By: Erin
Posted: January 16, 2024
There’s a comic I once saw on Tumblr of Persona 3 Portable protagonist Minako Arisato stumbling into Iwatodai Dorm, covered in blood and bruises. Her dorm-mates react in shock. One party member asks her what happened. Minako smirks.
“I won.”
She then collapses on the ground, triumphant.
It’s a hilarious comic. If I could find it right this second I would post it, because it’s exactly how I’m feeling right now. Yes, the EMN Programming Guide, the OTHER reason I started this dumb website in the first place, is finally complete! Every single programming lineup has at least a plot summary and poster attached, and some even have extra notes, too. No matter what month someone comes to my house, they’ll be able to see what’s on TV and get at least a little idea of what to expect. They can just pull up the website! It’s that easy!
This comes with some caveats, of course. EMN Most-Wanted is mostly just a list of movies organized into rough categories, because to be frank it’s more of a channel all about those categorical vibes. Some great stuff on that channel, though. And in full admittance, there are many descriptions that I just copied from TVDB, TheMovieDB, or Letterboxd. Everything on EMN One will always be my full writing, but I don’t think, for example, that I can write a better description of When Harry Met Sally… than has already been written. The final caveat is that of course these are done…but they’re done up to 2021-or-so (not counting the up-to-date main lineup). The horror channel has two more years of programming to add! Most lineups, however, are just full of a few gaps that must be filled in. I’m not really worried about that – the important thing is building this foundation we can then create on top of, and finally those bricks have been laid and that cement has set!
On top of that, as visitors to the site have already realized, there’s a new Guestbook page! I’m not fond of comments sections, but I do think that having an on-site place for people to weigh in on things they like or just to say hi certainly won’t go amiss, right? The whole thing runs on a wonderful modified code by Ayano that you can check out and install yourself here. It’s wonderful stuff.
So, wow. It’s sinking in that I’ve finally finished the first wave of everything I wanted the website to be. Me being me, I always have to ask myself What’s Next?
Well, filling in the gaps in the programming guide will be a priority, but I’m sure you’ll forgive me if I take a bit to do that, especially since I have to go through the file lists and note everything that isn’t there on each particular lineup…but other than that, I have a secret extra page I’m working on for fun, I’d like to finally create that hardware/software page and basic EMN unit tutorial, and I’m going to work on converting the Archives and Links pages to Eleventy, and I’ll be working on getting some of the promised archived sites to a presentable format. If anything I’m glad it took this long, because now at least I have a little more know-how and can get some of these to consistently use internal links. Web design in the early-00s, people! None of us knew what we were doing!
On top of all that, well, I’d like to work on more articles. I’m really proud of my latest site feature, an article about Brodie Lee, Katawa Shoujo, and the tiny ripples we make, and while future articles I have planned are nowhere near as contemplative, I still have fun making them and want to make more. I’ve had some VHS Rips uploaded on my Archive.org account for ages and am sitting on a stockpile of videos I’d love to talk about, or at least take pictures of and show off in a gallery. Sheesh.
For now, however, I’m going to take a lap. I like to think I’ve earned it. Check out the new cool stuff, stay safe in this cold winter weather (or hot weather, if you’re Australian), mask up, get some sleep, drink plenty of tea, and always stay creating weird niche art.
See you next update!