After countless hours, breaks, and torment, finally I reached a milestone in Neon White. I achieved the Emerald time on every stage in the game. I don't really know exactly how long this effort took me, but I don't think it really matters. It took a while. I was one of the slower people to do this. That's okay.

I wanted to have some more thoughtful reflections in the days that followed, but nothing was really coming to me. I didn't want to leave the achievement completely unacknowledged, though, so here's what I can say:

I'm a slow learner

Maybe something's wrong with me. Maybe things just don't come to me as quickly as they used to. Maybe I have some flaw in my approach to difficult tasks. For whatever reason, it's pretty obvious. I found myself taking much longer than many of my peer players to achieve certain times in the game. It kind of sucks. It's kind of embarrassing. But, at the end of the day, I still achieved the same things. I'm trying to hang onto that.

I can do hard things

This goes hand in hand with the last one. Even if it took me forever, even if I got super frustrated most of the time, I could still do the hard thing. Maybe it's not hard for everyone. It was hard for me. I am trying to look back on this achievement and feel proud of it. Hopefully I can do that.

Tension is the enemy of everything

This appears to be true in just about everything you do: Tension is bad. Don't grip the controller too tight, you'll flub your inputs. Don't swing your golf club too hard. Don't tense up your jaw while singing. Tension creates bad, uncontrollable outcomes. Learning to keep my hands calm in stressful moments was pivotal. I'm still fighting that battle every time I play, but becoming aware of it was extremely important.

I'd like to extend thanks to the many people in the Neon White Console Speedrunning server on Discord for advice, support, and an audience that motivated me to continue. You're cool people.

2026 is here, and I wanted to give a shoutout to a few songs that never left my rotation throughout the year. Hopefully I can give this sort of thing more attention going forward. If you were wondering what’s playing in my earbuds on the train to work, now you don’t have to.

Songs from 2025

food house – everybody’s eyes

No surprise that something from food house ends up on here. I really enjoy the duo’s work, and the album released this year delivered for me. “everybody’s eyes” stuck out the most for me because it’s high-speed, vulnerable, and hopeful. Frax sings about her relationship with her fans and performing, and how the mutual love was missing from other parts of her life. gupi’s squelchy lead synths really drive it home for me. This song is easily my favorite from the album, though the honorable mentions are close behind.

Honorable mention from this album: computerpunk, la la la, nono, credit card knife

glaive – Foreigner

I stumbled into glaive’s music earlier this year while getting caught up on ericdoa’s work. I had liked what I heard when “cloak n dagger” came on, and then I found recently-released Y’all. The first few tracks were interesting, but not enough to completely pull me in. “Appalachia” caught my interest and convinced me to listen through. “We Don’t Leave the House” was a smooth, moody, and catchy dance track that teed me up to be completely floored by the edge of “Foreigner.” I was in awe when the track wrapped up. I loved its grit, its anger, and the sound production was unreal. It’s a very interesting situation where I feel like the track excels when placed in the context of the album. I like it on its own, but I’m not sure it would have had the same impact.

Honorable mentions from this album: Appalachia, Weird, We Don’t Leave the House

underscores – Music

Anytime something new comes from underscores, I will be there to listen. “Music” came out and I enjoyed it right away. I appreciated her return to some of the EDM influences she strayed away from with Wallsocket, despite loving that album as much as I did. The accompanying music video and Stepmania Chart made this single that much more special. I can’t wait to see what else she’s cooking.

jasmine.4.t – Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation

This was a last minute addition, I had not heard of jasmine.4.t until later in the year. When I put You are the Morning on, “Guy Fawkes Tesco Dissociation” left the biggest impression. It took me a few listens for me to really like it, but then I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I think that’s the mark of an impactful work of art.

passengerprincess – PUPPY 4EVER

“4K CARPET” introduced the world to passengerprincess, a track that seemed carefully crafted to check some viral song boxes. I do like the song, but other tracks on their debut album had a bit more substance to me. I found “PUPPY 4EVER” to be surprisingly heartwarming and relatable. I hum the chorus to myself pretty frequently. I wouldn’t mind being your puppy forever and ever, to be honest.

