By: Erin
Posted: December 26th, 2024
Hello! Little darlings, it’s been a long, cold, lonely year. Well, long, certainly. The other parts came and went. A year of tremendous ups and downs! I always get a little nostalgic and ready to reminisce around the holidays, and as I look at my list of new year’s resolutions I didn’t come close to finishing, I turn my attention elsewhere. Looking back at this website…well, it certainly went through a lot more changes than I remembered!
I started the year by writing one of my favorite articles ever, though admittedly one I still struggle to share. Did Brodie Lee Play Katawa Shoujo?, a question no one else has dared to ask, lead to some fun internet archaeology and philosophical reminiscing on the small ways our lives can change, even in the strangest places. This is the year I got to tell another favorite story about accidentally getting the secret Gay Ending in Tokimeki Memorial Girls’ Side 3, and it was a good year for reposting old things I wrote with the mirroring of my fake Danganronpa 3 press release and my review of The Doom Generation. By the way, I got the Gregg Araki Trilogy box set for Christmas, and I’m so stoked to dive into Totally Fucked Up and Nowhere. You can thank last year’s email to Criterion for that! Totally!
It was a huge year for new projects! I haven’t really posted about it on the site, but I replaced the VCR in the EMN chain with another modulator, meaning right now we have six EMN channels going!! I have to be stopped! That means the main one, EMN2, Marathons, Pro, Vibes, and one we call “EMN DIY” which is just a Chromecast that we use to play various livestreams throughout the house. Right now it’s on an online nature channel, which is cool because you never know when you might see baby cheetahs or a cool monkey. I’m excited to flip it over to AGDQ when the time comes.
One of the biggest new projects Mandy and I launched was Role Credits, our movie podcast. We’re in our third arc already, and are preparing a year-end bonus episode! I’m amazed we got so far with it, and I’m glad to have pushed on through. We’ve had some really fun episodes, with my personal favorites being Batman Forever, Carrie, The Lost Boys, Beverly Hills Ninja, and Christine.
And of course, I should mention one of the biggest changes to the site – WordPress conversion! It was a wild little ride doing something that started as an inkling to make the main Armbar Studios site something people would actually want to click on that then snowballed into learning syntax and extensions to properly make sure all the legacy content on this website displayed correctly, but I’m so proud of how it all turned out. It really is better than ever, and because of it I can write articles and updates as the whim occurs – like I’m doing now!
2024 was a place of personal growth as well. Mandy and I took two of our biggest trips to date: first, a flight to Portland where we explored Movie Madness and the big city and met with our wonderful friend Nova, and then I drove from our Ohio home to Wisconsin to see Mandy’s family and our friends from the area, a trip that really reminded me that road trips kick ass. I really should make a little article and gallery about the Portland trip.
Just a little taste of our adventures on the road!
This is even without mentioning all the movies we watched, games played, skills picked up (like learning to mod iPods), or little projects completed (like porting the EMN tutorials and guides, or finishing my hidden TÁR hate shrine, possibly the best page I’ve ever made)! So, even if I didn’t manage to completely update all the programming guides, or finish a certain very-obviously-under-construction article, or finish archiving the websites I’ve wanted to recode and archive since 2020, it’s still been a wonderful year for EMN and Armbar Studios. Whatever the future may hold, I know we’ll be there to try and make it as fun and as bright as we are able.
My first goal is to finish that aforementioned Physical Media article, though. Gee, who could have foreseen that writing about over 160 items is a daunting and difficult task?!
This will probably be the last news update of the year unless something incredible happens. As such, ciao for now!