sent by: june santos (a.k.a neorootpain), august 19, 2025, 06:25:30.
Can you believe it? I can't believe it myself either.
It's been a long time coming, and a lot has changed since then, but something that never
changed or left my mind, was RootPain.com. And I promised I'd be back for more, and after
spending an entire year planning and rebuilding the website from the ground up, it's here.
Neo-RootPain.com: Godspeed. The latest, and possibly final iteration of RootPain.com.
I know it took me a good while, but I believe the effort was worth it.
There is a lot to talk about, and a lot to go over. So where do I even begin?
I guess why I even decided to remake the website (again) is a good place to start.
At the end of 2023, I said that I wanted to return to making frequent updates to the website again since
I really slacked off with it when in comparison to the original website, where I used to update it frequently
and seemed very enthusiastic to work on it overall (this was also in part due to me being younger and a little
less jaded, I didn't really had a job back in the day, and the website was far simpler, and easier to work with)
and I actually had a lot of cool ideas I wanted to bring to the table, with one of my ideas being a "new era"
for the website, centered around theme of "a big city", which I was going to dub "The City Era"
However, things already got incredibly messy by the beginning of 2024, and specially during mid 2024.

2023 was a year of huge changes, specially growth for me, with me learning a lot of things
completely changing the way I go about life and treating others, and pretty much just becoming an entirely new
person after mid-2023 due to a multitude of experiences that led to me finally "waking up", and finally
allowing myself to become someone at least decent. I came into terms with a lot of things about my life and myself
I ended up rekindling a ton of friendships, and allowing myself to make new ones due to these changes, and I consider
that period the moment I truly became something respectable, the period when "June", that "second chance"
I've been running after for so long, the person I wanted to become, stopped being a dream, and became a reality.

2024, however, was a year of pure loss and stagnation in a lot of ways.
The year started horribly, with me having a ton of fights with a multitude of friends
Then my job started to become a lot for me to handle, with me having days where I wasn't able to sleep at home
because my job would leave me completely stressed to the point that I couldn't sleep when I got home
leaving me completely tired and defeated when I arrived at my job, or I'd sleep all day until I had to get up
and get ready for work, leaving me with little to no time or motivation to do anything else.
That stress built a lot of things on me, mostly frustration and dissatisfaction, and that dissatisfaction
ended up seeping into my works, and my life as a whole.

This dissatisfaction and pent up rage over my job ended up making me upset with a lot of things that I normally
wouldn't be as bothered as I normally would, and at one point, once again, I felt like it was just me against
the world. And I kept entertaining the idea of just "running away". And at one point, I almost did.

At one point, all of my accounts (with the exception of Newgrounds) were either deactivated, or gone.
But after one of my friends kept calling my cellphone and chasing me around, I came back. Resentfully so.

But what really destroyed my motivation and made me give up on "the next big thing" for RootPain.com was
this one friend, the person that I used to consider "my partner" in a lot of ways, left, after me and him
had a falling out over the most retarded reason imaginable.

"Oh June, that sounds a bit too harsh, don't you think?" No. I don't. In fact, I think I'm being way too
generous when I say it's just retarded, it's beyond that, to the point I'm still thinking of a heavier
word to describe how ridiculous and idiotic that whole discussion was.

Anyways. After he left, I felt genuinely lost. Specially because at one point, we used to do everything together
So all of my works, my website included, had his DNA on every inch of my person and my works. So every time
I looked into my website, or anywhere for that matter, I saw him, and any motivation to go back and try again
would fade out in an instant, and once again, I was at step zero.

I tried to come back, and take him away from my website and everywhere, but nothing really hit the same.
I made the website with the intent of proudly using the things he made for me, and without him, everything
felt hollow. And I simply couldn't bring myself to delete the things he made for me from my drives and folders
because despite everything, I still loved him a lot, and in a lot of ways, I still do.

But if I couldn't bring myself to do any of that, I couldn't bring myself to work on RootPain.com again.
And even though RootPain.com wasn't getting any new updates, it never left my mind, not even for a day.
But for the time, there was nothing I could do.

At one point, I didn't even feel sad or angry, I just felt tired and empty.
And for a while, that was it.

Skip to 2025.
I decided to read my email again, for some reason. And unexpectedly, someone left a guestbook message
after a good time without me receiving anything new. Of course, I decided to read it, not expecting much
besides the usual, but what I got was an extremely heartwarming message.

Unfortunately, I cannot access my old email anymore, but I still remember the message very well
The person sending it, told me how cool they thought my website was, and that they felt bad for not finding
it sooner when it was still getting frequent updates, and that my website "really made them want more".

