Easy Breezy - A button was donated by the lovely Princesse Etoile. Thank you so much!

Blossom - In the midst of work hell, I ended up slipping into an animated movie binge of sorts, rewatching all kinds of movies from my childhood. One of them was Disney's Mulan (1998), which reminded me to go through my joined fanlistings and update links where I could.

When I saw that the link to the Mulan fanlisting was dead, I went to The Fanlistings Network to grab the latest. However, I was shocked when I discovered that Mulan was missing from the approved list—and had been for a few years now. Being one of the formative films of my childhood, I just—I had to! ( /)u(\ ) I couldn't let Mulan go without one...

Unfortunately, as I mentioned in the beginning, work has picked up like crazy—to the point where I worried I would even finish building the fanlisting by the deadline. Thankfully, we made it! Though, to be honest, I'm not 100% sure how I feel about the layout. I always find screencaps difficult to work with, and this certainly was no exception. If you happen to see me tweaking things a bit here and there, pay me no mind!

Dawn - A new affiliate was added back in early October: Please welcome The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword fanlisting!

La vaguelette - Here it is, the last one of the bunch: the fanlisting for Furina! Much like Cipher's case, I pretty much never apply for another fanlisting from the same series or topic. However, as time passed, and Furina continued to be without one, I decided to step in and give it a go myself!

Admittedly, I just managed to slap together and code the layout only today, so it's probably not my best work? But I knew I was a bit late to the deadline, and I didn't want to delay any longer, especially knowing what the work week ahead of me would be like, haha. Regardless, I think it turned out alright! There's a bit more info I'd like to add to the site, though I'm not sure if I'll ever expand it into a full-blown shrine one day. (But never say never!)

In regards to upcoming domain updates: There's one other fanlisting I'm thinking about applying for, but as it's a rather niche subject, I think I want to make sure I can create a decent layout for it first! If anything, this slew of approvals taught me to apply for one thing at a time (even though I rarely apply for new subjects nowadays). ( /)u(\ )

That aside, I do have one layout I need to finish coding! There's also one or two fanlistings I'm feeling the itch to (finally) create new layouts for. Hopefully I can also spruce them up a bit with some added content. May I have enough creative juices to complete one of these!

Serendipity - The fanlisting for My Neighbor Totoro is now open! When I saw the fanlisting available to apply for, I hesitated at first because, to be honest, I wasn't sure if I'd be able to come up with something that would do the movie justice. My Neighbor Totoro is such a precious film to me that holds a lot of nostalgia and many special memories, so I found the idea of creating something for it kind of daunting. ( > // < ) (I also own the fanlisting for Millennium Actress in the same category, which is enough for me!)

But such a wonderful film deserves a little something, so after seeing another fanlisting for it close again, I decided to get off my turtle butt and do something about it! This subject is part of the recent batch of approvals I received in June, and while I managed to design the layout last month, it took me until now to actually code the entire thing, aha...

I'd love to include more information about the movie, and write up a lovey, gushy entry about why I love it so much, but, sadly, due to time constraints, those will have to be added at a later date. Regardless, I'm happy I was able to open the site in the summertime—the perfect season for this movie!

When it comes to fanlistings, I have a small rule for myself: only one fanlisting per series or topic. I don't have any desire to maintain a ton of fanlistings, and, to be honest, I'd feel bad about hoarding too many subjects under one category. Moreover, I know myself and, given my ever-changing interests, if I don't feel passionately enough about a subject, I know I will end up closing the fanlisting sooner rather than later, and thinking about all that time spent creating a layout, coding it, and so on just makes me feel sad, aha...

All of this is to say that I really need to have a good reason to break this rule I set! Work has been murdering me as of late, and I just have this urge to do something creative for myself. While there's certainly a few sites of mine that could use a good refresh, there are some subjects that I would like to see fanlistings for. After being left unclaimed for some time, I decided to just step in and do it myself, haha. However, this doesn't really apply to the first fanlisting from my recent list of approvals, which is:

Windfall - The fanlisting for Cipher is now open! After playing through the recent Version 3.3 main story quest, I just had to build a little something for her. I have some ideas on how to expand this site into a small shrine in the future, but I do want to see how the Amphoreus story wraps up first I think. We'll see!

For me, the biggest hurdle of creating any site for any of the HOYOVERSE games, however, is the layout. The limited amount of images to use for each character has been a huge creative block for me in the past, but, surprisingly, I was able to slap together something rather quickly. (By my standards, alright! Aha...)

Initially I wanted to group all of the new sites together in one update, but given how busy work has been for me recently, I expect I'll be slowly pushing them out one by one as I finish them. Please wish me luck? Haha.

Resilience - After coming across a video clip on Tumblr of the gorgeous rui yun dian chrysanthemum flower, I ended up going down what I can only describe as a chrysanthemum research spiral, haha! On a whim, I visited The Fanlistings to see if there was a fanlisting for these beautiful flowers—only to discover there wasn't! Thus, I decided to apply for it myself and, well, here we are.

