Forem: Samejima

I made a website for my video game backlog

Samejima — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 08:11:33 +0000

I wrote about my process here https://dev.to/samejima/the-burning-journal-3lbg

but i really just wanted to share the link to anyone who likes how cringe it is <3. or maybe i feel accomplished for finally putting it up https://theburningjournal.abandontheworld.com/

I gamified my video game backlog

Samejima — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 18:32:37 +0000

Hi Samejima here

The burning journal is a database that holds your entire collection of video games. it holds valuable information such as, how many hours you've played the game, whether you finished the game, whether you completed the game, and what year you began playing the game, and even what you rate the game. I created this project because I wanted a place to catalog and track my backlog of games, At first I tried using things like backlog.gg the app...but you had to input everything manually(bleh). If any of you are steam users you know how large your gaming collection can get, and me personally... i didn't feel like manually typing 500 different entries in along with the meta data that i wanted with it. So since it didn't exist I went and made it myself. I made this tool to collect all the information and put it in a single database. While this worked wonders, it needed a frontend tool to be usable and that is where the burning journal came into play.

Now when it comes to designing the frontend for my database... i wanted it to represent me in some way. you know, if i'm going to make something for me, i want it to be unique to me and i wanted it to be something i wanted to make. something usable. I designed it with my "alter ego" in mind, Samejima Mamimi and designed it in the spirit of the character. the burning journal front end is supposed to be nostalgic, 2000s, cigarette ash and cloudy skies. This is not just a place where my data lives, this is where memories live, this is where a chunk of your life is spent. and i wanted to feel something when i visited.

Technical Stack

ExpressJS backend – I chose this because I just wanted to keep using the one language I was already using for the burning journal, javascript. Otherwise I would have used fastapi as i did in other projects.

I implemented the IGDB api to add things such as game art for your games and summaries for them too. The limitations being the rate limits that are given to you, also it gives you less control over your project I feel... and I want to change that(I'm working on it in secret hehe).

I am storing all the data in a postgresql database, it is all managed autonomously so that you don't even have to interact with anything if all you're interested in is gaming, or maybe you're just not feeling up to it mentally.

I used React as the frontend, I hate React but unfortunately it is the way to create a frontend like this. it's the right tool for the job, even if you aren't a fan of the tool lol. I'm styling it with all css, no special tricks. to be honest, i am not well versed in all the cool front end things that make things easy for the developer.. so i am using what i know and building off of that.

Challenges

There are many challenges with what I am making. The first being, there are no official APIs for xbox, or playstation, you can't get that information from your library and they won't export it to you or anything, they gatekeep that information hardcore so the first thing i had to do was find a way to get around that, steam you could do it through their official apis but if i wanted someone else to get their info theyd need to get an api key too but thats for later!!! there are websites online that have special connections with microsoft and sony that gives that information, somehow they get the information so i had to figure out how they did it, and implement it and combine it. Two, game art and information are also very closely gatekept, there are only a few places where you can get that information and they have very hardcore anti scraping policies and measures too. they do everything they can to make sure you can't get that information. I don't want to put out how i managed to get all the information because then things might get patched and they probably will kill my project even though... im the only one using it... even tho i would like to make money off of it in the future (im poor, unfortunately graduated in CS :( )

What’s Next

Planned features

Filters
soundtracks that play on inspection of the game
video clips of the game that auto play
my own achievement system
combining the hours of the games you play on different platforms
game of the year polls
people can add their accounts to the website
make the website responsive(please help)

Final Thoughts

This project started off as just making something I wanted for my own nerdy obsessions but in the end it taught me a lot about linux, hosting, servers, databases, react and even apis(making them and using them). I would have never learned this much about any of that if I hadn't had this gaming addiction lol

if you want to contribute to the project you can here and if you want to donate to me(i am seriously poor its not a joke lol) you can sponsor me on github or cashapp me $amejima or kofi. it'd be much appreciated but make sure you talk to me before or send a note with it so i know that it's you just being kind.

anyways... im gonna go work on the project some more now byeeee...

How to use Github basics

Samejima — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 01:17:25 +0000

Here is how you fork then clone then use github with a friend or more!

