jane doe

2004 was a very important year in the life of a little Rems. It was the year I opened a fansite, started an online blog, and it was also the year I discovered fanlistings. As anyone with a new interest does, I joined anything and everything I could find for my favourite things - and ran into a conundrum upon finding subjects that didn't have one. The only solution for this was, obviously, to make them myself.

Needless to say, I went ahead with it, even if at the time I didn't really know what I was doing.

As it happens, persistence has incredibly value. I taught myself HTML and CSS that year - you can thank those early fanlisting days for me carving a niche for myself in this corner of the webdesign world. I've always struggled with describing or emphasising my like for a subject, something I'm slowly improving on by heavily returning to fanfic, and fanlistings seemed the perfect inbetween compromise for showing my love for something. In a way, they are - they bring together many different people, and I've met some wonderful people partaking in this hobby.

It was a few months after I began making fanlistings that I decided a collective was in order, and Jane Doe was originally opened in January 2005. I don't mean to alarm anyone but what do you mean that was almost twenty years ago.

My interest in fanlistings has fluctuated a lot since the opening of my collective (as well as just the interests themselves), but whilst fanlistings come and go, it is the one thing that remains.

the name

Upon its opening - and for the nine years that followed - my collective was known as Holding On. There was no real reason for it save perhaps a lyric I kept hearing, an unplanned and spur of the moment kind of name, and with it came the most important lesson I learned about naming things - it's hard to unname a thing, even if you never really liked it.

Eventually, I did, and in 2014 my collective was renamed to Softly Call, after the rendition of "The Parting Glass" sung by Sarah Greene in Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. This one, I did like, but it still didn't feel quite right... and in 2017, I changed it once more.

Jane Doe is my third time lucky. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't thinking of Max from Life is Strange when this name popped into my head, but it's not only in honour or her. A Jane Doe is an unidentified, anonymous woman, and it makes me think of all those fictional women I've fallen head over heels with over the years. When I began making fanlistings, I had no idea of the subjects I'd one day own, the heroines that would mean the most to me, because they didn't even exist yet! After so many years in this hobby, what I own next is likely to be something new, someperson or thing unexpected. It's rather perfect.

layout

This layout features Aigis from Persona 3: Reload, and was made by me in Paint Shop Pro 8. The fonts used in this layout are Advent Pro, Amita, Charmoman, long distance call, and Pacifico. Textures are from subtlepatterns.

Aigis was one of my earliest introductions to robots gaining sentience and learning what it means to live, and seeing the menu art from P3R was particularly inspiring. It's nice to come full circle to things I once and still love!

The hover text over my owned fanlistings was something I was pretty sure I could achieve with CSS, but it was this tutorial on GeekGirlLife which helped me succeed.