Obligatory "yes I am still alive" message.

Just be warned that disappearances like that might happen more often, with how my life has been going. Chronically.

Long story short, I developed horrible fatigue symptoms post-Covid that reached their peak in August and started getting better by the end of September.

There's also always my chronic depression, CPTSD and ADHD throwing a wrench in my creative systems. While I didn't suffer from it in my youth when I was already depressed, I seem to have developed anhedonia in my adulthood that can kill my creative spirits for months on end.

That sucks more than I can probably convey with words. Art had always been my everyday joy, a balancing technique for my thoughts and emotions to keep me grounded, but also a pure expression of my spirit. I couldn't go a day without scribbling or sketching something. Those days just seem to be gone and I'm not sure what it means.

But whatever it is, I still love art, even if my ability to engage in it has shrunk.

Please bear with me as this project continues slowly.

I also totally missed my website's birthday on August 21st. Happy first birthday, Lair of Visions!!!

- Lexington

Happy 2 years on T to me!

I'm still late to my shot, still got covid, etc.

But today's update are 5 new pieces of art added to the current decade gallery, as well as new thumbnails added to the gallery of the 2010s.

I still haven't created the webpages for the newly added 2010s artwork, so clicking on them won't lead anywhere as of now.

But I'm working on it! Glad to have done a little bit of progress.

- Lexington

I really haven't been able to work a lot on my website as of late.

Commissions have been closed since March, and I will re-open them once I finish the last one on my backlog.

I just came back from an amazing vacation with some of my dearest furry friends in Portugal. I'm endlessly grateful that I got to meet those wonderful people in person for the first time.

Sadly I returned with covid, and due to that I haven't been able to get my T-shot as scheduled, so my mental health has been spiralling down for a bit, along with the post-vacation blues of having to see one of the best weeks of my life come to its end.

Today I'm just glad that I remembered to update my website with the index file, because I'm sure that the March update didn't even go live. Whoops! (Okay nevermind, it DID go live. But for some reason it still has the broken web counter...? The hell did I do there?)

I'll be okay in time, just need to stabilize myself, and then I'll be back to business.

I'm just still absolutely overwhelmed about how wonderful the time in Portugal was. And how someone as broken as me can have such tremendously joyful times with stardust spirits as shining as my friends are.

I love my life, as hard as it gets sometimes. I love it more than ever before.

- Lexington

Work on the site has been slow and occasional.

First of all, I have decided to move away from Ko-Fi, so that's what I have been doing on the back-end of the site; Preparing new pages to host my NSFW content and updating the way I take orders.

That means that I have quite some work ahead of me in terms of re-compiling my Terms of Service and fleshing out the rules.

Building the galleries is a ton of work still, but I guess I have approximated the style that I wanted it to have, as inspired by an artist I've been following since my childhood.

So yeah, I'm still alive and kicking, I've just been busy as all heck and life always has its ups and downs to it. Also I keep pivoting in-between projects as my ADHD demands it. But it's also good to come back to things with fresh eyes after a break.

- Lexington

Before this year ends, here are some updates!

I got my Ko-Fi republished. I've been pondering various options to hop off of it again though, as using Ko-Fi disallows me from using my personal website to post my own NSFW artwork. Which is very anithetical to what I've been wishing this website to be, one place for all of my art - and not only a portion of it.

On a different note, my domain has been successfully moved and connected to Neocities! Hooraaay! This webpage is now available as transgriffin.com :D

I've been rather sluggish and tired in the past weeks, so I haven't done a lot of stuff on the page itself. Hopefully I'll return to work on it soon, coming the new year!

Before I forget, my commissions are currently closed because I have some fundraiser rewards to draw. I'll keep everyone updated as soon as I re-open!

Thank you for coming on this journey with me.

- Lexington

My Ko-Fi got unpublished... Whoooops.

Honestly I don't know what the NSFW tag is for in Ko-Fi anymore? I went and read their conditions for NSFW content and I'm compliant with them, buuuut it turns out that they don't allow nudity (not even censored) nor sexual content in uploaded drawings. It's so weird to me.

Oh yeah and I discovered an extra caveat: Pages that are linked on Ko-Fi also may not contain any mature content. Huh. So... Looks like I'll have to re-structure my website a bit. Because mature artwork is what I do, and I was certainly not expecting the content of my website to get policed in any way, shape, or form.

I guess I didn't read the terms of Ko-Fi thoroughly enough to begin with, so it's obviously my fault. But I'm gonna find ways to make things work.

So I have removed my NSFW example drawings from Ko-Fi and appealed to be re-published. That could take up to 7 days.

Am I still allowed to offer NSFW commissions on Ko-Fi? I think so. Nothing happened when I just had the black square warning image up. I guess they just don't want to be hosting porn files.

In any case, I will be back, my business is still open, and I just got some tweaking to do. I've removed the Mature section from the Artwork tab for now.

