Some things have popped up around the network in the last while!

Joker’s Wild — Did you know Liar Game is getting an anime over a decade after the end of its serialization? Now you do. While updating the shrine with the announcement, I decided to rewrite all of it: Though the content has largely remained the same, the text was heavily revised in terms of preciseness, conciseness and style, many details were corrected and added, and all quotes retranslated. There’s also new content: publication information, information on the live action’s bonus material, a whole new section (“More Liar Game”), images aplenty, some links and a new set of buttons. Design-wise, I overhauled the stylesheet chiefly to improve readability, added semantics and made the site fully responsive.

All in all, the thoughts I wanted to convey have gained much in clarity and sharpness, and all of the shrine now “pops” more and is better than ever, yay! Shoutout to all the devoted Liar Game fans who have kindly left me comments over the years.

Carnivore Hearts — While too sick to continue work on oubliette.nu v2 last year, I turned to the revamp of my Claymore collective (this totally makes sense) and nearly finished it, knowing that stormwind.org would soon expire. Naturally, I dropped it the moment I was well enough to tinker around with the domain again. Nine months after expiration and after nearly ten years of looking embarrassing, the collective now actually looks good! And has a new title and corresponding buttons to boot. (Make no mistake, the site is still a glorified placeholder.) If you come across any leftover stormwind.org links, let me know.

Song Cradle — Added Vanishing Moon’s documentation, a reflection on personal galleries/media archives and some raging. I wrote most of it in May while abroad and only got around to editing and finishing it now. These documentation pages have truly turned into the blog posts of the network.

Network — The Wither and Bloom Network has a new favicon: Lunar Tears commissioned from the pixel artist Ota Jaider. Many thanks to Arrow for so kindly referring me to them. ❤

Not counting my first shrine Joker’s Wild, I have now been making shrines for ten years, hooray!

Vanishing Moon — Hi, I wrote about 6k words for a thing I don’t care much about, totally normal shrining behaviour: Here’s a personal guide to Fate, Fate/Zero specifically. I uploaded this a full month ago and had hoped to announce it along with other finishing touches to the shrine; alas, that will have to wait.

I also added two illustrations (Machi Asobi vol. 9). Images from the spin-offs Fate/Zero Cafe and Capsule Servant may be added in the future if I feel like it, but for now, I’m done.

Lastly, mobile view has been adjusted; though not optimized, the site should be viewable and readable now.

oubliette.nu — Added some text cliques. Also added a link button, which I received from Mina! ❤ People in this sphere are so incredibly sweet!

joined fanlistings — Removed a bunch of subjects I no longer feel strongly about. Might do some more pruning when I feel like sending out more mails.

Emotion — Added a bunch of link buttons donated by Christina! ❤ I’m really glad for these. =x

It looks like my site activity streak has reached its end for the time being, as I will be occupied in the next while. I’m glad for these seven months, which have shown me that it is still possible (or possible again) to devote so much of my time and attention to site-crafting next to a full life.

Happy new year! Mine is off to a great start:

Network — I am mighty pleased to say that the guestbook and contact page (now with a form!) have been, as dubiousdisc put it, mermaidified! As you can see, the pages build on the repository’s design; you may have spotted the header image teased in one of the buttons from the last update.

I spent way too much time on this (four whole days?) considering that these are periphery pages, but the unstoppable force of my love for these manga panels demanded that I make something worthy of them. >:( (Incidentally, this is the third instance of site productivity triggered by mermaids within the last years. Also, after over a decade of despairing over header image transitions, I have discovered… Photoshop’s own wet media brushes. wtf.) I’m SO happy about how it turned out, because I vividly remember looking at the guestbook script’s template in 2016 and pretty much throwing in the towel right away. Good thing there are many other brilliant people in this sphere who have crafted absolutely gorgeous guestbooks, which demonstrate that this degree of customization is indeed feasible. I managed to make it responsive too.

Many thanks to Larissa for sharing the code for individual site links with me, troubleshooting and listening to all the raging.

The network got a new error page as well. From now on, you will run into the same daydreaming lady if you follow a broken link, which I hope won’t happen too often. x)

Song Cradle — Updated Magic Kit with new and replaced tools. Optimized minor things (line-height, self-hosted fonts).

oubliette.nu — Added two link buttons, which are kind gifts from Christina! ^-^

I love how many new and familiar names have been popping up lately in my guestbook, mailbox and beyond, and I’m excited about every single declaration to continue or take up site-crafting again. Here’s hoping that 2025 will be a good year for all of us, and that we may create all the beautiful things we want to create. I can’t wait to see it all! ❤

oubliette.nu — It took another month (of considerable suffering), but the final — and central — text, Ode to Shrines, is now finished and has been uploaded to the “Wherefores” page. I have been effectively writing it for the past four months, but the words have been forming for perhaps a decade, causing me many a sleepless night; I’m glad to be rid of them at long last. (One of the text’s bynames in my head is “the tl;dr to end all tl;dr”.)

