Menu Fixes + De-BlueBirdWebsite-ification

It is 1 in the AM and I Should Not Be Here! But I am here! Because I have just learned about webdav and I am brimming with hubris and power!

• Social media links updated.
• TWWM is now sorted under my “other” tab because I haven’t really made anything in the game in about a year. Art therapy game is for art therapy! I’m sure I’ll come back to it again at some point.
• Chief and the R.A. promoted to submenu because… fuck it, I made a twine for them. Go crazy go stupid.
• De-twittered (most of) my site. Good riddance.

Belated Art Update + Privacy Fix

Whew. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

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

• Put up “Who remembered us? Considerations for Sauntiaq and the Field of Metaphysics,” a mock research article about Sauntiaq, the “hungry ghosts” of the ash tundra who were a pariah people for many many years.
• Added a little hub for Chief and the R.A., two women goofing around in an irradiated hellscape in the far, far future. They’ve put me in a psychic prison since about March and I’ve been making comics about ‘em ever since.

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…

• OPTIMIZE THE IMAGES ON THE CHARACTER PAGE. PLEASE LORE. IM BEGGING Y
• Fix Nendo + Dango’s tracker and its weird behavior on mobile.
• Fix broken links to old-1ore.tumblr.com
• Maaaaybe remove the blue bird website from my media list at the bottom of my pages. Just, yknow, out of spite.
• Apply nicer literature styling to RANSOM et al.?

Character Page Update + New Profiles Added

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!

Mobile Fix

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...

Small Menu Fix

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!!!!!!

New Year's Updates

I forgot to record this update until just now 🤔

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

• Created generic landing pages for most of the art galleries, so that I don't have to manually update the website navigation menu by hand every time a new year turns over. (previously they were directed to the most recent year.)
• Removed TES pages from my navigation menu. I haven't been actively interested in creating TES fanwork in a few years. They are still linked from the “Other Art” gallery, I just don't consider them important enough to have a place of prominence, so to speak.
• Updated the Ghost River cast page (v2.0: The One With Val)
• Updated the Moribund cast page. Most notable is the addition of Redmond and Jesse, now that Hell's Gate has settled itself comfortably into that world.
• Added a link to the Hell's Gate sketchbook to the Projects page and menu dropdown. May as well :^B

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)

Mercasor + RANSOM Info Updated

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.

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.

Navigation Update + Accessibility Fix

I said that my navbars were keyboard accessible in the last update, but I misspoke like a damnable liar. They were only screenreader accessible. The good news is that they should also be keyboard accessible now (for real this time.)

This fix is also tied up in a compatibility issue with Safari on mobile IOS. My dropdown menus make use of the :hover pseudoclass, but this class isn't called on when a user touches the menu in Safari, and so they don't appear. This fix helped me a lot. Couldn't tell you why it works, apart from expanding the inputs from :hover to :active + :focus.

What I can tell you is that, now that menu items can be called on with both tab ( :focus ) and touch ( :active ), all I needed was some creative use of the :focus-within pseudoclass to get the dropdown menus to persist as a user tabs through them. Spicy.

Thanks to pal Harvey for bringing this to my attention, testing the fix, and patiently listening to me rubber ducky it out!

I really should have started logging this stuff earlier.

Galleries Updated

All galleries have been redesigned. The thumbnails in each directory are real thumbnails, now (i.e. little 300 by 300 px images.) These images click through to the raw artworks, which are each hosted on a dedicated page with a comments section, alt text captions, and so forth. They should be much easier to load and much less demanding on data, now. Try the 2017 Moribund gallery out, if you like-- It's definitely my heaviest gallery page, but hopefully a marked improvement compared to what it was.

Previously, pieces were hosted using modals, and each "thumbnail" was actually a full-sized raw artwork resized in-browser to fit their frames. They were also laughably unusable.

Navigation Updated

Navbars have been redesigned to be keyboard and screenreader accessible (hopefully; I'm using NVDA to test this) and now include skiplinks. With the conclusion of Ghost River, I've added Kithless' page to the site menu, under TWWM. I've also added quick links to RANSOM, NAKAQUOI! and Ghost River under the Projects header.

New Content

Updated Dia's page, and added Kith's to celebrate the conclusion of Ghost River. My TWWM player profile is now linked on the TWWM info page. A handful of new artworks have been added to the Moribund gallery and the Other Art gallery.

Site launched, but, like, for real this time. 🎉🎉🎉

Site launched. 🎉