[Imagine a graphic of the one of the Basil catgirl designs tangled in Christmas ribbon]

Happy holidays! To nobody’s surprise, I have left this website generally alone this year. So, as many others are also doing retrospectives, here’s an (incomplete) summary of some of the stuff I got up to this year. It’s most likely going to be heavy weighted towards the stuff I did in the past few months, as that’s how memory tends to weight things in terms of importance/relevancy.

Codeberg

I moved my code to Codeberg! For various reasons,¹ I jumped ship from GitHub to Codeberg sometime in February of this year. Codeberg is an instance of Forgejo―an open source and self-hostable software forge (Git host)―hosted by a non-profit. Most of my older work is still on GitHub, mostly because I can’t be bothered to move it over, but all of my new OSS projects have been published on Codeberg.

Fedi

I never really used social media up until around a year ago, which was when I first joined the fediverse. It’s basically like email, but if it was different social media sites instead of email servers, each running some compatible server software.² The most well known of which is something you may have heard of before: Mastodon. However, despite Mastodon’s dominance, other server software exists, like Akkoma, Firefish, Pixelfed, and Peertube, each satisfying some niche and all interoperable with each other. It’s a super neat concept.

I’ve been somewhat active over there. If for some reason you want to keep up with my bad puns, random thoughts, and rambling, you can do so at @basil@tech.lgbt.

The Coffin of Andy and Leyley

The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is an amazing small RPG Maker game about two siblings in an incredibly toxic relationship who commit cannibalism.

I’ve pretty much singlehandedly put together (taking inspiration/some implementations from prior art) the following tooling for the (still developing) modding scene:

• A mod loader (adding and replacing assets, patching .json files and images, patching language files, injecting JavaScripts at various points).
• A wiki with mod-making instructions.
• A decompiler (de/encrypt assets, extracting and deobfuscating main game code).
• An experimental proof-of-concept reimplementation of the RPG Maker MV editor.
• A TypeScript port of an image patching library.
• A private porting tool to get the game to run in web browsers.

And some mods:

• A mod that adds some compatibility patches so the game runs properly on macOS & Linux.
• A mod that allows you to provide voice acting for character dialogue.

Sometime in the future, I will write a new post specifically about this.

Journal

I’ve been keeping a journal for over two years now! It celebrated its 2nd anniversary on the 5th. I write it in pretty much every day, and it’s all mostly just random thoughts or things I find funny. It’s a nice exercise (I’m pretty chatty, so I do it sort of absent-mindedly), would recommend!

Infrastructure

I’ve moved my (mostly personal) hosted services to NixOS. I’ve still yet to set up some of the things, hence why there’s less scrobbling and no new songs added to Boombox. Hopefully I’ll get around to getting Logto running again.

Music

Here are my Maloja stats for this year:

I’ll leave you with some atypical Christmas music!

• Camellia feat. Nanahira - But I’m Not Interested in Christmas at All
• BlackY - Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (BlackY’s XmasCoreStyle Remix)
• DJ Myosuke & Gram - Jingle Death (Extended Mix)
• μ’s - Snow Halation
• Deadball-P - Cut Down The Christmas Tree
• SiIvaGunner - Snow (Super Mario Bros. 3) (Alternative Mix)
• Sammy Davis Jr. - Sweet Gingerbread Man
• Tatsunoshin - Home Alone 2024
• Tom Cardy - Not Quite Almost Christmas Time
• Tom Cardy - Naughty or Nice
• Tom Hanks - The Polar Express (would love to credit the actual song producers, but I’m not sure who they are. Maybe the Wikipedia page for the soundtrack would be of help here.)
• Tom Hanks - Hot Chocolate