Recently I've been thinking about shifting iklone.org around. It's always been a very personal website I've used as my "home-base" online, and its been that way in various forms for over a decade now. Ever since the beginning the focus has been on writing articles, although I've always wanted the site to be more than a "blog": more a "portal" for anything I post online. And it really is pretty much my entire digital self here, I have very rarely posted anything online under an alias other than "iklone", and that's been true since the misty year of 2011 when I used to post my rubbish games on the "Scratch" website. One thing I've never cared about was popularity, I've never particularly cared if 10 or 10,000 or 0 people read my stuff, although I appreciate those people who do read what I write, and I'm very thankful to the handful of longer-form letters people have sent me over the years (I download them and keep them in a folder lol). But over the last year or so as my free time has become scarcer and my job has become my life's primary output, the stuff I make here has taken on a more important and sentimental position for me. It's existence is proof that I have created something apart from what is required of me; I have a dense catalogue of my own history going back to when I was basically a child which isn't something most people have, or at least not in such an easy-to-access format. And it's a very strange experience reading back my own stuff from that long ago, its like talking to an alternate version of myself. I especially enjoy the ones where I have totally forgotten the article, and its like reading something perfectly crafted to your personal interests and ways of thinking; I think if I ever get dementia or amnesia I will find reading my own blog articles the most interesting thing in the world, however vain that sounds. If you, reader, have anything similar I recommend you hunt it down and read it too, it's a fascinating and potentially powerful experience. I've been in a rather nostalgic mood recently, so I think I'll run through a timeline of this website and then discuss a bit about its future. This one's mainly for myself to be frank, but most of my posts are really! Read if you care.
-
The Scratch Era
The oldest evidence I can find of myself online is from 2010 on the aforementioned Scratch website. Its a website for children to learn programming on and share their creations; I used to play other users' games and post my own, the eldest being "potions": a game about making potions in Hogwarts featuring my (prepubescent) voice. This was also the only time I ever posted under a different username, with my original account being "lancelot01" before I forgot the password and had to make a new one: "iklonic". Thank god I lost the password... But in that it exposes already my two biggest fascinations when I was a kid: Harry Potter and the Arthurian Cycle. In fact you can nicely track the waxing and waning of these interests over time from the sort of thing I was posting, from Harry Potter to Zelda to Lord of the Rings to Star Wars. Some real highlights include my 1 episode animated TV programme "Rage" about a Knight of the Roundtable fighting Dolphin-chimaeras, and the actually surprisingly good game simply titled "shark".
-
The Newgrounds Era
I stopped posting on Scratch in early 2013, which (probably related) was a few months after I watched my "first" anime Tengan Toppa Gurren Lagann. I say first but before then I had sporadically watched a few other things like Yu-Gi-Oh, Akira and Macross, and more recently just gotten into Pokemon, which must have pulled me into that sphere if the internet. TTGL was my definitive entry point however, and I haven't gone a week or two since then without watching an episode. I then moved home onto Newgrounds, which at the time was the place to be online. I used to post drawings there of various western and anime characters, although very sadly I decided to nuke my account a few years later. I apparently forgot to delete one single drawing of Dawn, so that's still available (see above). I did upload some later drawings to Deviantart, but there are tonnes which I fear may be lost to time. I should have a look for the originals when I'm back home, I may have squirrelled away the originals somewhere. One cool little artefact I dug up deep in my hard-drive was my "pixel people" project where I would pixel-chibify all my favourite characters into the same format. Its pretty funny seeing all my favourite things from that era lined up like this.
^"pixelpeople.png" How many can you recognise?
-
Force of Lightning
Around this time I also started my first proper website, although it was hosted on an old webcomic service that doesn't exist anymore. The reason it was on a webcomic service was because "Force of Lightning" was my crappy high fantasy D&D-esque comic (I had never played D&D). I drew it all on Incscape for some reason and it ran for maybe 20 or 30 pages before being scrapped. I have all the files still, but because the host went down it's not online anymore (It's no massive loss don't worry). However it was through FoL that I firstlearnt HTML and CSS, which would lead me to launch my website proper.
^ An excerpt from Force of Lighting chapter 5. Humour of its era indeed...
-
UEUO
What UEUO stands for is a mystery that I will never reveal, but for whatever reason I thought it was the perfect catchy name for my new project. The website was hosted on another free hosting site (I don't think such things really even exist anymore), and it was the first true ancestor of Maidspin. I meant for it to be my anime-blog, where I would post reviews on every anime I watched. My writing back then was terrible and very tryhard unfunny, but I did write reviews for a dozen or so shows including the "brand new season of Nyaruko-san", which succinctly dates us again. The website's design was bizarrely, brown; everything was really brown for some reason but it looked clean enough. You can't visit the site anymore, but a few of the terrible reviews are still posted on my MAL account. Additionally I had an aborted attempt at taking UEUO to the big screen with the launch of my "Iklonia Anime" Youtube Channel. I made one video (a review of Girls & Panzer) and then immediately thought better of it and privated the whole thing. No you can't watch it. After a year I realised that such a strict formula was actually very uninteresting, and so just started using it as a place to dump my projects, such as my unfinished three-and-a-half chapter novel "Spirit Knot" about a shrine maiden lost in a spooky Closed-Youkai-Realm in Aomori Prefecture, and my stageplay "Tragedy of the Gourmet" which (I kid you not) my friends and I would do renditions of at lunchtime.
^ The UEUO landing page. It's brown.
