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John S. Blog

Cat:Other

Posted: 12th of December, 2024

While I certainly have an... interesting sense of humour, there is always one joke that sits above the rest in quality. The concept that an item or concept can be invented by a person who named it after themself...

Ever heard of Thomas Running? I don't know when this joke regained popularity, but I accidentally invented my own variation after seeing it in a chat of a stream once (I believe it was Raysfire). The chat message was something along the lines of, "The United States was invented by John S. Unitedstates in 1787."

Or something like that, I probably got the year wrong. I took that and expanded upon it. Sometimes I added strange reasons, such as John S. Adventure, who invented adventuring when he thought exploring wasn't a good enough word for what he did.

Actually, during a Pheeabee stream, I managed to trick her for a few moments with that joke... before I promptly explained the joke and ruined it. (She did say she'll credit me for using the joke though... hmm... (I don't care, I barely even "own" my own variation of the joke anyway.))

Me and my friends then took this joke and expanded it even further, using different middle initials and different first names. One of my characters, John S. Pizza, invented Pizza in the 1990's and has been under lease to not share his recipe anywhere else.

And then... JOHN BACKFLIP. This joke came outta NOWHERE, but instantly took the (barely-existing) credit I had for my own John S. Jokes (which is what I call them) and sent them so far underground you'll never find them. It didn't help that the punchline was FUNNIER than MINE, saying he had a rival, William Front Flip, who exiled him! I could never do something that funny!

But... such is the way of life... (Invented by Gerald J. Life in 1841 when he was tired of not existing.)

I really wrote this to explain that... this joke is suprisingly common? I dunno how there ended up being, like, 3 independent variations of this joke all seperate from eachother, and even then, there's probably more out there!

Why did I change my name?

Cat:YouTube

Posted: 11th of December, 2024

There's not rreally a good category for this. Sorry!

For around the past year and a half, I've went by the alias "Wiref", but now it's "Wyref". The reason behind this is pretty simple, actually. The name "Wiref" is taken pretty much everywhere... and also when you google "Wiref" on YouTube, it pushes WIRED content instead.

Okay, this is more of a personal thing, but why do you give me WIRED content when I didn't search for them? Wouldn't it be easier to give me Wiref content and then put the prompt up there, then when clicking on the "Did you mean:" thing it would actually search for WIRED? I dunno, seems kinda weird.

Anyway, I changed my name to fix this issue, becaus-

... uh, another reason I changed my name is because people kept saying "Why-erf". It's WHY-REF. I feel like the Y conveys that more... and Y is just a cooler letter, it instantly makes my name 50x better because there's a Y there now.

But, don't worry. You can still type "Wiref", that's still correct spelling... even I still do it sometimes.

My first video was kinda weird

Cat:YouTube

Posted: 2nd of December, 2024

On Sunday, November 17th, I released my first (and currently only) YouTube video. The process to make it was simple. After that stream, I took that video and edited it the same night... I stayed up until ~5:00 doing so. Only after that did I realise I uploaded the video EXTREMELY quiet, so I edited it again later that day to boost the volume, then uploaded it.

I also did that stream AGAIN using the same idea... but it didn't work out. I barely finished editing that one before I gave up. That's fine, doing the same idea over and over is kinda lame.

And yeah, that's it... that's the whole blog.

I personified my website and she WILL be here soon.

Cat:Art | Cat:Photos

Posted: 24th of November, 2024

Hello! If you're reading this in the future, then she's probably already here, but, I'll go over why I made her!

Recently (remember, this specific blog was posted on the 24th of November, 2024), I discovered that Wikipedia has a moe anthropomorphised version of itself. And I was like, "yeah, lemme just do that with MY website." So, I made Wiref.net-chan, also called Wiref-chan or Wyref-chan, but don't confuse her with me. She's the second one of my OCs to have the -chan suffix after their name after Pie-chan, who, wouldn't you know it, is themed around pie.

I made her entirely from scratch, I didn't use my character base, which ended up with her looking better than I thought.

I started with the hair, which is in the colour #08b257... my favourite one (can you tell?) and she has two white antennae, sorta like mine (but short, and she actually has two)!

Her shirt (or sweater, in this case), is themed around the exact website layout, with her right arm (yes, right) being the sidebar.

The text on her is nonsense, but it was originally text! It said some nonsense, like "I am Wiref-chan and I need filler text", but with... more filler.

Her legs are BORING, though, you won't see 'em much, and her shoes are themed after the "super scroller" text you see at the bottom of every page.

Oh yeah, she's also a robot, because she's a website, you can see the plating under her visible eye.

Making Juno's Spritesheet!

Cat:Art | Cat:Photos

Posted: 13th of November, 2024

I don't do blogs about this stuff, usually. My first ever completely custom SMB1-styled (y'know, the first Super Mario Bros. game) spritesheet was of Pheeabee. I made that late at night while I was probably half-asleep. I have yet to make an updated version of that sheet. Oh, also? Making Blogs with images is REALLY hard. You have to split the text and add the image in the middle because Google Sites has no good way of doing both. I thought it WOULD BE EASY!!! Also because these images are so small, they're blurred. Oh well...

