The Big Facelift

Honey, it's time for another Magenta Hardcore branding update!

I've spent a lot of time recently (honestly, per usual) staring at magentahardcore.com and thinking, "wow, this sucks." My main site's been a mess of CSS and HTML for a while, probably due to the fact I originally wrote it over a year ago, completely changed it, then dug up its corpse and reanimated it. The blog has been in a much better state since I started it mostly from scratch, using Unlife as a rough guide to figure out more "correct" webmaster practices and CSS/HTML layouts, but has still been visually boring and probably a chore to actually read since the IBM font was so small and kinda unfriendly to dyslexics.

Anyhoot, I self-initiated into the Qliphoth through Nahema (technically for the second time; I wanted to get a fresh start since I fell off the wagon) maybe a day or two before obsessively messing with my branding for, as of writing this, nearly 3 days straight. I haven't been able to keep the flow of ideas out of my head, nor have I been able to keep my body from physically performing them. Every time I've gone, "that's enough for today; I should get some rest," I end up laying in bed for maybe 30 minutes before the overflow of ideas & adrenaline gets to me and I get up again to keep furiously typing or messing with an SVG. Take that for what you will. I don't really have a new name to go with what the branding changes have resulted in, in my opinion every era of Magenta Hardcore is just a new unraveling of a thread already rolling, but I do think this one has been the most drastic and so I've been referring to it as "The Big Facelift."

First and most horrifying, the Magenta Hardcore Brand Magenta©®™ has been changed from #f20587 to #e50067. Yes, those are two different colors. Why change it, especially if it's barely even obvious to most? Well, it was bothering me. Simple as. I had felt for a while the titular Magenta Hardcore Brand Magenta©®™ (I'll stop now I promise) simply wasn't Magenta Hardcore enough. It evolved from a bad color-pick of a drawing of Nyx IIRC; but nearly every time I looked at it I just thought, "this is way too pink; too juvenile." I've always wanted the magenta I picked to be strong, vampyric, crimson-esque, lesbian, and to simply be "right" for me (not to assign meanings to colors). I ended up taking Nyx's #e60073 and splitting slightly from it in attempt to personalize it a tad—although I doubt the difference is visible or ultimately meaningful whatsoever. I'm certainly no stranger to lifting elements from others and I had considered absorbing myself into the Nyxian sphere of magenta specifically, but ultimately ended up on #e50067 after fiddling with colors for too long. Besides, we all know stealing colors is a serious offense—I wouldn't dare do such a thing!

Second and most obvious, so much shit has visually changed!!! Magenta Hardcore as a whole has been moving towards being more inspired by Black Metal, Grotesque art, Goth, etc; in synthesis with its "punk," Halloween, cyber-feminist/communist/what-have-you influences. Magenta Hardcore has obviously always taken direct inspiration from these and related spheres, but as it's been unraveling its shown to have its fangs much deeper than initially thought. The previous attempts to portray Magenta Hardcore were simply not sufficient; they did not wholly portray the nature of Magenta Hardcore, nor did they originate from a real attempt to. Up until now I've typically though of myself as attempting to find solid aesthetic footing; but now I'm interested in expanding, refining, and defining that footing and its path myself. It's hard to speak of what exactly I am doing or mean to do, in part because I am not a writer and in part because Magenta Hardcore seems to make itself more than I make it sometimes. I intend to work on the former point as someone who's always been into reading and (attempting) writing (you can probably tell I don't properly understand specifically when to use a semicolon, em-dash, or parentheses @_@), although the latter is more-or-less fine how it is. I hope the direction being headed towards is obvious and that things look nice(r) now. Maybe this time things will last longer than 5 months without me changing everything.

Third and least obvious, a lot of changes have been made under-the-hood. I'll probably be chipping away at this even after this post goes up, but I've been attempting to simplify and refine the actual code running on my sites so that they're not as much of a mess. This mostly involves actually paying attention to the elements, scale, etc. that I'm using (e.g. em instead of px for most elements). I'm not really a coder by definition—I've taken a compsci class but only learned how to make a calculator in *trying not to barf* Python—so my knowledge of what's going on is only really what I can infer (which with HTML/CSS is thankfully a lot). If you do notice any issues or want to make any improvements you can let me know directly and/or fix it yourself and send a commit somewhere here. We've also been JavaScript-free for some time before this post :).

The last matter at hand, my birthday is coming up! October 16th, to be exact. I'll be celebrating 20 years of pure misery very shortly :). I likely won't have much sonic work to put out around then. I have some singles sitting around that'll be put out sometime, but I'm planning on spending a very long time on my next release—possibly a year or longer; however long it takes, really. I'm looking to keep this project and myself out of the public eye until it's (mostly) finished, so I might be a bit sparse (apart from shitposting on fedi and twt -w-). If you'd like to support me at all in the meantime you can find the means to on magentahardcore.com, obviously.