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Today I watched Akane-banashi Episode 4: “Beyond Joy”!! It's on YouTube right now, but I think they might take it down after a week? Very mysterious...

This episode was split into two parts, one with Akane's performance and the other part with Kyoji's.

Knowing Your Audience

There is something extremely refreshing about Rakugo in that it's incredibly localized. Akane has 15 minutes to perform in front of an audience of around 20 people. Numbers that seem like near nothing when you're thinking about the scale of the internet and views there. Numbers have a context in which they exist in, don't they?

It's very physical and embodied and all about stories that have been passed down in a way that's like... the reverence for tradition is kinda completely at odds with the endless desire for the flashy and new.

But anyways, it makes me think about... something like sonder in appreciating that every individual has an inner life and a unique experience. We can only really get to know a couple of people really well in our lifetimes, and perhaps, not even then, if you're not paying attention.

The last episode was all about Akane learning about attentiveness with your audience. Knowing who you are performing for. What are their needs? What are their wants? What makes them comfortable? What makes them laugh? I'm a huge fan of how this episode shows what she's learned from her training and also weaves in another aspect of, doing something that you yourself are proud of.

Use Your Life Experience to Inform Your Creative Practice

"Being human and how people think hasn't changed at all, no matter the era. So Akane, I hope you'll experience all kinds of things. Agonize as much as you want. Get hurt a lot. And one day for sure, all of that will fuel your stories" "Rakugo is about laughing about life's hardships"

Be "Too Serious" Lean into Your Strengths, Don't Be Someone That You're Not

Something that I love about this show is the characterization. Each Rakugoa brings their unique life experiences and personalities to ther craft and it's really fun to see! Kyoji's strength is that... he is a very serious and responsible and disicplined person which might seem at odds with the comedic nature of the performance, but he actually uses it to his advantage. Being "too serious", exaggerating a trait that he is already strong is creates a humorous effect that he can really push! I think that's really cool. At times you need to learn to pull back and do something that isn't immediately obvious with in order to grow (Akane learning how to be more attentive). At other times, you can really lean into what you're already good at, and that is your strength :3

I'm literally freaking crashing out over date formatting. This is so awesome...

So... today I chanced upon this mysterious very awesome template!! https://strawberrystarter.neocities.org/

It's really cool! I want to experiment with lots of different template and website making tools! I think that the medium and design of something is really important for the type of projects that you want to make, so I wanna try different stuff and learn stuff and have a good time :3

I'm having so much fun learning new things and even though it's a big of a struggle sometimes, it's really rewarding! Though I do need to stretch a bit more since I'm at my computer a lot...

Oh yeah! About the date formatting thing. I was confused because... well it seems like the date format is really important for the RSS feed, of which itself, I have no idea how it works... But I think it would be good to learn eventually? But I wasn't sure whether it wanted it like month-day-year or something else and it was confusing me a bunch and giving me weird errors (it matters that the month and the day are two digits each! Even if it is just like 1, you have you write is like 01)... It's funny because I think other people were probably having issues too since it's in the FAQs lol... Good place to look for troubleshooting.

I'm reminded of this presentation that I listened to in college about programming. Programming is like... communication between you and the computer. It's called a programming language for a reason, you need to learn a completely new way of thinking and expressing what you want to express in order to get your meanings across. I'm very interested in the nature of meaning and semantics, but of course, communication can be frustrating at times, especially when one requires as much precision as a computer... Computers aren't great conversation partners, are they?

I'm thinking again about knowledge and memory... It seems like things I just did, I forget how I fixed them and I delete the tabs and then the knowledge is gone. I'm thinking I should keep a record of all the bugs that I fix and what helped when I was struggling with this or that. It's frustrating to encounter the same error and then realize that you've encountered it before, fixed it, but now you can't remember what you did! Memory is finicky like that.

Anyways, I'll try to be a bit more careful next time and leave behind more documentation for the sake of my future self :3

If you're curious... I wanted to find a blogging system that worked with neocities and also had tags, and I found this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/neocities/comments/171tpr2/anyone_found_a_way_to_integrate_tags_into_their/. Someone commented that they use this: https://codeberg.org/cdvr/Zonelots. And the creator of that was like, actually there's issues with this, use this instead! https://bagenzo.itch.io/strawberry-starter And that is how I found strawberry starter :3

So cool, its on itch.io and it recommended me some other random things...

A new update for Strawberry Starter! In fact, the first major update!
Here's a rundown of the new features:

Tags

You could already tag your posts, but now it's more useful! If you have at least one tag (that isn't post or infobar) a tag view will appear in your "All Posts" page. This lets you view every tagged post at once! All of the example posts that come with the template have tags now, to serve as little examples of this feature.

Navbar links & Footer comments

It's now easier than ever to add external links to your navbar, or add comments to your post pages. You'll see two new layouts in the _includes folder: navbar.html and comments.html. The former lets you easily add external links (or whatever else)! and the latter lets you easily copy paste a comment script from a service like Disqus or CommentBox.

Minifeeds

A new social-media-ish alternative for your blog! Add feeds to the minifeeds folder and give them a tag. This is a great way to keep an ongoing list of books you've read or stuff you're doing. Posts added to the minifeeds folder won't count as "posts", and so won't clog up the RSS Feed or the "All Posts" page. They'll only appear in the tag view, but you can also link to them directly. A new #Updates minifeed has been added to the template to show you how to do it!

Easy backups!

You can now type npm run backup in a command line to backup your blog. This will preserve your assets and posts in a format that's really convenient for backing up, OR for using to upgrade to a newer version of Strawberry Starter. Just download the new version, drop your backup in there, and voila!

There's a new guide on the site about how to use all these in more detail: Advanced Features.
Let me know what you think about this update! I've already seen some cool blogs out there, and am hoping to see more. Special thanks to Em Reed and their awesome blog, for helping me test out these new features.

Keep blogging, and believe in the net! 🍓

Hi! Welcome to my blog :3

Strawberry Starter is an 11ty blog template that came about as I was thinking about the recent push towards personal websites. There's been growing sentiment in my corner of the internet that social media is bad; that that we should ditch it in favor of blogs and personal homepages, but... there's not many great options out there if you're a beginner to HTML/CSS/JS!

Lately I've been doing a lot of dev, and decided I could put some of my knowledge to work, adding to the pool of available resources.

My hope for this template is that someone with little experience can download and use it, and that it'll spur them towards a path of learning about HTML and CSS!

Special thanks

• Zonelets
  • Zonelets is a huge inspiration to me! Part of my design goal for Strawberry Starter was basically "Zonelets but without needing to write HTML".
• 11ty
  • Finally, static site generation that's good! This is the most intuitive SSG I've used and it has totally rekindled my love for webdev.
• Foto
  • For being wonderful and helping out when I get frustrated. Thanks for contributing a theme, too ❤️
• Sean
  • For always taking a look at my code, fixing bugs, and teaching me lots.
• Emma, IAN, Rumpel, and S.T.
  • For being helpful guinea pigs testers 😎 and contributing critical bug reports/pull requests.
• My friends who blog
  • For being excited about this project and cheering me on!

Wow! You can now blog with this cool new tool!

1. 04/26/2026 - Akane-banashi Episode 4 “Beyond Joy”
2. 04/26/2026 - dev journal

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