27/6/26

remember when we used to own stuff? these days everything is sold as a subscritpion. a monthly payment of only $5/$10/$20 a month to access all your favourite shows, songs and games. how convenient! whilst 10 to 15 years ago this might have been true, i think we are reaching a point where the enshittification of services is no longer the exception, but instead the expectation. prices go up and quality goes down. remember when all of your favourite shows and movies were all on netflix for only $10 a month? now theyre split between 4 or 5 different services, all with varying quality and definitely not for only $10 a month.

however in my opinion the exception to this is music streaming services. having an absolutely gigantic selection of music, in 16-bit/44khz on almost every single device with an internet connection is - quite frankly - one of the greatest man made inventions. having access to a vast majority of every musical piece ever created is something i think most of us take for granted. the ability to be reccomended an album or artist, and pull out your phone and listen to them right then and there is fucking awesome. plus having access to all these songs allows their algorithms to reccomend you artists you may not have heard of otherwise. unlike shows and movies, music has yet to be split between multiple different services and providers (except for when tidal tried igs. remember that whole thing?) and even though the price has increased, i think the value they provide is well worth it.

unfortunately however, i am broke. and whilst i can easily justify the price of music streaming services, the justification only works if i actually have the money. because of this, ive slowly been transitioning away from streaming and wanted to write about my journey moving from apple music to a 2006 ipod. maybe someone else will read this and move to a player themselves?




this is my ipod. its a 5.5 gen (the one with the fabled wolfson dac) with an iflash quad and a chunky battery. the reason for chosing this over another (and arguably better) dap was because of 1. y2k nostalgia bait wow so retro nostalgia bait and 2. because i had one. im moving away from apple music not because i dont like it but because im poor. buying a brand new dap kind of defeats the purpose.

ill be honest, unless you particularly want the wolfson dac, i wouldn't go out of my way to use one of these over another player (or even just an iphone with apple dongle). they have lots of little caveats and annoyances that unless you know about them going into it, they will absolutely drive you mad. also the photo above is old, and im no longer running rockbox as i found the stock os works perfectly fine for me.

the first thing i had to do was actually get my music. how you acquire your songs are up to you. i already had a pretty big collection of tracks on my pc so i was already about half way there to start with. for anything i didnt have, i had to source myself. if your pc has a dvd drive, you can easily rip your cd's using a program like xld on mac, asunder on linux, or windows media player if you use windows igs.

next i had to convert my music to something that the ipod supported. you might not have to do this depending on how your putting your music onto your ipod, but i wanted to convert to a file type that was a bit more conservative with its file size. yes this meant swapping from lossless 16-bit/44khz flacs to lossy .m4a's, however im going for quantity over quality here. i still have the .flac files for hq listening for when im sitting at my desk and wanting to listen to a particular album from start to finish, however the ipod is here to replace my casual listening habits, so .m4a's is what i went with.




to get my music onto the ipod i used swinsian. the reason i chose swinsian is because unlike itunes/apple music, i can add to the ipod without adding the song to my itunes library, and secondly because it supports tagging before and after putting songs on the ipod, unlike something like waltr. swinsian also supports converting tracks into lower bitrates as ipods can be a bit glitchy with high bitrate songs, however since we did this with xld it doesnt really matter.

if youve ever explored starting a digital music collection, or browsed r/musichoarders for 5 seconds, youll find hundreds of people arguing about what the correct way of tagging your music is. thankfully, since we know what exactly were going to be listening to our music on, we can tag specifically for that device. for the ipod, that meant moving features from the artist section to the title of the track (eg "Song Name (feat. Featuring Artist)"). this did mean i had to tag some collaboration tracks as features, so very often deciding who the main artist was just came down to vibes.

after adjusting all the tags to be appropriate, i moved on to adding comments. the way i would use apple music was by listening to an album from start to finish, and favouriting any song that i particularly enjoyed. this left me with about 3 or 4 songs from each album that would get added to apple musics automatic "favourite songs" playlist. this is my most played playlist, and where most of my casual listening is, so i wanted this playlist on the ipod. the way i achieved this was tagging each song in my favourites playlist with a "☆" in the comments section. this allowed me to create a smart playlist on the ipod using swinsian that would add any song that contains a "☆" to the playlist. additionally if i had the entire album that the song originated from on the album, i would tag it with an "A". this is mostly just for organisation purpose, but also if i ever fill up the storage or come close to the ipods 50k song limit, i can view what songs are apart of an album but not favourited.




