Weekly Recap: 1 February 2026

My school, 42 Malaysia, just held a roadshow event on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Two weeks ago, I and two other classmates were invited by my school's campus staff to take part in a student showcase during the roadshow event, then in last week we joined a session hosted by the campus staff to prepare for our presentation.

At last, after two weeks of preparation, on the past Wednesday we got the opportunity to present ourselves in front of a bunch of industry partners of our school, mainly from the education industry, to showcase one of our projects and shared our journey at 42 the school.

Fortunately, this was not my first time presenting myself in front of a public; I have had experience doing so in both physical and online events. We needed to deliver our presentation in 5 minutes, so it was not too demanding, and I was fairly satisfied with my performance. After the roadshow event, some members of the 42 Malaysia staff praised my presentation. In conclusion, my presentation was a success!

From January 1 to 22, 2026, 32-Bit Cafe hosted their 2026 New Year, in which people could participate in by submitting web pages about 2026 resolutions, or a butterfly or moth pixel art that they coloured from a provided template, or both.

I chose to submit a butterfly pixel art, since I was interested in trying to make pixel art more. For the colours, I decided to colour the wings of my butterfly with the lesbian, non-binary and disability pride flags, since they reflect my identities.

As for the software used to make my pride butterfly, I used GNU Image Manipulation Program, since I have made the conscious decision to use free and open-source art and design software as much as possible, despite coming from a professional graphic design background, in which the "industry-standard" art and design software are proprietary.

Given I am not experience with making pixel art, I am satisfied with how my butterfly turned out.

I submitted my pride butterfly on January 16, while 32-Bit Cafe published a web page that included people's submitted entries to their 2026 new year event on January 28.

Unfortunately, not everything went smoothly for me in this week. I encountered a major unexpected setback when I woke up in the morning on Monday: I was unable to access my main virtual private server (VPS), which hosts all my websites, including this one, and most of the self-hosted apps I use, and I could not visit any of my websites. On the other hand, I can still access my other VPS, which I rented from a different provider.

I opened a support ticket to Deluxhost, the provider of my main VPS, as I suspected the possibility of the issue being caused by the provider misconfigured my server, with a detailed technical log produced by my attempt to access the server with secure shell (SSH) which would hopefully help them figure out the cause.

Fortunately, I have always kept local backup copies of my VPS data, and I took notes about how I set up my VPS, so I temporarily worked around the issue of my websites and self-hosted apps not being accessible by moving them to my other VPS, which I rented form Chunkserve.

After some back-and-forth between the Deluxhost support and I, I could finally access my Deluxhost VPS again since Thursday, though Deluxhost support did not reveal what they did to solve my issues.

Since my main VPS is back to normal, I moved my websites and most of the self-hosted apps I use back to the server.

TVTropes is one of my most visited websites, as someone who enjoys media analysis. I have had an account on TVTropes since 18 February 2012 to both follow articles of my favourite media and contribute to various pages on TVTropes.

Among the TVTropes articles I follow and have contributed to include the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic series, which I have also created a shrine for. Recently, there have been an effort to remove trope entries related to the cut content and The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod (TSLRCM) for KotOR 2, due to the site's policy of keeping official and unofficial works separate. I contributed to the effort by creating an entire work page for The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod, so tropes pertaining to the mod can be moved there.

While I am not part of the developer team of TSLRCM, I have created and released mods for the KotOR series, so I feel like doing my duty to help to document information about arguably the most important mod for the series.

I continued to play Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Pokémon Legends: Z-A. In the latter, I have finished the post-game main missions by winning 15 reward matches in the Infinite Z-A Royale and catching Zygarde, then started the Mega Dimension DLC.

Interesting things I have discovered on the web this week:

• "The pioneering path of Augustus Tolton, the first Black Catholic priest in the US – born into slavery, he’s now a candidate for sainthood" by Annie Selak, published on BLK News Now!.