09/26/2025, 1:11 PM

ONE YEAR OF MOTSDRAMA

(and a remainder of 16 days)

some of you fine folks out there might already know this, but i started motsdrama as a project for my college Web Development class, initially using it as a testing grounds for any new techniques or skills i had learned. it quickly spiraled out of control though, and it ended up as its own thing entirely. and as of September 10th, 2025, it's been an entire year since i began hosting the site on neocities, which is insane to think about. (also yes, i know i'm quite late to this anniversary update... life has been, let's just say, chaotic as of recent) so for the occasion, i'd like to give some behind-the-scenes insight into some aspects of the site. think of this sort of like a developer commentary, however pretentious that may sound. so let's get started with something any developer commentary is incomplete without: Prerelease Details!

yeah, i know i just said the site launched on September 10th, 2024, but that's specifically on neocities. there's actually an earlier incarnation of the site that i hosted on a service called webhostingforstudents, which was the hosting service provided by my school. well... not provided, it was actually something the students had to pay for out of pocket. yeah, as if paying 800 dollars for a course isn't enough, you had to spend an additional 50 dollars to get a year of webhostingforstudents. and in the end i still didn't even bother with that for more than a month, i migrated motsdrama to here, of course, and put all of my assignments on github. 50 dollars well spent, i guess. at the very least i did get some use out of my WHFS purchase, as it's what i currently use to host the polls on this site. from what i can gather, if your neocities account is too new, you can't use external scripts directly in your site, such as what's used to make PollCode work. that's locked behind becoming a supporter, unless your account is old enough, in which case you're able to use external scripts just fine, since it was a feature available to everyone when that account was made. as a very broke college student i'm trying to avoid spending money whenever possible, (i say that but i'm totally willing to spend 26 bucks on an objectively bad PS1 double pack of Final Fantasy V and VI...) so i came up with a workaround. i created an html page on my WHFS filesystem that contained the html for PollCode, then used an iframe here on neocities to put that pollcode window into the site. if you've ever wondered why the poll window acts so strangely when you try to view the results of the poll, that's why! it's certainly not elegant, and i'm sure there's definitely a better solution out there, but like... if it works, it works, right?

speaking of the WHFS incarnation of the site, that version had a completely different look to it. and i'm not just talking about the layout, i mean the entire CSS file got rewritten at a certain point. unfortunately i don't have access to the original files for when the site looked that way, however i do have some screenshots from back then!



as you can see here, the old look of the site used to more closely resemble how the Diet Building appears in SMT:Nocturne. i had really liked the idea of the site "taking place" inside the Diet Building, specifically the room where you fight Mot, and i actually took the picture for the background myself using some emulator features to try and get rid of the hud. in the end i wasn't able to get rid of them entirely, so i ended up just cropping the image. when i implemented the background i did really like how it looked, but i wasn't a huge fan of the old, gray textboxes on the golden background. so i changed the textboxes to be golden! but then THAT didn't look right either. i knew i wanted to make the site be themed to SMT:Nocturne in terms of its aesthetic, so my next idea was to try and replicate the look of the textboxes from that game, which have remained that way to this day. i know they're not exactly on point, but it was hard to replicate them perfectly, since the Nocturne textboxes have a very nebulous look to them... so i tried my best to capture the spirit of them in a way that would work with what CSS knowledge i had at the time. i actually REALLY wanted to make the font the same as the original PS2 version as well, but no matter how much searching i do i can't find anyone who's correctly identified it. there's this one mod for the HD Remaster of Nocturne on GameBanana that's supposed to replace the font with the original one, and that uses Helvetica Neue. but that one isn't correct either!! the font used in the PS2 game has a more rounded look to the tips of each letter, and Helvetica Neue has sharp edges instead. it's an extremely minor detail, sure, but it bothers me enough that i don't want to use it. so for the longest time i used my go-to font that i like to use for everything, Georgia. it's classy, while still keeping a casual quality that i like. a lot of times in my head i'll read fonts with a certain voice, and Georgia always brought to mind Tim Rogers of Action Button fame, someone who has quite a flowery vocabulary and is very articulated with their words, while still having goofy moments where they go off on a random, unexpected, comedic tangent. (plus, Georgia is one of the universally supported fonts in most browsers, and i didn't know how to import custom fonts for a really long time...) while i do like the look of Georgia a LOT, i ultimately decided that it didn't really fit the voice of me, and i eventually opted to change things up. after researching how custom fonts work, i settled on Motherish, a font created by the fine folks at Curiomatic. it's meant to resemble the font used in EarthBound, though of course it's not limited by the resolution of the Super Nintendo. plus, i spent the money to buy the font, and damn if i wasn't gonna use it! if you know me on other parts of the internet, try and spot all the different places i use Motherish, it crops up pretty often in my other projects! font sidetangent aside, i liked how the Nocturne-esque textboxes looked a lot, but i wasn't a fan of how they looked on top of the golden Diet Building background. sure, i could have found another Nocturne locale to use, but i really wanted it to be the Diet Building. like, come on, that's where Mot is located, it's too perfect! i then got a way better idea: just hueshift the original picture to fit with the darker textboxes! after fiddling around with some filters in paint.net i finally settled on a purple palette, and it's been the same ever since.

next on the docket is something kind of small, but i thought it was still kind of interesting: where did the name motsdrama REALLY come from? of course, you can read up on the origin of the phrase in the scroll window to your left, but it actually goes a little deeper than that. if you're an observant peruser of the site, you might recognize the name Retro Computer Cavern. i want to do an entire Words entry dedicated to that site so i'll keep my explanation brief, but it was a forum made by a friend of mine meant to imitate message boards of the early to mid 2000s. the whole gimmick of the site was that you couldn't use a username you've used elsewhere, and it was generally encouraged to take on a different "persona," if you will. you really had to get into character and channel the energy of the time period, and it really captured me. of course, the username i chose was motsdrama, and this far predated even the idea of this site. RCC was started sometime around April of 2024, and this site began development that August. but a lot of my mannerisms and text quirks that you see here originated from me trying to get into character for RCC, and in the early days of the site the two were very closely intertwined. in fact, the Jumping Flash! let's play was originally posted and updated over there! unfortunately, RCC was shuttered a long time ago due to a lack of activity, but it still holds a very special place in my heart. if anyone from RCC is reading this, i hope you're doing well!

with that, i think it's about time to wrap this words entry up. working on this site has brought me a lot of joy in an otherwise very harrowing time in my life, and i'm forever thankful to those of you who check in every update. from the bottom of my heart, thank you. here's to many more years of MOTSDRAMA!