This site is the product of many hours of laborous typing, scanning, and editing, and I regret none of it. Of course, it helps that I never put too much of said effort into the site in any one shot, though there've been a few 8-hour sessions working on the site, and always a pile of time involved in converting layouts, so the time does add up. The site's name, Artistic Genius came up a while ago, and reflects on my opinion that I think Shirow is a brilliant, and amazingly talented artist, and no, I don't care if you think othewise, after all, this is my site.
This is purely a project of fan appreciation for the works of Masamune Shirow and those who have created products from his works or with his help. I'll let people see scans of Shirow's stuff, but I do not do it with the intention of having those people up and take his works, instead I merely wish to let people get a glimpse of all the wonderful work Shirow creates and hope it inspires them to go purchase copies of whatever caught their interest themselves.
That leads into the Ad banner, I suppose. Until now, I've been doing this site at a total revenue loss to my own person. Unfortunately, I am currently unemployed and have bills to pay, and every little bit of income helps. About a month ago, J-List approached me about running advertising on the site and given my ongoing situation, I was open to the idea. For the moment, this advertising is helping keep me afloat, but it also means that this site will stay around, and the money gives me strong motivation to provide you all with more regular updates. Hopefully down the line I'll have a job that pays the bills and then I can invest the banner money into the site, getting the latest Shirow goods from Japan and the US, letting me keep you informed as to what's going on in the world of Shirow better than I can by relying solely on 3rd hand information.
Here on the eight layout, the standards push marches on, running things XHTML 1.0 Strict this time around, meaning I had to go through and clean up a pile of old and dirty code. I've also cut out javascripting altogether for the site, except for Internet Explorer, which still doesn't know how to work the menu properly, so I have to feed it some on the sly. Of course, not just for standards compliance, but also security and privacy reasons, I advocate for any of you actually using Internet Explorer to try out something else, you'd be surprised at how nice other offerings are. That all aside, I'm rather happy with the general cleanliness of this layout, and don't mind switching up so soon after the last one showed up.
Now don't get me wrong, I loved my old layouts, particularly the first one, but I've had to move past them due to growing demands of the site, changes in mood, and the striking of inspiration. Of course, if I was really smart i'd get this on some sort of dynamic system like PHP so I wouldn't have to spend a day converting things, but unfortunately I'm not at this time.