While reading that, I felt this weird sense of comfort and accomplishment, because at the end of the day
one of the main objectives when first making RootPain.com. To make a website that made someone feel the exact
same thing I felt when I was younger and use to scroll through "The Mystical Forest Zone" on a daily basis.
I wanted to show someone something that they never knew they needed until they saw it
I wanted to make someone go "I want to make something like this one day" just like TMFZ did for me back then.
So seeing that I pretty much accomplished that, and they had hopes that I would make my return one day
resparked something in me again, even if very briefly, and very faintly. So I decided to start fiddling with
HTML and CSS again, and I started by remaking the home page of the website.
Although I did improve upon it a lot, I abandoned it after a while due to me once again having difficulties
when it came to achieving certain results, so I decided to leave this idea for later.
But even after that, I started to tinker with new ideas, how to expand my website, what to refine
what to keep, what to throw away, and what else could I do for it?

There were days on my job, where I'd sit around in the cafeteria, and I'd spent my whole break looking for
inspirations and ideas for this new version of RootPain.com. There were days where I'd write and rewrite
entire articles in preparation for the new website, and sometimes I'd even daydream of making a really cool
trailer for when it launched, if that day ever came.

And slowly, but surely, the idea of my website was once again taking control of me once again.

But what really drove me to revisit my website and my art hobby as a whole (besides my friends making cool shit
that inspired me), was finding out this two part animation called "Charlotte's Apprenticheship." from this guy on
Newgrounds called "ICantSeeHelp".
It was a very weird and experimental animation about this girl trying to achieve perfection and suffering because of it
and for some reason, it really resonated with me. Mostly because I was in a similar shell during that time, where I felt
pretty isolated and disconnected from everyone and everything, and despite how much I wanted to go back to drawing and
enjoying making things, I could never really scratch that itch, no matter how much I forced myself. There were
improvements, but I still felt like something was wrong, and the way those animations played out, with this weird mixture
of shitpost and sincerity made me feel connected to something art related like I haven't felt in YEARS probably (aside
from Kingdom Hearts, which was something I really got invested into during that time), and the character of Charlotte Gray
in general is beautiful in genuinely every sense of the word.

Me describing the whole thing in here would make a huge disservice to it, so I'll instead tell you to go watch it yourself
by clicking this hyperlink. But all you need to know is, it definitely sparked something in me again.

It's probably the first time I've "fangirled" over anything in years, really.
And even after retyping this countless times, I still feel like a bit of a loser for losing my shit so much over
these animations, and specially over this fucking character, but I can't help it.

I love a woman, and she's not even real.

Anyways, I eventually I started making fanart of Charlotte Gray, and it was one of the first times after
so long where I genuinely took my time inserting little details and taking so much care when making something
and seeing that people noticed these little details, and saw how much it meant to me, motivated me to
"push it a little further", even if for just a little longer. One of them even got frontpaged, and it was also
the main feature for the Takeover Tuesday. This blew my mind.

ICantSeeHelp even started following me at one point.
You know how excited I was? I did that whole a little cheer and jump when I found about it.
I was at my job, during my shift.

Again, the first time I've fangirled over anything.

ICantSeeHelp even made some Big Whiskey fanart at one point (which honestly made me go completely red
and I had a shit eating grin for the rest of the week pretty much.), and all of these things happening in succession
made me want to do more to push myself further, and RootPain.com once again became a huge consideration in my head.

And then I started fiddling with it again for a little bit, and I was like "this could work".

But what really drove me to fully resume work on it was ICantSeeHelp's website.

I saw a post that he updated his website again, and I decided to take a quick look into it. Very cool and stylish website
Pretty edgy too, which is pretty much everything I like.

But when I scrolled at the bottom, I saw it there.
When I first saw it, I barely woke up, it was like six in the morning, but when I saw the RootPain.com banner/button at the
bottom, I genuinely jumped out of my bed, fully awake. I was so happy you couldn't believe it.

At this point, I never really thought a majority of people wouldn't even bother to scroll through RootPain.com anymore
considering I left it abandoned for an entire year, but yet, there it was, in all it's glory, being displayed on the
website of the person that made what's probably my favorite art thing in years.

In a weird way, everything built up to this moment.
That guestbook message, my friends rebuilding their website, my vacation coming up, my website being featured on his
and when I heard that the reason he even went back to his website was because he saw me fiddling with mine
I immediately locked in, and made the decision to finally finish Neo-RootPain.com: Godspeed.

And so, work once again, resumed, and this time, I planned to take it to the very end.

