And now for something completely different, just in time for Valentine’s Day (cheating again, as it’s past midnight here already) and Femslash February:

Vanishing Moon — a shrine and comprehensive media gallery to Irisviel von Einzbern from the light novel and anime Fate/Zero. This shrine is not a brand new 2025 work, but rather a revived project from the end of 2016 that I dusted off, polished and added to so as to share it with the world.

For the record, the layout, character profile and nearly all of the image galleries had already been finished in 2016, and uploaded for (pretty much) my eyes only. Then life happened and I lost motivation for this project on top of it. Now, eight years later, I updated the code to HTML5, upgraded Fancybox from version 1 to 5 (goodness!), edited all existing text and updated all links. I also added about 20 new illustrations and cards respectively that I have, to my immense surprise, since unearthed, in the highest quality I could find and along with their sources. Most importantly, I finally did all the research and material-gathering necessary to compile and write the “Openings & Endings”, “Audio Dramas”, “Merchandise” and “Link Collection” pages along with the credits section, and to finalize the profile.

Unfortunately, the shrine is not quite finished yet in terms of textual content. After sitting down at last to do all the research mentioned above, and reading all the Fate/Zero light novels a few weeks ago (on a whim or out of sheer tenacity), it turned out that I may have some things I want to say after all. I’m also currently playing the official (!!) English release of Fate/stay night, which may spur some thoughts. I have been hell-bent on releasing this shrine on Valentine’s Day though (you’ll see the reason on the shrine itself), and don’t want to deprive myself of that reward after all the hard work in the past month. :v Despite the missing content, everything I set out to do is already up, and the texts to follow, though hopefully substantial, are more of an afterthought with regard to my personal goals.

I hope I can wrap the remaining content up soon, and perhaps release it along with the documentation, which should be fun to write. Though it is an old project, it is a valuable exploration of various questions I consider crucial to shrine-making.

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.

OUBLIETTE.NU HAS FINALLY BEEN REVAMPED. It is still the 11th of November according to the time settings of this update log’s script, and in any case, THE DAY ISN’T OVER IF IT’S STILL NIGHT AND YOU HAVEN’T SLEPT YET. (Yes, taking pretty dates really srsly; you have no idea how much it motivated me.)

Coherent log entry (also, accursed link buttons) later. Now: sleep.