Today I bring two new pages. One is about European dolls and stuffed toys with some sort of connection to Disney. I expect this page to grow in the future. The second page is about Transposia, a Belgian distributor of edutainment games.

Still slowly plowing through Defiance of the Fall. As for music, I got a bunch of Rondò Veneziano on CD and vinyl. How fun!

I'm not sure whether it makes sense to continue maintaining this miniblog. If anyone actually reads these updates, feel free to reach out to me. Many times, writing something here has been more effort for me than actually making new pages for my site. Like… the idea was to be less polished and more personal in these, but I think I've always felt more comfortable expressing myself through the things I like and consume.

I do promise that if I retire this blog, I'll properly announce it. 😛

You have probably noticed that my website has been a bit stale the last few months. I'll be frank about why that is.

One of the strong focuses of my website has always been the overlap between European and American culture. I've covered several uniquely European adaptations of Disney and Belgian appropriations of American culture. And even the more general nostalgia-focused articles were generally strongly colored by American culture.

It's a bit harder to get as excited about that as I used to, these days. Much of what I admired has been sacrificed on a profane altar to pettiness and hatred. But the true America is still that of The New Colossus.

In the meantime, my attention has often been focused on other things. I have gotten into miniature painting, for example. It's fun, though quite expensive. I don't feel like it's a good fit for this website, so I will probably not be talking much about it here. Maybe I'll reconsider if I find an interesting hook. I'm still reading Defiance of the Fall during my commutes as well. It's moving quite slow, and it's definitely not hooking me as Primal Hunter did. But I keep reading anyhow. I believe I'm at book 11 now?

Despite all of that, I do bring some updates now. The Greatest Belgians is a page that came out of discussions I had concerning cultural literacy. In it I go over some of the people voted by Belgians as the so-called Greatest Belgians. This list of course includes few women, for many of our prominent women have simply not been allowed to be consequential. Beyond that, there's a small page about Cirque du Soleil, and there is a new paragraph on the Belgian comics page, showing how one specific Belgian comic artist definitely read American Donald Duck comics!

Until Halloween, there'll be a bit of decor on the entire site. Afterwards, it will crawl back to my mildly updated Halloween in Belgium page. So, until November, Coby has been drafted in the Skeleton War.

I made a new little page to write out all my thoughts and recollections on Pokémon. After my previous article's section on flippos, I've worked on cataloging as much information as possible about these trinkets on Bulbapedia. That ultimately led to me starting to trawl through many childhood magazines (and their foreign counterparts), on the hunts for ads. Ads make for great primary resources on ephemeral merchandise! I ultimately ended up contributing quite a bit more to Bulbapedia than I had expected, leading me to reconnect with the Pokémon franchise for a bit.

Along the way, I also started setting ads for different franchises apart. The ones for my beloved Bionicle I have forwarded to the BioMedia Project, where they'll eventually be collected on a section dedicated to magazine ads. Anybody know where I can deposit Digimon ads?

I finished Primal Hunter's available material, so I've moved on to Defiance of the Fall. It hasn't hooked me as much so far, and I don't know if I will keep reading. We'll see.

To get my pretty minor Halloween theme up and running, I actually had to combine and streamline my various stylesheets. Hopefully, the site should load a teeny tiny bit more smoothly. It's also possible that here and there something doesn't quite look like it should look anymore.

I've expanded my LEGO page a bit as well, and moved it to the About section since it's less of an informative article and more me reminiscing about things from my childhood. Between this and the Pokémon page, I've needed to redesign my About page a bit. I've also added tooltips to make the page a bit clearer for people who aren't blind.

Finally, a different sort of music recommendation than what I tend towards. Samphonique Volume 1, by Dutch composer Sam Vlas, is a soundtrack to a theme park or movie that doesn't exist.

Remember when chips bags were fun? That's right, I got a new lil' interactive article about toys included in chips bags here in Belgium! Maybe someday I'll update it with the toys I'm too young to remember.

Still on my Primal Hunter binge. I've run out of books and have begun reading the online version on Royal Road. 😮‍💨 I hope that afterwards I can find something else that hooks me as much, to keep my commute to work bearable.

In other updates, my page about Dutch Disney comics has seen an update, and a few new books were added to my Book Reviews page. Beyond that, I've been slowly polishing and standardizing some of the CSS on my various pages.

This is a deep cut, so I'm gonna have to add some context. K3 was a Flemish attempt to copy the Spice Girls formula, which initially kinda flopped but found massive (and still ongoing) success when it pivoted to a kid-oriented group. A South African copy was apparently established by the same manager, which resulted in (among other things) an English cover of a song I remember from my childhood: Grandma At The Top. How odd!

