It's the last day of 2023, and oh man did a lot of things happened this year. It's amazing looking back at what I've done this year. Even though it's small, it's still a start for sure. I want to write this down, so future me can truly appreciate the 2023 me.
Everything really started during Chinese New Year 2023. As this is a traditional Chinese festival, I basically got stuck in relatives' home.
It's the festival where everyone comes together, but I'll let you know it got boring when you have to do this for 3 days straight.
Luckily, I brought my Nintendo Switch. Therefore, I picked up competitive Splatoon 3. I played an entire day of Anarchy Open (and Open only) and got myself to C+ to B- rank-up battle.
It was really fun. I wish I picked it up earlier. After the new year gathering, I kept playing Splatoon 3. I even got a little bit grindy with it.
I knew the r/splatoon community has existed for long, but I didn't really interact with it, until February. As I have been playing more Splatoon 3, I also submitted a lot of clips. But it all really started when I made my first considerably popular post on there. It's an art post during the Chocolate Splatfest. Can be slightly NSFW, depending on how you interpret it.
And you know how horny Redditors were. (I mean they probably still are at the time of writing, but it can change in the future.)
I have never got so many upvotes in a single post, and this has kickstarted my obsession with upvotes.
This caused me to become a really active community member. And by really active, I do mean REALLY ACTIVE. You can basically find my comment under every post for a while.
I got so obsessed with it, I started sorting by new and replying to every single post, except the times I'm asleep.
It was also around that time I became super active within the community, I also read a lot of posts about Undercover Brella (a weapon in Splatoon 3) being bad.
At that time, I felt like if I want to really get recognized by the community, I need to be a special guy.
And that's originally why I was determined to get 5-star (a badge for someone who plays a weapon A LOT) on Undercover Brella.
I managed to get my way up to S+0, but it was straight up all losses when I got there. It got me really frustrated, so I put the game down for a while, but I was still obsessed with getting upvotes.
A season passed, and I decided to really grind it this time. My skills really started to grow there.
Together with my non-stop comments on r/splatoon, people really started recognizing me.
Now hold on, before I continue with the Brella thing, there's another decision I made that has also shaped me right now. Remember that choco art earlier? I have decided to try something new - vector art. And so, around the time of the Nessie vs Alien vs Bigfoot splatfest, I made my first vector art post.
It wasn't so well-received. I mean, it still got 70 upvotes, but I was aiming for hundreds. So I made another one, and man did that go well.
This is also where my style started forming. I would like to keep both the straight and curved styles. That basically impacted all my future fan arts.
On 12th April, I made the Grandma Inkling post. For some reason, people really liked that. I got 1.2k upvotes from that. This motivated me to try to keep the ball rolling, so I made a drawing of that.
The response wasn't good enough in my mind (220 upvotes), so I tried again. This time I made an animation, and I posted it to both Reddit and YouTube. Reddit gave me 422 upvotes, and I was ready to stop, but then I woke up the next day to YouTube making me almost 2.5k views (a lot for me at that time). People really liked it, and that animation has become my motivation to keep making animations.
My non-stop comment and post spam in r/splatoon went on for a few months. I was pretty successful at doing what I wanted to, which is getting useless Internet points.
Everything changed when Reddit messed up.
Reddit announced an API pricing change in May, and that has made a lot of people mad, because it basically means all third-party apps are gone.
I'd admit, before that, I didn't even know there were third-party apps for Reddit. I have been living under corperation's control for long.
Anyway, the Reddit blackout happened, but just before that, I saw a post from the r/linuxmemes community.
That post, was my first time hearing about the Fediverse, or Lemmy to be specific.
Recall that I was super obsessed with upvotes. The blackout would mean I could not do what I usually do, which was commenting under every post, because everything is locked.
I joined Lemmy, just to give myself something to look at. It wasn't so good back then, so after the blackout I just went back to Reddit.
The thing is, Lemmy users are really just open source enthusiasts, and I was a half-baked one too (my computer runs on Linux since 2 years ago).
They must've embedded quite an amount of open source knowledge in those few days.
The idea of the fediverse also sounds really awesome, so I came back to check it out after a while.
And guess what? It's a lot more active and well-rounded.
As a former r/splatoon poster, I went on and posted in c/splatoon on Lemmy.
Due to the smaller amount of users, my post actually get read, and man was it a great feeling when people actually look at your work.
Luckily I still have a piece of sane mind in my obsession, so I finally made the switch to Lemmy, and stopped posting on Reddit.
I still frequently browse c/splatoon on Lemmy after the switch. One day, I happened to click into a post from Splatoon Unofficial.
The instance name blew my mind. It was Wet-Dry World. As a Super Mario 64 lover, how could I not be on this server?
Turns out it was a Mastodon instance, and my other account on mastodon.social wasn't really used anyway, so I switched.
The people are memey, but also friendly. I just stuck with them.
I posted this piece of art specifically on Wet-Dry World.
Some time around July, the Splatoon 3 challenge, "Duel of Dynamic Duels" was going to happen.
Due to me also following the #splatoon3 hashtag on Mastodon, I saw a post from One Suit Samus inviting people to play the challenge with.
I somehow decided that it would be my first time trying to play with strangers on the Internet, with voice chatting.
He said he would stream that, and I was like, "Oh, I could stream that as well!" And we both streamed it on Twitch.
Obviously, no one would be watching my stream, because I hadn't streamed for years, but it was still really fun.
And that was my first ever Splatoon 3 stream.
I edited the stream afterwards to make it into a video.
It got 242 views. Not too bad for a small channel like mine.
That's not the only result from that stream though. You know how starting was the hardest part of doing stuff?
I've streamed once, so why not keep going? And that's exactly what I did.
After that stream, I have basically decided to stream almost every day.
I made streamer friends by doing that, as well as non-streamer friends by interacting with people on the Fediverse.
I'm happy.
Besides streaming, I have also decided to edit some streams into videos, and got myself into a consistent upload pattern.
And now you're reading this. Thank you so much.
I'm truly proud of what I've done this year, even though they're mostly unexpected, but sometimes life just works in mysterious ways.
I will surely return to this blog post if I have any bigger success with content creation in future years.