“Lore, where have you been?”

In hell, probably. I remade M0R1BUND.com.

“For the love of god, why?”

Short answer: to save time and money.

Long answer: Sharing art was getting burdensome. Neocities hosts static websites built with html, css, and javascript—which is awesome for its mission, to encourage people to create future-proof websites. But this also means that every page is created and maintained by hand. I handle every little link and file and bit of code, and if I want to do site-wide changes, I have to push those by hand, too. This takes time, and so does writing image descriptions and cross-posting art to other websites. It became normal for sharing art to eat up an entire day.

I later created Basedt.net in WordPress, so that I didn’t have to worry about managing link hierarchies, which was a big timewaster on my old webcomic. I liked working in WordPress well enough, and I knew I would benefit from being able to use PHP to manage the sheer amount of stuff that’s on M0R1BUND.com. I was also paying double for webhosting through two different services, when I really didn’t need to…. So… I knew it was inevitable that I would consolidate the two at some point. It was time.

I do really love Neocities and I’m sorry to let it go. I encourage anyone who wants to learn web design and create their own website to start there.

Anyway, that’s how I ended up in hell for 6 months.

“What’s changed?”

Most things. I’m most excited about the quality-of-life stuff, like being able to sort art by character/location/world, or being able to move between individual pieces instead of having to return to the gallery landing page. There are lots of things I want to add, but my soft deadline for this was the new year, so I focused on recreating M0R1BUND.com as it existed before… well… this.

I’ve also edited most of my writing. This site is old, and the art is even older, it felt good to give it some TLC.

There are still a few things missing from the new site:

If you need them urgently for some reason, I can share them with you? but that seems doubtful haha.

Links to pages on the old M0r1BUND.com are broken and will remain broken until I set up redirections to the new M0r1BUND.com. I have no idea how long that will take! … Hopefully not long, given the new semester is here.

“How’s Basedt going?”

It’s going. Recreating my website took precedence for the above reasons, but I’ve been working concurrently on it in my spare time. We move like a glacier into the new year. ETA: ???

Site relaunched. 🎉

HEY I HAVE A WEBCOMIC NOW CHECK OUT MY WEBCOMIC ITS CALLED BASEDT ITS ABOUT LOVE AND GRIEF AND THE INCALCULABLE COST OF VIOLENCE AND A FUCKED UP GUY WE FOUND IN THE DIRT

ahem. did some housecleaning. have webcomic. did some housecleaning for the webcomic.

Whew. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

Some notable art updates since the last time I checked in here…

The back-end has been sorely neglected, but tonight I had a fire lit under my ass to take care of one big issue. I’ll cut to the chase: Turns out the Google Fonts API leaks your IP address to Google! I dropped it like a bad habit and moved to self-hosting my custom fonts, and I highly encourage you to do the same. There’s a wonderful tool here to help you do that.

We can all be a little bit web stupid sometimes. It’s old web wisdom that “free” services aren’t really free, so I am sharing this out of good faith and asking you not to sue me for my oversight. I’m… not sure that the legal costs would be worth a 110 USD damages settlement, anyway.

I will be cutting out Fontawesome next, which also collects usage data. I do not use any of their symbols on my site as far as I can tell; the line of code I’m thinking of is a deprecated artifact of the free template that I used to duct tape together this site back in 2018. For this reason, I don’t think it’s actually collecting anything from M0R1BUND.com. Still, I’m gonna peel it off with a spatula. Don’t need that where we’re going.

Also, for accountability, here is an abbreviated list of things I really need to fix up around the site when I have a moment…

An update that was a long time coming. Redesigned my Moribund character page to be much more readable, and uploaded four full character bios for the “Asthaom TTRPG Party,” as I affectionately term them— Roan, Dai Hei, Len, and Sadren. Profiles will be accessible from the character page moving forward, and will be filled out gradually as I move along (hopefully.) Lots of little fixes throughout, as well.

Happy Lesbian Day of Visibility!

Apparently my new antivirus was recursively injecting code into my HTML sheets, which piled up and prevented my pages from loading properly on the Neocities dashboard and on most mobile devices. This is now fixed! You would not believe how comical that was to troubleshoot.

Anyway. Fun new additions to come, hopefully soon…

I forgot to record this update until just now 🤔

Over the new year, I made a few small updates around the site:

In the future, I would like to fix the weird snapping behaviour that occurs on the Ghost River section of the site on mobile. I *think* I’ve fixed it on desktop, but it’s been long enough that I forgot how I did that, so.

Other than that, I hope to add more old art to various galleries, to round them out and make them more complete. Then I can finally declare them comprehensive (or at least to my liking OTL)

Minor update. I’ve consolidated the Mercasor and RANSOM stories into a single story, under the Moribund Info and Character Info pages. The old Mercasor story with Ken, M, Ors, and Erin is now defunct; The story formerly known by RANSOM, with Brun, Sinuk, Darrow, and co. is now taking its place.

I have been sitting on this change for the better half of a year. After being out of love with the original Mercasor story for so long, I realized it was probably time to retire it. What I didn’t realize for quite a while was that RANSOM was kind of its spiritual successor! It’s weird to say that I’m actively writing one of the “main” Moribund stories, but, yeah, that’s what I’m doing. I guess that’s what happens when you work on a world for so long that it starts leaking out of every orifice.

Ken and M are technically ‘retired’ characters, now, which is why I’ve updated my social media icons to be Brun and Sinuk. It’s kind of bittersweet to see them go the way of the original Mercasor story, but they’re also not… really going anywhere. Brun and Sinuk have only ever always been the same thing retold in a way that I’m more excited and more in love with.

Ors and Erin’s (future) roles in RANSOM / Mercasor remain unchanged. I’ve removed them from the “character info” page because they’re not relevant to the story yet, but they’re also not going anywhere as far as I know. It’ll just… be… like 9 years before I finish writing this dang story and they /do/ finally become relevant.

Whew. @_@ Did I mention I need to rename them? This is what happens when you sit on a world for like 7 years. Please strike while the iron is hot.

Created a generic landing page for my Those Who Went Missing characters, while I was at it. No longer must you abide by me restructuring my menus around the site whenever I get a new esk.

That’s… That’s it, baby!!!!!!

Hell’s Gate Sketchbook

Compiled all the ragtag sketches of Jesse and Redmond into a single page, the Hell’s Gate Sketchbook, and added a few new ones as well. The page is accessible from the “Other Art” gallery.

Happy Pride month! Redmond is in lesbian agony.