i did another font overhaul, because i am never satisfied with anything.
and let's be real, i'm going to do it again >:) i also changed the way the
navbar works on mobile so it's a little smoother across different screen
resolutions, but it's a stopgap bc i want to replace the whole thing
anyway. working with pixel fonts on web is such a pain...have i mentioned
this? i'm sure i have.
i also updated the h3 & hr graphics to actually match the color scheme of
this website. tiny detail only i care about lalala ok that's all.
11.26.24
ok! i reorganized most toybox sections to move teeny tiny pixels into
their own section, which makes organizing
the rest a lot less annoying. i realized that deciding what qualifies as
'extra small' when dealing with pixel art
was a bit of an imperfect art, but whatever.
11.24.24
added 105 new adoptions to the sozai page, from
12 different websites. i thought i'd
actually count this time instead of just saying "i added some stuff bye",
but i'm actually surprised at the
amount. i'm thinking about moving the really tiny pixels (like > 16x16?)
to their own section, because it's a bit
annoying to organize them in with the rest without the overall page
looking awkward. plus, i sort of love the look
of a bunch of tiny pixels together. mostly it's that.
highlights~
11.21.24
i finally went through and organized all of my old link buttons, and added
a few more 32x32s to the about page. they're pretty ancient, so they all say
'ravey', which was the name i used online from like,
2001-2006. honestly, it feels as much a part of my identity as jessica
does, and i've never actually cared what
people call me.
i've made a few half-hearted attempts over the years at making a 32x32
that says 'jessica', but it's a bit too
long to fit nicely, and i always just give up. and while a lot of people
in my life call me 'jess' (who knows why,
i've never introduced myself as 'jess'), i never use that myself. so ravey
it is, for now. do people even use
32x32 buttons anymore? affies have kinda fallen out of fashion it feels
like...
i also added a couple more adoptions and fixed some alt text. i am working
on new site, but it's driving me c r a
z y so i am doing all of this other really pointless shit instead as
procrastination lol :(
11.13.24
oh. haha. hi!! it's been awhile, hasn't it? i had a pretty crazy month, so
all my fun computer activities had to
take a backseat for a bit. i've just moved to a new city, and i'm very
happy to be finally settled in with all of
my stuff now. i also took some time to help my boyfriend create a website
for his work, but now that that is done,
i'm ready to get back into my own projects.
very minor update, actually. i added a few new adoptions, and now i need
to catch up on whatever i've missed. i
also need to just reorient myself and decide what i want to focus on next,
because i have a few things in progress
(classic!!)
11.13.24
oh. haha. hi!! it's been awhile, hasn't it? i had a pretty crazy month, so
all my fun computer activities had to
take a backseat for a bit. i've just moved to a new city, and i'm very
happy to be finally settled in with all of
my stuff now. i also took some time to help my boyfriend create a website
for his work, but now that that is done,
i'm ready to get back into my own projects.
very minor update, actually. i added a few new adoptions, and now i need
to catch up on whatever i've missed. i
also need to just reorient myself and decide what i want to focus on next,
because i have a few things in progress
(classic!!)
09.29.24
fairly large update to site-wide font styles, which hopefully won't break
anything :') we'll see! i also found a
long lost pixel of tina's, which i've added to the adopt section.
09.26.24
i added a lot of new pixels to the old school
toybox today. it's occured to me that the
'old school' category as it stands spans from about 2000 to 2012, and the
differences in style gets massive at
that point. as an old person, i'm especially fond of the very early, more
simple ms paint pixel art that drew me
in as a child, so i try to include as much of it as possible. i think for
me at the time, it made the medium feel
accessible in a way the very beautiful and polished pixel art that came
later didn't. obviously i love many styles
of pixel art, it's just got me THINKIN. i could write a lot about this,
and maybe!!! i!!! will!!!! another time :)
09.20.24
i added a few things to the sozai section, because it feels like an
eternity since i updated. although i am working on Web Things daily, none
of it is public yet lol so it seems like maybe i'm doing things like going
outside and touching grass. as if!!!!
