We're donning a brand new coat of paint! The blog has really been needing a new look for quite some time now to be honest. The previous design was from at least 5-6 years ago and it's aesthetics haven't aged very well with me. This new minimalist design, coupled with that totally rad header I made really gives this place a nice, cleaner look.



How about some history? This blog has been around for almost 8 years now (it turns 8 in November), and over that times it's had 3 major revisions. Version 1 had a poorly made header featuring my first Figma, Kagami of Lucky Star, donning Miku's threads, slapped onto a basic (and classic)  2 column template. I don't think I even have any screen shots of it around to be honest. Most of the "A Day with Kenn" took place during this time, and looking back at them reminds me a lot of all the dumb stuff I did back in highschool.

Version 2 was what we just came from. I used a 3 column template with a theme revolving around circles. I remember doing lots of little experiments to animate and make the circles a whole lot spiffier than they ended up being, but none of them seemed want to work when I loaded them into the blog. I still think the circles was a cool idea but I just had a few too many, and it looks really busy to me now. Each circle represented a facet of the blog. The header circles were largely aesthetic choices, but it was Kenn, Vocaloid, Anime/Manga, and Music. The lower six circles, in order, Vocaloid, Anime, Manga, Music, A Day with Kenn, and Webcomics. Each one of those linked to a post tag, letting you view all posts under that tag.

Version 2 was also probably the heyday of this place. I was at my most active, but also my most structured, with up to 4 weekly features that came to become the majority of my output. Things started to change. Channels I followed for Vocaloid stuff shut down and I started to lose interest in it. Webcomic stuff was fun, but difficult to do. They depended entirely on the English translations done by members of Danbooru, as well as Pixiv posts being reuploaded to Danbooru, so things were already quite limited. My interest started to wane as I stopped following them as closely, and I eventually just stopped doing the feature all together. Interestingly, it's actually gotten a lot of views, primarily from Japan due to the way I wrote them up and linked them. I think the biggest nail in the coffin for the weekly features was time. The blog really was at it's most active in my last years of highschool and first of post-secondary. After that, as I got busier, the blog became more and more neglected. You can definitely see that in the Archive, where yearly post counts drop by a staggering amount.


And here we are, in this freshly applied Version 3. Minimalist in theme, with Squares instead of Circles, but still representing the core of what I want the content of this blog to be: games, anime and music (in order). They're my 3 hobbies and, maybe passions is too strong a word, but enjoyments? It might look a little empty, but this cleanness and pristineness really makes me feel good about it. I don't think I'll be resurrecting the weekly features, but I'm going to try to be a little bit more active, maybe dropping in more than twice an anime season.

How about that name change? This blog, from the very beginning, operated under the name "Ha Gao", written in what I believe was traditional Chinese. It was a dumb thing I came up with during a highschool project. I gave dim sum nicknames to me and all my friends, but I ended up really liking the name I gave myself. It's weird, it's dumb, and just gets better as I retrofitted it with an actual "deeper" meaning. "Life in a starchy pocket". Someone once asked me "why ha gao?" and that dumb thing is what I told them.

There is a much more serious reason for all of this, one that I only recently came to realise as I wrote up a term paper for a class unit social linguistics. Perhaps it was an attempt at grappling with my cultural and ethnic identity. See, I didn't really know what I was. Growing up, I was told "half-Chinese, half-Vietnamese". It's actually a whole lot more complex than that, leading to my story changing everytime I learned something new. I'm 1/2 Viet. I'm 1/8 Viet. I'm ancestrally Chinese. I'm basically Vietnamese. My answers would change almost every year as I learned more about my family's past. I associated more with my Chinese side, partially because my friends and my school were predominantly Chinese, but also because Vietnamese people generally don't have the best reputation in these parts. I've more or less come to terms with whatever I am now, but it's still confusing for anyone who's not me. For as long as I have a Vietnamese last name, explaining this isn't ever going to be easy. I'm ready to move on from that, and the name change is a long time coming.

Well, seriousness aside, Wobbufux is a name I've taken to using a lot for games. This one, unlike the above seriousness, came from a dumb thing a friend said exactly once. "I am the Admiral of the Wobbufucks Empires and I demand you answer!", or something like that. I cleaned it up a little, changing "fucks" to the much more family friendly, "fux", and this dumb, but oddly catchy name, became my online moniker.

This turned out a lot longer than I originally expected. Like, a whole lot longer. If you took anything away from this long ramble, it's that this is now Wobbufux, and don't expect too many great things in the future.