Ah yes, the good old end-of-year recap. I'd say 2025 is the year I've achieved the most things out of all ■■ years I've been alive. At the same time, it's also the year that I've slacked the most on what I'm "supposed to do". Hm, I wonder if that proves a point.

Ignore how it's already halfway through Jan 2026 at time of posting; I got busy.

When I first started building this site I had thought about writing an entry about what happened in the summer, because a lot of things had happened in the summer. Obviously back then I didn't even build the blog page yet, and other factors such as my procrastination and all the new work that's been piling in prevented the entry from being written. Now that I have a blog page and there is a little less work to be done (still a lot...) I'll recount them along the way.

Since I don't know how to do recaps, I'll be going through the most important things that happened month by month. Prepare for an extra long pointless yap session >:3.

January:

I was into Legends of Avantris and Guardians at the time, irrc.

I don't know if this started in this month or December 2024, but I read Western comics for the first time, and wow is the paneling and structure different from manga. I remember reading 28 issues of Guardians of the Galaxy (2008) in five consecutive days with no context whatsoever and feeling like my brain is going to melt on the fifth day. Pro tip: do not do this. Don't start without a proper reading order and try to go into something way too complex for a new reader and devour at least five issues at a time. Not good.

Also made the huge step to make fanart for LoA's campaigns. It was a lot of testing new waters since I've never drawn any DnD species etc. before; I've done nonhumans (like slugcats and other creatures from Rain World and just all the Hollow Knight characters) but I've never done something like this. Not quite happy with the other stuff I did, but I'm proud that I finished that one Uprooted doodle page. A lot of people liked that too... kinda feel bad for abandoning the fandom lol but it's fine. If I have more time or energy I'll get back to watching the campaigns. Multi-hour long videos are just a little bit too much for me after the summer ended.

I still remember waking up one morning to see a discord DM from one of the players (Derek) asking me if he can use my fanart of Bitsy as his server profile picture, and I said yes with as much enthusiasm as I can muster with the typed word. That was quite something.

February:

Oh boy, it all starts here. This is the start of the story of how transforming robots ruined my life (/pos).

I don't actually know when exactly I got into the fandom. I do know that the first piece of fanart I saved to my photo album was saved on exactly February 1, and that I sent a text message to a friend irl that I started watching TFP at Feb 10, so somewhere around that time probably. I have a recent prior history of watching animated shows with a younger target audience (e.g. Voltron, Villainous, Mech Cadets, and Hilda among some others) which was probably why I got comfortable with TFP relatively quickly.

I think I started on tf comics just by searching 'transformers' and browsing randomly on the website I use for comic-reading? Me being me I picked the one with the artstyle I liked the most (lol) and it turned out to be Windblade. I will DIE to draw like Saren Stone, I swear. Anyway that kind of made stuff confusing for me, but not something to dwell on here. The important thing is I started a New Thing.

Another important event related to this happened also in this month but I will choose to not talk about it yet.

At the end of the month I started MTMTE. I was finally properly oriented, by god. I'd say MTMTE is actually less confusing than GOTG(2008) because it didn't actually really throw 50 different people in my face at the same time. Like it kind of did, but I was still able to follow along and understand the gist of what's happening. But that's besides the point; the point is I actually decided to embark on the journey of (at least trying to) finish a 57-issue comic series. Yay for trying!

March:

Hmm...what happened? I don't think a lot of notable events did. I thiiiink I went to the tf toy store near where I live for the first time that month, and drew my friend's tf oc (idk if it's in the gallery I forgot; I might've counted it as a gift and didn't put it in). You know what, I'll just put it here:

Good thing about this: I figured out metal render techniques. Nice! This one still looks good to me, at least the colors do. The cockpit in particular I was very satisfied with. Idk why I'm good at rendering cockpits specifically. This still holds true now.

April:

Proooobably when I first started drawing tf fanart? I think I also made a gotg oc and a tf oc in this month (lol). I haven't made fandom-insert ocs in a very long time. Not since I was into like... Percy Jackson? Which was when I was twelve? Damn. I'm still on my journey to become cringe and free (failing miserably as of now but taking little steps).

We also took our bird out!

I love her but none of us love her enough.

This was also the month where I completed my first full illustration, without lineart. It's the Hunter and No Significant Harrassment piece and it's somewhere in my gallery. Still very proud of that one. Don't know how I did it but I did.

