are making my own little Neocities page. Sort of like how I was maliciously tricked into taking better care of myself and had an epiphany and decided to get the whole transitioning thing over with. Granted, I made the very unique decision to do that at like 2 AM while playing Lagoon for the X68000, so now I have that as my legacy, but... oh well??? It's pretty funny tbh.

After that, I made the decision to get into vtubing. I like playing video games, I like old games, I like interesting niche stuff, and I sure do enjoy talking to people while playing them. Yeah, sure, the anime woman avatar part is pretty appealing too in the wake of recent life changes, you don't gotta point that one out to me, I'm well aware!!! Four-ish later? It's fun. I'm happy doing it. Some day I'll have a model I can truly call my own (not to disparage the one I'm using!! it's just one anyone could use if they bought it on Booth!!) but there's plenty of time for that. The fact that I can have 15 people chilling out as some complete nobody while I play random ass things like Belzerion or Assault Suits Valken is cool to me.

I really am grateful for those who come to watch, regardless of whether they're just chilling and lurking or chatting. (Sorry for everyone having to suffer the woes of me trying to get better at the whole streaming thing... sorry... sorry... lmao)

It's been nice. I've met a lot of very chill and very funny people in the past few months or so. I won't name names because I think the psychic damage I'd suffer if any of them read anything I said here and repeated it to my face would be too much to bear. Sorry, I have a very low defense stat and the two worst things that can happen to me are someone directly saying something nice about me to my face or worse, having someone know I said something nice about them and then repeating it back to me... it's painful... ooogh

It also sort of makes me regret taking so long to do anything new with my life, but, eh. No time to worry about that, you know? Gotta make the most of life going forward even if I'll still do the "babe it's 1 AM it's time to think about how much more sick life could have been if you got your shit together 5+ years ago" thing.

I don't know where I was going with all of this but I figured it made sense to make a lil intro post before I commence with posting other dumb nonsense. I'll still be posting on BSky as usual, I'll be streaming for the foreseeable future, no big exciting plans at the moment or anything like that. That's about it. I'll probably start doing some small one paragraph write-ups of random stuff I've been playing this year that falls in the realm of 'this was kinda neat but I don't have strong emotions about it' versus the unhinged 2-3k word braindumping I do over on my Bearblog site when I really dig a game or want to talk about a niche title. I will likely post about this site Once over on Bluesky but I don't intend to directly link to this site very often/at all unless I do a particularly interesting write-up of something that doesn't fall under the realm of stuff I'd put over on the Mirage Library. Thanks for reading.