This website in spirit first existed as “The Thirteenth Mystical Dark Relm: which is a nicer place than the name would imply,” a long title that I found mildly humorous at the time. I was early in my high school years and eager to put some of art online, primarily to contribute to the Final Fantasy VII fan community. I quickly grew to hate the website design and when Cox (my internet provider) switched to new servers, I simply let the site die.

Later in high school I missed having a website and had some new art I deemed slightly less crappy that I wanted to put online. I also wanted to encourage myself to finish some fanfiction and I thought having my own website to host it on might finally give me the kick I needed to get into gear. However, I had a lot of schoolwork to do as well as college applications. I also had a boyfriend that took me out relatively frequently on nights I would have normally spent alone on my computer. All these factors meant nothing got done until after my senior year was finished.

By the end of my senior year, I was accepted into UCSD and untimely dumped by my boyfriend of one year. I had a sudden increase in free time. I also had more drive to get my website done, because I have a tendency to turn negative feelings into creativity. And let me tell you, I had a lot of extra “creativity” to go around that summer.

This all led me to the creation of “Dark Corner,” an idea conceived on June 30, 2002 and placed online July 13, 2002. I chose the title “Dark Corner” because what I was creating was a little space for myself in the back of the vast complex that is the internet. Most likely to go unnoticed, my dark corner would have things I thought were interesting or important. I used ivy in my layout because I like the way ivy crawls in and out of dark places searching for a way to climb. I also find ivy, and much of nature, very calming and I wanted my website to be something I liked to visit.

The original ivy layout was made on my old laptop, with an 800 x 600 screen resolution. When I visited my website on other computers with higher screen resolutions, I didn’t initially mind the size because I like to keep my windows smaller and I only full screen when I absolutely have to. But eventually the ugly tiling of my ivy background annoyed me too much, and I deemed the site needed changing. In addition to this, I had a 1000th visitor art picture to draw and I had a very difficult time drawing something I deemed worthy of the picture idea requested. For me, this meant I did not want to update again until I could deliver the drawing I owed to my 1000th visitor. And when I did update, I wanted to unveil a new layout.

I did eventually finish my 1000th visitor picture, but I only have a picture taken from my camera of the drawing, not a scan. I ended up charcoaling the piece and I still haven’t bothered to experiment with covering my scanner so the charcoal hasn’t been scanned (at the time I wrote this sentence at least). I sent my 1000th visitor the camera picture and he was satisfied.

Next I proceeded to work on the new layout. I tried to do something with ivy again, but became frustrated with the tiling problem. Nothing was solved for a whole year, and then at the beginning of my second year of college, my roommate convinced me to try out for student council as webmaster. I somehow bullshitted my way into the position (I had no real motives or ideas for improvement, but oh did I ever come up with them quickly when asked). That killed a year’s worth of my time, but I learned a lot of stuff, like how to best fight with cascading style sheets, along the way.

The old council liked me, but a certain individual had a big problem with me and he managed to swindle his way into becoming president for next year. The political clique began to take real shape and I was kicked out of council when reappointments came around again. I was pissed because I took a lot of shit for those people, and if you saw how crappy the old website was in terms of updates and content, you’d know what I was talking about. Feeling betrayed for the way the appointments happened (someone already on council got my slot so not even a new person could have a stab at the political scene) and feeling grossly unappreciated for the work I put into that council, I decided @%$& it, I’m going to work on my own damn website for a change.

The new layout was born out of this frustration. I decided to ditch the ivy idea as it would be too difficult to tile without the help of a program. My surprisingly legal version of Photoshop is older and doesn’t have the tiling tools I’ve heard the newer ones possess.

In an effort to keep things interesting, I switched the layout over to dragons. They’re quick for me to sketch so I had my images in no time. I wanted some nature in it so I threw some odd branches into the mix. For easy maintenance, I made a repeating image for the middle of the link menu. Now I can have as many links as I want and the menu will conform to the amount of text in it. The layout works at pretty much all resolutions, although I will admit it looks a bit empty at higher resolutions. I may fix this later… but for now I am happy enough.