Honorable mentions from this album: TUMMY, 4K CARPET

Older Songs

The Beths – Little Death

Some algorithm somewhere put this song in front of me at some point this year, and I am very thankful. Something about its sound captured me immediately, and I was listening to it on repeat for a few days. I love the vocal delivery and upbeat drums. I will be paying more attention to The Beths from this point.

ericdoa – dancinwithsomebawdy

My ericdoa binge lead me to glaive, but I also picked up some new favorite tracks from him on that journey. This one seems to have become a success, and I completely see why. I find it incredibly fun to dance and sing along with. It’s a very satisfying mix where the driving bass is always reminding you that it’s there, but in a way that feels welcome.

Wavves – King of the Beach

Completely driven by the release of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3+4, this song from the soundtrack defined a lot of my summer months. It captures the essence of a summer song so well, and this summer I found myself longing for the water, and the beach more specifically. “Let the sun burn my eyes, let it burn my back” was a popular refrain of mine when the sun seemed determined to beat down on us. It’s a fun and memorable track.

AJR – Inertia

This one surprised me. I never really listened to this group, but the song crept into my autoplay one day and it left a big impact. I know many people deal with this feeling of being stuck and unable to snap out of it, but it came across during an evening when I was really stuck in those feelings. I had to shout it out because it was there for me at a time when I needed something to help me feel heard.

Sooner than I could prepare, the year has come to an end. I decided to take a moment to tend to a few things on the site, and reflect a bit, on the coming year.

Site Updates

There is only one, really. I moved web hosting. I had been curious about what it would take to configure a web server from scratch, and my previous hosting situation had been set up for me, so I wanted to take an opportunity to learn. I am experimenting with some other new things as well, like how I will host media files and I may change how the web pages are served entirely. I anticipate messing with this, and learning, a bit more throughout 2026. It feels good to have more ownership over my site architecture.

Reflecting on my 2025

Most of this year sucked quite badly. Everything was kicked off with this horrific administration in the United States, and the horror did not stop for a moment. Beyond that, though, I felt extremely adrift for most of the year. Office politics at my day job kicked into high gear, tensions consistently ran high, and I felt very alone in managing it all. Even though I had people around me willing to help, I didn’t understand what I should even be asking of them. It felt particularly alienating and painful to know that I desperately needed help, but be totally lost with how to ask for it.

One major win for me was that I successfully pivoted to a vegetarian diet. It is something that I had been curious about for my entire adult life, but due to my past as a picky eater, I was always afraid to fully give up anything on my already limited palate. I started the year with the intention to eat meat with only 30% of my meals, and by about April, the meat meals felt more out of place than the meatless ones. It was around then that I decided to give it up. There were a few moments where I broke the diet earlier on, but the second half of the year was meat free, as far as I can remember. It feels good for me to reflect on that. I think it is right for me.

As far as gaming goes, this year was fairly successful. I checked off a couple goals, Death M grade in TGM2 and getting my first quad star in ITG/Stepmania come to mind. I got much further into riichi mahjong than I ever anticipated. Before 2025, I knew the basics of how to play, very little about scoring, and I didn’t feel comfortable leading a table. This year, I learned to score, I can teach others how to play, I attended 2 large tournaments, and placed fairly well in both of them. I found a new community of people to make friends in, and I intend to continue that momentum next year. I returned to Neon White, at least for now, and I have made solid strides in cutting my overall time down. I broke 95 in golf, though my swing fell apart shortly after that.

Art was a mixed bag. I’m really happy that I ended the year by starting vocal lessons. I started 2025 strong with visual art, I was drawing a lot and it was fulfilling, but I fell off the habit. I struggled to regain it. One thing I’m proud of is I think I pushed my understanding of color theory a bit further than it had been before. I hope I can return to drawing in 2026 with a new focus.

My career has always been a mixed bag. My relationship with my job has been touch and go for years. I found myself working harder this year, and I think the work paid off. I put myself out there more, and forced myself to become someone that people could trust with important questions regarding the products I work on. I was scared of it, I’m always afraid to say the wrong thing, but it hit me that any time I sidestep responsibility, I’m really offsetting that work onto someone else. It felt like it was my turn to own some of that work and I believe that yielded some solid professional growth. I put more work into recognizing and mentoring my junior coworkers. I have heard some positive feedback for that, which is nice. The biggest career move of 2025 is that I am starting a new job in 2026. I am looking forward to this clean slate and hoping I can put everything into motion from the start.

