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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 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 wall upon finding subjects that didn't have listings. 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, and fanlistings seemed the perfect compromise. 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 the making that I decided a collective was in order, and Jane Doe was originally opened in January 2005. This year it's fifteen and I have owned it for over half my life, which is bananas.

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 source or reason for it save perhaps a lyric, 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 - and as glad as I was to get away from the first, 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 (and I might have been wearing her t-shirt whilst coding the layout), but it's not just for 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 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 an unmasked Lucina from Fire Emblem: Awakening, and was made by me in Paint Shop Pro 8. The fonts used in this layout are Abhaya Libre, Amatic SC, Amita and Magnolia Sky. Textures are from subtlepatterns.

I've never featured Lucina in any of my layouts before, which is a crying shame and is now happily rectified. Also, I love purple.

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.