On Shrines

Written: 2025-08-10

New experience achieved!

Through my personal website exploration while working on V3 of this website, I came across shrines - page(s) about that webmaster's favourite thing(s).

From mainly images to mainly text, there was a wide range of format for those shrines. Some had a page about a very specific thing, like a character from a book, while others were essentially mini-sites covering from many angle a whole movie.

I've got to peruse "libraries" of books owned or read by the webmaster, walk among forests of interesting tit-bit about a variety of topics, gotten lost in rabbit holes about a piece of media I had absolutely no interest in (but was completely enthralled by the shrine). Every page had a little zing to them, glittering with pizzaz.

One thing was certain: the webmaster displaying the shrine either absolutely loved or was deeply interested (or both!) in the thing they made a shrine about!

There is something quite... intimate about going through someone's shrine(s), like peeking through a window of that person's soul, in a way. Learning more about them and how they express themselves.

Another interesting thing about shrines is how anti-commercial they are. There you get, for absolutely free, a bunch of information bundled together by a real person, displayed in a meaningful way and with clear intent: to showcase something important.

In a commercial viewpoint, shrines are an anti-thesis: instead of working on something that will bring you income, you spend time and effort on something to be freely accessible to anyone. The time spent to compile relevant information and put thoughts into coherent sentences. The effort into coding a page and placing elements in the right spot and with the proper formatting. Gathering (or even making) the assets and links to add alongside the text...

All this, and sometimes even more!

Because of your love, or admiration, or interest, for something and your need to share it with the world.

Truly a beautiful act~ keeping the web interesting.
Also, in a bit of a meta way... personal websites are as a whole some sorts of shrines of their own: about the webmasters themselves.

All of this to say... I've made my first ever shrine!

I'd been toying with the idea of making one for some time now, but always struggled to pick a specific thing or how I wanted to share things on a page. Like, I've recently revisited the Giscardpunk movement, but got overwhelmed when it came down to explaining it. Or thought of doing a deepdive into the animated movie Megamind and how it had no right being this good, but blanked when I started coding it.

So I sort of took advantage of the 32Bit Café 6th Code Jam to actually make the plunge. Even if it was badly made, even if I didn't manage to convey everything I wanted to do or in a good way, I made it my mission of publishing a shrine no matter what.

Well... I ran out of time. Some sections are missing, some are super bare, I hate the way I wrote some sentences (so many repetitions!), the formatting is fine I guess but not accessible on mobile (I forgot the @media), the CSS is such a mess, there are a bunch of placeholders because the pictures I meant to take haven't been snapped or because I scrapped the pixel arts, I'm missing so many links... I really scrambled the past few days to bring a "viable" version online, so I wouldn't miss the submission deadline.

So we have a... work-in-progress shrine? a sort of evolving shrine for the next few weeks as I scramble to finish and polish it? or maybe it will forever stay as is as I move on to a new shiny shrine to make. Only time will tell.

What I know is that... this was fun to do! I am not sure If I'll end up making more shrines in the future (even though I've made space for it), but I'm glad I can say I've tried something new this month!