Anyway(s), I have since made some other sheets for other people, which I copy, then edit COMPLETELY to make the new person. I mainly do this to keep the body shape, since that's hard to make by itself. So, I went about making Juno normally, by first making them with as many colours as I need, then bringing the colour amount down to 4.

I got it down to 5 quite easily, with two colours I pretty much couldn't remove, skin and hair. Removing the blond(e) from the hair was easy because I could just replace them with a similar colour, which is what I did!

(The NES could handle 3 colours max + transparency, but I always give myself an extra colour to make it... actually look good.) HOWEVER. Getting Juno to look good with 4 colours was REALLY hard. I thought it was easy, but NOPE. Even a complex person was easier than this! I didn't know what to do, giving Juno 5 colours would make them look weird compared to everyone else with only 4. But then, dithering. I decided to dither their sprite because it could effectively knock the total colours in their sprite down to four!

Dithering is a process of-... nah, read the Wikipedia article man, I'm too lazy to explain this. It's what BALDI DOES!!!

Ough. Oh no. Oh man.

So, eventually, after ALL of this... I just decided to keep it 5 colours. It's not the end of the world, in fact, they look fine paired with everyone else's. Another thing about everyone else's sprites, they all use official colours ripped straight from the game!

That is stupid. I stopped doing it when making this sheet because not even NINTENDO abides by this rule. All sprites may have 3 colours, but they're all different from eachother.

I also made their mouth two pixels because one looked kinda weird.

Anyway, that's ABOUT it. I do wanna quickly talk about the skidding sprite. Each character I make gets a unique skidding sprite. Why? Why not?! For Pheeabee, DougDoug and Wym, they just kinda hang there; Astelina and Polygon Donut do the standard skidding movement; and finally, Juno... does whatever that is they do, kinda like SMW Luigi originally did. I only used three examples, but it's the unique three that DO exist.

Anyway, Juno was a fun person to make. I liked the headgear because I could move it up during the falling sprite. Very nice. Anyway, I don't quite know how to end this, so thanks for reading this nonstandard blog of mine!

That, "Fall Bling" or whatever.

Cat:Travel | Cat:Photos

Took place during: ??? of October, 2024

Posted: 22nd of October, 2024

Recently, the Georgia Renaissance Festival, in Fairburn, GA, held a new thing. The Fall Fling Festival (hahaha alliteration)... and I have some things to say about it. We traveled there from my place of residence and got there around 14:00. First off, the GA Renaissance Festival by itself is great! It's large, people dress up, y'know, it's a tourist attraction! But, the thing about THIS? It felt like someone ordered the Renaissance Fest (RF) for really cheap on a third-party site.

It certainly felt like the RF, sure, there was a show, the normal stores, it looked pretty much the same! But also, half of it was sectioned off. There were just... large fences in the way, the total area was, pretty much, cut in half.

Oh yeah, this place has some lore or whatever. It takes place in Nottingham... which is real. In England. Actually, glancing at the Wikipedia article, it looks like a fine place!

But anyway, it was the RF but smaller. There was... probably something interesting going on there, but honestly? I got tired so much quicker than I usually did. Now, I can't blame this on the place, nah, that's enTIRELY my fault, I probably didn't get much sleep, or something, but walking around the cramped, smaller place than usual, WHILE tired? It wasn't really fun.

Anyway, that's really all I wanna say. I took this picture of the windchime... store. Yeah.

But also also, when I heard one of those chimes... it was kinda scary. I imagined a dark, black & white, foggy forest where you had the sense of being watched, and that chime was the only sound you heard. It wasn't a pleasant sound either, sure, it could work in the right context, but it was low and, honestly? Kinda ominous. My aunt asked who scarred my childhood after I told her. And to that, I say... myself. That's all I've got to blame!

British English & Why I Hate Double Spaces

Cat:Lang | Cat:Grammar

Posted: 22nd of October, 2024

I know I just had a grammar rant, but that was exactly two weeks ago and I have more stuff to share. I write in a mix of British and American English. This is mainly because I prefer spelling in British English, but sometimes I can't remember words exactly or my muscle memory takes over, resulting in sentences like, "I went to the grey-coloured center." In this sentence, both "grey" and "colour" are in British English (BE, from now on), but "center" is in American English (AE, from now on). This is not only a strange sight, but inconsistent and confusing for both me, and perhaps even other readers. I do try to fix mistakes like this, but sometimes they fall through. This is also an issue in documents, such as grammar assignments in school (yes, I do attend a school). I am unaware if BE is accepted here in the United States of America, however, I still use it. BUT, if I KNOW I can't remember a certain word in BE, I am FORCED to turn EVERY BE word into its AE counterpart so it's consistent. This... just kinda sucks and is an overall inconvenience. I don't want to overreact.