It's happened, folks! Your old pal Coby Cat has taken the leap into the third dimension. My mascot's new CG-rendered look is purposefully a tad dated, trying to evoke something you'd see on a Disney Eurobeat CD or in a gaming magazine. This is the capstone of my site's redesign, and to accompany it, some of the cursors and bullet points have been updated as well.

Since this is so soon after the last update (just a few days even!), there are no substantial new page additions. My PC nostalgia page has gotten a little new addition covering the Skipper & Skeeto games, though. My various links pages have gotten a few additions as well.

Oh boy, it's been a while.

I wrote an overview of the shows I remembered watching on our public TV, which has been interlinked with some older pages. I really like when I get to link things together. Everything is connected after all. Maybe I'll tackle my childhood Saturday mornings next.

After reading Dungeon Crawler Carl last year, I've been binging Primal Hunter. Unlike Carl, I don't know if I would recommend it per se, unless you are really into this sort of LitRPG thing.

I've given miniature painting a try, with a starter kit from the Danish company The Army Painter. The kit had a pencil, a bunch of paints, and a single miniature. And wow! It actually turned out much better than I had ever expected (the secret is the brown wash at the end). I wanted to do more, including crafting some terrain, but I quickly fell into the worst illness I have had since I can remember. Guess seasonal covid is no joke!

I've been playing a mobile game that is almost suspiciously well-polished? Acecraft is a shoot 'em up visually inspired by Cuphead, and it has a crossover event with Tom & Jerry. So far I've had quite a bit of fun with it without spending a dime. If you feel at all interested, I believe this friendship code is supposed to reward us both: 9589797113596.

This update was supposed to have come out last month, as the title indicates. Then again, I am not some corporation erasing all rainbows after June ends. 😁

Anyway, I really enjoy watching the old Euro Disney special Night of Magic, and I recently discovered that a now-defunct Magician's magazine actually had a write-up on it. Since it provides so much cool background information, I've transcribed it and added it to my website, together with a brief bit of contextualization. I've been slowly transitioning from Plex to Jellyfin, which is why I was thinking of that special again. In Jellyfin I can more easily manage different versions of movies, and this special had several different editions depending on which country it aired in.

In my earlier page about cowboy villages, I referenced the 1958 Brussels World's Fair. I've tied some more thoughts about Expo 58 into a page about several 1950s Disney cartoons, as a bit of an antidote to the troubles of our time.

A song that's been stuck in my head since I've properly watched nWave's Haunted Castle 3D is Lane Navachi by Lunascape. Apparently this is Trip Hop?

My largest change this time around is the expansion of my Center Parcs page, featuring a more in depth look at Orry & Friends. Plus, I've taken pictures of some of my souvenirs!

I've worked on adding more links between pages. Everything I talk about it somehow connected to each-other. In the mean-time I have cleaned up some pages, and even sneakily added some new tidbits here and there. I've even added some cool arrows to navigate between articles in a series. In light of all that, my PC nostalgia page has gotten a new addition too: Neopets. Nothing substantial, just some stray thoughts and braindumps, as is typical for those pages.

Since I've been listening to Dungeon Synth, my recommendation this time is actually… a film! Riddle of Fire. It's a magical movie… a coming of age 1970s fantasy movie, with a whiff of Mandy… shot on 16mm film, and with a soundtrack full of Dungeon Synth.

Oh, and you might have noticed that we've now got a new typeface for headings and buttons. I might remove it or replace it later in a future update, since I'm still a bit uncertain about it.

Germany really loved westerns, as you may know. That's a bit outside of the scope of my website for now, though maybe I'll get to it someday. Still, Belgium also had a strong fondness for the genre, as you can see in my article about Cowboy villages. You know, I actually got some research help from some friends Even deeply personal websites like mine can be a team effort! 🤠

In other site news, I've got rid of some external frameworks I used to imitate GUIs in some obscure corners of my websites. This should make my site leaner in case you venture that deeply.

I've been listening to a bunch of DungeonSynth albums, way too many to all list them out. Gonna opt to highlight a recent compilation then: C14: The Black Keep, which is conceptualized as a sort of oldschool D&D adventure.

Jewel Match Origins: Palais Imperial is a game I've been enjoying lately. I like a good themed Match 3 game, but I especially like that the jewels are rendered in a realistic fashion. Many mobile Match 3 games I've played have the most gorgeous artwork, just to resort to clashing cartoony gems regardless.

Today I bring you two new articles, which are more on the personal recollections side of the spectrum. Both feature genuine (but edited) childhood pictures! First, my recollections of Power Rangers. And then the start of a subsection on LEGO. For now, it remains just a personal essay (with a nice new Coby face though!), but I do hope to enhance this with some shrines and subpages later on.