09.07.24
updating this website is now something i do when i need a break from the
other project i'm working on, i guess :'] i added some new adoptions to
the oldschool category, this time by two of my friends, lani & ann.
they're both incredibly talented pixel artists, and were very prolific, so
i've been putting off choosing what to add from them.
09.06.24
omg...i found 2 whole more missing adoptables today. i am a world-class
internet archaeologist. i am unstoppable. anyway, check out the adopt page to see them.
i also decided to do a little cleanup on some of tina's old adoptables. i
ummed and ahed over this for quite awhile, but ultimately decided that
cleaning up some of the pixel artifacts & doubles wasn't disrupting the
integrity of the originals. i just get weird about that kind of thing!! i
did leave some things that felt like intentional stylistic choices, even
if i didn't totally agree with them. shocking news: girl who overthinks
everything is overthinking another thing. more at 10!
09.05.24
i found some old adoptions in the vast expanse of the internet archive. do
you know what that feels like? it feels like winning the fucking lottery.
anyway, they've been added to the adopt page. i also added a little 'up'
icon, to indicate what's been 'up'dated. i decided not to go with 'new',
because that felt a bit disingenuous lol
09.03.24
i've been mostly working on another project, but tonight i decided to add
a bunch of adoptions to my toybox pages. mostly there are additions to the
sozai section, but also some studio ghibli sprites & a bunch of new
dachshund icons i found :>
08.30.24
recently, i've done a bunch of reading & watched a lot of videos on ~pixel
art~ techniques & methodology, and started reworking some of my older
pixels with some of these ideas in mind. today i redid my personal
favorite pixel, my heart calculator. i bought it in a little shop i used
to work at in college after falling in love with it, and it's sat prettily
on various shelves in every apartment i've lived in since.
08.29.24
i added a virtual pets section to my toybox~ it's pretty small right now. if i'm less
lazy another day, maaaaybe i'll add my neopets there
08.25.24
i made a little journal pixel while working on some icons for another
project, and decided to do a few color variations and make it an adoptable. side note: i do try to use other color
palettes, but rainbow always seems to win.
08.24.24
i added a loading indicator to the toybox pages, which i think is a better
experience than images sporadically being loaded. i also updated the
mobile layout of the toybox pages so that the nav sits above the page
content now, allowing both to take up 100% page width, which looks a lot
cleaner. those were the major ux changes i've been wanting to make, so i
think i am pretty much done with those for now & can just focus on just
adding new content~
edit// jk, i lied. i added a cute sparkly animation to the header, because
it's felt a bit plain ever since i increased the size of the main
container. it's my first experiment using lottie for animations
:>
edit2// i've been meaning to remake the background for this website for
ages, and finally got around to doing that. the original was a free bg
made by kimikat in like, 2000. i slowed down the animation a bit to use
for this website, but it was very low res and had a lot of rough,
pixelated bits. i basically just rebuilt the same design using vectors in
figma & did a quick animation in photoshop, so it's much smoother and
2024-friendly now. here
is the original, for reference.
08.18.24
i've been on a journey today, y'all.
i'd been meaning to refactor this website to use reusable components for
the header/nav/footer
elements that exist across multiple pages, because maintaining them in 20
diff places is super
annoying and inefficient. i finally decided, "ok, i'll just use php
includes, those are easy to
implement". then i realized that neocities doesn't support php, lmao. of
course it doesn't. my
next iteration used javascript to insert php from externally hosted
template files into the html
of my neocities website. this DID work, but it was inelegant and clunky,
and i was unsatisfied.
finally, i decided to try out eleventy, which is a super simple, lightweight static
site generator, and leverage the
templating functionality. this was the clear winner, and 10000x cleaner.
i've mostly avoided
static site generators, having messed around a bit with hugo (i found the
setup annoying), but
i'm really impressed with eleventy. there was almost no setup, and very
little config needed. it
pretty much just worked out of the box with my existing html/css/js, and i
was also able to
re-use the templates i'd already created earlier for php includes.