Command line vs desktop app

they both achieve the same thing so I am going to show you both

Step 1 - Fork your repo

find the repo you want to contribute to and click the fork button in the top right of the screen

there is a prompt to create that fork and you should absolutely click that big green button on the next page

after you do that you now want to click "code" on your forked webpage and then copy the url that is inside there

Desktop App

Step 2 - clone your repo

click "file" then "clone repository"

after that a context menu will appear, you will then paste your copied url in that first input area and select a place to have your clone saved, this is important, you should pick somewhere you want this repo saved.

and you are pretty much done after doing this, another pop up will appear and you should answer accordingly. If you plan on contributing to this repo then you should select "contribute to the parent project"

Step 3 - create your branch

so if you want to make changes and contribute to the repo you need to create your own feature branch, then push to your feature branch and create a pull request(or PR)

to do this in the desktop app you select the "Branch" tab, select new branch and name your branch. These names are public and should be a small description on what you want to accomplish. example "add-run"(there are no spaces in these so you use dashs instead)

after you complete that you will have your own feature branch

Step 4 - add(push) to your branch

after you made the changes you wanted to make, you click the Repository tab then click "push" and your branch will show the changes

Step 5 - pull request

this is simple too, you click the Branch tab then click "create pull request", it will take you to a web page on github and you can fill out the information as stated.

what this does is show the other people on the project that you have a branch with changes you want to make to the main branch. This code will have to be first reviewed by the maintainer of the project and if they like it, it will be merged if not then you get to try again or make some changes!

Command Line

Step 2 - Clone your repo

for this its simple, you want to open your command line or terminal

select a place where you want this copy to exist, and paste the following

git clone -insert url here-

the rest will happen on its own

Step 3 - create your branch

if you want to make changes and contribute to the repo you need to create your own feature branch, then push to your feature branch and create a pull request(or PR)

go to your terminal or command line and add this

git branch - your branch name -

Step 4 - add(push) to your branch

after you made the changes you wanted to make, you go to your terminal or command line and you post these in order

the "." is shorthand for ALL but you can select specific files you want to add

you then commit those changes along with a short message describing the changes

and finally you push the code.

This can also be done in the UI of VS code

git add .
git commit -m -Your commit message here-
git push origin - your branch name -

Step 5 - pull request

for this step you want to go to your github account after you pushed your code to your branch, then you will see a a big green button that says compare & pull request you click that button then you fill out the information as requested.

My 5 Goals for 2024

Samejima — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 14:27:20 +0000

2023 was the worst year of my life. I graduated in December 2022 in computer science in the worst job market of all time for specifically computer science majors with 2024 not looking much better. 2023 were the tech layoffs and 2024 is starting them up again. I also severed a lot of relationships I had for years and I ended up spending the majority of 2023 completely alone, either trying to find employment or just trying to find a reason to stay alive. I know there are people who had it worst but today I am only going to think of me. I know I can do better than what I did in 2023. i don’t want to harp on that year too long, it’s time to forget about it and move on to the next year. That was also the reason I am a month late on writing this. my 2023 depression bled into 2024, it was that bad. I do feel a lot better than I did but there is still so much progress to make. I made this list for both you and me. Hopefully we both get better this year and here are my five goals for this year.

Learn to love learning again.

Before going to university I truly enjoyed learning. I loved getting better and improving on the things I was interested in. At the time the main thing I was interested in was coding. That was the reason I even went to school because I believed that school could make me truly next level at it and to some extent I was correct. However going to school for learning that one single skill is not going to fly as the current way the school system is designed.

Before going to school I taught myself how to code basic websites through youtube tutorials and I was learning at a very quick rate, the best way to learn something is to teach and I had the opportunity to do that with the social program I attended at the time too. I also taught myself some Japanese, I used to be famous for doing twitch streams where I would learn Japanese by reading manga online in Japanese, all I would do is look up words in the dictionary that i did not know, that would teach me new kanji through repetition and I would also learn sentence structure through the patterns of words and on top of that I was able to read things I really liked and still like today. I would also learn how to play the piano on my own a lot and even taught myself how to play a single song i loved at the time, i learned the chords of a piano and I learned the structure of how music is generated.