I have also made a bunch of new button sets and retired nearly all previous buttons. If you have kindly linked my site with a button, please replace it (unless, for some reason, you are really attached to it). :)

Now that I am no longer sleep-deprived and worn out from intense months of site work, I can properly announce the big news:

oubliette.nu — After over eight and a half years, oubliette.nu has entered version 2 at long last, with a new design and all-new, greatly expanded content! In fact, only the segments “History” and “Domain name”, rewritten and expanded, have been retained; all previous text is archived, with minor edits, at Song Cradle. Alas, I was not able to finish all of the revamp in time (after missing Halloween, I was dead set on releasing on the 11th of November), as the complex and final text for the central “Wherefores” page still requires editing.

If you perused the site on day 1, a bunch of tiny things have been added, notably the ACNH birthday party, which now sports an extended screenshot gallery and updated text. (Looking at you, friends coming out of the woodwork and creeping all over the site even though I kept the launch hush hush so I’d have time sleeping/adding stuff that didn’t make it in time!! You’re sweet.)

Song Cradle — As mentioned, archived texts can now be found at the repository. The timeline and bulletin board have been updated. This update log is now also available as an RSS feed.

This revamp was long overdue in multiple regards; three years after launch, I already considered the site outdated, as a forum post from 2019 can attest. In terms of skill, version 1’s aesthetics and code didn’t lag behind my sites towards the end of the 2015–2017 phase too much, even though I had added more tools to my arsenal. In terms of content, however, the site, by as early as 2018, no longer reflected where I personally stood. I could still see and appreciate my self in all of the text, but the Lethe stored in there wasn’t “whole”. Additionally, I had major gripes with the cluttered network page as the sites had become too many. Their equal visual presence meant undue prominence of some sites at the cost of others, which made orientation difficult for anyone not familiar with my site or this part of the web.

All of this made me reluctant to touch anything around the site. I saw and appreciated it as a congruent whole that couldn’t just be picked apart arbitrarily; if it was to be modified, then only by rebuilding it as a whole. Because I loved and still love version 1 very much though, it was hard to let go, of the parts and of the whole. At the same time, I couldn’t commit to rebuilding sooner due to a lack of resources. As a result, the whole network was forced into deep slumber, stasis that extended even to the links page (“these were the people I knew and interacted with then; I can’t add new people because they weren’t part of the world of the Lethe from that particular time”). The framework that no longer fit no doubt also had a (not quantified) impact on my motivation to make more (or perhaps finish) sites, as they would have no tidy home to move into.

In 2022, when I returned with a shrine that my heart absolutely had to finish and share, I finally took steps towards the imperative revamp. I erected Song Cradle, an archive as relief measure, chose the images for the new layout (and failed to come up with a satisfactory draft), wrote a draft of the index, and edited all previous texts for archiving. This year, starting mid-August, I set aside summer break to lay the textual and visual foundations for the revamp, and, with a forced interruption of 2–3 weeks, pushed through to mid-November to finally free myself from the ghost of oubliette.nu version 1.

I have now rebuilt my home, and will continue reinforcing its fundaments in the next while. From this remade base, I can create new things, set sail to new destinations and establish new ties. (My thanks to newly acquainted fellow site makers for showing understanding regarding my temporary inability to put up a link to their site.) There are many more thoughts on this revamp, some of which you can find on the “Layout” page, and more that will go into the documentation. I might even cut these lines and move them to the documentation later.

If anything looks off on either site, please hard refresh the page (Ctrl + F5 on Windows, Cmd + Shift + R on Mac). If there are any errors, typos or instances of incorrect English (I don’t care how miniscule), or if any suggestions come to mind, I’d be grateful if you let me know. I have no idea how to fix the capital first letters looking off in Firefox though.

I hope to get the remaining page edited and finished, new buttons made and the revamp documentation written posthaste. I would also like to improve vertical mobile view and implement some more accessibility measures. Aside from that and the minor but necessary update to the Claymore collective, I expect things to be quiet site-wise in the next two months at least.

Thank you for your visit and for reading this. I hope you enjoy the reborn oubliette.nu! There are many insubstantial things tucked away in every nook and cranny, some linked, others flavour text on mouseover; their presence delights me.