amazing. i'm going to
actually read the docs, now, and figure out what else i can leverage, but
bigtime win for
eleventy.
i also configured github actions deployment for neocities (ty nenrikido for the tutorial on this) which will make life a lot easier.
honestly, i feel like adapting the the
specific quirks of neocities has been such a ride. i have a lot to say on
it, but here isn't the
place :>
08.16.24
i've been in a bit of a creative slump for awhile, but i finally dragged
myself out to, at last,
make myself a button. it's not much, but it's more than i've made in
awhile!! very big shoutout
to robyn and pomelo for the inspo & encouragement :>
08.14.24
i finally have a real button for this website thanks to the wonderful robyn ♥ look at how cute and jiggly it
is!
i made some adjustments to my about page, but nothing major. i'm working
on something new rn >:]
08.13.24
housekeeping~ i updated the toybox page categories to replace the 'kaoani'
category with 'sozai.
i felt like the 'oldschool' category was getting too massive with al of
the sozai and icon
material, and decided it made more sense as it's own category that
encompassed kaoani. i'm using
the term 'sozai' a bit loosely, here - it isn't just web materials, but
general pixel art &
icons from japanese websites. in the case of kaoani, i'm keeping the ones
made by non-jp artists
on there, also, because whatever.
you may need to do a hard refresh (cmd + r) to see the updated page, but
it's here ♥
i also added an archive for older updates
below, because this page
was getting embarrassingly long :')
08.11.24
i added a www section for links and such. i originally wasn't going to
have links on this
website (i have them on my other website), but it felt wrong.
i also launched my ~revived~ sanrio clique, sanrioness yesterday. sanrioness was a super old
sanrio fan clique i made with my friend
phoebe back in 2002, which i decided to revamp and relaunch for funsies.
check it out and join
if you're a sanrio fan ♥
08.09.24
i've been wanting to make adding new adoptions to this page more efficient
since, basically
always. until now, i've been adding every image manually, including it's
link + respective
alt/title attributes. OBVIOUSLY that is insane, inefficient, terrible
practice, and very
difficult to maintain. finally i decided to make a custom component to
handle adoptions, and i'm
very pleased with it.
basically, my image file directory structure is [category] > [creator
name] > [image 1], [image
2], [image 3], etc
all i have to do now is provide a category, creator name, url, and some
attribution text (for
alt/title text) and the code checks the specified directory for images,
then spits them all out
on the page linked to the provided url & using the provided alt text. this
saves an enormous
amount of time and lines of code, especially when there are a lot of
images from one creator.
consequently, i decided to kill the tabs on the toybox page and just made
each section it's own
page. it's not really ideal, but the tab + lazy loading code was brittle
and annoying to work
with, especially when using the custom component for adoptions. eventually
i'll work on a better
approach, but for now, it just wasn't worth the effort continuing to
maintain.
08.07.24
i've been tweaking my own stuff again~ i haven't felt very creative, but
recoloring stuff &
practicing making color palettes has been a nice compromise.
08.05.24
i decided to update the layout on this website so that the content box was
a lot bigger - it's
been driving
me crazy for awhile, especially given how much content is on some of the
pages. i might play
around with the
header now that it's like, half the size of the container div...
originally, i wanted this
layout to be
reminiscent of the simple table frame layouts of the early aughts, but it
looks so empty now lol
:'(
07.30.24
ahhhh! i was browsing random old websites on the the wayback machine (as i often do), and came across
an adoption of tina's that i had been *missing* !!
this is about as exciting as things can get for me these days, lol. it's a
cute little star pop, which you
can find on the adopt page now.
07.23.24
i took a long vacation, and breathed a lot of fresh air. my brain is kind
of like, "huh, what's a website?"
right now, so i'm doing some mindless tasks like organizing. i have
another mini trip in a couple days, so
i'm not doing anything too intensive. i added a bunch of pixels to my
'new' toybox, today. although many are from older
websites that are just still
alive...you get the point, right?
