Pearlnight's Lair: Annales

Lair updates, 24 October 2026

2026-10-24T00:00:00Z

Say hello, baby, to Club 991! This is a miniature fan site for none other than J.P. Richardson, also known as the Big Bopper, of Chantilly Lace fame. This project started in early August and consumed much of my summer, and I'm so pleased to release it on what other day than his 96th birthday. So I'd like to issue a happy heavenly birthday to J.P. over here. And hopefully you all get to see a side of me that I haven't quite shown you before. We got scans, we got high quality scans, we got transcripts, we got a whole story, we've got footnotes, and we've got an essay, and all manner of fact-checking. So hopefully I'm going to do him justice with this little thing. I plan to open some kind of fanlisting soon, though, as I am hosting this on Neocities, it's going to be a little bit more hands-on and manual than the ones that use databases. Certainly not PHP, given, well, don't we all know?

We've also got some other news as well. While I very much adore ASCII art, it is quite time-intensive and does not always scale well, regardless of how much CSS trickery you do. As well as this, I have to manually recreate the same character over and over again. While it's a work process that I don't find bad, it's quite time-consuming, it's quite meticulous, and in turn, I have decided to finally confront a long-running creative gap in my portfolio, which is 3D modeling. So using the power of asking Claude to help me, because Jesus Christ, Blender is an absolute labyrinth to navigate, I have actually gone on ahead and created my first ever 3D models. Now, what you don't see are the high-poly prototypes before this, which I initially attempted before realizing that retopology was going to cause a murder-suicide. So instead, I have turned to something a bit closer to my actual philosophy, which is keep it simple, stupid. So here you can see some low-poly models of my characters, ranging from my gargoyle that you all know, to several other designs, some of which actually originate from designs I created as a kid. These will be coming out whenever. Some may take a bit longer than others, as I'm still learning how to rig and do some of the more technical sides of this. But I am pleased to say that it has been a very fun and rewarding process, and Astro is delighted to see my characters in the third plane. They'll get many silly little outfits and poses and whatnots, and as much as I'm going to miss the ASCII art as the predominant aesthetic, you can still go ahead and find it over in the Sylva page, alongside a lot of the other one-time projects and archives. Now, note that with these models, these are primarily for my own amusement. Naturally, as I do not take commissions, I will remind you that I will not take commissions for these models. A lot of this is just being able to say that they exist and show them off. Astro really wants me to consider making a game later down the line, but we'll have to see about that. We still got the Inform 7 version of Foxtrot to finish up, which has been thrown pretty off course by the Big Bopper obsession. Got so bad it made me up my Zoloft.

Lair updates, 17 October 2026

2026-10-17T00:00:00Z

The Outgoing page is gone. The 88x31 button and linking policy now live in Link Back on the Main Page.
Did You Know on the Main Page now serves up vampire facts, each one from a book in the Vampire Library.
The Bestiary, the Haunted House, the Aquarium, the ghost and the Ex Libris bookplate now all live together in the ASCII Gallery, and the Sylva is sorted into code templates, galleries, lists and essays.
The entrance page is gone. The Main Page is now the front door, and the notices that used to greet you there live on as Disclaimers, linked at the bottom of every page.
The Settings page and its two reading fonts are retired. Courier Prime still takes over if your device asks for more contrast.
The Dancing with the Dead advert on the Main Page is lit up like a theatre sign.

Lair updates, 16 October 2026

2026-10-16T00:00:00Z

Recounted the statistics in every Vampire Library book's box. They now update themselves whenever a text changes.
The search boxes on the Vampire Library work again.
Contact now has footnotes, with sources for what I say about each platform.
The Lair is now built with Eleventy, so the menus live in one place instead of being copied onto every page.
Search is quicker. It no longer reads every page each time you look something up, and the best matches come first.
Two new pieces in the ASCII Gallery, rescued from the dead-end pages that used to guard my folders.
A new page for dead links, explaining where pages go when they die.

Lair updates, 6 October 2026

2026-10-06T00:00:00Z

New art on the Main Page logo, a new dagger of § and pilcrows in the sidebar (pixel or smooth, in Settings), and a casket for the 88x31 button over on Outgoing.

Lair updates, 5 October 2026

2026-10-05T00:00:00Z

A new scrolling logo on the Main Page, and an 88x31 button for linking back, over on Outgoing.
The Contents now lives at the bottom of Help.
New Contact page, with who I want around. A few FAQ answers moved to the entrance page.
New fonts all round. Page titles are now in SF Gothican, section headings in Amarante, and subheadings and the sidebar in Spectral. Labels use Josefin Sans. Body text stays Special Gothic, and dates, numbers and small print are in the ModernDOS terminal font.
New Settings page. You can switch the reading font to Atkinson Hyperlegible or OpenDyslexic, and show or hide sidenotes. If your device asks for more contrast, every page switches to Courier Prime by itself.
The whole Lair is black and white now, framed in double rules with an asterisk at each corner.
The sidebar is now two lists, Main Pages and Projects, like a proper wiki. New Contents, Help and Outgoing pages, plus a Random Article link.
"What links here" now works without JavaScript.
Numbered sidenotes in the margin, or under the text on phones.
Bookmarks overhauled: descriptions trimmed, dead links show their archive year, duplicates merged, everything alphabetised, and the Fanlistings cut down to vampires only.
The Florilegium and Glossary are set like old books now. The Concordance is retired; its definitions live at the end of the Glossary under Site Terms.

Lair updates, 16 September 2026

2026-09-16T00:00:00Z

Searchbar now functions!
Glossary fitted with new quotations and formatting.
Fonts are still being chosen.
My Dungeon Keeper 2 shrine has been dissolved into the rest of this site. The guides and Usenet archives are now over here.