May:

Uhmmmm..... what did I do........ I think I started posting art on Tumblr. That has to be it? Nothing really memorable.

There's also an extraordinary amount of photos of me during this month, for some reason.

June:

If my photos aren't lying to me (of course they aren't) I baked bread for the first time. Went surprisingly well but I didn't do a very good job of photographing it, so just imagine a really delicious-looking cube loaf of toast. (I only have a mini-oven so I can't use the big bread pans. Two-in-one microwave ovens are a lie! They can't bake shit ;-;)

Also made my first ever ita bag!

Half of it kinda gets concealed but that's okay.

July:

Artfight month!! Only goal I had for this year was to do better than last year (so more than four attacks). Aaand I did! Ten of them in fact. Proud of myself for that, especially given I struggle so much with finishing anything.

Also met up with an online friend of 2 years irl :33 Not sharing photos for privacy reasons, but given that meeting with her was on my bucket list draft, I'd say this is veeery important. There's only so much you can do in a mall so the events aren't very notable but the fact that we have now seen each other face to face is. Win!

This was also the month I finally published my entity page! It has been in the works for two years and we (me and my collab partner) decided to post it as a duelcon entry. Worked pretty well as a team hope submission. Very much a personal success; got very positive reviews, and it's loads better than what the first draft was. I finally finish things and am proud of them. Woahh...

August:

Biggest event this month is the local tf convention. Wow, where do I even start.

The funny thing about this is that I didn't even know where you bought the tickets at first. I found out how to buy tickets literal months after the initial... selling...? ended, and just happened to catch someone giving up theirs. Very lucky of me, I know.

I had the bright idea of dyeing my hair blue (parts of it; I had the inner layer bleached since 2024) to match the ita bag I was going to bring to the convention. This counts as a new thing because a) since when did I do shit like this? And b) it's a new color. Worked great too. I love what I did for the ita bag as well. A lot of things went wrong, to be honest, but in the end it turned out great. Only the second one I've ever done as well.

Imprisoned TC briefly (well... actually he might've stayed there for several months). Removed him from the bag once I realized he was doing damage to the plastic.

So one of the things people apparently do at conventions is handing out / exchanging freebies. I only learned this like a month prior to the event (which is about when I bought the ticket lol...) so I had a mildly panicked few weeks of trying to pump shit out. I drew 5 TFP chibis which I no longer like (but they're in my gallery still! Recording progress is important) and made keychains with those; repurposed the full body from the TFA Bee doodle page I did and made that a standee; did basically the same thing for the TFA Wasp one; drew a sticker sheet for the Combaticons and made two things with that; and printed two previously done TFA drawings as is.

That probably sounded confusing as hell. In summary, this is what I did:

More close-ups not featured.

I'd say not bad for a first-timer, haha. Forgot to mention TFP Optimus and Megatron both had standees too. I don't even remember if I did this because I knew people would (might) like it, or if it was just because those two are faction leaders and they deserve it. I kept an OP one but not Megs because I severely underestimated how tall 10cm would be and he's just. Holy shit. He LOOMS. Legit just did not keep him because I was scared. Everything else I kept one sample of.

I also bought these... no idea what they're called in english but it's a thing for drawing. Yeah. (Help.) Asked around in the big convention gc if anyone wanted some and I ended up taking 9 requests. So that was another thing I had to work my ass off for.

Brute forced my way through learning how to ink on paper with these.

Convention day! I panicked as hell getting out from the car and dragging a large ass suitcase because I decided to bring Robosen OP. (We will not be talking about this because I was too tired to do shenanigans and when I did decide to take him out I was too scared to do it, so I had him standing beside me while I watched people perform on stage. And then he ran out of battery for some reason and just collapsed. So that was anticlimatic.) I made like five circles around all the booths trying to discreetly browse because I didn't want anyone to talk to me ajdshfjklsdalhjkdk-

As you can see I'm not the best suited for conventions. Thankfully a lot of the booths were utilizing the scan-to-order thing they have at restaurants and cafés, so I just did that and showed them the order number on my phone screen. At the ones without this feature, I wanted to bail so badly but ended up getting my shit like a normal person. I hope.

At some point in the morning I decided to start doing the freebie exchange thing. I had made deals with upwards of twenty people before the convention so now my job was to find them. This took up a significant portion of time and by the time I was done my phone was at 13%. Somehow. Mostly non-eventful but I was surprised at how busy I got. Also VERY surprised at just how many people wanted my shit. Wow.

