New Year's Resolutions For 2025

1 1月 2025

Happy New Year everyone. 2024 was a rollercoaster of epic proportions for me, with the last two months being a terrible mess for my family and friends. I don't know how 2025 will turn out, but at least I'm excited to start the new year with some resolutions about how I want to write the blog and how I want to improve myself.

Major Resolutions:

1. Write more about micro-indie media.

This may be an unusual resolution from a blogger who constantly writes about indie games, especially untranslated media. But the truth is that I don't usually cover games that don't have some major publisher involved.

Take 1000xRESIST, a game that deserves a lot of write-ups. I think people consider my article to be one of the best written last year. But while I think I'm still the only English-language writer who isn't a coward to explore Hong Kong politics in the gaming media, people have written about the game in different ways. Fellow Traveler is a well-known publisher thanks to the success of titles like Paradise Killer and Citizen Sleeper. I don't know if there will be a writer who will cover the same ground as I did, but there have already been people who have written about how the game is different from its peers and why the game is important. Of course, I like the game and what I wrote, but I'd like to emphasize the point that even the games that people think of as cult hits are not necessarily the obscure titles.

Few people are writing criticism on the games hosted on Itchio. I think I need to change what I write about on the blogs. Specifically, I've been thinking about writing more about micro-indies and trans feminine literature on Itch. I don't really trust the current writing scene to write about, say, Until Then which is critically underwritten, but it has a better chance of getting a good write-up than some title on Itch.

I may also set up an email in the near future to receive review copies from indie authors, developers, and publishers since discovery is quite difficult. There will be a disclaimer about how I got the copy if that happens. If this intrigues you, comment away so I can be more motivated to do something when I'm bored.

2. Write more about trans media.

This goes hand in hand with the first point, but I think it is worth emphasizing. The lack of historical knowledge and critical representation has been quite detrimental. There are always calls for better trans representation in the media, but there have always been trans people in the media, and some of them are really good.

I enjoyed writing about Clockwork Girl, and I would love to write more about the online trans writing subcultures. The Trans Feminine Review is also an inspiring site for me. It made me realize that I haven't read much trans writing, and I need to do more of that. It would be fun to discover Japanese and Chinese trans writing as well.

I've been thinking about the social role of criticism. A critic doesn't write in a vacuum. Their criticism reflects their thoughts on the general state of society through literary criticism, but they also have the ability to point out certain trends in literature (and thus the world) to their readers. I'm always striving to be more observant in my own writing, and it's time for me to use that eye to write about trans perspectives.

3. Write about Chinese media and how I'm learning the language.

I'm learning Chinese again after having a dream about reading a Chinese yuri visual novel and thinking, "I'm having fun learning Chinese again. It was strangely inspiring to me, so I decided to take it seriously.

Me and Chinese have a complicated relationship. My family doesn't use Mandarin in everyday conversations because they have historically suffered cultural genocide and racial viiolence. Meanwhile, I always liked reading about Chinese culture and history, but I was discouraged in different ways to pursue, say, comics written in Chinese. My family never liked me being a bookworm and had instead put me into extracirricular language lessons that ate up my time in unproductive ways. There's a family legend where I told my family that I was retiring from the Chinese language when I turned fifteen. I really thought I was stupid. I was already struggling to learn American English, and I didn't see any practical use for learning Chinese.

There's also an internalized racism thing going on: my Singaporean Chinese peers looked down on my Chinese Indonesian background because I wasn't one of them, and moving to an international school made me experience a lot of class and race dimensions. I wanted to be accepted by the white people there, so for years I was ashamed of being Chinese.

But since I learned Japanese, and realized that I had been failed by education, and learned what it means to be a Chinese Indonesian, I eventually became less antagonistic towards the language. I still dislike simplified Chinese characters, but there are now games and visual novels that seem interesting. When I read a Chinese-language visual novel, I realized that I could feel the trauma leaving me. It may have taken sixteen years to get back on my feet, but it felt good.

I like to chronicle my journey through Chinese-language media. I'm still using text hookers and whatnot, but a lot of it is coming back, and the only real problem I have is realizing that there are different formal writing registers in written Mandarin that I never learned. Singaporean Chinese has also simplified some of the words, so it's been a pleasant surprise to notice the differences.

And there aren't that many writers on Chinese-language media. The few writers who do are writing about RPGs, so me writing about visual novels should be refreshing. This period of time kinda reminds me back when I used to write about Japanese visual novels before they became big. I've already bought a few acclaimed titles (some already translated) and wishlisted many yuri titles. Some of my friends are also interested in picking up in Chinese, which will be fun. It would be like the good old days. I expect the world of Chinese media to be as interesting as Japanese media's.

At the very least, they have cute anime girls!

Minor Resolutions

Try to read English and Japanese works at the same time again. Helps to not focus on games forever!
Get back to yuri manga and live-action dramas. They'll go well on those monthly overview review articles I've been doing.
Make the blogs pretty. I do have a banner I can use for the main blog, but I keep forgetting to.
Try to get on subculture media podcasts as a guest. Dunno what though, lol.
Participate in game jams and organizing more. I actually want to organize a zine for my Japanese media Discord server...
Try pitching a Japanese literature article to sites like Trans Feminine Review.
Waste less time on social media. Go listen to podcasts more.
Write more reviews on Nepchan. I enjoyed writing my article on Aural to Hikari no Ryuu ~Gathering Light~.
Get back to translating. I will like to fan translate some games.
Play more historically important titles. I really need to get to Black Onyx...

I hope to keep most, if not all, of them. Although I don't show it in my own writing, I tend to be very self-deprecating and critical of my own narrow-mindedness. Writing these resolutions feels therapeutic in a funny way, as I try to submerge these feelings.

Thank you all for reading my blog posts, including this one. Let's survive another year together.