Hello visitors of the internet!
It is I, Pudding, here as your host to recap midseason events of this anime called "Pudding Attempts to Maintain a Website"!
To be more specific, I'll be talking about the events from January 2023 to June 2023, so none are behind in the lore! At the end your host will express in many words how the experience was so far in way too many words! And also talk about the future!
Let us begin the recap.
JANUARY & FEBRUARY ARC
Here we pick up after the not so popular oneshot: "Pudding Attempts to Create a Website", that covered through the months of September to December 2022. Don't worry, you will be provided with knowledge from this oneshot if needed.
January marks the month of rest after Pudding had possibly the toughest month of work he ever experienced. Choosing to spend his time of rest working on the website. Changes included:
Organization - Pudding decides he doesn't want to live in a mess of files and pages. So he organizes everything on his backend in copious amount folders all unhingedly named like his pages. It was very effective and a good dopamine because he loves cleaning and organizing. He still loves it to this day.
Visual representation of Pudding organizing his files.
Stamp and Button Collecting - He began his madness inducing journey of collecting buttons and stamps from other websites, to this day he still doesn't know why he still does this.
In this image we see summoning of all (5%) stamps and buttons.
Shrines and Dreams - This month marks the addition of 2 mainstays of the lore, the shrine pages and the dream pages. One includes information about his favorite characters and the other he tells the tales of his dreams which are somewhat unhinged. Our main character has been confronted by one of the side characters about him abandoning the shrine idea.
He had this to say:
Art made by Miya.
This marks the month where he ended Persona 5 Royal and began his adventures on the world of Gakkou Gurashi which will become more and more relevant in future arcs.
This month also had the very first and only plot twist, the removal of a feature!
The Password system was scrapped due to the constant issues he was having trying to make it work. Too much trouble for what it was worth.
February was a calmer and filler month, including much expansions and additions to previous features. Including:
Tier List - Mainstay from the oneshot, our main character had the brightest idea of making a tier list of every item and trinket in The Binding of Isaac: Repentance. For those who don't know, below the tier list includes a list of everything in order. He sure tortured himself for that.
This image contains a tier list that didn’t make the cut.
He claims the tier list "only have correct takes-". I'll leave the discussion of that quote to the readers at home.
The others will not be included here because there's too many. The stand out would be the new and current button of the website. Third time's the charm as they say.
In his life, He began his addiction to Pizza Tower which will become more relevant in future arcs and he rewatched Steins;Gate and watched 0 for the first time. He said they were great, and I have to agree with him, go watch them.
Here we see Pudd representing Pudding recommending Steins;Gate (0) to you.
Edited art by Miya
A theme began to occur during this arc, a theme that would later gradually evolve with each day. The Status Updates become more refined and a lot bigger for no reason.
MARCH & APRIL ARC
This arc is best described as the "Filler Arc". The protagonist got better at writing and coding during this time (the word "better" carries a lot of weight). He also made his debut as a writer to the world.
In March not much happened for a while. The only major thing was the discovery of a new technology named "Iframe".
At the tail end of the month he made his debut as a writer with chapter 1 of Phoenix Club.
A series about a girl named Seiko and her friends trying to get back what they lost while making a group!
Fun fact: Phoenix Club was originally a fan story for OCs of a friend, but the characters ended up being far too different from the creator's vision. So the decision was made to turn this into an original story. There were about 5 chapters made for the fan story and they are now being rewritten to fit this new original world.
Miwa (Miya's OC) was the first character before being replaced by the new and original Seiko.
Pudding continues to train his Pizza Tower skills and the month concludes.
In April the plot stalling continues as we enter the vacation part. This part is notorious for not having anything for the website! That's right, almost nothing was changed on the website! LAZY PROTAGONIST!
Before we got to the vacation though, we had the invasion of a familiar face and villain.
The Lolo takeover!
That lasted about 5 days. Nothing much happened and she met with fate being flushed down a toilet shortly after.
In this picture we see Lolo moments before her disappearance in 1987.
The notable highlights of the vacation is the protagonist's birthday where he got a wonderful gift from his friend.
The 101% speedrun of Pizza Tower which he's ultimate goal was to achieve a time under 4 hours, and he did just that.
Pudding also mentions that he mostly walked around the city and enjoyed it. Which is fair enough, boring but okay.
And that's it.
Yup that's it, as I said, these were more filler. But those who kept up with the lore know, this was the calm before the storm…
MAY & JUNE ARC
Now we arrive at this anime's most recent arc. arguably the one with the most content out of all. Let's begin the dive into madness.
May is the month where our protagonist returned from his vacation from work. Almost instantly there was a lot happening:
Random Moe Image for Home (R.M.I.H.) - Pudding receives assistance from Miya's Advancements in Logic and Devices (M.A.L.D.) and acquires the power to add a random image every time the viewer enters the home page! Such technology was thought impossible but yet M.A.L.D. achieved it and gave it to him. Such generosity brings water to the eye.