Beyond that, I’ve done some visual and structural clean-up—my About page has been redesigned, and the index page got a refresh. No drastic changes, just a little polish to keep things looking nice.

I've been spending a lot of time ripping disks and downloading obscurer tape recordings, growing my Plex server as a convenient complement to my extensive physical media collection. Organizing files and adding metadata is a great distraction from everything that's going on. At least one tiny part of the world that'll make sense.

I don't have a new indie music album for you, I'm afraid. I don't listen to enough new music to keep up a steady stream of recommendations! 😅 Maybe a specific song from a few years back, then? Scizzie's Aquatic Ambience is a remix of the eponymous Donkey Kong Country song. It's become associated with nostalgic content on shortform video websites, and I guess that's why it stuck with me.

Hey folks! A considerable amount of weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

For now, I bring to you a small but impactful update: the first new navigation button to this site since its inception. It leads to a portfolio page, linking to some of my artwork that is already on this website, but also to a substantial (yet abandoned) effort to create Pokémon-inspired creatures inspired by Belgian culture, and some silly image edits.

With that more directly creative aspect added to the existing line-up, I think my website is finally starting to offer a somewhat comprehensive overview of the Coby Cat persona. I'm phrasing it like that because not everything I, the real person behind this persona, do or care for necessarily fits within the scope of this site. Political takes which have been sitting in my drafts folder for many months while I contemplate the merits versus the potential downsides of its inclusion. And, yes, unpleasant personal baggage that will never sully this site at all.

Still, there is always more that could be added that's definitely within scope. I have not yet written in depth about the LEGO themes that captures my childhood imagination: Adventurers, Castle, Slizer, Bionicle. Nor have I written about Edutainment software and games, of which I have an extensive physical collection for PC and CD-i. I'm not even mentioning all the various media and snippets of internet culture I am fond of. And I've also been pondering my orb whether a sub-site in Dutch could cover bits of Belgian nostalgia that I don't think have much international value. Rest assured, this site will never ever truly be complete.

I've been listening again to Goldenrod Citypop: Gold and Silver. I don't dig every track, but I do dig enough of it. And as a whole, it's a great love letter to my favorite generation of Pokémon.

Welcome again to my humble abode.

This month, I wrote about American Stockhouses in Belgium , stores that originally sold American military surplus, as a follow-up to earlier articles describing the European fascination with the US. The current swift collapse of American liberal democracy may well be the final death blow to that admiration, but let's hope it won't come to that.

With personal tragedy piled on top of the geopolitical tragedies, maybe I am just getting numb to it all. I've been archiving rare uploads from YouTube and the Internet Archive on my Plex server. Organizing things and adding metadata… it's a great distraction from everything. At least one tiny part of the world that'll make sense.

Anyway, I've got a more direct sequel article as well. My earlier article about Belgian food now has a follow-up dedicated to (fast) food in Belgium that's still perceived as foreign, specifically focusing on the cuisines that are considered (but are not really authentically) Italian, Chinese and Turkish.

Wanderlore, an album by Dungeon Synth artist Deep Gnome, has been of some comfort. The opening quote sampled from the 1977 Hobbit movie sets the right cozy vibe immediately. Appropriately, a wizard Coby variant has appeared on my OCs page.

What a year, huh! What, it's only January? 💀

What's your poison in these interesting times? Mine's, as always, nostalgia. So I've got a short new page about Pierre Sala's designs, in particular his pencil-based furniture. And I've finally finished a page that I've been working on for over year now: my memories of tabletop gaming, which you can find through my about page as well.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I kind of enjoy watching some short-form video content to kill some downtime. I like seeing people's dogs, thrift hauls, fun crafts, as well as the various artful explorations of liminality. Since Tiktok's bizarre automated systems banned my purely passive account, I turned to Instagram. But because of recent events, my experience has gotten a lot worse. The political filter has been kneecapped, and I can no longer view the chronological feed of reels from accounts I follow. What a bummer!

Since that experience has worsened, I've been dabbling with mobile games again. Specifally ones that I can safely turn off at short notice. Slice & Dice ticks all the boxes for me, and I've been playing it quite a bit lately.

An album, then, to fly you away from here. Tiki for the Atomic Age. Written as an escape from a crumbling city, hopefully, it can also help us escape from a world that seems to be crumbling.

To round things off, I've been cleaning up and polishing various bits and bobs of my website. The most noticeable change will be my new logo.