-
Overly Friendly Squid
Next I moved to a more free-form blogging site called "Overly Friendly Squid", where I wanted to be free to just write anything without a theme or ruleset to follow. OFS was when I finally bought the domain name "iklone.org", but the contents of the site itself switched between being a recoloured (blue) version of UEUO and just a blogspot template blog because I couldn't afford the hosting costs once the service I used went down. OFS is the aggressive, angsty and undoubtedly teenaged ramblings of an /a/utist, but there are some legitimately funny articles on there if you dig such as the immortal "Autism isn't Real", which is undoubtedly my most influential work. There are a few straight anime-reviews there still, but its mostly weird pseudo-philosophical rants and a strange train-station reviewing series that was meant to be an ARG or something.
-
Overtly Friendly Squid
Another terrible name choice, but when I finally saved up enough earnings (which I raised through selling cut-out anime screenshots printed on T-Shirts) I decided to finally host my own website properly, and thus I changed the name to reflect the new page. I ended up not posting as frequently as I hoped here, but I think for me this was a time of transition between teenager and adult, so its interesting going back through to see which of the waters I was testing became core to my self, and which were routes abandoned never to be followed. It's interesting to imagine how different I would be now if I had embraced some other philosophy I explored at this time. You can still visit this one, it's hosted right here!, although the majority of the images are gone, and most of the fancier features don't work anymore (they 503 for some reason).
-
The Psychoframe
This was "the green one" where I wanted to start afresh with a more adult tone, focusing on "anime analysis" and Gundam stuff. There were some articles I'm proud of here, but all the good ones have actually just been reuploaded to this website, so to trawl through the others may be a waste of time, but you can do so at the re-up here. I feel like my style has solidified from here on, nothing on Psychoframe would feel out-of-place being posted next Sunday. Although I would like to think the actual contents of the articles now are considerably more developed, and they're definitely better structured.
-
Maidspin
It was during Coronavirus that I made Maidspin, which for those unaware does not actually refer to this website, but a discord game I built for me and my friends where the premise is spinning as many maids as you can. It took off in my circle due to us all having way too much time, and ended up blowing up a bit, having several hundred active players per day at its peak. Being in my NEET-era, I had plenty of time for such projects which included several webapps which you can still find most of easily on my git or linked elsewhere. I also wanted a new website, so I created this monstrosity, which changes name and colour everytime you refresh the page. Looking back I think I wanted to try returning to the aggressive-style of the old OFS1 articles, but trying to turn back the clock to a psyche I didn't have anymore was impossible. So instead I made Maidspin (the website this time) which I've been happy with for nearly 5 years now. Being the longest-lasting, it also has the lions share of posts (and definitely word-count), spurred on by the longstanding rivalry with my friend's website breadisdead.net, and more recently with The Knownotwhere Gazette. This brings us to the present and my latest article, which you can read here.
Obviously over the course of Maidspin's run my interests have meandered away from their original course; rather than being an "anime blog" this is really now more of a history and socratic musings sort of place, only focusing on anime every few months or so. Which brings me on to my conundrum and the potential for a Maidspin-Reformation. I do like sharing my articles with people, and as I get older I am developing more pride in my writing so want to be able to share it to more people I meet. For my friends this is fine, but to try and get my colleagues or boss or Dad to read something I've written on an "anime website" is difficult, even if the contents of the article in question is nothing to do with anything otaku. I have done it, sending links to colleagues or my Dad et cetera (although when I sent it to my boss I did just send it in plain text... I'm not that brave), but recently I've been thinking it'd be good to separate these two aspects of iklone.org, or at least have them be separable. Say I want to send a post about my holiday in Dorset to my sister, or an article on the geopolitical importance of a port we recently visited to my boss; I could send them a version without the cartoon maid and screenshots of anime. And then if I want to post a link to my website on an anime forum, I could send a version that you don't have to wade around in my weird tag system to actually find the anime-related articles in. I'm thinking something along the lines of Bread's Light/Shadow Mode (although I've never quite wrapped my head around what the difference is meant to be). Perhaps entirely different domains to separate them cleanly? Who knows, but maybe one day soon "iklone.org" will host other sites apart from "Maidspin", we'll have to see.
I suppose it's strange that I'm worrying over such a change, who cares? Well the answer is that I care, it feels shameful to hide a part of oneself just to be socially acceptable. We all do it all the time, but there's something different about making such a clear delineation between two parts of my interests. It's not like I'm embarrassed about being an otaku, I'll talk about it with whomever, but I never announce it unprovoked and would rather just share my enjoyment of the subculture with those already inside rather than proselytise to a crowd with blank faces. Sometimes it feels like that decade I spent totally engrossed in the Court of the Otaking constitutes my "kuro rekishi", a time I can only really tell of to those who already "get it". And even if it does incorporate a case of belayed chuunibyou syndrome, it's far more interesting a tale than what many people tell me they did at that time in their life, not something to be embarrassed about at all. So my current plan is to go through with the split, hopefully finding some innovative solution to the two-blog problem, and if I hate it we'll revert back to the good old ways. And hell, maybe it will provoke me into actually writing about anime again, which is something I do want to start again but I just haven't quite found the angle at which I want to tackle it. Maybe post more short-form thoughts? Maybe try my hand at that dreaded "anime review" format once again? All I know is that you, dear reader, will be the first to know.
Yours aye,
iklone
PS: I also added the little "flash text" to the header. It'll change everytime you refresh the page (or you can click it to cycle through them.
