Chao Gardening + Update

• 2 September, 2025
• Sonic
• Chao Garden
• Update

I always am saying this, but there's been a lot happening in my life recently. This time it's way more personal and related to my physical life outside of the Internet: my mom's health has been taking a big nosedive due to stress affecting her blood pressure. Her stress comes from a multiple string of sources, unfortunately. Politics, my old high school stalking and harassing my brother, my brother being racially profiled by police due to his tan skintone... it's a lot. I've been trying to do my part in taking care of my mom, which escalates on some days due to her being immunocompromised. Thankfully I rarely get sick. I just hope she gets better soon... It's also hard because, to be brief, still going through an abusive living situation. We have a plan to escape but unfortunately it just takes time. And even worse, the United States government isn't... exactly helping with it.

In my free time, I've been hopping around a lot of games and projects lately. One of my most recent ones is contributing to the source code of this amazing Aseprite plugin, MCSkinViewer! Please consider checking out the plugin, as it's massively improved my motivation and skill in creating Minecraft skins.

Some of the games I've been playing lately obviously includes Minecraft, but another one has been Sonic Adventure 2. Specifically, the Chao Garden! It's one of my favorite parts of Adventure 2. Since I play the game on my computer via Steam, I use mods to enhance the game experience, including the Chao Garden. Primarily, I use the mod Chao World Extended. This expands upon the Chao Garden by allowing the Chao to talk to each other and become friends, more Chao accessories, new fruits and toys, and more! It really makes the garden a more enjoyable experience. I just wish that you could do MORE with the Chao, like taking them on levels AND they gain experience in a certain skill depending on the level... alas, that will forever live on as an idea in my brain. I know there's a mod that allows them to be taken to levels in general, but I'm thinking of having them fly around your character out of the way, and perhaps they do stuff like collect stray rings and whatnot.

Anyway, something I've wanted to do for a while... meet the Chao of my gardens!! Click a name to view the Chao's info.

It took a while to assemble a script to view all of my Chao without the page being super long and filled with images. Not only that, but it was ridiculously hard to get good pictures of the Chao. I didn't want to just take pictures of them sitting or standing around, and wanted to capture some sort of personality. At some point I felt like I was just making this harder on myself and just took a picture. Small note: Chao with animal parts, I'm currently working on maxxing out their stats. Others, they're just living their life.

Noise's Halloween Bash came out while I was working on the Chao stuff for this journal, so feel free to check it out! I wrote my own opinions of the game in my Interest Zone, if you're... heh... interested. Sorry.

Overall, life's been hard. I've been trying to take care of myself but it's been getting really hard. Sorry there isn't much to update about. Hope it's better wherever you are.