Speaking of people wanting my shit(?): I brought all the remaining freebies in a little yellow suitcase thing I got from... somewhere, and just laid the thing out. There were three long tables at one corner of the space for people to put their freebies on so others can take and exchange as they please. My merch was taken surprisingly fast?? The first time I came back to check on it about half of everything was already gone. Wtf. I took some to hand out at the booths I bought things at because I saw someone else do it. Got complimented on them too... good god I'm experiencing the feeling of fandom community for the first time. Seriously, people liking what I make genuinely makes me so happy.

There were a lot of events including individual ones at the booths and the thing at the stage in the afternoon but I basically didn't participate in any because I am a) scared and b) busy and tired. I also didn't take any good pictures because of the same reasons. One might wonder what I even went to the convention for (THE MERCH, of course...) I feel like I need to brush up on my socializing skills, what the hell.

I only had time to unpack everything I got after I got home from Japan, but it's quite something:

I got everything in the first two pics for FREE. These are all from trading freebies with others. I didn't realize I have more free stuff than paid stuff until after I laid everything out. Truly an impressive feat(?).

Now, time to finally chronicle my Japan trip! I was reasonably fed up with family dragging me on trips all the time, especially given that they always choose the most boring tourist spots and I just end up being miserable and/or on my phone most of the time, but the prospect of a toy hunt on the last day spurred me on. Let me tell you, Japan's wonderful, but the first few days of the trip made me want to throw up and die. I think it might be a combination of having five people in close proximity at all times and my heat intolerance problem.

Buuut enough of that. Positive things: I got some good pictures and found out about the marvel that is Japanese convenience store food. It's so good. It rivals restaurant food. Surpasses it, even. I managed to plead my way into getting back to the hotel early and eating dinner (convenience store food) by myself for several days in a row, and it was a blessing. Ok, I don't actually like talking about food at all so I can't really try to describe how good it is or why it's good, but it's the best thing. I can't stress this enough. The taste. The vibes. The everything.

Oh yeah, I did bring a bunch of toys with me. Not the most flattering photo because I can't for the life of me figure out how to photograph food, but you get the point. To the right: AOTP Vortex and me (customized doll of my human sona). To the left: some kind of carbonated drink. Not pictured: me behind the camera chillin.

Other toys that travelled with me :D

Going back to the photos I mentioned- here are some of them, including ones that I didn't put into my photo gallery:

Everything is pretty!!

And then it was onto Toy Hunt Day! It's mostly browsing multiple stores and me having fun inside my head. Because of that there's not much for me to just talk about. Instead, how about some pictures?

I tried my best to capture them but glass is just too reflective. Same goes for the rest.

I don't really know how to say this in an expert manner but look at the paintwork, it looks beautiful. OP is the most metallic I've ever seen and Devastator has some nice worn look to him. I kind of admire people who paint figures and stuff. How'd they do that?

An assortment of MP figures.

Love how they're posed <33 The MP line in my very unprofessional and un-expert opinion is a... well... masterpiece (stop it, you). I love how clean the shapes are, the show accuracy, and most of all, how they're not painfully obviously plastic. I can see why their prices are high af (where I live, anyway).

Also OP with the Screamer head (alternatively, the Screamer posing as OP scene) absolutely sent me. I love you, whoever decided to do that. It's so genius.

Apparently releasing toys granted the characters new concept art as well. Hello??? I saw these and went 'holy shit it's official TFP designs for non-show characters!!' and took pictures immediately. However, I was also a huge dumbass and did not capture the name of said characters in my photos. WHY AM I SO STUPID

Majestic. God, look at the detail on him. If I ever get rich enough or own a spacious enough house I WILL own Metroplex. Someday...

Woah, it's Deadpool!! I don't know a lot about him but I love this figure. Cheeky bastard. Also the detail work. Are you kidding me?? The folds look so good. I love this. Only non-tf guy I took a (very bad due to glass case reflection) picture of. If I'm more into figurines and Deadpool he'll be on my wishlist for sure.

Final score: Titans Return Cosmos, MP-18 Bluestreak, and Combiner Wars Onslaught (minus his guns). All of them are secondhand.

September:

This month, of course, was when I started building this site. You may notice that, when you go to my Neocities profile, it will say I joined in July of 2025. That is because I did absolutely nothing website-wise between July and September.