My biggest problem when trying to rework my website again, is that I had no real plan, nor any good idea of what
I was trying to do or wanted, and in a lot of ways, it felt like I just wanted to redesign it for the sake of
redesigning it. So my first plan was to actually lay out a plan, and try to figure out what I should be aiming for.

The menus were the first thing I started fiddling with. I remember before abandoning the old website, I had a ton of
fun figuring out CSS effects, and how making the buttons go up and glow was the coolest thing to me, and I wanted to
try and make something that looks even cooler for this iteration. So I quickly came up with a plan of making so not
only whenever you hover over the buttons they give you a cool color change effect, but they also give you a quick
introduction of what that section is likely to include on a little image slide.

Although it looks very simple, it does help to boost the "cool factor" of the website.
Although implementing it was an actual nightmare, and it's still a bit finnicky to use in a lot of ways.

The next thing after the buttons, was the menus themselves. The old ones looked pretty rough and amateur
I had a good idea going for them, to make everything look futuristic, but the execution was subpar at best, so when
revisiting them, I wanted to finally execute this idea properly, by making the menus look actually futuristic by giving
them this metallic/cyberpunk vibe to them (I think that's the word), and although the sprite work is simple, it really
does help to make things look a bit more organic.

And the last thing, which is something I could never figure out how to implement in the old website, and was one of the
main contributing factors to my frustration with HTML, was the menu sounds.

I always wanted my menus to have sound whenever you hover over the buttons, but I could never get them to actually work
on the old RootPain.com. So after a lot of heartbreak and headbreaking, I finally got them to work.
And honestly, the difference is night and day. It's something very simple, but it does make so that the menus give
more of a "videogame menu" vibe to them, which considering this website is supposed to be like one of those old
Sonic/Game websites from back in the early 2000's, it helps to sell that type of vibe a ton.

After the menus were done, the next thing to figure out was the website backgrounds, how they looked, and most importantly
how to get animated backgrounds working, which is what made me give up completely on RootPain.com for a while.

One of the last planned updates for the old website was to make so the backgrounds were actually animated, and I even
managed to record a perfect loop for a good majority of the backgrounds.

However, once again, nothing was seemingly working.

I tried to rebuild the header from scratch, change the Javascript behavior, but something just wasn't doing it
and after being stuck in it for a while, I gave up on trying to implement it, and eventually, the website itself.

For this version, I wanted to come back, and finally implement so I could close this chapter for good.
Turns out, after remaking the whole website structure from the groundup, working on it became far easier, and I managed
to implement a working animated/webm background very easily. Same goes for the Header background.

After I re-recorded everything in better quality and changed it to MP4s for better quality (while still making sure
the file size wasn't too big), I pretty much finished the visual side very quickly, with the only thing remaining
to be changed was the logo and the characters being displayed on the header.

At first, I was going to go with random characters, like Sora or Serious Sam because I wanted to avoid using other people's
works on my website to avoid a similar situation to the previous iteration, and I didn't had enough (or good enough) works
of my own to use it aswell. So at one point, I was considering having no characters on the header at all.

But that would never work. After implementing the characters on the header page, not having them just makes the whole
website feel so empty by comparison, so I had to think of something.

Fortunately, ICantSeeHelp made this amazing fanart of Big Whiskey out of the blue one day, and despite me wanting to
establish the "No guest artists on the main pages" rules, I was going to break this rule for him. Specially because
he's responsible for Charlotte's Apprenticheship, and having his works featured on my website would be a huge honor.
So I asked for permission, and once granted, there he was.

With that out of the way, the logo remade, and the backgrounds implemented, the next thing I had to do was to finish
the remaining sections, starting with the Blog Section.

And once again, I started to slack off again.

I didn't know how what approach I'd like to have with the new text boxes, how the category selection would look
or how I'd tackle anything past this point. So I started slacking a little bit again, pretty much just fiddling
with visuals and seeing if I could fix anything else in the meantime

But eventually, I started talking to ICantSeeHelp, and the conversation eventually devolved into my old websites
and it would lead into me revisiting my old website, JuneSSai.net, the very first website I made, once again.

And despite how much I avoided looking at old things, going back through my first website again lit a fire inside me
that I haven't felt burning as brightly in a long time.

The website was very basic, and very poorly made. Everything was broken, a lot of the things I used to write were
incredibly stupid, and a lot of them were just wrong.

But none of that mattered, because I was having fun.
While reading through my old posts, I saw the younger me, just having fun, writing everything he felt down, being
genuine not only with the world, but himself. He believed that website was the coolest thing ever, and with every
page he made, he believed more and more.

I started going through old Guestbook Messages, seeing how much my design evolved, seeing how much I grew
but what really made my heart ache for a moment, was reading through one of my older posts
"The Philosophy Of JuneSSai.net".

