I have neglected this log for a while, so here’s a bundle of updates.

First up: The Ghost of You Shrine Challenge concluded nearly two months ago, and brought forth a bunch of new and diverse shrines! Do check them out at the event website. As for my entry:

Dreaming through the Noise — a shrine to Nanako Amachi from the manga The Top Secret by Reiko Shimizu. It is the second lodestar of the Six Chances Collective, a companion shrine to Refugium (the first star) and a dream come true. This one had been in the works since at least 2021. See also the event plug post.

Between the challenge deadline and today, all of the images were implemented, countless passages have been edited and enriched with more thoughts (chiefly under “Echoes and Admonitions”), the essay “Otherness and the Undefined Other” was completed, one last essay was added, deliberations on the poem selection were shared, and the site was made fully responsive. I will admit that the incomplete state of things and the gap between my vision and what was feasible by the challenge deadline had me reluctant to update this log; what’s more, the site truly was not contentually and emotionally finished without that last essay. I am pleased to see that the new content on the essay page turns out to be a thematic continuation of my “Ode to Shrines” on oubliette.nu v2, linking the two as works of my new era.

The cover image remains the last element to be finished, but that shall happen at a later date.

Some smaller updates around the network from the past half-year:

Joker’s Wild — Added a short segment about the new manga serialization Liar Game: The Last Game, which started at the end of February. Don’t forget: The anime adaptation is launching today!

Refugium — Added a note about the 2025 television drama. Fixed/replaced broken links in the link list, switched to self-hosted fonts.

In Another Dream — Finally switched out the main font to resolve Droid Sans’ rendering issue, which had shamefully persisted for probably eight years or longer. (Yes, I was so down/spooked about it that I refused to touch the site again for that long. Definitely an argument to hurry up and update my previous shrines with self-hosted fonts.) If you’ve visited the shrine before but couldn’t read it, please give it another chance… It’s one of my favourite creations.

oubliette.nu — Fixed several major blunders with font configuration; the site should load faster now.

The last stretch of the shrine challenge period was intense, and in the two chock-full months since I have felt so restless and torn as I was held hostage by an incomplete shrine that would take so much more to finish. This Easter break was sorely needed; hopefully, I can gather myself as I bring various things to a close, prune plants and catch up with chores and correspondences so that room for new things may emerge. Now, I crave making something creatively and analytically less ambitious to decompress before tackling another lodestar project or some other long-held dream (will I be haunted forever?), but we shall see… I’ll start work on a new site-making event next, and then there are some documentations to write/finish.

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!

All shrines have undergone light maintenance:

• Footer text was adjusted to reflect the new network name.
• Definitions for “shrine” and manga demographics were added.
• Links were updated and dead links were removed or replaced.
• The contrast of select elements was adjusted (notably font colours on Setting Sun and Jamais Plus and the background on Sway).
• Minor additions were made to link lists.
• Some larger images were converted.
• Minor typographical elements were converted (e.g. typewriter apostrophes).

Valkyrie and Waterbound were excluded from thorough link list updates.

Code has been edited for all of the below to keep things consistent across my shrines. Some functionality was added as follows:

Jamais Plus — All videos now open on-site for a better visitor experience.

Setting Sun, Dornenkaefig — The galleries now utilize a different script.

Joker's Wild, Baton Pass, Sway — Navigating has been facilitated: Smooth scrolling was added to the first, and page leafing links to the other two.

Joker's Wild — Prisoner's Dilemma, my Liar Game shrine, has been renamed and revamped as part of Amassment's Shrine Revamp 2016! The outdated layout from 2012 is gone, more functionality has been added, images replaced and some sentences were rewritten. See Amassment plug topic.

Network — Index now features a shrine plug of my choosing next to the latest creation; I thought it was a pity that Waterbound didn't get to be featured for long before I pushed out the next shrine, and now I've also revamped another shrine... The individual page for Joker's Wild has been updated and now includes screenshots of the shrine's previous layout. Previous layouts of The Caged Songbird Network have also been added to Domain. Links has been updated with new friends I've made ehehehe.

For both these sites, please refresh the tab for updates to the stylesheet if you've recently visited, else things might look off!