4/1/25

rip hmtl and also nano i guess

I came back at a hell of a time, huh?

I found out the other day that the Haunted MTL website will be shutting down. They're shifting to different types of content, so HMTL isn't completely shutting down.

I have mixed feelings. It definitely sucks, it was my first ever writing job, and the articles I wrote will presumably vanish. I do have hard copies saved, so they're not gone gone, but I'm not sure if I'd be allowed to post them myself elsewhere.

On the other, I haven't written for the site in years, and there were reasons for that.

Either way, it's a weird time. We'll see how the new Hautned Empty Hell pans out.

I'm still doing review content, just not here. I keep that stuff over on my book blog. I wasn't intending to do review stuff there, it just kinda happened. It was mostly meant to be an archive for liveblogs I posted over on Tumblr & Cohost. It felt a bit too informal to keep here, and also it was associated with my main account and not my Leather Snow account, which I was worried about, so I made a separate place for it. Then the review stuff started creeping in as I kept having Thoughts about books, and here we are.

Guess I'll have to take the HMTL link off my sidebar, huh? It's a good excuse to update to a static Javascript sidebar. I learned how to do that, btw. The Neocities Club on Tumblr shared a tutorial in their Discord that was super easy to follow, it made updating my other site 1000x easier.

Somehow, it took me so long to write this that Nanowrimo is shutting down too. Wheee?

The general reaction has been disappointed, but not surprised, and I can't help but agree. If there was any chance of them bouncing back from their financial issues I think the various scandals snuffed that out.

I owe a lot to Nano though. I met a lot of fun people, and I proved to myself that I can write longer works. Granted, I haven't really been able to do that again, and I've been chasing that high ever since, but that's neither here nor there.

Anyway. End of an era. Several eras.