BLOGPOST:
welcome to the new world!!!
2024.05.09
PHEW!!!!!!!! holy smokes. hi! okay! welcome to the new website!!! :D ain't that swell!
ill do the best i can at explaining all the new ins and outs of the site but i can't promise that my "i'm so ready to be done with this fucking project" won't seep into my writing. i'm also all juiced up on a vanilla latte with lavendar pumps from Ritual Coffeehouse, so this will be quite the battle ahead of me.
basically, i've been coding this site for like the last 2 months straight and, while the content of the site is mostly the same, everything is refined to be just a bit more accessible and fresh!
shoutouts to max for telling me about VSCodium which totally unleashed the hidden computer whatever major inside me haha.
general changes:
so, with the new way the website is laid out, i think it's finally mostly mobile friendly? it ain't perfect and if yr phone is smaller than the average iphone you might have to do some horizontal scrolling (my arch nemesis). but i wanted the site to be easy on the eyes if you're looking from a phone and not have the text be too impossibly small!
the website is far more gif heavy and animated which i love =) as an animator i want my website to feel like an interactive toon! while not MAXIMALIST by any means, i still want everything to have a nice texture about it.
TOONS:
the portal to watch cartoons is now far more expansive! the general style of the toons pages have fluid design and provide a more ideal viewing experience in my experience.
there are also some pages with custom layouts! such as the page for 00102_6 (love/poison) which returns to the sites original look since the toon was made with that website in mind. i also have a page where you can watch some toons i made as a kid which i stylized to look like my old youtube page to the best of my ability haha. sadly, i don't have the full background image i used for my youtube page u_u only what existed in some low quality screenshots. but, i made do!
the "MINOR TOONS" section of the page has been reformatted to be a link dump to my cartoons on dropbox. this makes the website easier for me to update regularly, so i don't have to make a whole individual page for smth if it isn't like a big important project to me! now i can just copy/paste a line of code and voila.
TUNES:
very proud of this one =) i very sloppily kind of not really learned some javascript and made a bandcamp style page for all my albums where you can listen to my records beginning to end online uninterupted! mostly, the look of these pages are pretty consistent, but for lemonade mouth 2, i recreated the look of my old bandcamp, complete with the banner and style and everything (mostly)! did the same for the page of i witness skeletons.
MORE:
the "more" page got a fucking GIGANTIC overhaul! after much delay... probably the biggest and most ambitious change of the website. i've always wanted to make the "more" page something really expansive and fun, and now it finally is!
NOTE: MUCH OF THE CONTENT OF THESE PAGES IS INCOMPLETE, BUT THE PRESENTATION OF THESE PAGES IS READY TO GO. HOPEFULLY THIS GIVES YOU AN IDEA OF WHAT TO EXPECT AS I GRADUALLY BUILD ON THESE PAGES OVER TIME <3
i don't wanna name all the things that are new, but i'll give a very basic breakdown of some of the most major ones:
this is my new MERCH PAGE!!!! =) sooooo excited about this. as of right now, i have not created any of the merch, i will probably get around to setting up all my merch over the summer!
another exciting incomplete page! you'll pick up on this pattern.
this page is meant to be an informational clickhole bible of any/all of my work that pertains to the expansive lore of THIS IS MY DISASTER. which includes lesbian dogwood stuff, fishbaby stuff, etc.
this is meant mostly to help myself flesh out and understand the expanses of neo kansas city, but will also probably act as a really fun little thing to peruse if you're as autistic as i am!
i love rambling about media. it's in my blood and it's unavoidable. this is a venue for doing so and is based on my blogspot of the same name!
my stints of writing about music and/or movies are very sporadic. the site is currently barren but i want to have the spot for posting this shit ready for whenever i get around to it.
this one is really fun!! over the years, i've accumulated quite the sizeable archive of videos i like on my dropbox. inspired by eternal family (the best streaming service), i made a rudimentary little streaming service looking page to browse it all at your leisure!
it isn't complete, and i still have a LOT of videos to add to it. i also wanna make a function to filter by genre. but i'm only one woman for cryin out loud! for now though, it's serviceable enough and i'm really happy to have a space to share at least some of my favorite videos with everyone!
final thoughts / what next?
yea! oh golly yea that's pretty much it. ^_^" thanks so much for reading! i hope you have lots of fun clicking around this joint.
aside from what i've already mentioned, the future of bentl and this website in the short term will be once again picking up work on DURT, preparing my line of merch, and preparing to update my patreon to include all sorts of other fun bonuses!
as you can probably gleen from everything, i'm leaning much more into "shilling out" than ever before haha. i used to stick pretty close to my punk values of not making art with the aim of making money off it. i still do value that, but i've certainly drifted away from practicing that in the last year or so.
so, what happened bentl?? well... living independently happened i guess hahaha!
working a 40 hour shit job and trying to make art on the side was an impossible venture for my over-extenting autistic burnout ass. on a practical level, i need to be making money off this shit in order to continue making this shit, that's just the unfortunate truth. a general life thing i've learned is that i need to "pace myself" as to not suffer a psychotic break, and sadly pacing myself means the things that don't help me pay rent and survive will HAVE to take a backseat. and what is a bentl if not for a furiously determined artist? not a bentl at all!
this tangent is mostly for my own self justification i'm sure, but i do value authenticity and pure unfiltered expression a lot and i worry that a lot of that can get obfuscated when money is involved. but god dammit if i don't gotta do what i can to survive and stay happy in this cold capitalist world.
anyways, take care all! much love from the faggot in the windy city <3
- dd bentl
2024.05.09