Anyway, since this rant is already about grammar, and I don't want to make another one purely for my double space hate, I'll write it here as well.

I hate double spaces. They're inconsistent and make it look like you don't care about what you're writing. Double spaces (DS from now on) are fine if you use them consistently, though. This means adding a DS after a full-stop, as I know some people prefer that, is fine, as it is consistent and usually accepted. You can also be weird and place a DS in between every word instead of a singular space, this looks really weird, but is consistent, I guess. These examples are fine.

But...

Placing a DS in the middle of a sentence looks bad and wrong. Let's take that sentence from earlier and place a double space in it. I'll give it its own line because of how text is formatted.

"I went to  the grey-coloured centre."

There's a DS in between "to" and "the". That looks so bad, it shows that consistency in your writing is not a priority, and, to a certain extent, makes it look like you didn't proofread it. I'll give the benefit of the doubt to people who can't see well, or are writing quickly, as that's obviously a minor error in situations like those. But PLEASE, even if its a quick sentence, look it over for any double spaces.

(Also, while writing this, I misspelled "consistent" as "consistant" numerous times.)

Hyphens, Em Dashes, and En Dashes

Cat:Lang | Cat:Grammar

Posted: 8th of October, 2024

I don't know about you, but I'm very picky about grammar. I have a huge document detailing things relating to my planned projects, and in order to keep them concise, I must write so my sentences are clear. Something I've always used are hypens, but not in the traditional sense. While I just wrote that grammar is important to me, I do make some adjustments so the documents get their ideas across faster. For example:

"Step 1 - stop procrastinating."

This works for me, but I always had something buried in my brain that resurfaced recently, and it's the fact that hyphens have an actual use in writing, and they're not always called hyphens.

Hyphen's definition is as follows: "the sign -, used to join words to indicate that they have a combined meaning or that they are linked in the grammar of a sentence (as in pick-me-up, rock-forming ), to indicate the division of a word at the end of a line, or to indicate a missing or implied element (as in short- and long-term )."

I kindly borrowed this definition from the English Oxford Dictionary, and it shows that the word hyphen shows that I am using that specific symbol for that specific purpose, but there is another symbol, an em dash, and I suppose also an en dash. Marriam Webster writes, "Like a colon, an em dash introduces a clause that explains or expands upon something that precedes it.", so that is pretty interesting.

But what's an En Dash? Seriously, before writing this rant, I didn't know these existed! They are, apparently, "... used to represent a range or a tally." I borrowed this definition from Thesaurus.com. Anyway, how I use hyphens fall into none of those categories, as I mainly use it for its own purpose which I came up with by myself. If I wrote the same sentence "normally", it'd go as follows:

"Step 1: stop procrastinating."

This is similar to an en dash, but it's destinct enough that I feel like I can't call it one. Anyway, no matter how grammar-centric I may be, I will not stop using hyphens like this any time soon. 

The Entirety of Minnesota Ever

Cat:Travel | Cat:Photos

Took place during: 21th-25th of September, 2024

Posted: 8th of October, 2024

Minnesota! It’s a state in the United States. If you don’t know (which you obviously shouldn’t), I was born up there. For any non-Americans, Minnesota is pretty much just Canada but smaller.

Obviously, we had to get there, so we drove to the nearest airport to us, which also just so happens to be the largest one in the world, the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

We rode on Spirit, as it was only a 3 day trip and a one-way flight. We were only there to pick something up and we would drive back a few days after, and it was SO much cheaper than other flights… though, the amount of room I got was… not very much.

Once we did get to Minnesota, we made a quick stop at our hotel, then drove to the best breakfast place ever (trust me)… Perkins! The nice green-white building! If you ever come across one, PLEASE try it!

Next day was pretty interesting. We went to a nearby cat cafe, which, if you know me, was great, because I am a big cat fan.

After that was our first visit to the Mall of America… which is a mall! This was also my first time eating at A&W’s actual restaurant. I ordered a burger, and, surprisingly, it was very flavourful. Enjoyable, 9/10.

Anyway, the rest of the mall was standard. I’d been there before, so there wasn’t quite much to mention, I really try to not put so much personal info here, so I do apologise if this ends up having little to no info. I just don’t quite remember the mall very much.

We proceeded to go to the mall again for the next day. Again, I can’t recall the details much.

The trip itself: very fun and good! I would go again… obviously.

But… there was still another thing.

The drive back. Instead of flying, we had to drive back, as we now had a car. Shipping it would be unreasonably expensive, so the only other option was embarking on a 2-day journey across the entire US. It was boring, and you can pretty much recap every state we crossed with one sentence each.

Iowa: Literally just endless fields of corn, maybe a silo if you’re lucky.

Missouri: The only interesting thing was St. Louis, that's it!

Kentucky: Minor hills. More fields. How do people live up here?

Tennessee: Wow, mountains… and Nashville. No more flatness, finally.