Almost 7 years of working on this site, and now 6 years of being on Neocities... Starting my website journey all the way back in early September 2018.

I think it's rather convenient I created my Neocities account around the same time that I started this site on 000webhost. Just pretend I've been actively on here since 2018, lol

I never got a chance to discuss this, but the refreshed version of this site is finally out. Believe it or not, this took me much longer than the last major update I did in May 2024. Now that my website has since then garnered a bit more content, more considerations had to be made in terms of navigability and layouts. To be fair, when I did this last, I had much more time on my hands (because I had a shitty job) so this was strewn out over the course of two weeks... And to be honest, I appreciate it in a way! More time to work on it gave me more thoughtful choices, as opposed to the last time I did a major rework, which I did in two 5 hour work sessions across maybe 2-3 days.

I feel like there's no entire need to explain my choices with the rework, as that'd be boring. The only thing I want to stress is that the about section has much more info that I reccomend you guys read, including an official about ME section, where some personal writings and rants will go, instead of being on the main page.

So yeah. That's about that! Proud of the direction thus far. Hoping to settle on a final product for this site at some point, and I am getting closer to that point.

Getting off that topic, an update from the last blog post-- I have made my final purchases, at least my final major purchases in terms of photo gear until 2026.

I finally bought the Canon EOS Elan 7NE I've been dreaming about for months, a $200 body-only SLR all the way from Japan. It's actually gonna be the Japan-market 7S, which comes with the dateback as standard. It's yet to arrive, but with eBay speedpak, it's already in New York City, and I purchased it only 2 days ago! The marvels of commerce in the 21st century, not even 5 years ago, this would've taken 3 weeks. Now I can literally get anything from Japan in as long as it'd take buying something from Chicago or Atlanta.

I wanted to get a good all-in-one lens, too. Something that I can just slap onto any Canon and have lots of versatility. I got the greatast-- the Canon EF 28-135mm USM IS. Only had it for one day and I am loving the results-- can't want to cram some hikes in with that lens.

As for camcorders... I did scrap the idea of getting a crazy professional unit. I decided to stick with a good working-order Canon HV20 HDV camcorder with some added goodies for a good price. This hasn't arrived yet, but I think it's a perfect addition, it being a playback unit that won't wear out my V1U and can provide a good secondary angle for any video shoots I want to do.

Anyhow, that's that. Fall semester starts in about a week for me, so expect regular updates to somewhat drop-off (hence why I wanted to overhaul the site now as opposed to later). I'll still provide some show write-ups and news posts, but other than that, just keep this in mind. Life is gonna get very busy for me as I have to really allocate 90% of my time to academic work as I do NOT want to fuck up for senior year of college. See ya!