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the my ex-wife is a real bitch update

(Published 5/12/2021.)

Wait, what?

Aranoyas! Wow, we sure have no idea how that got in the release title field! This update brings a redesign to the album sidebars, and lots of data fixes and additions across the site. Much thanks to everyone in the Discord community for throwing in suggestions and additions all throughout this update - details, as ever, past the split!


As ever, thank you to everyone who sent feedback and kind messages during development! We're also very grateful for all supporters of the wiki, including: enchantingHunter, vriska/leo, and Nights!

Like mentioned in the summary, this update is brought to you in most significant part by everyone in the community Discord server. So, for these release notes, I figured I'd go over the contributions of everyone who threw a hand in!

From Niklink, we've a variety of additions and input:

  • The new Psycholonials complete album has been released, and with it, we've added information about the original releases of many tracks from the game, most from earlier, since-unlisted releases by Clark Powell. Niklink located all of these throughout the release of each EP, and helped with the track lists for the Psycholonials flash/game pages!
  • Since suggesting album banners and wallpapers back in December (as added in the February and April updates), Niklink has also taken a major role in refining assets across the site. This update brings remasters to the banners all across the site, with improved upscaling, better rendering, and a variety of other tweaks. He actually wrote a summary of the changes, which we've included towards the end of this news entry, if you're curious on all the details!
  • Ever on top of album aesthetics, Niklink also prompted the redesign for album sidebars, offering comments and input throughout that design too. (Thanks go out to Megatti for additional feedback here!) Details on the refined layout follow these contribution credits.

LowDeath675 went through every official album, as well as several from the fandom, and caught countless missing or misplaced character tags! Especially improved are tags for minor characters, like Sawtooth and Squarewave, plus species tags, like Horrorterrors - though there are more fixes all about. Now's a better time than ever to give tags a visit and explore the excellent art of Homestuck's official and fandom discographies!

foreverFlummoxed helped out with tags too, catching a number of missing dancestor appearances throughout Beforus! Both Celeste and FF also caught a bunch of typos in commentary for the albums they reviewed.

An anonymous contributor also let us know about the commentary booklet for Alternia, which we'd totally missed until now - so there's much commentary and composition notes on the early solo album from Toby Fox now!

Lastly, thanks to Celeste, Niklink, and Mixolydian for catching a variety of track references now newly brought to the wiki.

To everyone who helped out with the update, together - I'd like to thank you again, for all your feedback and kind messages. It really bears repeating: this wiki wouldn't even be close to what it is without you, without everyone who's brought their ideas to the table, built upon updates and suggestions from others, or just shared kindhearted comments about the wiki. We've come a long way since release, and it couldn't have been done without each and every one of you. Thank you!


Now, tweaks to the album sidebar layout! As mentioned, the biggest push for this (and much accompanying input) came from Niklink. (Thank you!) Ever since adding groups as part of the Traversing Fandom update back in January, there have been two sidebars on most album and track pages - one on left, one on right. This was a pretty neat look, but having two sidebars meant there was considerably less space left for the main content area than prior. Unfortunately, this left album and track art squished to a much smaller presentation than had always been intended!

So, we've finally revisited that layout, and done a sweeping refinement to fix that issue and make album and track pages be both better looking and more functional than ever before!

Most notably, we've combined the right- and left-hand sidebars into one. Group boxes are now displayed above the track list on the album page, since there's already a full view of all the tracks visible in the main content area. On track pages, they've been moved beneath the track list - and if an album's part of more than one group (e.g. Psycholonials), group info will all be combined into one compact summary box! (Much thanks to Megatti for this suggestion - we feel it helps a bunch to make the new layout feel focused and clean.)

For albums (like coloUrs and mayhem: Universe A) whose tracks are divided into groups (i.e. "track groups", not to be confused with groups like Fandom and Official Discography), we've tweaked the track list part of the sidebar as well. Previously, track group headings (like "Side 1", "Additional Mayhem", "Bonus tracks") weren't especially interactive - if you clicked them, they'd just bring you to the first track under that group. With this update, they're now collapsible/expandable - clicking toggles the full list of tracks in that section! This should make navigation between tracks in an album a nice bit smoother, skipping the inconvenient step of visiting the first track in the desired group or just heading back to the album page.

And last off, on album pages, where we'd previously have the sidebar show every track all at once, track groups are now collapsed by default - making it easier, we hope, to navigate between, visiting tracks from whichever section you're looking for. (Since the main content area shows a full track list anyway, it didn't make much sense to just repeat that same view as part of the sidebar!)


As regular, some quick notes on the meta around the wiki:

  • We're pleased to announce a new, spectacularly spiteful salacious speculative partnership: Homestuck Music Dot Wiki has now been acquired by MILF! /joke
  • On a more (less? lol) personal level, I was dealing with feelings of burnout for a while this month, and ended up writing an entry on where I was at in the #devblog there. (It's a few weeks back in the channel, if you'd like to give it a read.) Although my energy and motivation have been returning in the last couple weeks, the general conclusion still stands: since I'm one person and the wiki is a hobby project (as I'm happy it is), code development time will generally be put where and when I have motivation to work. There won't be as many self-imposed expectations to complete huge sub-projects, though they'll still get attention when the time comes! And monthly updates will remain, though they'll likely be less focused than prior releases, in service of giving the wiki the time and space to breathe and develop more naturally.

As ever, thank you for the support and feedback. Besides the Discord, our usual channels remain open, so you're much encouraged to share any comments or music suggestions for the coming releases!

~ Quasar Nebula


PS: Here's the banner remaster commentary from Niklink!

Niklink:

depending on the banner, alterations fall within a few different categories:

the only one I'm not satisfied with is Homestuck Vol. 7: At the Price of Oblivion because it has aliased images with transparent antialiased stuff over them

so I have to pick to make either the aliased stuff or the antialiased stuff look bad depending on how I do it

View original file ( kB MB). (Heads up! If you're on a mobile plan, this is a large download.)