With all that said, school has completely wiped that out of me. The way in which school is taught made the concept of learning so lifeless and draining. Although it did teach me the value of reading large textbooks for learning as opposed to watching youtube videos it did kill a lot of the fun of it for me which discouraged me personally a lot. It made it very difficult for me to find that love i had before. In 2024 I would like to rediscover that love I have for learning, I know it is still inside of me and I know I am capable of achieving anything I want. In spite of hating my experience in university i still was the only one of my roommates who even graduated. I went to school even if I had to quickly move out of the dorms, live through school through covid, fight my school on retaining my ability to attend online because I had housing issues and they didn’t care at all and would active antagonize me on it. I still saw it through to the end. So I know that i can do things, I know I can love to learn again, and even now i am beginning to get that love of writing and creating back because I am making this list now. So in 2024 my goal is to get that love back. It’s honestly my top priority.

Build apps, websites, or programs you always wanted to.

This goal is a lot less heavy than the others. This is just a self satisfaction thing, there are things i always wanted as applications and I want to be the one to create them. Simple. I went through all the trouble of going to school to learn how to become a software engineer I want to actually put those skills into practice and as a huge bonus make things that I personally want to use regardless if other people want to use them or not. This is a wholly selfish endeavor that I want.

I guess since this goal will be short I will list some applications that I want to create.

The main application I want to focus on this year is my gaming backlog application, this application is one where I want to create a system to manage the video games in my library across all platforms. I want to make it so that it shows all my games from my steam, xbox, and playstation libraries. I want it to record when you first played it and I want it to record when you are done with that game. The thing i want it to do most of all is at the end of the year to show you all the games you played and ask you to rank your top 10 games of the year. I think that feature would be my favorite feature in any gaming application!

The next application I want to make is a discord bot similar to twitch plays pokemon but {your discord server} plays pokemon, i’m aware that nintendo will nuke my house if i make this available for everyone which is why I want to only make it for me and there would be several workarounds to make it available for anyone who wants it. But the main concept is that everyone in the server gets to play pokemon together through this bot, you all vote on the next move with the emotes and you’re either sent a screenshot of what is happening on discord or it is streaming on youtube or twitch while you all vote. This would only work on a server that is fairly active or where you have some friends who want to play with you.

The final application I want to make is a game, I really love video games as you can tell from the last two things I wanted to make are video game related. I want to make my own game, there is a game I have been wanting to make that is similar to splatoon but is more pve focused. You fight against hoards of enemies and solve puzzles, this game hasn’t been all the way thought out and it would take me forever to tell you all about it. I wanted to make this forever, I have concept art of it and the thing that is holding me back are getting 3d models and animations. I will make this game in the future, guaranteed. Nothing can stop me.

These are just a few ideas i have had in my head I really want to make and if anyone wants to help or talk to me about how i can get closer to achieving this i would be very happy to, talk to me on discord or follow me on twitter and talk to me there. This kind of leads me to my next goal.

Try to socialize more.

i have learned that I can spend endless time alone and really thoroughly enjoy it. I know I like it and that I want more of it however I know I can’t be that indulgent on self satisfaction. I need to get out of my comfort zone. Life is about the relationships you have. it is necessary to build those relationships and maintain them. I want to develop new relationships, meet new people and I want to reach back and maintain relationships i have really neglected throughout the years being busy with other things and even being too self indulgent with my isolation.

It is hard to say a lot about this because I know it may not be normal to be alone as much as I am but I now want to work my way out of it and hopefully find some really fulfilling relationships.

Work towards building your company.

Before going to university I always knew i wanted to build my own company and after graduating into the horrible jobs market I did shows why it is kind of necessary to have your own source of supplemental income. No company or establishment will ever care about you in the slightest. The only one who will take care of you is the one where you have control of. This is not achieve-able for everyone obviously but I do believe you should still try. This economy this world everyone is against you, everyone will try to take advantage of you and everyone will try to step on your head. Building your own business is a way to have more control over your life than to have that solely in the control of your employer. I know I am creating a software based business due to my educational background but I don’t have a solid idea of what I think is needed in society right now. In 2024 I want to make some progress any progress towards the goal of building my own business.