Unfortunately, I've been swamped with work lately, so this layout was rather rushed in that I coded and cobbled it together in a night to meet the deadline, whew... I hope to add more content to the site soon when I have more time (which will likely just be me gushing over chrysanthemums), but in the meantime, the fanlisting is open for fellow fans to join!

lost-boy.org - A very minor update, but something I should've done earlier: I've replaced mentions of my Twitter account across my domain with my Bluesky account instead.

While I do still have a Twitter, I almost never use it and don't receive DM notifications for some reason. Due to all this, I've missed one or two DMs in the past! I've replied to all of them, but apologies for the super long delay. Even though I barely use social media to begin with (save my Tumblr, which is more or less private!), I frequent Bluesky more than Twitter in comparison, so feel free to chat with me there if you'd like. Also, it's public! (Which is more to do with the fact that there is no locked account option but—hey, it is what it is, haha.)

There was a server update recently that enabled Imunify360, so I had to update a number of files across all of my sites to ensure that nothing would be mistakenly identified as malicious. (Many thanks to Yuuka for passing me the fix!)

While the Aventurine fanlisting was the only site in particular that was experiencing issues, I went ahead and updated all of my sites—just in case!

I've been on a creative high lately when it comes to my sites, and I have no idea why, but I plan to ride it out and enjoy it while it lasts, haha.

Run — What started as just a new layout bloomed into a revamp of some kind? It's not unlike what happened with And they shall fall to be honest. I really only planned to write up some basic info, like a synopsis of the film, but then I decided to include more things, and before I knew it, I was taking pictures of my DVDs and my copy of the official artbook...

That aside, the previous layout was up for way too long for my liking, especially with how special Millennium Actress is to me. I'm not sure what really sparked my creative juices, but if I had to guess, it was stumbling upon Susumu Hirasawa's live performance of "Rotation (LOTUS-2)" on YouTube, which prompted me to re-listen to the soundtrack. Also, after all the muted colors of the last two layouts, perhaps I wanted to prove to myself I could make colorful things...? Haha!

Regardless, I'm pretty satisfied with the end product, I think. I really hope I did Millennium Actress justice, even though 90% of the site is just me gushing and quoting excerpts from artbooks, haha. Additionally, the site is now on its very own lil subdomain!

It's been a moment, hasn't it? A part of me was pleased that I always managed to make at least one update of some sort per year, no matter how small. Sadly, that didn't happen last year due to some life changes, but! I've picked up a few new coding skills over the time I've been gone, and while I can still definitely improve a lot, I'm happy I can start applying them to my personal projects, bit by bit.

In fact, the two new sites are the first ones I managed to code using SCSS! I even made one of them compatible with different screen sizes. Again, not the most perfect attempt, but the process was definitely an interesting one, and I learned a lot. Many thanks to dearest Yuuka, who helped me set up gulp long ago and taught me so many neat tricks over the last two-ish years! (Also, does anyone else find that when they create layouts at roughly the same time, they share similar color palettes? That's definitely what happened here, aha...)

I also—finally—learned how to properly use the shape-outside property, which really makes me want to re-code some of my sites that could really use it! But it's quite daunting to sift through all that old code, so I'm setting that aside for now, haha.

All or Nothing — I opened the fanlisting for Aventurine from Honkai: Star Rail a few days ago, but refrained from logging it here so I could group it together with the other updates. I couldn't resist applying after finishing up the recent Version 2.1 main story quest! I do have a bit to say about Aventurine, so perhaps I'll expand this site some more in the future.

Polaris — I finally added some basic information on Kaeya to the site. After finishing up Aventurine's fanlisting, I felt bad that I neglected that section of the site for so long. Regardless, it's up now!

Foreordained — The fanlisting for X (X/1999) is now open! This was a huge wishlist of mine, and it finally got me off my turtle butt to make something for the series on my domain somewhere. To be honest, I'm not fully satisfied with the layout, so there might be some tweaks here and there. But I think there's always going to be a part of me that wonders if I'm even capable of doing X justice. In any case, now that I have an idea of how the content is structured, it will hopefully make the next attempt go a lot more smoothly!

lost-boy.org — I added Panacea as an affiliate! I also cleaned up the links list, and sadly had to remove a lot of domains. I tried my best to track down people's new domains (if they moved), but if I missed you, feel free to let me know!

I also reorganized my sites a bit and added A Thousand Years of Dreams to my list of shrines. Like I mentioned in my lil blurb, that I think bears repeating here as well: As I grow to have less time to dedicate myself to writing text walls for a subject, I've found that my idea of what a shrine is has also shifted.

I used to think my shrine category—speaking only for my sites in particular, I don't apply these standards anywhere else—was reserved for sites that had pages and pages full of content. When I looked through old site plans of mine, I saw page topics listed that I wasn't even that interested in writing about. However, I felt I had to include them because the site wouldn't feel complete to me otherwise.

Nowadays, I'm a bit less concerned about all that. So long as I put in the effort and heart, I don't mind listing a project in the shrine category. It just bears a different name—"pocket love letter," as that's what it is to me. I may move another site of mine into the shrine category for these very reasons—we'll see!

Finally, I fixed a small bug I noticed in the fanlistings section of my domain. I had no idea the center alignment was wonky until I added more sites there, haha. But it's fixed now!

Dawn — Added three new lovely buttons, kindly donated by Panacea. Thank you so much!