It was just me reminiscing about why I made JuneSSai.net to begin with, why I found working with these things
so cool and interesting, and what my philosophy around that time was. And despite me remembering how depressed
I used to be (and how awful everything used to be), something I wrote back in the day really stuck with me.
"In general, this is the website's philosophy; passion

Passion for the things I like
Passion for the things I dislike
Passion for when I first started browsing the internet
Passion for learning new things
Passion for the friends and people I've met along the way that impacted
and are still impacting my life
Passion for all the things that make me the person I am today
either that's a thing to be proud of or not.

I've built this site with love and care, and even with all the troubles it has gone through
Including me being a disaster of a person, it changed and evolved with me, and it still continues to
even when I threw the towel here and there

But I don't think feeling down is any reason to be ashamed
I don't think it's bad to recognize your limits and maybe even give up here and there, however
I do see shame in not trying again, and that's what I've been doing

I've thrown the towel countless times, and I've come to get it back every time
Always saying it's the last time, but I'm always lying, and I always come back to try again
And I think this site in many ways is the culmination of all of these attempts
From a barebones website, to what I'd consider something truly refined and special
I was expecting it to be abandoned in a few weeks, but it's still up and going, with more things
to come, and looking back at when it first started, really makes me proud, because my efforts
paid off, and now, I have something truly incredible at my hands
I'll probably get burned out of it again, and I'll give up again, but I'll come back again
I always do." -June S. Sai, 2022

And reading this just made me feel something incredibly powerful, almost like it was me talking to myself in a way.

I remember how depressed I was back then, how I was in a infinitely worse situation, and how everything just sucked
in general. I genuinely had nothing going for me besides my friends.

And yet, I kept trying.
I kept saying "No more", and then immediately go back on my word, and give it "one last shot".
I kept saying that "Everything was pointless", yet I kept giving all the things I did meaning.
I would keep throwing the towel, but not once that towel stayed on the ground for too long.
Despite having nothing, I kept trying, and I kept believing. I had a genuine passion holding me together.

At one point, that website, and everyone that visited it, meant everything to me
And despite everything, I was the happiest I could've ever been, and I firmly believed that.

I remember getting excited over new ideas, and actually figuring out the way to implement them
I remember being happy with every guestbook message I would get
I remember feeling incredibly happy when people kept telling me how my website was the coolest thing
they've ever seen and that they couldn't wait to see more.

And I think somewhere along the way, I allowed that passion and excitement fade away.

Going through that website again, I knew what I wanted to make for this version of RootPain.com

I wanted it to embrace both JuneSSai.net, and RootPain.com.
I wanted it to embrace both the past, and the future.
I wanted it to embrace both the good, and the bad.
I wanted passion to show at every corner of this website at any chance I'd get.
I wanted it to be The Sum Of Everything.

Not to try and outdo myself at every corner, but to try and refine what's already there
and every so often, fix or change things that need to be changed.

A wanted a website that I made with pure love and passion, something that me and others could go through, and just
have a huge dumb smile in their faces while scrolling through it.

I wanted something that would make people go "I want even more."
And something that would make me tell myself "I want to do more."

So that would be my plan, and my philosophy, for Neo-RootPain.com: Godspeed; Passion.

And so after a whole year, a ton of headbreaking, and a ton of heartbreaks too
A bunch of broken code, coffee, good friends, and a ton of revelations, it's finally here.
neo-rootpain.com: Godspeed
It doesn't even feel real for me either.
At one point I just told myself and everyone "that's it.", and I expected everyone, including myself to just be done with it.
And all that I would do was to keep the website archived so anyone interested in revisiting it's history would be free to do so.

But just like me once I enter your life, RootPain.com never left me, not even for a day.
And in a ton of ways, nothing of this would be possible without YOU.

I have a lot to thank for.
The people that stayed, the ones that are now gone.
The people that showed me kindness and patience, the ones that showed me that I'm never truly alone.
The people that showed me how to be awful, so I could have a good reference of everything I want to avoid becoming.
The ones that are here for the ride, and the ones that were just an experience
The ones that endured and tolerated June S. Sai, so we could get to June Santos.
The ones that were just there for the experience, and the ones that stayed for the ride.

Either you're new, or you've been keeping up with me and my works ever since I started to bloom...
Thank you for being badass! And for the past few years, I always ended my posts with "The Struggle Continues."
So it's fitting that I end this one with...

The Struggle Is Over.
Peace out, suckers; it's been real.
Until we meet again. Godspeed.

blooming anew
june santos (a.k.a neorootpain)