This article serves as an explanation for the changes to the site over the past week; my feelings on how the site operated until now and my approach for the future implementation of the site. It's a little long, but it's essentially a press release, so please take the time to read through it.

As an overview: There are no major changes to how I work on the site, and the site is not being retired or scaled back in any way. The content of reviews and articles may change, and there may be further changes to the design, but the core of the site will continue to remain the same.

With that in mind, here are my thoughts:

Shuppi://Beri was never intended to be the site's permanent name. I was limited on changing it for a number of years because Neocities does not support "backlinking" (forwarding stale links to the correct page), but I ultimately made the decision to cut those links because the name was practically useless. It did not represent what the site contained; it had no meaning outside of an association with my username on other sites.

I do think that I could have handled the name transition more gracefully but, as you'll come to understand by reading this, I have always been spontaneous when it comes to my presence on the internet. Frankly, I should have changed the name sooner.

Going forward, Waking World serves as a concrete name for the site and its contents. "Waking" reflects the site's sunrise-sky theme and creates the image that the articles are revealing or eye-opening. "World" reflects the wiki-like nature of the world section of the site and the fact that this site represents my internet presence as a whole. Together, the name is short and expressive. I like it a lot.

"Letters to a Waking World" serves as a thesis statement for what I want the site to be.

The central purpose of the site for its first five years — the "thing" that the site was a container for — has been editorials and game reviews.

I found myself struggling to consistently write articles from the very beginning. Waking World has been the source of several burnout periods in my life and has also been the first project that gets dropped in favor of other things that I want to work on.

Writing game reviews is hard. It's frustrating. Games, especially video games, are products that revolve around a very tight media schedule. Reviews are necessary when the game has not been released and become stale almost immediately after. As a small-time reviewer this has made it nearly impossible to target games that are fresh for review. A strong contender for a game review might have ten, twenty, or even fifty hours or more of content that must be played through, but that's really only the up front cost. Playing a game to completion is not something that would put the site on hiatus for months at a time.

Once those ten, twenty, fifty hours are up — maybe a few weeks after the game's release — I have to actually contend with what I want to say about the game, which is often nothing.

I don't want to sound cynical here. Video games have been a passion for me for almost my entire life. However, in the context of an article, there are not that many games that end up being noteworthy over the course of a year. Add to that the fact that I do not receive review copies and have to pay the full price of the game upfront, and it's obvious that I only have so many games that I can review over the course of a year. The result is a lack of reviews. Without reviews, the site needs other categories of interest to even exist, and it's not always possible to create those categories without compromising what makes the site a "game review site" in the first place.

I won't lie: Gaming as a subculture has also been toxic. The majority of "gamers" who read reviews are not interested in my style or my self-expression; they don't give a shit about what I have to say.

That might be a pretty scathing thing to say, but given how ragebait YouTubers are currently trying to recreate Gamergate with the continued abuse of Anita Sarkeesian, it's justified. I cannot write a retrospective about the culture of gaming without my voice being drowned out by thousands of angry, violent men.

By writing independently and uncritically in the space, I feel like I associate myself with those men; I don't want to be a representative of a web culture that treats women as sex objects. That's all there is to it.

I've been looking for a while for something that will fill the space of the game reviews on the site while also offering 1) a fresh perspective for me and my readers and 2) an opportunity to move to a healthier space for my mental health. Looking at my options, I settled on book reviews.

Books are nice because, with few exceptions, they have a uniform length and time investment. I can bash out a book in less than a week without hurting my hands or getting bored. I also have a lot more to say about the average book than the average video game. "Soft reviews" where I briefly talk about the themes and style of the text work better for books than they do for games (where core themes might be relegated to the last ten hours of an eighty hour RPG).

What tipped me over on book reviews was the fact that requesting review copies is actually possible for small independents to achieve. This isn't a process where I have to grow my audience and wait for publishers to reach out to me — I reach out to the publishers.

That means that I would actually be able to review books in advance of them coming out, which is a huge advantage. It means having deadlines and review windows instead of "oh, you know, I'll review it sometime this year, I guess. Whatever. Who cares."

So, with all of that in mind, I'm going to be focusing on book reviews and editorials for the foreseeable future.

Yes. I do not plan to review any more games once my current crop of articles is done. I have reviews planned for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream and Titanium Court. After that, it's over. No more planned reviews.

Also, no. Just because I don't go out of my way to play games for review doesn't mean I'll stop playing games. Think about it like this: Right now I write five to ten articles a year about games. If I fill in all of that empty space with book reviews, I may still write five articles a year about games; that just isn't going to be the majority of the content that I use for review.

Hopefully that makes sense.

I love editorials. My article on what's happening to Bluesky is probably my favorite article I've ever written. There's no pressure to get them done outside of the window where people are interested in the topic; I'm also really good at researching articles quickly when the subject isn't the last twenty hours of a full-length video game.

So yeah, those aren't going anywhere.

I've been keeping a consistent changelog for the site since its creation in 2021. As of this article's release, the site is on Version 19. My plan is for Version 20 to be the "final version" of the site — in so far as it will be the end of me making any html changes to how articles are formatted or designed.