The Americans haven't even celebrated Thanksgiving yet, and Coby's here already with a double dose of Santa Claus? Not to worry, there's a good reason for that, as you can read in my newest article about a holiday in Belgium

Staying in the spirit of not-quite-christmas, maybe this compilation of old atypical spacey Christmas songs can set the mood.

I've been playing quite a bit of Balatro lately. Sometimes it shocks me that things are often mainstream and hyped for good reason! 😲 It reminds me strongly of all the Yahtzee I played during my childhood, both physically and digitally, scratching that same itch. There's apparently already a Yahtzee-based clone being worked on, and I'll probably check out its demo once I get a bit bored with Balatro.

I had taken a bit of a break from webweaving, but Coby's back! (Alright!)

I'm squeezing in just in time to submit something to another code jam, with a page about Halloween in Belgium. I hope to eventually get to making such pages for all the major holidays.

Daniel White has dropped a new bit of encartacore music, titled Studyscape. In these trying days, the dreamy promise of a better future is a welcoming consolation.

Some small updates have happened here and there. I stumbled upon a new IMAX DVD release, which I've added to the IMAX page.

Agatha All Along has some of the funnest witchery I've seen on the screen in a long time. But it all feels… lessened when you think of it all existing in a multiverse of superheroes and whatnot. I really wish it could have been its own thing, rather than just another MCU vehicle. But as it stands, I'm still having a darn good time with it.

This month's big article was written for a code jam Originally intended as a small section of my article on motion ride simulation videos, it quickly grew in scope and size to the behemoth I present to you today. What's it about? IMAX movies on home video, with some asides about IMAX in general and an early 3D encoding for home use.

Have you heard of Dreamcastle before? These Vaporwave and Plunderphonics tracks evoke 90s and early 2000s Lego and Sega, two topics that speak to me very much. I believe they first came to my attention because of the elaborate custom cassette packaging they sent out to Lego YouTuber R.R. Slugger. The trailer for their new album also has to be seen to be believed.

To accompany my big article of the month, I have started a page that tries to get an overview of the entire nWave catalog, a Belgian animation studio. With these two efforts behind me, I hopefully can start expanding the motion ride simulator page in the future.

My article about the the defunct Chinese Disney MMO got some juicy updates thanks to tips from a friend over on Discord. The installer is still around, and we can even extract 3D models! Best of all, I'm explaining how you can do it as well.

Last time, I highlighted a concept album by Lookfar. Louie Zong, the artist behind Lookfar, has a varied selection of other concept albums which I've been enjoying. Gonna give a shout-out to Funky Friends, which evokes the acid jazz of Hey Arnold. Good stuff!

I've whipped up a quick little page about motion simulator videos, specifically the one I brought up earlier on my Center Parcs page. I want this to be a stepping stone towards a broad curated selection of similar ride videos, so feel free to send in your own recommendations and recollections! And if you know anything more about the videos already described, please also get in touch!

For a code jam, I wrote a page about my early days on the internet. Since the code jam has run its course, I've properly linked to my entry on my own site. Try finding it, or resort to the boring no-fun shortcut.

Our tour of Michael Jackson's Neverland Ranch finally continues into the mansion, aided by a 3D model I created. There's still a lot we need to cover, so if you're a die-hard fan who knows a lot about the mansion, please hit me up so we can collaborate towards an improved model and tour!

Music-wise, I'm quite digging Mineral Hall, a concept album which kinda feels like it bridges Dungeon Synth and the musical evocation of the so-called Utopian Scholastic aesthetic that I enjoy (like the Daniel White album I mentioned in a previous post). The cover art has the right sort of aesthetic, and the instrumentation also hits just right. Good stuff!

I've collected some rare screenshots of a defunct Chinese Disney MMO. The game always intrigued me, and I'm sad I never got to play it. There are many other defunct Disney games that I actually played that maybe merit a page as well, at some point.

Today I bring to you a page about Belgian comics, written from the perspective of someone who grew up surrounded with heavy comic fans but never being terribly invested in them. This serves as part of a larger series of pages I'm writing, to present a sort of accessible pop-cultural canon of Belgium, so to speak, and one specifically for a non-Belgian audience.

No music recommendation from me this time, but I can recommend a free game that I've been enjoying lately. Moonring is a homage to old role-playing games like the Ultima series, with a timeless neon aesthetic and a rather brooding vibe. Also comes with a nice dungeon synth soundtrack!

A short page I whipped up has finally been made public on my website. You can find it linked on my about page, or take a sneaky shortcut.

I actually managed to finish a first iteration of the update I had hoped to get out last month, when I got hit by scope creep. The result is my page on Center Parcs. I do intend to expand this page eventually.