Let go of school and the past.

Alright I think this is the most heavy thing I want to accomplish this year. I want to let go of the past. I was very mistreated by my college, i was put in incredibly bad situations by them and they actively tried to screw me over and make me do bad. They also never gave me that mentorship i was looking for and they did everything they could to get in the way of me learning the things I wanted to learn while in school. I do hate academia and I would not even be mad if that whole system is financially ruined. I know for a lot of people school is a gateway to uplifting their lives and they get truly fulfilling experiences with school. I can’t say I feel the same, school has brought me mostly misery and burn out.

In 2024 I want to forget, not necessarily forgive. But I do want to move past those experiences I had at that institution and get on with my life. I want to look forward to my future and I want to not feel so drained anymore. It has been a year since I last attended any classes and I am only beginning to feel any motivation to do anything. It goes in and out but I do think I am starting to feel how I used to feel prior to going to school. I am feeling like I am intelligent, I am capable, I am a resourceful person. In my head I know all those things are true, from my accomplishments in life. I think this will come with time, I don’t know how to really get that drained feeling out of my body but if I can I will work towards it and if I can’t actively work towards it then I look forward to the next version of me who fully forgets the atrocities of that place. I am glad that I don’t have to attend that place anymore and I am relieved that i no longer have to see professors faces anymore, that was especially upsetting to me. I think the first thing i can do is to appreciate that it is over. I am healing.

Those are my 5 goals for 2024, I hope that me talking about them can help someone else who felt like me in 2023 move on and do better this year.

Don't go to college

Samejima — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 05:21:01 +0000

Don’t go to college.

I just finished my computer science degree and I highly recommend everyone in the United States against going to university. This is not some political thing so don’t expect me to talk about how college is just transing the kids because honestly I really do not care either way.

This is about a purely financial aspect of why college just is not a good deal if you aren’t already rich or upper middle class. For anyone lower on the totem pole you are pretty much just digging yourself further into the hole that you were born into unfortunately.

I guess I should start off with the positives of university. It is said that you will meet a lot of long time friends and like minded individuals that will help you achieve career success and ultimately help you achieve a more fulfilling life through those relationships.

Another benefit of going to college is the education, you are paying to receive an education in a very specialized field that will bring you at least financial stability.

The last thing I can think of about going to college that is good is that you get the college experience, you get to drink and party and have fun time away from your parents. Now I definitely do not agree with that final bullet point but I know someone will jerk themselves off at that point.

Wow geez this makes college sound like a phenomenal deal to anyone at about any price as statistically speaking you are going to make more money as a college graduate than high school or lower however personal experiences have shown me differently.

There are a lot of people who are motivated to sell you on the idea of going to college, the same is true as for not going. However I have literally no motivation to dissuade you from going to college as I won’t gain anything financially or spiritually or anything at all really from you deciding to not go to that money sink.

First I want to say do not go to college if you are only going there to party, you are spending THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of dollars to be there and years of your life there just to fail out with no degree and the negative money glitch.

Now even if you actually want to be there and get an education in a specialized degree I am here to tell you that is still a bad idea.

Starting out, if you are poor you will have to work fulltime through college. This is a problem because you have to simultaneously make enough money to survive in this economy on your own in my case to support an apartment, food, internet, phone, etc, while having to maintain 4-5 different classes at the same time if you want to graduate in 4 years.

This takes an exceptional human being to maintain throughout the entire four years, the only way I was able to achieve this is by completely sacrificing my social life not that I had much of one prior and putting literally every ounce of my being into succeeding over the course of four years. This is overkill for most people, especially those with children who require additional attention. This pressure could be eased by having some help from family or even financial assistance from almost anyone, however in my case I did not receive so much as a thank you from the professors who gleefully punished my existence from a day to day basis.