07.04.24
i got a domain for this website - hello mooncandy.toys ♪
07.02.24
i added a bunch of sailor moon sprites from some of the video games, which
come from an archived version of
lycentia's
sm graphics. lycentia's website was massive for sailor moon girlies
in the early 2000s, which i
obviously was.
i've been taking a course on vue.js, and i'm going on vacation soon, so
i'll prob be a little slower with
updates for a bit. i'm planning on starting a new project once i finish my
course n_nv it'll be a fun one
06.25.24
i got rid of the enter page bc i realized it was kinda pointless. it's my
dog ponyo's 10th birthday today -
happy
birthday, ponyo! ♥
06.24.24
i fixed some
mobile
responsive alignment issues for older iphones, and added a page top quick
link for the toybox page, since
you
need to do a fair bit of scrolling there (especially on mobile)
edit: i added a ton of new pixels to my oldschool toybox from punch★gum and yupidle, two of my all-time fave early 2000s jp icon
websites
06.21.24
i changed the main body font to one that supports japanese characters -
じゃーん！ i don't like it as much, but
it
was bothering me that i couldn't write out kaoani 顔アニ, etc. i also added some
more adoptions in the toybox section, and will probably
continue to add a few more today~
edit: i added a font for kanji. nobody cares, jessica!! ps- remind me to
never use a pixel font again lmao
06.20.24
i re-colored some of my adoptions - most of them i did about a year ago
when i was first starting making
pixel
art again, and they're kinda rough. i'll probably continue to tweak them,
because i'm still not happy with
them. i also made a little sulky princess jessica today~
06.18.24
i'm continuing to add more adoptions ♪ the ones added today are the
really special to me. they come
from
kimikat, who's websites inspired me to start creating my own back in the
day
i decided to merge the ancient + oldschool section (bc honestly, the line
is blurry anyway) and add a kaoani
section instead. i loooove kaoani - they're such an iconic part of early
internet history, and i happen to
have
a massive collection of them. i should have the revamped sections
up
soon.
edit: the toybox is updated now → gogogo!
there are only a few kaoani up right now. i think i need to find another
font for this website, since this
one
doesn't support japanese characters :[
06.17.24
ok, i realized i need to do some performance optimizations on the toybox
page (lazy loading) so i'm gonna
try
and launch today with that one under construction, and add it once i get
the lazy loading to work. we got
dis.
edit: we are live, y'all woohoo
edit 2: the toybox is live now and the script works, but it's rough.
adding a refactor to my todo bc i don't
feel like doing it right now!!
edit 3: wow i realized neocities doesn't support .htaccess, and i don't
know any other way to disable
directory
indexes without putting an index file in every directory. which i did.
take that!
06.16.24
i've been working on adding adoptions, which is half fun, half intensely
dull. i'm almost at a point where i
can
publish this website, and then just continue to add content. today i did
all of the dachshund images, made
the
enter image, and fixed up the enter page a little in general. i'm going to
focus on fixing up some little
details & testing for launch (yayay)
06.13.24
i took a break from making this to play like, 200 hours of harvest moon.
oops.
today i started working on the toybox, which is the most complex page and,
of course, the one i saved for
last.
i set up category tabs, which, after some sighing and teeth grinding,
turned out pretty cute. FUN FACT, the
most
annoying part of working with rainbow palettes is figuring out how to
divide all of your elements by 6 to
fit
all the colors nicely. now i just need to add the adoptions...eek.
06.08.24
i've actually finished most of this website, i think? i updated the fonts,
styled lists, finished about &
credits pages, created the footer background, uhh some other stuff? i need
to decide on some final font
colors,
finish the enter page, and start on the toybox page. maybe do a favicon
and some other misc little
images/animations.
edit: actually, i thought i'd spend like 4 hours making a creepy marquee
mobile responsive
and x-browser compatible instead.
06.06.24
i started working on this website today. happy birthday louis!