after all of this, its finally ready for listening! i wont lie, the process sounds a lot easier than it was. it was a very time consuming process, however i think the payoff is worth it. i know own (yes, own!) all my favourite songs and can listen to them whenever i want wherever i want. for listening on my mac, swinsian supports directly playing tracks off of the ipod, and for listening on my pc im using the strawberry music player. at the moment im not really happy with this however as it doesnt support using the playlsits found on the ipod which means i kind of just have to add all the songs into a queue and then shuffle it.

another great thing about using the ipod is the "on the go" playlist feature. whenever i come across a song that i enjoy that isnt currently favourited, i can quickly add to the on the go playlist by holding down the center button. then, the next time i manage my ipod via swinsian, i can quickly tag all the songs in the on the go playlist with "☆" and swinsian will automatically add it to the smart playlist. overall the transition to using the ipod over streaming has been a lot smoother than i expected it to be.

i wont lie. i miss being able to quickly check out a new song or artist. it also isnt as convenient to have to plug in my ipod every time i want to bring a new song with me. but it also isn't costing me $25 a month and its never going to go away. i own it for as long as i have the files. as a bonus, i can spend the $25 i would of spent on apple music on cd's or bandcamp! i dont think this is better than music streaming, but yknow what, its pretty great nontheless :)

18/6/26

happy birthday imaqt.org <3

13/6/26

the anniversary update to imaqt.org is here! technically, its not the anniversary for another 6 days, however i have a pretty busy few weeks coming up so i probably wont be working on the site during this time. because of this ive decided to push the anniversary update live now! before i talk about whats new i want to showcase some fun statistics of the site.

firstly, this website was created on the 19th of june 2025. i tried to find a screenshot of what the site looked like at the very beginning but i couldnt find one :c. about 4 months after the site was created, the github repository for the site was created. this was my first time ever creating, managing and using a github repo and to be honest it wasn't as difficult as i thought it would be.

here is a graph of my github contributions since i started using it. the first 4 months are empty as i wasnt actively using my github account yet.




we can see that the day with the most contributions was october 28th (38 commits!) and the least busiest was, well, any other fucking day of almost every month lol. i suspect after i push the anniversary update (im currently working in my local branch), today might become the second busiest day :) overall, almost 90 commits have been made to the imaqt repository. the next thing to look at is website activity.




neocities stats graph works weird. this is the all time view, but im not entirely sure what exactly it charts. if we look at the graph we can see that in may the site had the most views on the 21st with 37 unique views. however if we switch to the past 30 days view, we can see that may 25th actually had the most views with 84 unique views. then if we swap to the 90 day view, it shows the highest day in may being the 26th with 61 unique views.

all this is a overly completicated way of saying i think neocities statistics kind of fucking suck. what i assume neocities is doing here, is just grabbing a handfull of dates equally spaced apart for whatever time period you are viewing it for. it would be nice if neocities displayed averages instead of equally spaced days, however im sure they have their reasons.

now on to the fun stuff !



the redesign is here! we have a new homepage logo & a background! ive wanted to have a background for a while but have been super indecisive with what i wanted. the problems were that i wanted something i could split & would still look good, and something that could be dithered (with good results). well now i have one!

talking about dithering, you might notice that whilst the logo is the same image of lain, the dithering is different. this is because im using dither-guy instead of just brute forcing it with the index colours tool in photoshop. going forward, everything on the site will be dithered using this.





the next big change is to the music page. we now have a webamp player! this page was originally going to be used as a way to share what music i have been listening to. this is still what the page is being used for, but now you can actually listen to the songs, instead of having to go out your way to search up the tracks yourself!

im planning on updating the playlist and rotating the songs in and out so make sure to stop in every few weeks to see what im listening to!





along with these changes are some smaller things such as buttons (finnaly!), a new header image, resized borders so they dont appear as stretched, a new portfolio image, and whilst not noticable to you guys, i fixed all the indentations on every page, making it much easier for me to read and edit.

that concludes the anniversary update. to anyone whos spent the 5 minutes out of their day to check out the site, thank you. heres to another 12 months of imaqt.org \o/