Here is an example of a time where a professor took joy in making my life even more difficult than it needed to be. I was required to take a general education course and we will talk more about them later where we were scheduled for homework due the next day when the class was only once a week for 2 and a half hours, naturally I had to work after class. I told my professor that it would be nearly impossible to finish this homework by the next day, and asked for the assignments to be due on Sunday at midnight because they did not get to grading them until the following class.

Now to me that sounds like a very reasonable request however the professor responded me in this way ‘if i make the assignments due that day then most of the students will wait to the last minute to complete them’ I again reminded them of my situation and how i literally have to work until late after this class and by the time i get home I definitely would not get to complete the assignments on time, they didn’t care and left it the way it was. I then turned in every single assignment that semester either late or I just didn’t do them. Luckily I barely passed that class and that professor got to enjoy their cushy bs job.

Now this is just me with no kids, imagine the pain those with children would have experienced. Thank god I do not have kids to take care of.

Secondly, the thing I want to discuss about college is that it is filled with years of fluff. Looking at my transcripts the overwhelming majority of classes I was required to take were classes that had literally nothing to do with my major and the thing I wanted to do in the future. As a freshman I had ZERO programming or computer science classes. I complained about this to not only my academic advisor but also a professor employer I had about this and I received the same non response from both of them. The response being ‘oh these classes round you out as a student. You should enjoy these less rigorous classes’

Personally I do not enjoy paying thousands and thousands of dollars to do a set of english classes that I already experienced in high school. The reason I went to college is to do computer science and get a job in that field.I do not have time to play around and have fun with everyone in the english classes to talk about whatever is popular for the week, me personally would have liked to only take those relevant to getting me employed and to financial stability.

I am a very strong believer that the reason universities pad your required classes with nonsense is to further inflate the price of education, which in the US is astronomically high. However there are government requirements that also force the university to force us the customers to attend these courses, they could make them less expensive not only financially but time wise as well, but there are no incentives for them to do that. In fact they are more incentivised to force even more of these classes onto you as it is a lot easier for someone to teach an english class than it is to teach in a more specialized STEM field and it takes more training to not only learn the STEM material but also learn how to teach that STEM class. So I don't see this ever changing. In fact I think if they ever make any changes to university to make it more accessible this will be the very last thing they will change.

Overall my experience in university was about 70% these gen ed courses and 30% computer science and mathematics.

Every single general ed class that I attended had a stuck up professor that always and I mean always wanted their unimportant irrelevant loser class to be your most important class, often requiring customers to write long meandering essays about whatever is current in the news or something else related to ethics so that the professor can grandstand about either being knowledgeable about the topic, about how unbiased they are, or how important this is to your lives.

This is a complete lie. This class is completely irrelevant and is only required to steal your time and money. There is actually no point in attending, doing the homework or even knowing the professor's name. You would actually be spending your time in a better way if you sat at home and masturbated or went to the class to flirt with that hot girl or guy you are interested in, there is actually no point in doing anything else when required to take these classes.

The reason I did not do that is because I wanted the piece of paper at the end of all the endless coursework.

Another reason why you should not go to college is that when you actually get to attend the courses related to your major it is very VERY hit or miss on whether you will get a good professor. The entire point of you risking your future to attend this is to learn from these intelligent people in the industry about the specific craft you are interested in.

However there is a deep deep cancer with professors mindsets, since they are financially stable or honestly working towards something better in the background a good few of them will just leave you to your own devices and have you pretty much teach yourself the content of the course with no feedback or explanations or help in pretty much any way for the cheap price of a billion dollars and about 3 months of stress. Now back in the past I guess this could be acceptable as books and question packs weren’t nearly as accessible as they are today, I would highly recommend you instead just torrent the book for the field you are interested in or go to a library or book store to get this information instead of paying some arrogant pompous professor to stand there and read the slides from to their course that they made a million years ago and leave it at that. You would probably do a lot better doing that considering you don’t have deadlines, and they don’t force you to stop at the middle of the book at the end of the course because this book is broken up into 2 different classes. You could get the full experience for none of the millions of dollars it costs to be there in university.

If they are actually teaching the material then you lucked out, I have received a few different professors that actually cared about my being but they are few and far apart and I would never roll those dice again.

