End of Year Log - 2025

I planned to write this since my birthday, but only finds time (forcing it, to be precise) now.

For those who congratulates me on my birthday, thank you very much. I’m glad I can still be here right now.

2025 has been quite a year. You can say this is the year I finally turn around for the better after 5 year of walking through deep muddy road.

I still have the bad habit of unable to remember what I’ve done (my journalling effort hasn’t bear any fruit since I can’t find a good flow of doing it yet), but I’ll try to recall some notable events and other stuff that I’ve done this year.

Tutoring

I started tutoring elementary school kids this february through a recommendation from my mother— One of her friends planned to open a small tutoring class in her house and they need english teacher. Now it has been 2 full semester (almost, the tutor activities started on week 3 or 4 of the second semester) and I learned a lot of things—and still learning!—on how to deal with childrens and preparing study material.

Music Archival

Last year I joined a music sharing forum, and right around mid-2025 started contributing here and there on their archival project. Is it on a gray legal zone? Yes. But I do think the specific framing of their activities as archival rather than just piracy is interesting and worth doing, since it’s specifically for doujin or self-published musics. I’ve only appreciated the scale of doujin music scene, be it Japan-only or worldwide, from the number of creator and their creation, after I stayed there for a while.

The premise is this: Since a lot of self-published (not necessarily indie, because a lot of them, mostly outside Japan, do strike a deal with some sort of publisher or promotor for their releases; Think indie bands who only publish their songs on bandcamp) only have physical releases, and those release catalogs are often unorganized or managed individually, there’s shitton of music that probably only have been listened by limited amount of people. Thus there’s a need to catalog and preserve all of those releases, albums, EPs, or singles, from the first available doujin music release until now. Their library now has logged 681 out of 17000-ish circles/bands, and that’s only from publicly available records that’s archived or still hasn’t touched by link rot.

I plan to grow my own collection from what I could get, either second-hand or direct buy from related artists. I finally able to buy some CDs this year, and hopefully in the future. I want to post reviews of the albums I bought myself… Let’s put it in the bucketlist for next year.

See also: music-collection

Selfhosting

The list of services I selfhosted this year grows a lot. I only remembered Navidrome last year since I used it to listen to musics on Chibicon. Now I even have set up scrobbling station for Navidrome (https://scrobble.maulanamd.my.id).

My paradigm for accessing those services also changed. Now I mostly used cloudflare tunnel with this domain and pinandhita’s rather than accessing it through tailscale.

My mental condition

I can safely say that my condition has been stable. Though I still need medications, it rarely relapsed and even then, it’s not in the nuclear-meltdown-level like a few years ago. Those medications are also on the way to be reduced further— Changes in the psychiatry ward I frequented means I have new psychiatrist since September, and she deemed it safe to reduce the dosage on some meds I took, though I already stopped taking one because of its side effect (I have bad sleepiness in the morning, I imagine not unlike having hangover, if I took Clozapine regularly—I still take it if I need to, like when I relapsed or I have a spree of not taking the regular meds for whatever reason).

Also, I picked up a new pocket journal this December! I bought a nice one from Chibicon, though I can’t (or shouldn’t) write any review for the product nor my methodology just yet. Hopefully I could make a consistent habit to write on it. Two field notes that I bought this year, which I planned to use as commonplace book and a temporary notes, ended up as archivable temporary notes for slipbox/zettelkasten, and even then, it still doesn’t work for me yet.

Translating and Pinandhita

This December marks second year of Pinandhita’s activities. While the group’s income isn’t much yet, we’re finally able to do commission works since the latter half of 2024 until now, which is still net positive. I can feel my skills for redrawing and proofreading going up and up by each releases.

The path I took for learning Japanese seriously was rough this year. I still can’t be diligent or consistent enough in my studies. That said, I finally have some kind of direction on what to do and learn after discovering this guide (site is in Indonesian) - thanks Allam!

My strategy so far is this:

• Repeated kotoba and kanji learning with Anki, I used AnkiDroid with basic deck mentioned in aforementioned guide;
• Learning bunpou with resource from irodori - I still need to learn a lot since I mostly understand Japanese by guessing;
• Immersive application through playing VNs - Started just a month ago, and I am already at the stage where I can take my time to learn and recall kotoba when reading the dialogues, though not one without voices like MC’s lines or narrations.

I still aspire to be active, individually, in the translation scene, either as a freelancer or working in a firm/company, but the road is still long ahead and I need to work on some kind of roadmap of what I need to do and achieve beyond what I’ve done this year.

Writing

This is one activity that I’m still sucked at this year; after all, I barely wrote stuffs here in 2025. It’s not wasted, however— I have learned and reviewed quite a bit about my writing flow.

For example, I have started over my main, base vault, in which I did my writing stuffs. Rather than brainstorming an article there, I started to just write a crude one here, on this website’s vault. I still can’t find a good way to collect references or ideas from other media, though, and started looking into zettelkasten as a way to try working on it. It still didn’t go smoothly, mainly since I can’t be arsed to write it digitally on my phone, but trying to sit and write it on my laptop feels like a chore. I did send my sister’s old laptop to be fixed, but it still wasn’t done up until this day; I hope to use it as a mobile editor that I could type more comfortably since I can’t use my current laptop without plugging it to the wall. One way that I tried to fix that is by using analog media (writing it by hand); The first attempt with field notes wasn’t working, but the second one that I tried to do recently is going in a good direction. In the end, I just want to make the writing part to be as painless and smooth as possible - see starting-out.

Next year

I hope to be able to grow what I’ve done this year not unlike the seed of this digital garden that I’ve made.