11/6/26

as of writing this its the 11th of june and its currently 8 days away from the sites first anniversary. its (very) slowly but surely coming all together into something im happy to share with people. im hoping to have the next website theme out by then, but theres no promises as life is v busy at the moment. in the mean time i want to yap about shows n stuff




i dont really watch much anime. its vary rare that i find an anime that not only is interesting enough for me to start watching, but for me to stay invested in to finish. in fact i can count on one hand the anime that i have watched from start to finish. despite this, serial experiments lain not only was interesting enough for me to start watching, but was interesting enough for me to finish in just 2 sittings (thanks to its relatively short runtime).

if you really wanted someone to watch serial experiments lain, you would tell them its about a girl who surfs da web (tm) and upgrades her puter all while dressed in a cute bear onesie. this of course is not what serial experiments lain is about, but it is a hell of a lot eariser than explaining that its about the entirety of humanity in the physical form of a 14 year old girl who seeks an escape from irl lonliness by using the "wired", a technologically advanced version of the internet whilst a group of hackers collectively gaslight and manipule her into becoming the perfect tool for them to use to merge the real world with the wired. oh and god is here too.

whilst i find serial experiments lain to be an incredble watching experience and the core message of the show is more relevant in the year 2026 than ever before (seriously, its aged like wine) i am more interest in talking about the cyberpunk themes/aspects of the show.




in a world of of cyberpunk2077's and blade runner's i think we forget about the more dystopian aspects of the cyberpunk genre. cyberpunk is not all neon pink & blue, hover cars and holograms. its also dirty and lonely. poverty stricken and sickening. and i think lain in a great show that leans into these aspects. at its core the show is about someone who seeks escape from the real world using technology. this is inherinetly cyberpunk. high tech with low life. a lot of the promotional art for the show looks almost like it could of been drawn by h.r giger (whos probably most famous for his work on the alien movie)

another great piece of media that showcases the dystopian parts of the cyberpunk genre is the manga blame! by tsutomu nihei. addmittedly i think blame! is recognised as cyberpunk more than lain is, however i still dont see it mentioned very often when discussing cyberpunk. before writing blame!, tsutomu nihei studied architectural design and it really shows in his artwork.




theres plenty of cyberpunk works that learn towards the more le dark n gwitty aspects of the cyberpunk genre and i urge you to explore them. some of the more popular examples of this include the game baroque on the sega saturn & ps1 (skip the ps2 & wii remakes). i also reccomend the ttrpg cy_borg, made by the creators of mork borg. whilst not as crunchy as something like cyberpunk 2020/red it is still very fun to play if you have friends who share an interest. the artwork contained inside is also just fucking awesome. something that is not yet released however i am eargerly looking forward to is the game defect. developed by industry veterans, defect is a cyberpunk swat sim with what might be my favourite cyberpunk aesthetic ever seen in a game (sorry 2077.) oh and did i mention that its scored by mick fucking gordon? last but certainly not least is h.r gigers art compendium titled necronomicon, which directly inspired a lot of cyberpunk works.

all this is to say that if you have an interest in the cyberpunk genre then please check out some of the works ive mentioned, and please please please watch serial experiments lain!

4/6/26

my bad for the crashout

3/6/26

might fuck around and nuke the site teehee

no but really, im generally pretty unahppy with my site at the moment and im not really sure what to do about it.

at first the site was created to be a creative outlet & a way to share random things that i wanted to share when i had no one to share them with.

very quickly it became the guinea pig that i would test on whilst learning basic html, then nvim, and then git. the result of this is a site that is built on a foundation held together with duct tape, string, and an ungodly amount of line breaks as a subsitute for padding.

now almost a full year on (as of the 19th!!) i find myself wanting to refine the site into something i would actually want people to visit, not just a place for me to incoherently spew my thoughts out. unfortunately, the foundation the site is on is just not solid enough for me to work on. the fact is i only know basic html and in all honestly i fucking despise coding. i find it frustrating and confusing and whilst html is pretty easy to grasp, holy fuck css is hard. the fact is you cant paint a portrait without learning to use your paint brushes properly, and i dont wanna fuckin learn to use them.

anyway what im trying to say is

how the FUCK do i add colour to my website