My social life was a bit tumultuous for the better part of the year. Friendships faded or strained, or fell apart completely. There were fights that I was and was not involved in, I tried my best to navigate things, and I’m sure I made plenty of mistakes. I do believe that I tried my best. I’m sure I have a lot to learn, as we all do. Partway through the year, though, I hit a groove with reaching out and finding new friends. The mahjong group helped me shake off some of that rust. I made some new local friends, as well as online ones. I still keep up with most of them, though I have a tendency to drop focus here and there. I hope anyone reading this knows that I am doing my best, and that I don’t think less of someone just because I haven’t reached out in a while. I am looking forward to sharing the future with many of you.

Conclusion

I don’t have any clean way to end this. I know that I will press on into 2026, and that I will try to push my art, my athleticism, my mental wellness, my career, and my happiness to the best of my ability. I hope you all do the same.

I am Jordan, or Boing, as many people know me. I grew up in South Central Pennsylvania. I spent most of my childhood bouncing around between a variety of activities and hobbies, as children do. I never really stopped doing that as an adult.

Early on

In grade school, I liked to do a little bit of everything. I was in the band (mallet percussion), orchestra (violin and double bass), chorus (tenor), musical theater (actor, though I envied the sound and lighting people), tennis team, bowling team, golf team, volleyball team, and newspaper. I find it important for myself to pursue a large variety of things, for it has always been how I operated.

While I enjoyed some aspects of living in small town Pennsylvania, I realized that I had to try living somewhere else. I was a queer teenager with an intense hatred of cars, driving, and car dependency and could not abide adult life in such an environment. I left for the Philadelphia area for unversity.

Computer Stuff

I work with computers for a living. When I was a kid, I always loved using the computer. I'm not entirely sure why. I found them very fun. I learned to code using the Game Maker program. Making games was my main motivation for programming for a long time. Nowadays, I mostly work in backend services. I really like APIs, I find it interesting to see how data is organized and used by different systems.

I went to college to learn how to make games, though I got a general Computer Science degree to be safe. I wasn't very good at making games anyway, and college felt like it was just a victory lap for people who were already good at what they wanted to do. My senior project was a video game project that I can only amicably describe as a total nightmare. It left my self confidence as a game maker, developer, and person completely broken. I gave up on making games for the time being. I'd like to learn to enjoy making games again someday.

Gaming

Playing games continues to be a passion. The first video game I competed in was Halo 3 around 2008. I loved playing in gaming tournaments after that. I have competed in a variety of video games since then: Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania IIDX, Pinball, Tetris, particularly guideline tetris, though occasionally Tetris the Grandmaster, Splatoon, Neon White, Super Monkey Ball, Sound Voltex, and probably some others that I am forgetting.

Eventually, I found myself interested in helping with gaming events behind the scenes. I joined Inkling Performance Labs to help with online Splatoon tournaments. I joined as technical staff, but then found myself finding my footing as a broadcaster, which I helped with for several years. I found that I have a strong appreciation for broadcast media, and still like to develop further skills in that realm. My first major gaming tournament I competed in was Riptide 2021 in the Splatoon 2 tournament. I have been attending every Riptide since, and it has been nice to have that staple even to return to.

Creativity

I have long been a very amateur artist. I do not know if I could be a professional. I would draw and sing a lot as a kid, and I eventually found a creative outlet online within the Furry subculture. It was through furry that I explored myself as a queer man and never looked back. I made lifelong friendships and developed an appreciation for self-expression through this space. The intersection of furry and gaming is where I met my partner, whom I have shared the past 9 years of my life with. This does not mean that I have had universally positive experiences in furry, but I appreciate what it has provided for me and so many others. Also, if you are curious, my fursona is a snake.

As I transitioned into adulthood, I began participating in conventions, initially Bronycon in 2013 and then I attended other gaming, furry, and anime conventions. I still love to attend conventions, and I occasionally staff them. I really love nerd events, and I love to see everyone coming together to celebrate the things they love. You can see how many people are a version of themselves that they rarely get to express in other places. These spaces are important for them.

Outside of playing instruments at school, I would occasionally dabble with making my own music. I installed FL Studio in 2008 or 2009 and would mess around. I find myself mostly influenced by the breakcore, hyperpop, and showtunes genres. I return to making music every once in a while. Perhaps someday I will have a consistent habit of it.

Urbanism

Like many others who are currently into it, I started identifying as an urbanist in the 2020s, when the term really exploded through YouTube commentary. Despite this, I found myself relating to urbanist ideals for a long time. I was quickly drawn to cities as a kid while discussing public transportation and cities online. I was enamored by the idea of being able to get wherever you needed without having to drive a car. I loved the thought of so many people and places being within such small proximity. I still love these things. I knew I wanted to try living in a city, and once I tried it, I knew I wanted to stay.