Another type of professor is the yapper, this professor loves to talk to the more entertaining customers ad-infinitum and pretend as if these customers are so much better than you because they provide entertainment to the professor and they like current marvel movie and you are only concerned with learning the material so that you can get a job and feed yourself which makes rich professor uncomfortable. This professor will yap and yap and yap and yap until their favorite customers fail out of the classes then they will be sad and teach the remainder of the course very mediocrely but you will still pass because you never had that help unlike the yappers.

Obviously I am thinking of a specific professor when talking about each of these types but I don’t remember their names because they are ultimately irrelevant to my life.

Finally the last professor type if you don’t receive one that proficiently teaches the course. That professor I honestly don’t blame them and I don’t give them any crap because it’s not their fault. It is the poor english speaker, as a STEM major you will experience this professor but again it’s not their fault. Majority of the time they are one of the best professors in the university and really cares about the customers. However, they have to learn both their professional field and native english skills and that seems like it would be rather exceptional to achieve. As someone who is teaching themselves another language I can say being at that level with not only the language you want to learn AND a STEM field would be a minority of a minority.

Finally, the last reason you should not go to university is that no employer values a degree. There is not a single employer that values your degree no matter which field it is in, I will say this again, I acquired a computer science degree and that is one that takes endless rigorous work to get, there are a lot that takes more and there are degrees that are definitely more challenging to get I am not dick measuring the difficulty of the degree, I personally do not care I would rather have a refund for my degree instead of the degree itself.

No employer actually cares about your degree, the gatekeepers to you starving or not are recruiters, HR, and CEOs. None of these people actually care if you have a degree unless they know you personally. This degree might as well be interchangeable with a boolean value, unless you go to one of the mega rich schools which you won't be able to due to most of those going to legacy students, rich kids, and people who had head starts in life that you will most likely not have. These people will encourage you to finish school and tell you how much better your life will be once you graduate until the end of time, but the frame you graduate they will completely ignore you and tell you good luck. I am not sure why they do this but this is the reality, this is the behavior I have experienced first hand.

I remember before going into school, I had to do a year of community service. I asked someone who was speaking to us poor people, she was a news anchor and tech journalist. I had just taught myself python and I asked her how I could be successful in the tech field and get a job to support myself. Her answer was to make a social media account and talk about it there. At the time I felt so hurt and insulted that she told me non advice for what I was doing and she did, what I took from it definitely wasn’t her intention and she was not profound. But looking back at what she told me was incredibly based, the only way to succeed in this life is to be a social media influencer and to pretty much maintain your own separate business.

This is why I am going to at least try to get use out of my degree or as I call it my piece of paper by making a youtube video about it and talking about my experiences acquiring it. Also posting the scripts online to hopefully meet literally anyone who can help me in any way as I need it desperately.

please please please donate if you can https://ko-fi.com/samejima
whether you like the message or not i would really appreciate it.

I just failed my coding test...heres the passing solution

Samejima — Fri, 12 Jan 2024 03:04:28 +0000

So I just failed my coding test due to running out of time. It was one of those codility tests only 70 minutes and 3 different problems, I passed on the first 2 questions however I ran out of time with the 3rd problem.

Here is the question that gave me issues

initially I assumed we would need to use the sliding window technique to get the contiguous 'x' and measure from there and I hacked at that solution for about 20 minutes but in the final 5 minutes out of pure desperation and need i came up with another solution that i did not get to fully flesh out in the official test.

The idea of the solution is in 3 simple broken up steps,

separate the contiguous x
sort by length
decrement from your budget

this solution is magnitudes simpler to comprehend and a LOT easier to read. I may not have gotten the ability to benefit from coming up with this solution but hopefully someone reading this in the future will.

here it is in python

def solution(S, B):
    # Implement your solution here
    count = 0

    #sliding window technique needed
    arr = []
    temparr = []
    for index in S:
        if index == "x":
            temparr.append(index)
        else:
            arr.append(len(temparr))
            temparr = []
    arr = sorted(arr)
    index = len(arr)-1
    while B > 0 or index == 0:
      if B >= arr[index]+1:
        B -= arr[index]+1
        count += arr[index]
      index -= 1
    return count