03 Aug 2026 - digitalily

At some point last year, not more than a few weeks prior to Gen Con 2025, a friend posed the question (paraphrasing) 'do we want to try going to Gen Con even though it is imminent?' And we definitely tried, but the exorbitant hotel cost, lack of hotel space nearby in general, and dubious ideas of transportation meant that it wasn't to be, almost certainly for the better. This year however, with others also interested, we chose one day to attend the con, booked an AirBnB a couple months in advance, and after a bit of a whirlwind of a couple days, have successfully completed Gen Con 2026 with an eye for a full Gen Con 2027 weekend.

01 Jul 2026 - digitalily

I originally encountered Higurashi no Naku Koro ni via some late 00's anime recommendation image. I remember being generally aware that this thing existed, and I ultimately went into the 2006 Studio DEEN adaptation not really knowing all that much about it. As someone who is really not a big horror fan (especially back then), little did I know that I would soon be up at 3:30 AM terrified of the view outside my window onto the street because I just watched the end of the Onikakushi arc and was half expecting someone to be standing out there saying "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry...". Looking back, there's a lot to be desired in the presentation in the DEEN adaptation, but it's hard to say that it didn't succeed in conveying at least some of the VN's stellar atmosphere. I'm not here to discuss that, however. While there are a few things I'd like to write on Higurashi at some point, for now I just wanted to focus on one little part of it that I wasn't quite aware of until having finished the original VNs, something which had been put off for far too long.

26 Jun 2026 - digitalily

Among the minor things that I think enhance a website are images and how they're handled. Well, images in general obviously enhance a page, but it's the surrounding bits I'd been a bit concerned about. I have been using embedded images mainly in blog posts and in song/game pages, and while you could always right click to open in a new tab, it isn't a great experience, and is possibly annoying on mobile (which always finds its way into design decisions). And speaking of mobile, because of the area limitation many images would be way too small anyway, so something was needed.

Originally the thought was to just wrap the images in <a> tags, with to make them clickable and pop-up in a new tab, and while that functioned, it caused some friction with the css I use mainly for blog images to align them to one side or the other. I'm also not a huge fan of the extra browser tabs on my phone, and even on desktop it just doesn't feel like a great solution. I knew many websites had in-page viewers that expanded the image, included a bit of information about them, and allowed navigation, so I did some googling around and came across a javascript library called glightbox which does all these things. I was thinking of a way to roll my own solution, but having an open source library that works well (and in ways I don't yet even realize yet) is pretty great.

22 Jun 2026 - digitalily

Tomoe is a character whose design I saw and went 'you are going to be the favorite character,' and things sort of went from there. With her 2nd ascension in particular, I appreciated that in terms of design, while it was definitely embellished as all things in Fate especially are, it felt much more restrained. It invokes 'samurai' very well, without leaning too far into (or really at all) fanservice, and is also visually striking in terms of the colors. It wasn't until some friends were discussing a group Fate cosplay that wheels started turning about potentially cosplaying her (and woops I missed it for the year we actually 'did' that), but once I started thinking about it things started flowing.

15 Jun 2026 - digitalily

I would like to begin by stating that I am not a UX designer. I did technically take a very phoned in UI design course in college, but it was only dubiously useful and mostly boiled down to 'talk with the client.' Which, all things considered is a really good piece of advice, but also is something that clearly a lot of large tech companies seem to stomp all over in favor of their own ideas of streamlined, or worse, maximizing dark patterns. Fortunately on this website, the stakes are a lot lower, and it mostly comes down to my own preference in combination with the degree to which I want to go. Starting from a fairly basic starting layout and being a static website with limited javascript at the moment means larger changes are simpler (except when confusing css is involved), but how exactly I achieve my goals can be a bit constrained. Here, we'll be talking a bit about what I call the horizontal navigation bar.

12 Jun 2026 - digitalily

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