Multiplatform Anime and Setting Standards (M.A.S.S.) - We also see protagonist making his anime more friendly for multiple mobile platforms. This was mostly done off camera due to being fairly mindless but it still took him the entire arc to finish. But after this arc all new pages follow these new standards and are much better according to the audience.
Here we see the fictional OS that probably worse than the Iphone 1.
But it was at the middle of this month that things took a turn…
Pudding made the decision of reading Gakkou Gurashi.
Miya's comment on this line: "Pudding got pressured for months into reading Gakkou Gurashi and finally gave in after reaching a breaking point with the black mail."
As previously mentioned, he saw the anime and was touched by its horror and message of hope. But all was amplified by the manga. He binged it for 2 days straight non stop, all the drama, crying, laughing, everything consuming him from the inside out until he finishes the manga. "Hey, Megu-nee, I made it." reading that line as he empties his water supply from the eyes. Something awakened inside him, something powerful that we would only see the truth in the next month.
But before we move to the next month me, your host, has to address the horse in the room:
Pudding Art - It was during this time he began to do actual art via pixel art, thought Dotpict. This wasn’t the first time he tried, many attempts were given but all given up. But now he had a resolution and a goal so he couldn't give up. Many people say that his art is good but he still doubts this to this day.
This image depicts Pudd painting "The Creation".
The June mega highlight was, Drum Rolls please…
Sorry we don’t have drums here…
ANYWAY
Letter's Shadow - His first actual original story made from the ground up. This story was in his head for a long time but it was this fateful encounter with Gakkou Gurashi that allowed him to break his barrier of struggle to get started on writing and began this project. He put a lot of his soul on it and learned a lot from this event.
This month was still full of highlights such as:
New chapter of Phoenix Club;
More mobile optimizations
Secret reworks and typo fixing
Terraria addiction
Genshin and Honkai gaming
And the final event of this arc was:
The Finale of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure Rewatching - Here is where I, the host, have to apologize for something to you. I have not mentioned that during all 3 arcs, off camera, our protagonist was rewatching all seasons of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and in this month he finished watching Stone Ocean for the first time. He claims it was an amazing experience to see this universe end and I agree with him, I watched it too and it was great. Go watch Jojo it’s not cringe.
THE PRESENT
Now, we have reached the end of recap. Readers at home I have something to confess to you. All this time, the host Pudding presented this fictional anime… He was a LIE!
Yup, that’s right it was me Pudding all along telling this honestly convoluted and not really worth telling story of how my past 6 months were.
But here we are, at the end of the first half of the year…
Looking back at all of this, aside from being completely insane, I learned a lot about my own self.
This will get sappy and sad so beware of that.
For a long part of my life, I felt directionless and without purpose. Just allowed things to happen and lived by the day, not really having any goals or things to aspire to. When people asked me as a kid "What I want to be in the future?" I would lie to them, "A soccer player","I want to become a teacher","I want to become a game developer", "I want to study biology". The truth was I didn't know what I was. This kid continued to grow to teenage years and still without any desires, telling himself "I guess that’s how the world is…" to everything that happened. These feelings compounding to a feeling of worthlessness.The question I kept asking myself and running away from "What was the point of my existence?".
Despite what I portray myself as, I'm not one who likes to socialize much in real life. I enjoy my own company but even my own company was thinking that I was worthless.
Living like that… It was miserable.
After a personal problem in June of 2022, I began to feel even more worthless. This deep seeded problem hit an all time peak during that time.
I was sad, lonely and directionless. But I didn't want to live like this anymore, my entire life was spent like this, I didn't want it anymore.
It was around this time in 2022 that I discovered this website called Neocities.
Where users could make and share a website to the entire world to see.
A piece of yourself made by you to show to the world in website format.
I wanted to do it but like all other things in my life, I kept telling myself that "You are worthless", "You couldn’t do it", "You're not good enough".
Not wanting to live like this anymore, I made the decision to prove myself wrong.
I was going to push through what my own mind told me.
I'm going to prove to myself that I am worth something.
In September 2022 I created my website, its purpose being "Change".
Its existence is a beacon of my will to change my life and turn things into a better direction.
Born out of the desire to change.
And here we are.
9 months later, look what I have accomplished. I have desires now, I have goals that I want to achieve, "I want to become a writer".
Making this website gave me purpose, gave me an answer to the question I ran away from for so long. I want to become a better writer, I want to tell wonderful stories that inspire hope into people and put it here on this website. The very thing that inspired me and gave me hope.
To you people reading this, it doesn't matter if you are just reading this for the first time or have been familiarized by this website, I want to thank you for reading and experiencing the silly things I did for it. I'll continue to make more things and improve this website for a long time.
And if you felt the same way as I did in my past, go and create your website, trust me, it's hard to fully understand coding but it's worth it. You have worth, don’t let your mind or anyone else take that away from you.
