Greetings. It’s “the Unjust Depths lady” again.
I’ve made the decision to take down the webnovel version over time.
This will begin with updating the Epub to have all the things in it.
Then once that’s done I’ll unpublish all the web novel pages.
My reasoning for this is as follows.
First, I really don’t like the footprint the website has. When I started doing this, I really wanted attention on it and I really didn’t think of what that would entail for myself. I have not really thrived under the attention. It kinda annoys me, and I feel stupid that I didn’t foresee this years ago. But also I suppose I could have not realized the type of person I would become. Anyway I would prefer to receive less attention while still expressing myself creatively. I’m not going to ever be hugely popular or successful so I’d prefer to be the most exact opposite of popular and successful I can possibly be. If you can’t be the Sun, then really really put your effort into being a gigantic black hole where all light goes to die.
Something that has always bothered me, and this will sound insane to some of you, is that Unjust Depths seems to turn up on search engines for certain Russian and German language words being searched on the anglo internet. This is because of my stylistic quirk of wanting the story to be implied to be multi-lingual without really knowing the languages I’m interested in myself, so I sprinkle it here and there. I think it’s important to depict multilingual worlds in English language fiction, for reasons that are beside the point right now– anyway the consequences of this kinda annoy me. I have tried to de-index from Google and a bunch of other stuff that frankly has not really worked. Taking down all the pages WILL work because there won’t be pages to navigate to and eventually they’ll be pruned off.
There’s also the fact that the world is turning ever more hostile to trans women in general, and writers and artists are having their platforms ripped from under them. If there’s not really a need for me to expose myself to the bad weather for now, since I’m not *actually* actively working on any web novels– I’d rather minimize my exposure until I am doing something that’s worth getting any kind of attention for. A form of hibernation perhaps.
In general I feel really surveilled for having a stupid website and I’d prefer to limit the footprint of that surveillance. My NSA guy is gonna need to put in that extra effort and read the epubs from now on. Really earn that pay my man. Email me if you got opinions brother.
Frankly, the past several months have been really bad for me psychologically. I try to put forward a strong and stoic front and to actively repress all of my opinions and feelings in order to become highly efficient at living for another day and completing necessary work. But eventually you gotta crash out. It’s like air pumped into a balloon– man is that really the best simile I got right now? I’m a shadow of my former self. I have no idea when that’ll change.
Anyway– Second reason, it’s really easy to read epub files on your phone. Most of my readers read on their phone. With the benefit of hindsight, it feels really wild that I made you all read the website on your phones like an acceptable substitute for years before I made an epub and I really was resistant to doing this! Because I’m a ridiculous stubborn person and terminally fucking lazy; but now I realize how ridiculous that was. I’m sure all of you read books on your phone. Like actual books formatted as books and not wordpress pages. Not only is it easy, but you have better control over things like font size. While this will mean I won’t be able to do some of the stupider layout tricks I had planned for some later things, honestly– it might be for the best that I didn’t get to employ any of these gimmicks.
Some consequences of this decision in a beautiful bullet list:
- I will probably refresh the site layout once it becomes unnecessary to have it be focused on the web novel.
- As I’ve said before the thing that sucks about URLs is that if you let them go ever some unscrupulous marketing entity will gobble them up for nefarious purposes, so while I would kinda love to get rid of the URL, I care enough to continue paying for it, knowing what might happen if I break this blood pact with the web overlords.
- Your social media posts that linked to specific pages on the site will break.
- I’m getting rid of my SEO suite when this is done so the “social appearance” of the site will revert to just reading off the page rather than having the little quotes that used to be in each chapter’s social appearance.
- I don’t really care about this and won’t be preserving these anywhere.
- You’ll have to keep up with the site through news posts I will put in the RSS feed.
- It turns out the RSS feed has been broken forever because of some plugin or other.
- Once I delete a bunch of unnecessary plugins this will likely correct itself.
- It turns out the RSS feed has been broken forever because of some plugin or other.
- Y’all been checking out that there Uma Musume? It’s so good. Please read Cinderella Gray. I won’t say any more than this but Oguri Cap scores a goth baddie later and it’s absolutely insane. Please read the manga. Don’t do the whole “I’m NOT reading the manga because it’ll SPOIL the anime” you’ll love the anime whenever it comes out because it is really good. You’ll love everything that happens the second time. They’ve done a fantastic job of using the medium of animation to add different and new strengths to the material from the manga. Read the manga *now*. It’s *really* fucking good.
- Season 3 of Pretty Derby was such a kick in the teeth for me. I LOVE Kitasan Black. What *happened* over there.
- I’m constantly thinking about horse gender now.
- I mean I guess it could be a consequence that you’ll be mad at me.
- You can email me at madiha at unjust depths dot com if you’re mad at me. But I won’t care.
- If you’re *NOT* mad at me and you DO have a source for really good, preferably 4k footage of St. Petersburg Russia, like POV walk-arounds or drone cams or highway driving footage or whatever on youtube, email me at madiha at unjust depths dot com. I will care and thank you, if that means something to you.
- You can email me at madiha at unjust depths dot com if you’re mad at me. But I won’t care.
EDIT: I’ve now completed all the necessary work. The epubs are fully updated, download the new ones. All web content is gone from the site. There is some ancillary work (Wounded Tyrants) that is not accessible currently. I am not proud of it and don’t like it and I don’t know if I will ever bother to reproduce it. I have all the source files of everything so maybe, IDK.