Website building was definitely overwhelming at first especially given how my only coding background was modifying wikidot themes. Wikidot has a different syntax that uses css but is nothing like html. Neocities' tutorial was still a work in progress back then (don't know if they updated it, never checked) and it basically taught me nothing. (No hate...) I started by looking at the layout generators other people have recced, but I didn't really want to use it because... I guess the code looked too complex to me lol. So I was only looking at the code to learn.

This was the very first draft of the archive:

Unimaginative, I know. Eventually I decided it looked too modern and mid and soulless so I abandoned the entirety of my files, save for the 404 page which I kept. (I might say goodbye to the current 404 page soon so enjoy it while you can. Thinking of revamping it mainly because the moon image is ridiculously large... anyway) I also switched from PC to laptop for coding because I don't always have access to the PC.

I've come a long way, even though the journey is only three months long as of now. Still, I'm happy with how everything turned out.

October:

On exactly October 1st I finished the first ever multi-character illustration with a full indoor environment background I have ever done. Woah... It's the overly pastel(?) Combaticons piece and it's somewhere in my gallery, so I won't post it here again. It was also part of a Combiners relay event so also first fan event I've joined. Proud of me!

A paper I wrote (literature review) was also accepted and published. Won't go into detail for privacy reasons. ;)

November:

Concert! I don't really know how to feel about the fact that most notable events that happened this year were Transformers-related, but uhm, yeah, it's a Transformers concert, surprise surprise. I went with one of my irl friends and one of her irl friends, so this is actually the first time me and the other friend met in person. The plan: go there via subway, spend the night at a hotel, and leave the next morning. This was mainly considering that the concert ended at around 9PM and it'll be too late to try and get home anyway.

We were a bit late to the concert due to the dinner place we went to being slow, and ended up missing the first song which was... the TFP theme song, fuck me. We were able to enjoy everything else though. My seat was separate from theirs because I bought my ticket late, but I had an entire row to myself so I took advantage of that to vibe. Music loud enough to drown out my words, no one beside me to mess it up? Say no more! I talked to myself because I'm weird like that and sung when the singer sang. I was very disappointed by the lack of singing and/or clapping during The Touch. People in my country have no taste for vibing, smh. That or it's because it's technically performed by an orchestra and located inside a concert hall. There was one person in the first row who matched my vibe and was playing air drums excitedly. All the best to you, sir.

The performance itself was excellent. There was an actual choir there for the movie scores, and the reverberations inside the hall... mm. I didn't expect much from the singer, It's been so long since I've been to a concert of any kind and it was a delight all around. I don't really know how to write reviews on this kind of thing o_o how do you even describe music. I thought hearing the movie scores in person was really cool and I vibed. Yeahhh. That's about it.

There were also cosplayers there but I was too scared to approach them haha... friend dragged me to take a pic with an Orion cosplayer though. So I guess that counts for something.

We had planned to play this G1 drinking game I found a few months prior (see picture above). The other friend suggested we mix a drink by buying random drinks at a convenience store, sort of like a blind mix thing. There's probably an actual name for this that I don't know about. For the alcohol part, one of them got tequila, the other got beer, and I unknowingly bought something with 20% alcohol content because I didn't look at the label and I only thought the bottle looked cool. I would later go on to find out about this the hard way when I took a test sip before mixing it into the Concoction. Among other things the Concoction had citrus flavored soda, orange juice, pink Monster (that was me) and actual fruits in it. I don't like alcohol, not the taste of it, and not what it does to me (nothing good). This, though, came out surprisingly good. There was basically no taste of alcohol since it was so diluted by everything else, and as far as I know it didn't actually do anything to me. I'm pretty sure my friends got tipsy but to hell if I know.

Also drinking game was fun as hell. G1 in itself already sends me but it was somehow 100x funnier with two other people around and having to spot the things on the list. We stayed up until I think 3 or 4. Most nightlife experience ever.

December:

I don't think a lot happened? I decided on a whim I'll try to do a drawing-a-day thing and I succeeded to some extent but real life kept me busy. That was new.

and that's the end!

I ran out of yap juice owo;; that's it for 2025! It's been quite a year and I can tell 2026 is going to be even more of quite a year. I don't want to set any resolutions because that's unrealistic for me -- I know I never follow any plan, ever -- so the only rules I'm going to follow for '26 are: keep doing what I'm doing, try more new things, and go ham. Go absolutely ham. Believe the world is my oyster, something like that. I can and will make it that far, just you wait.

Good luck to me and everyone else here. Love you to anyone who made it this far :3