12.3.2025
→ mini recap, favorite records, and evaluation (from you!)
what a year it's been! i know i'd started off 2025 by saying i'd go into a hiatus, but looking back at my music page, it doesn't seem like that at all...
i started off with a few edits of songs, from a sleepy winter edit of "choke enough" to a shitpost edit of "gasolina" (SORRYYYYY for the whiplash!!! it will happen again), then two more little edits for 14/4/2025. the same day, i started a short run of chiptune covers that started with porter robinson's "look at the sky" and ended with "raise up your bat" from DELTARUNE - the latter was the fastest i'd jumped to make a chiptune cover in years! and just a month before, i made a conscious effort to push through creeping decision paralysis by challenging myself to finish the first draft of any song that i started writing in the same night, resulting in my first 4 track EP "Stay up". it didn't even end there, because in october i somehow ended up DJing in the middle of the woods... and i'd do it again! that's so much stuff, i still can't believe i did it. i think i'm out of breath lol.
but enough about me (for now)... i listened to so much amazing music and went to so many killer shows. (i finally saw KNOWER, the duo of my middle school dreams... thank you N for humoring me and getting taco bell with me after, you're the best and i can't stop smiling ♥) so in addition to what i had already mentioned in my blog post from the middle of the year, click the title below for four more albums/EPs i really loved listening to!
my favorite records of 2025 (continued)
Emeel - Softspoken
the soft, dancing synths put this right at home with the playfulness of PC Music... with a supercute title and supercute artwork, Softspoken is perfectly sweet, and makes me feel like i'm floating on a cloud ... 
lydels - Messages
with whispery vocals and chords that sound like waterfalls, this album shows a softer, downy-feathery side to the breakbeat. but in lydels' care, the roots of jungle remain intact here through energetic breaks and smooth bass lines. is it too crazy to say that Messages is to jungle as Doss (2014) is to trance? sooo beautiful !
Carly Rae Jepsen - Emotion (10th Anniversary Edition)
technically this is a reissue but my sole purpose in life is to get people to listen to Emotion by Carly Rae Jepsen, so please celebrate the 10th anniversary of my life being given purpose by listening to Emotion (10th Anniversary Edition) by Carly Rae Jepsen.
Khadija Al Hanafi - !OK!
"Always Treat U RiTE" has been my morning song for months now. 34 minutes of the smoothest footwork and juke i've ever heard ♥
evaluation
In January 2024, I decided to renovate www.14-4ml.neocities.org, rewriting it into the site it largely is today. I have learned a lot about webmastery since then, and it has been so cool to meet many other webmasters too. the internet is so beautiful sometimes!!!
January 2026 will mark the 2-year anniversary of 14-4ml.neocities.org 2.0! To celebrate the occasion, I'm turning the tables: this site almost entirely runs on Me Giving You Things, but just this once, I'm asking You to Give Me... Your Feedback!
Given my 2-year anniversary of "not really changing anything", I think my design philosophy is clear; I'm a musician first and a webmaster second, so a navigable, comfortable place to put my music and art is all I need. While 2.0 satisfies that, it's outgrown much of its spaghetti code and needs some serious reworking. i see this as a double opportunity to both reorganize the site and reevaluate what "navigable" and "comfortable" mean to me... and you!
it's intimidating, but i hope it's also reassuring to know a few things about the website for now: it's going to stay on neocities; it's going to stay on the left side of the page; and it's going to stay blue. (text is going to be mostly black from now on, though, because my astigmatism got better since 2024 and now i can see what my friends mean...)
while the primary goal of this evaluation is to make the website easier to navigate in its next version, i also welcome general comments or questions ♥.
although i don't plan to share comments publicly, i may mention your response in passing and anonymize it beforehand.
thank you for listening and reading! and thank you to my friends who gave so much life to my year through jam sessions, symphonies, shows and everything in between. see you in 2026!
♥ 14.4