I bought the Pangeapedia Plus album I recommended in my first blog post. I probably shouldn't have. Don't get me wrong, it's an amazing album and it was very swiftly and correctly shipped by the artist! But dang, international shipping has gotten way worse lately. I had to pay massive fees to Belgian customs… 😓

A small page I added is one for my OCs. It's small for now, but maybe I'll uncover some more from the depths of my memory soon.

Some music I'd like to highlight this time is the soundtrack of the Bionicle fangame Masks of Power. Calm Sands of Motara (Po-Wahi Night), for example, really manages to capture (and even expand on) the feel of early Bionicle.

This is not the update I was hoping to get out by now! I started on a page, and got struck by my eternal enemy: scope creep. I wanted to add some photos, so I dug out old family photo albums, and then I found photo negatives. Long story short, I scanned over a thousand photos. And when I finally got back to writing the page, I got hit by writer's block.

So have a complete site redesign instead! I've taken inspiration from Skins Factory designs for the Disney company around 2007, and other designs on the slightly more playful and colorful side of what is now called Frutiger Aero. There are some aspects on various pages that still date from the old design, in particular the backgrounds, but that's alright. I can deal with those later.

I recently started gratitude journaling using Momentory, but I'm not sure if I can keep this up daily. It's part of my effort to adopt a more optimistic outlook on life, as I touched on in an earlier blog post.

One new page I was able to add is one with book reviews. Only one of the book reviews is actually written out to a satisfying degree, but hey, it's a start!

A song I'd like to highlight in this blog post is Love Maria by Crazy Loop. Crazy Loop was a one album project by O-Zone founder Dan Balan (who you probably know from their hit Dragostea Din Tei, better known as Numa Numa or Maya Hi). His original album, the Power of Shower, was released in 2006. I discovered it several years later and instantly fell in love. Balan has since been active in Ukraine. In 2023 Crazy Loop returned, with a new music video filmed in and dedicated to the beautiful city of Kyiv.

Well, this is a big one! I had this crazy ambitious idea, and despite feeling burnt out on it multiple times, I managed to pull it off! I wrote an article all about Belgian fast food, candies, and more, lovingly illustrated in a cohesive style to tie it all together! I really challenged myself — both on writing and illustrating — and this was probably too much for me… but I am really proud of what I accomplished. Just, um… please don't expect this level of quality for future site updates! 😅

The past week I've been listening to Gold Casio again, a criminally underrated disco and synth-pop band. I highly recommend checking out Last Song, which is one of their older songs, and $$, which is a newer one.

Oh, and I've spruced up some texts here and there, so they read and flow a bit more smoothly. No worries, the actual content is still the same!

A quick little update! I've added some more buttons to my Button Wall, expanded my links page yet again and added a new video links page.

A rather forgotten part of my website is the Spacehey Profile Pimper I created for a friend. There are no links to it from my website, since I never really found a good spot for it. Feel free to reach out with your ideas!

I had hoped to get a new article out in this update as well, but I didn't get one of my many works-in-progress up to my standards yet. Maybe some other time then. This is, after all, a hobby and not a job. 😀

A pretty obscure song I'd like to highlight is Money Can Buy Happiness by New Century. Maybe I should also find a proper spot on my website to bundle these music recommendations in my blog posts, haha.

I've added a little blog to my site, as you'll have noticed (since you're reading this). You'll probably find notifications about site updates here, and some quick thoughts. Proper longform content I will probably reserve for regular pages, as I prefer their timeless nature. These pages are being generated automatically, a first for my site, but I'll spare you the dull details of all that techy nonsense.

I've been listening to Pangeapedia Plus again lately. Probably should buy the album one of these days, but international shipping is such a pain in the wallet. To get this new year off to a good start I'm embracing the bright-eyed optimism of the so-called Utopian Scholastic aesthetic. Let's pick up where we left off, and make 👏 history 👏 end 👏 again 👏.

A rather obscure part of my website that's not really easy to find except by stumbling upon it is my Visual Memories of Computing page. I probably made it too tedious to find. Some of the screenshots lead to subpages, others lead to relevant links. See if you can find the intended way of accessing this page! Eventually I'll be adding some other overviews like that. One about board games is in the works, for example.

One memory of computing not on that page is “Active Desktop”. Until the late days of Windows XP, you could set an HTML page as your desktop background. That was pretty fun, and I regularly made use of that back in the day.

For this first blog post I haven't really got any exciting updates to share. Based on some remarks a while back, I've overhauled my links page to include some context on the links. Links pages are my favorite part of personal websites, especially now that major search are flooded with low-quality results, so I want to make my own links page as good as it can be.