From the charred and useless ashes of our past, the body is restored once more. Like the phoenix of legend we rise again.

Okay but I just spent an insane amount of man hours fully and completely restoring this site from nothing. I pulled off several straight up science miracles rescuing this shit from what should have been oblivion. The site was DEAD. An update to the hosting server was necessary, that went fine, but then a mandatory update to our old CMS happened and it completely and entirely shit the bed with the lights on. I fully restored entire site backups to no avail. I fully wiped things and started from scratch, to no avail. Vague error messages with no actual details or codes to speak of that even stackoverflow couldn’t answer. It made no sense and I was at the end of my rope.

But you know Shepton doesn’t fucking give up. Not when he has a problem to solve. And boy howdy did I solve the SHIT out of this problem. I wiped everything, installed a brand new CMS, which through sheer magic was able to import our existing database from the old CMS and correctly import and save ALL OUR OLD CONTENT. I still had to do an extreme amount of work to get things back in order though – had to go through everything we ever posted and assign correct authors, categories, etc. Had to comb through for any kind of errors with links or images (there might still be some in obscure places – if you happen upon any broken links or weird behavior or pages that look janked up, lemme know). Had to totally re-work a lot of Renegade’s longer guide posts to handle the old pagination they had. But it’s here. I restored it all.

And not only did I restore it all, but I made it BETTER while I was at it.

For whatever reason the old site had incorrect date info on a ton of posts. Anything posted before August 2010 used to just say it was posted August 1st 2010. Fixed that shit. Now things go back to exact correct dates.

We got dark mode now. Welcome to 2022 motherfucker. I’ve been using dark mode on every computer and device since as long as I could. And say what, you don’t like vibrant green on dark grey? Come back when you got the stones to get a job where they give you a chair. (By the way, when I say we got dark mode now, I mean I made the site dark colors instead of white. You can’t swap between the two or anything like that. It’s just dark now. You’re fucking welcome. Your eyes can thank me later. They can’t because they’re eyes, but when you’re old and you still have some of your eye sight left, it’ll be because SHEPTON made this GOOD DECISION on YOUR BEHALF. So I say again YOU’RE WELCOME. [p.s. you’re not fucking welcome, bitch])

Disqus comment system? Gone. Fuck your old comments, I don’t care. The new comments look so much cleaner and nicer. If you really wanna go back and check old Disqus comments, they still exist on Disqus. So just find the site on there I guess. Sorry, not sorry. I REALLY tried to save the old comments too – I mean I really fucking tried. Syncing the comments over to the new CMS is supposed to be possible but Disqus’s own system wouldn’t let me go back any farther than October 2021 anyway during the import, so excuse me but FUCK you Disqus. And it didn’t even pull in any of the few comments we’ve gotten since that time besides. So fucking whatever. Useless platform and it had gotten really cluttered with annoying bullshit and there was talk of it starting to force ads in, so that shit has been removed like a cancerous growth. Now we have the simplest, cleanest, plainest, and most default comments, and I think they’re perfect.

Anyway, I’m fucking tired. I’ve been working on this for like a week straight with my only breaks being to do my actual real job 9-5. So I cannot wait to take a step back and just let the site exist for a hot second. But I do have every intention of coming back and writing some stuff. Been writing shit for years on and off, actually, and just never posting it. Nothing that important – mostly just ideas to talk about all the retro collecting I do and the old games I play. But hey, it’s stuff I like doing and talking about so I figured I’d start writing about it. Maybe I’ll even start writing reviews again on (extremely) rare occasions. If you’re unlucky that is.

There is still work to be done. Things are by no means perfect, nor even finished. I still have to tweak a few things that could be a lot better. I’m fully aware that the header and footer menus don’t look great in mobile right now, and images in posts need to be tweaked so they resize properly in mobile as well. But I’ma go take a break. I’ma eat some pizza. I’ma maybe have a drink. I’ll be back. Got my eye on you.