- Lexington

✨My Ko-Fi is open✨

And I already got my first customer? Oh wow this is so exciting!

I will continue working on filling this webpage with content, I'm caught up with the SFW of the current decade now, hopefully I'll soon have some time to dedicate myself to the past decades.

It's honestly exciting to realize that I've finally taken the steps to open a small business with my art. It's been a lifelong dream, and now it kinda just crept up on me and fulfilled itself?

Yeah, I am absolutely happy!

- Lexington

Okay, I've been able to resolve my Neocities issues and restore the links inside all pages. A simple slash before the html filename allows me to redirect to files in the home folder, even if the page currently viewed is stored in a nested folder. Hooray! Oh yeah and my headache with file management is sort of resolved as well: I simply drag-and-drop any file I need to update, and it will overwrite the existing ones. I'm glad that I put the individual pages for the artwork inside a separate folder. That way I can just delete the whole folder if needed.

I have also started the process of moving my transgriffin.com domain from Wix to a new provider, so I'll soon be able to use it for this website.

I also did some further tweaking to the Artwork page. I still need to populate it with my older works and my NSFW works. Oh yeah, and I've added a "Back to Gallery" button to all existing individual art pages to help with a smooth experience.

Page loading times are also looking fine.

I think that I might definitely open up commissions on December 4th!

- Lexington

Wow, I've encountered a major headache when trying to sort all of my offline-created website files into Neocities.

First, I tried mirroring my files using Cyberduck, but it regularly skipped over entire folders when syncing, and then it duplicated every file with spaces in its name and added "%20" to every space. Which is, begrudgingly, all my fault, but going back to fix it all would take me way too much time.

Well, I went back and deleted all the copies and decided, okay, maybe I'll just try to use Cyberduck to download the website as it is. It failed.

So I downloaded Mountainduck to try and mount my Neocities site as a filedrive on my PC. It didn't give me a trial period at all, went straight to asking me for money. Uh, no. Not for a program that I can't be even sure will work for me.

Thing is, managing files inside Neocities is TEDIOUS. I can't select multiple files at once to delete, the editor is fucking broken (when selecting a spot in a text, it doesn't actually edit where you selected, but will randomly start editing multiple characters forward???)

I also ran into a bigger issue when I realized that having index.html in the Neocities root folder is compulsive, and there is no way to tell the thing to find the homepage inside a /home folder. Which was how I had engineered this whole shebang.

So I had to move my structure around, get rid of the /home subfolder, go back into my 45+ individual html files and delete every instance of "/home/" from them all. Thankfully, Visual Studio exists and comes with a tool that allows you to find and replace across multiple files at once. THANK YOU, VISUAL STUDIO.

Man, but the past two days I've been doing nothing but fighting WebDAV programs and the file management and editing tools in Neocities, having to re-do things over and over.

Are we there yet? Hopefully. I still need to do some testing, expecially since Neocities takes a while to actually update the files I've edited within it.

Struggles and hassles aside, I had a great time streaming topless to the Clowder Community today. It was quite the confidence booster!

Tomorrow, I'll have work, so I expect the opening of commissions to be delayed a few days. Maybe I'll open on Monday, December 4th.

See you there soon!

- Lexington

So, in a bit of an unexpected turn of things, I have decided to speedrun the creation of my Ko-Fi page, because... I have officially registered as a small business from December 1st, 2023 on forward!

I had not been working on this webpage since the beginning of September, since I got pretty sidetracked trying to catch up with various responsibilities, such as my own mental health, job hunting, and other stuff.

But as of today, I can finally look back to where the thicker portion of this year started, and joyfully say that, yes, I have come extremely far. Oh I feel so good in my skin now, half a year after top surgery. My name change stuff is also dealt with. Well, 98% dealt with.

But hell yes, I've got things going for me. So today, I dedicated another bit of time to my website.

Hopefully it'll all be functional enough soon.

At least I've finished the first gallery section today, that is, Refined SFW 2020-2029!

- Lexington

I've been scrambling my brain trying to find a nice way to handle the image galleries. Call me paranoid but the most simple version which sent people to a _blank target, AKA an image-only page, allowed anyone to simply download the image. In full resolution. Needless to say I wasn't comfortable with that.

Also, that plan did not allow me to write image descriptions and display them in a nice way. They were hidden within the tooltip upon hover, which was quite jarring.

So I sorta haphazardly decided to make dedicated html pages for every individual drawing.

Is it a pain in the ass? Oh shit yes.

Does it look nice and allow me to avoid JavaScript and other things that might slow my webpage down? ... I hope it doesn't slow the page down lmao, I don't know if it will... But it looks nice tho...

I also still have no plan on how to make my galleries mobile-friendly but I honestly don't know if I care. :3

- Lexington

Well, hello! After being a stubborn little donkey for a handful of... Days? (It feels like months when you're hyperfocused, tbh) I have finally given in to modern CSS methods and decided to re-build everything from scratch using CSS grid.

