been a while; just some updates

Wow it’s been a hot minute (or more) since I last posted something here!

Been making a bunch of updates in the blog. Just gonna section them out since I can and I want to.

Comments now available on blog posts

There’s comments now, still haven’t seen how that works with the rest but i guess it’s there!

I’ve yet to surface the numbers that show up in my post metadata but I guess that is work for future me.

This comments section is separate from the webmentions, and generally allows anonymous commenting for now, but if anyone tries any funny business that gets turned off or removed entirely 😬

Working on adding stuff to my archive

My old WordPress blog posts are now housed here. I’ve included the link to the original posts when they were still up in my (now private) WordPress site, and unfortunately I lost access to my own WP.com account for some reason—every time I tried to log in, it would say “too many login attempts” even if it was the first time I tried and I only clicked the button once. “Forgot password” flows suffer the same issue. I’m treating this WP account as my lost media for the meantime, and thankfully I did export my posts a year ago when I was thinking of doing this.

At least by doing this I’ve finally placed some of my art here, at least the ones I posted on WordPress back in the day. And for anyone curious, you’ll get to read through the inner workings of my cringe past self, with stuff I wrote over a decade ago. I even have some of the poems I wrote, which… honestly I don’t know what to think of :))

One thing I need to fix is the number of tags good lord I wrote too many tags back in the day for each of my posts, and I don’t even know why I did those 😆 My Tags page now looks “fancy” with lots of tags but most of that are from WordPress and will prolly either be merged with other tags or will be deleted 😝 I will do that in a future update.

I haven’t gotten back to weeknotes

I feel bad huhu I really wanted to keep that up ☹️ Maybe during or after my upcoming trip to Japan, I can do that.

The past few months have just been a whirlwind and the only energy I have left after the work day is to game or just … maybe try some updates to the site and then I forget about it for a week or so

And on a related note to this: I also haven’t updated my hobonichi journal since… June 18 I think? I was in the process of catching up then but my trip to the US was also its own whirlwind of activities and I didn’t really have the energy to write (as writing is also a task for me, and I still haven’t figured out a way to hold the pen to the point that I don’t exert so much effort into it while I write stuff down so my hand gets worn out after a while 🥲)

Still doing kendo

Since my last post, I did write that kendo is fun, and now even more so as we’re learning kata¹ and are also starting to do jigeiko² with the senseis in full bougu³. So far… I did nice last time—finally ramped up the courage to face our head sensei first and just take it on—but I know I have so much more I need to fix with my posture and how I do my strikes. It is tiring… but I will just keep on doing it, as it is nice to see the improvements I have, albeit small sometimes as I haven’t gotten back to doing suburi every other day 😅

It helps that my batch is close enough that we encourage each other to do better, and we also have our own invites who are technically our kouhai who started in June as well.

I’m gonna try to get 1st kyu on October 2026, which… is gonna be a challenge for me, as I am gonna be coming from another overseas trip then 😅 Initially I didn’t really plan to progress this quickly for kendo but I guess if the opportunity is there, I might as well try it. At worst, if I do gun for 1st kyu and I don’t pass the sparring time, I guess I could get 2nd kyu?

But I’ll see. That’s in 3 months. A lot can change between now and then.

Routines, routines, routines (and apparently, gaming?)

It’s been hard to keep a routine. I did get a bit disrupted due to my 10-day travel, but it’s been around a month since I got back and I haven’t gotten my old routine back, where my partner and I would find time to go to the gym, and also do some kendo suburi, and just play FFXIV.

I unsubbed from FFXIV for now because I knew I wouldn’t be able to utilize the game time while I was away, and I think I’ll just get it back after I get back from Japan and settle in a bit. I realized recently that after I finished some other games I had in my backlog, I didn’t really want to do anything else but… I guess, FFXIV? I still have lots to explore there and also lots to work on with the classes, so that still felt like a goal or a doable task to complete.

I don’t have too much of a drive for other recent games, and I haven’t even played games as much on my PC (mostly since we do have a PS5 Pro and even a Steam Deck, if I really wanted to play something, I’d go to the TV instead of in front of my PC and at my desk).

Taking a step back from extra curriculars

This month was also the month I worked on “retiring” from my extra curriculars, notably being an active volunteer for UXPH and being the chapter leader for FoF Manila (formerly FoF Philippines). I do want to write a separate post for this when I get to it, maybe in the next few days (and I say this because that’s my mental deadline for it 😆) and I’ll collate some more thoughts on that and repost on LinkedIn as well lol (gotta get them views 😛)

I don’t think I’ll step back forever. I’m pretty sure, knowing me, I may have ideas in the future to gather people or help organize some other thing since I know how to do it and I guess I do enjoy it from time to time. Lately though, I guess I’ll just say this for now: there’s a moment when you know you’ve done enough, or you’ve given all you could. And I think I’ve reached that point for this chapter. Not to say that it’s fully closed, but it definitely needs… a period, an end. It can start over again in the future, but for now, closing it for the meantime.

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Anyway! It’s already 12AM where I’m at—why do I keep making blog posts at midnight—and I need to sleep lol. This was initially meant to be a short update post but I ended up writing a lot more.

I hope the updates I do here help me get back into making small tweaks and adding some more stuff on my personal site. I still do want to have my own space online that’s just me, and not really something that could disappear if the 3rd parties that manage the accounts I have on their sites decide to just go poof like Koko Krunch and disappear.

To more updates! And to getting my footing back 😅 Baby steps!

There’s always another day, there’s always tomorrow.

Footnotes

1. Fundamental forms, or I guess more specifically: Bokuto ni Yoru Kendo Kihon-waza Keiko-ho. Wikipedia has more info on this and basically the Kihon 1-9 is what we’re studying! ↩

2. While trying to search a good reference for jigeiko, I stumbled upon this article: The role of jigeiko — kendocat.com and the site is super cute!! the article layout is also really nice, I like the playfulness 😁 ↩

3. Bougu is just what we call the full armor worn during practice. More info in Wikipedia ↩