Ultimate Deployment | Part 2

Well met again, fellow tribesmen and web scrapers. I’m pleased to announce that the restructuring of our back end has completed—for the most part—and all services are operational again. Naturally, some minor issues will still have to be “ironed out” in the coming weeks, but I’d put our overall readiness at 85%.

Your Questions Answered (Again)

1. Why’s everything so blue now?

I was in the mood for blue.

2. Whatever happened to the contact form?

It was scrapped. There are two reasons for this: first, over the lifetime of the old site, not a single legitimate email arrived via the contact form. On the contrary, the form was under constant siege by bots “from the Far East”, and even with a Cloudflare Turnstile in place keeping the inbox clean proved to be a challenge.

Second, the addition of a contact form would—at least in most common setups—have an email server as a prerequisite. Running an email server is its own can of worms, however, and if the spam flood from the old site can be taken as a coarse reference point, the maintenance overhead seems to outweigh the minuscule gains in user convenience.

Yet nothing is set in stone, and we’ll always have the option to add back the contact form, should the need become apparent.

3. And what is that visual atrocity in the lore section?

Well, I decided to change things up a bit. So all on-page atrocities are planned and accounted for. As for the memories subsection, you have our twisted Dr. Kramer to thank for. I actually tried my best to expunge these falsities once and for all, but he somehow outplayed me again …

4. Why does page [ XYZ ] look so garbled on my phone / tablet / PC?

Cross-platform compatibility is still being worked on. Expect to see gradual improvements in the UI’s adaptiveness / flexibility in the coming month. Full coverage of all handheld devices can’t be guaranteed, unfortunately.

Conclusion

There’s not much more to add at this point, though I guess this special occasion calls for a special book quote. So, in order to properly commemorate the establishment of our new home, I shall leave you with a passage from William Gibson’s Neuromancer:

He closed his eyes.

Found the ridged face of the power stud.

And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiling in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like film compiled from random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information.

Please, he prayed, now—

A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky.

Now—

Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding—

And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems, forever beyond his reach.

And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.

— Case, upon regaining his abilities as a console cowboy (Neuromancer, chapter 3)