Like a giant beast stirring from slumber...
The oldest screencap resting on my harddrive has a date of 12/31/02 on it. And, unsurprisingly, it's the shot of Bakura and Yami Bakura from the first opening. Kokoro no Naka went online less than a month later. There are now over 30,000 files crammed into my YGO images folder, most of them screencaps and manga scans that I've made. And that's not even touching the video files ripped, the AMVs made and who knows what else lurking around on CDROMs and else where on my harddrives. But when KnN was still young, space was hard to get online. Images had to be shrunk down to fit the tiny free webhosts allowances, and then the seeming huge at the time 250 meg paid webspace. For a long while, it spanned over two web servers to try and get as much as possible out and online. Times have changed. The screencaps that looked so big and took so long to load back then look tiny now. The page I was once so proud of when it first went up is an utter jumble of “wait, how to I HTML” coding, the galleries were a mess that any attempt to try and clean up made worse. The fandom moved on to the sequel series, the forum filled up with spambots and old connections faded away. KnN shrunk back to a single host as allowances for webspace went up. Attempts to reorganize it came and went. I wasn't even sure if anyone was looking at the page any more outside my small group of friends, but I kept it up so that at least I could easily link people to what I was talking about when I started nattering on about this crazy show about card games and friendship that sucked out my brain and still held on despite finding better anime out there that I loved more. 10 years is a lot of time. And for many of you, this may sound like a speech given at the closing of the gates to shutter the past and let it fade away. But it's not. A friend showed me a link to a Tumblr post that was being forwarded around that was talking about KnN and how even though it hadn't updated in years, it was still a good resource and it floored me. Then I checked my web statistics and found out that people were indeed still coming to the page, quite a few spending hours on it and that floored me even more. People were still coming to the page. Even more were still hotlinking to the images. KnN was still relevant to people. Holy crap. So, according to my webhost, I'm using less than 3% of the space I can for everything I have stuffed into this webspace. 3% for all of the stuff I worried about not being able to fit up years ago. One of the things that has been bugging me for years about the site is the small images and the annoying way I set up the galleries, but it was always too much of a pain in the butt to redo. A previous attempt to do so had left the section in shambles. So on a whim, I decided to see if I could redo the HTML fast and easy like in a way that left is still very functional but took little time. Through the magic of spreadsheets and copy paste, I managed to recode the entire mess of Bakura galleries in an evening. With distractions. So, as is fitting from the birth of KnN, the first reborn area of KnN 2.0 is the Bakura galleries. Now with full sized images. For those with slower connections or hotlinking, don't worry, the old stuff is still there and is linked in on the new gallery index. And don't be alarmed when you notice that there are fewer pages listed. There's the same amount of images (possibly more. I'm not even sure right now,) there's just more per page. The next section likely to get added to is the Latest Episodes section which... needs a new title. But basically, since I'm still lazy and I numbered the AE arc screen caps differently, anything from ep 183 and on are going to be in those areas. With possibly an exception for part of 199. ;) As a note, the fanworks section has been removed. There are plenty resources for fanfic and fanart out there that will likely be linked to the links page once that gets overhauled. Authors and artists should have control over their work to take down and edit as they see fit, and hosting it here doesn't allow them to do that. KnN now also has a Twitter, #KokoroNoNakaYGO which I will be using for all the small, lazy updates. Or likely every update after this one. If you have any questions, things you wanna see, comments, random spamy glee or whatever, direct it that way! Happy 10 years a little early, guys. And thanks for everything! |