shine upon the far frontier

My first website, back in 2002, was a blog. Back in the day, making a blog meant you were coding a lot of it yourself, and I threw myself into learning HTML and CSS. I used premade layouts for the first few versions of my blog, tweaking them to my liking, then started to design things myself. At the time I was very into making digital art, and indeed my first website outside of the blog was a Geocities site to display all of my creations. I was in middle school at the time, and aside from a brief year spent at my own very domain (a gift from a friend), I was at the mercy of whatever free webhost I could find. (Life is hard when you're a teenager on the internet without a credit card.)

Over time, my interests shifted: I had loved Pokémon as a child, and got heavily back into it around 2005; I spent the next few years running a large Pokémon fansite. As I got into high school, I grew more interested in Japanese role-playing games, chief among them the Final Fantasy series. From there I discovered the plethora of 2000s character shrines, many of which were accompanied by fanlistings. My first fanlisting, opened in 2006 and still online today, was to one of my favorite Pokémon.

redcrown.net is not the first name or home for this collective; it has lived on a couple of other domains, starting in 2007. I registered this domain in 2009, intending to put sites about the Final Fantasy realm of Ivalice on it. (Ivalice has at times a very bloody history, so the name suited.) However, I was able to register ivalice.org in 2012, so that plan fell through. I still liked redcrown.net a lot, though, so when I decided to move on from my then-collective, this was the perfect choice.

The name "red crown" comes from the theme song of the Playstation Portable game Dissidia: Final Fantasy, Cosmos/Chaos/The Messenger. In other words, it is a Final Fantasy music deep cut, which is about the most Larissa thing you can get. It's also a generic enough name to work on its own, which is why I've kept it for so many years. Occasionally I think about finding a new domain name for this collective, but unless I come up with the perfect name it's unlikely to happen.

about me

I tend not to talk too much about myself online. "Larissa" isn't actually my name; I grew up in a time where it was considered unsafe to tell strangers online your real name. (Sometimes I wish the internet was still like this.) That said, I've been going by Larissa since 2002, so it might as well be my name at this point; it would be strange for online friends to call me something else.

When not making websites, I spend my time writing and playing too many video games. I keep a blog on Dreamwidth to talk about my current media fixations. I am really too lazy to host my own blog anymore, and I still cling to the days of curating 100x100 icons.

I use the following platforms to log or track my media consumption (or, in the case of MFC, how all my money flies away). These days I try to write reviews of most things I consume, if only to capture how I felt about it for my future self. Some of these profiles are locked to logged-in visitors only; on the whole, they offer a good idea of the kind of things I like in media.

layout

This layout, version eight, features Clive from Final Fantasy XVI. Clive was not my first idea for a subject; I had originally intended to use art from the 2025 Final Fantasy x Magic the Gathering collaboration.

However, after receiving copies of the FFXVI artbooks for my birthday, I was reminded of how much I enjoyed FFXVI and its lead character, and I decided to try and make something with him. (It doesn't hurt that I've been reading a lot of excellent FFXVI fanfiction recently.)

FFXVI isn't without its flaws, but Clive has swiftly become one of my favorite Final Fantasy characters, to the point that I will likely write about him in more depth for a future fansite. To be honest I wanted to replay the game in tandem with this revamp, but I ran out of time and had to prioritize the site. Hopefully soon, though.

This revamp was completed as part of the Our Kingdoms Eternal marathon hosted by Lethe. As usual, I am very appreciative to Lethe for hosting an event that got me actually working on sites instead of procrastinating! Thank you, as always, for all of your support for this and all of my sites.

This layout uses resources from so-ghislaine, sanami276, and Subtle Patterns.

You can view a list of resources I use to make websites in the toolkit.

previous layouts