While I love living in a city, I think all areas can do better by their citizens when they are outside of a car. I love the work of Strong Towns, and I hope that most of the United States learns that it is worthwhile to make their downtowns safe and navigable for people. It feels a bit silly to have to say that.

In my late 20s, I have re-learned the joy of riding my bicycle, and using it as a form of transportation. I do not use it for every trip, in fact I haven't ridden it in quite some time as of writing this, but the experience of using your own effort to get around is unparalleled. I think more people need to remember how empowering it is, and maybe then they would support their towns and cities making it safer to do.

Etc

Everyone's story continues to be written. Hopefully, I have more to share here as time progresses.

Last updated October 7, 2025.

September 24, 2025

What do I mean by this? What do I hate?

I don't hate clothes. I am not a nudist. I love finding or putting together an outfit that makes me happy. I like that clothing can be a tool to show a new side of yourself. I have plenty of favorite clothing items that reflect my style and feel comfortable. The sensation of a soft new hoodie fills me with warmth. I enjoy wearing clothes that I enjoy!

What I really hate is the culture around clothes. There are so many unspoken rules. I'm not interested in learning them at this point, but I feel so clearly out of the loop and like I had missed some set of instructions that so many others got.

The issue for me is that you don't get to opt out of the game of fashion. If you're into clothes, or feeling particularly motivated to look a certain way, the world gets to be a stage upon which to hone your craft and solicit feedback. If you're not into clothes, or you're depressed, or overslept, or broke or what have you, you're still beholden to the same standards, expectations, and judgment that you get to experience on a good day. Clothes that make you feel like you look good can still be out of line with what others expect. How many memes are there about making fun of how other people dress? It's not acceptable to wear comfortable shorts and a graphic tee celebrating one of your hobbies. I've seen the phrase "adults with backpacks" uttered with palpable venom radiating from it. How you dress is an ever present source of scrutiny on your character, your personality, and your value as a person. It's exhausting, and it's not fun.

Working an office job in the finance industry really submerged me in the world of the unspoken rules. Why does everyone dress the same? Where did they learn to do this? Waiting at the train station, surrounded by my colleagues, makes me feel like such an outsider to the point where I start to feel like I'm not even a real person. There are the obvious differences, like a price tag: I don't buy expensive clothes most of the time, and while I can appreciate them, a majority of my clothes are inexpensive. I know that will reflect on my overall look to some extent when I'm in a crowd of office workers.

Another persistent pain point for me is how clothes fit. Shopping for clothes as a big guy is pretty frustrating. I'm still finding what shapes make me feel confident, but everything I pick seems to be out of sync with what's around me. It can be really alienating, even when I feel confident with my outfit when I leave the house in the morning.

What does this all mean for me? I will continue to work on my relationship with clothes. I won't let others ruin them for me. I will find new, colorful ways to convey myself with pride. I will express respect and admiration for my friends' clothing choices when they are excited. I will reserve my feedback for when it is asked for, and I encourage you all to do the same.

- Jordan/Boing

August 2nd, 2025 | Washington Square Park, Philadelphia

Usually, I keep journals private, but I would be remiss not to capture this event in its native form: HTML!

Today, I am (currently!) attending the HTML Day event at Washington Square park in Philadelphia. I heard about this event on Bluesky, via NeoCities promotion, and learned that there was a Philly event.

I took the SEPTA 109 bus from my town in Delco to 69th Street Transportation Center, and then rode the SEPTA L train to 8th Street Station. From here, I walked to Washington Square until I found 2 kind people under a big awning/tent thing.

I was the first non-organizer to arrive, but at the time of writing there are 14 people here! We are all surprised, because there was no explicit promotion effort beyond a couple Fediverse posts.

We partook in some arts and crafts, shaking POSCA markers ad nauseum, hand-writing HTML divs on things, making NFC tags, messing around with pipe cleaners, and coding on our Thinkpads on a picnic blanket. I'm having fun!

I used the art supplies to make a simple sign.

Tapping your phone took you to a photo of the tree.

I had a good time, if not a short one, as I had other places to be that evening. I made a few nice connections, and I left feeling a bit more inspired to mess around with computers for fun again.

Thank you to the organizers, ragman and Pixel, for bringing us all together!