My. Sweet. Honey-drenched. Dragonballs. This is so intuitive. This makes so much sense. This just... Works. And it's so damn easy to understand as well?!

Wow, I was really doing myself a disservice by being so knuckle-headed about using float properties.

But hey, it wasn't worthless, right? I learned a few valuable things about float properties, had moments of pride when I got the code to bend to my will, and I got the basic layout and color scheme figured out.

Now it's just a matter of carrying these changes over to CSS Grid, which honestly is a walk in the park. It's so pleasant - The code is much, much cleaner and incredibly straightforward to understand.

Hey, with all the things that I hate about the current decade and how it's been detrimental to the internet as a whole, this modern CSS power really is something good about coding websites in 2023.

A dear friend of mine went through both instances of the Lair of Visions yesterday while screensharing and they made me blush a lot. Really made me feel proud about what I'm doing here.

And I really am expressing myself significantly more freely here than I ever dared on Wix or Jimdo. Idk why, there's something really satisfying and assuring about writing your own code. I really do feel like a web "master" now.

So here we go, CSS grid! All hail the mighty grid!

- Lexington

I am proud to say that I'm making substantial progress in the creation of this website!

Just yesterday there was nothing but the homepage here, and now I am starting to fill the subpages with content.

I am very pleased with the design side of things, even if I'm still struggling with mobile-friendliness, but I digress.

Today I carried over the "About" page from my Wix website, and just for fun I decided to add a little more to it in the form of fun facts. I'm really starting to express myself here, and the gallery isn't even made yet.

Speaking of galleries; it makes me quite happy that I've been able to bring my original vision to HTML with collapsible menus. That's precisely what I wanted from the beginning - and the best part is, this whole website isn't using even a single line of JavaScript. It loads like a charm.

I'm a little bit anxious about how I'm going to fill the gallery portion with images, not to speak of image descriptions. Should I create individual pages for each drawing? Should I go and use a JavaScript lightbox? I don't know, but I'll find out soon!

I'm pondering the addition of a photography page as well - it will be a ton of work, so I'm writing it down right here for the time when I've got my galleries figured out.

This website project provides me some much-needed focus and creative fun, it's been a really rewarding challenge so far.

See you on the next update!

- Lexington

Welcome to the *new* new Lair of Visions!

So merely two months after I paid for a year of "Premium" for my Wix website, I discovered Neocities thanks to some cool people on Tumblr.

I immediately felt a jolt of joy tugging at the strings of my childhood heart. Handmade, personal HTML websites in 2023? Oh hell yeah!

I used to dabble in HTML4 back in the days and built a website for my worldbuilding shenanigans as a school project when I was 15 years old.

The website was never really finished, but neither was the worldbuilding. Still, writing lines in HTML and seeing them do their magic in the browser gave me an immense feeling of pride. I could design this any way I wanted.

To be honest, after wrestling around with Wix and Jimdo in the recent years, constantly aching over how expensive they are and how limited my options for layouts were (unless I wanted to live with a webpage that took 10 minutes to load...), man, I've grown really dissatisfied with modern solutions. And everything just keeps screaming at you to join the white-knuckle competition for attention on web search engines.

That ain't fun.

And I also don't want to be walking around on eggshells when hosting NSFW artwork on my personal website. *cough*

Neocities smells like freedom, like the early 2000's - but with the new capabilities of the 2020's. I'm back to the HTML shenanigans, and this time I'm also learning to use CSS.

It's exciting!

And the pricing for the "premium" option on Neocities is... Reasonable? Holy shit, reasonable pricing for a webspace where I can toy around, play like a child and express myself like nobody's watching.

Yes, please, and thank you.

- Lexington

I've been fighting really hard to get this layout coded the right way. I'm currently ill and my head is spinning, but I am dead-set on getting this done correctly.

It has been quite a rocky road, just getting the sidebar to function properly. But have you seen it?! I DID IT!!! Y'all, it works!

My sweet Satan, I can finally start filling this homepage with content. That's so exciting! I can't wait to see where this goes as I fiddle with new CSS properties previously unknown to me.

Hey, CSS can auto-generate styled buttons for me so I don't have to place graphics everywhere. Isn't that cool?! And they can even have drop shadows!

I wanted to try and use the transform:translate properties to make the buttons move to the side upon hovering, but currently that seems to override the transform:skew property of the navbar buttons.

Nonetheless, I'm so glad to have reached this point. I was really close to giving up and cheating my way around to make the sidebar appear flush with the footer by just using a background fill.

I'm really proud. I've reached a significant milestone that will ensure the future of this project.

Now, making this website mobile-friendly is probably going to be one of the larger issues to tackle.

So enjoy the Lair of Visions on your PC for now.

- Lexington