You may have noticed that this article has an estimated read time at the top. This is not the first change I've taken to modernize the site, but it is the first one that I'm taking that affects articles directly. Future articles will continue to feature these changes. With Version 20, I want articles to keep the same html format for the next several years.

It's worth talking a little bit more about the parts of the site that need work, how long that work will take, and the direction I'd like to take the site in the future.

The World section of the site has been perpetually out of date since its creation. There was also a serious blunder that I made by marking some of the articles under a Creative Commons license — a decision that I later realized might remove my own ability to get my books published.

Since that time I have written an entire novel. Almost all of the World articles on the site are now either outdated (replaced by the contents of the unpublished novel) or are too broad to be meaningful.

For the time being, I am considering completely removing the World section of the site, or at least hiding it until it's ready to be viewed again.

When it comes back, I want to pursue a wiki-like format that uses a different css sheet to the rest of the site. I'm currently feeling inspired by the MelonLand wiki, but there's really no telling how I will adapt this section for the future. Even if the book is a success, there may not be enough demand that I should want to host and contain my own wiki on my website.

Right now, I'm filing this under "Do Not Disturb" on my checklist.

Another part of the site that's in disrepair, the Files section has been the host of multiple problems in the past and ultimately has ended up abandoned — but unlike the World section I do have plans for it.

There are files that I would like to host on the site. Some of them are entirely weird or self-referential — like ancient art of my characters — but others are more genuinely useful. I have written a full guide for Memoirs of Magic and a playthrough of Saga 2 in the past, but neither of those are hosted anywhere. Being a weird trans animal lesbian, I also have things that I would like to say that are too complicated or lengthy to serve as a real article. A separate section for files would serve as a good excuse to host these larger documents that I currently have no place for.

For the things that are stored in the Files section, I have considered moving to a proper content hosting site. You may have noticed that there was never a way to read past the prologue of my college thesis, Heartfelt Familiar — because I have been waiting to put it up for sale on itch.io.

Being perfectly honest, the idea of selling it doesn't feel right to me. But there are other projects that will benefit from that treatment, like my upcoming tabletop roleplaying games.

For now, this section is "under construction."

I don't have a ton to say here — I love having external resources on the site and I even recently updated the Links page.

However, I have now been introduced to the concept of a /uses page, and so I am considering converting my Links page to that format. (It is already most of the way there).

Consideration will be given to the fact that the current page is /links; I will set up a simple redirect to prevent link rot from hitting the site again so soon after its rebranding.

"Almost done" with this one.

Waking World is a zonelets blog, but it is not a Blog; I do not post about my daily life or my projects. This has made it kind of impossible to tell what I am doing, especially when this means the site is left untouched for multiple months at a time.

Hi! We're halfway through 2026. I was writing a fantasy novel.

An active life update page (also known as a /now page) would serve this purpose really well and could easily be worked into the format of the site. It's also a lot less time-consuming than an actual blog because I wouldn't have to change Waking World's sitemap in any way to update it.

Let's say that this is "currently in the works."

It has been a goal of mine to give this site an RSS feed for a while now. Unfortunately, I haven't had the time or energy to make that a reality — and honestly I just don't know how RSS works. (Not that that has ever stopped me before!)

Seeing that the process is relatively easy, but understanding that it will add some extra processing time to articles on the site, I am still interested in it.

"Maybe coming soon."

Lightning Round:

There is no upload schedule for the site at this time.

As I learned from making an attempt at streaming, it's very easy to say that you have an upload schedule and very difficult to actually keep it. There is nothing more discouraging to a viewer (or a reader) than promising big things and then not delivering on them. You may be feeling this sense of discouragement from me admitting that I will not review all fifty games from UFO 50 — an issue I wouldn't have if I didn't publish a statement saying I was going to do that.

The reality of working on a website is that I do have a schedule, but you do not get to see it. I often fail to meet my own deadlines. Projects interrupt other projects and send them off-course. Real life events can disrupt progress for weeks, if not months. There is just no way to have a public schedule without disappointing you. I'm not going to do it. I won't apologize for not doing it.

For the time being, know that I am working on the site and I am working on it a lot. When the /now page is finished, it will provide a lot of transparency for how well progress on the site is going.

There is always the chance of me burning out again; if that happens, please be patient with me. I always come back.

It has been five years since the creation of the site and in my opinion it is doing very well. There have been many hiatuses and I plan to move forward with as few as possible; in particular I am going to commit to a page that will provide more transparency about how I am working on the site.

I'm moving from primarily focusing on game reviews to primarily focusing on editorials and book reviews. This is because of the time commitments involved in game reviewing, but I also have a lot of problems with the state of the "games industry" and gaming culture that have turned me away from games as a topic for review. Books will fill a large portion of that topic base until I get back on my feet. There are two more game reviews in the works at this time. Then, no more.

The site is in a good position in terms of design. I'm satisfied with the changes I've made to branding and visual style, and I'm focusing more on backend and trimming pages that aren't being used. My current plan is to stop focusing on backend after I release Version 20 of the site (we are currently on Version 19).

That's all the news I have for you today. Thank you for reading.

Here's to another five years!