1997: The X-Men Fanfic Site
In January of 1997, my cousin and I wrote these really, really stupid “round robin” X-Men fanfics that mostly just included Cyclops dying in a multitude of silly ways. For some reason (!) no serious X-Men Fan Fiction websites would accept our stories, so I decided to make my own website on AOL to put our stories on. I learned basic HTML in order to build a simple little members.aol.com site and then decided I ought to add some more content; why not add some of my X-Men fanart, too? I had done “chibi” portraits of my favourite X-Men characters and quickly learned I really enjoyed maintaining a site and sharing my art.
1998: A Merry Good Page
In Dec of 1997, I had outgrown the AOL members website, so I begged my parents to forego giving me a monthly allowance, and instead pay for monthly hosting so I could move my website to simplenet. I chose “carp” as my username (because my best friend Ash and I thought “carp” was a funny word), and named my site “A Merry Good Page!” It had already quickly expanded from being an X-Men site; it was now my personal art portfolio site. I had become a huge fan of FF7, and from there, into other anime and games, so a lot of my art posted throughout 1998 reflects that.
And also in 1998, I began work on my online comic, SunDowner!
1999: Bad Candy
In 1999 I renamed my site “The Brother Makes Bad Candy” — a name you can thank magnetic poetry for, and later in 99, I moved to my own domain name.
I continued adding new issues of SunDowner, new art and fanart, as well as redesigning my site countless times. Too many to ever post them all here!!
2000: Super Freak Out
Going into 2000, I expanded my website and made a “base camp” called “Super Freak Out” – which linked to Bad Candy, SunDowner, my blog, and all of my other countless mini-sites – I had an Utena mini-site, a Xenogears mini-site, a Star Wars mini-site, and Astronomy Domine, my Harry Potter site. For Halloween in 2000, I realized I was getting into this costume thing enough to make a page dedicated to my costumes, and thus “Lazy Eternity” was born (More magnetic poetry for you),
2001: Whisky a*go*go
The madness continued into 2001. More redesigns, more SunDowner, more art, and more costumes, and I renamed my blog Whisky a*go*go. I also attended my first anime cons, Animazement and MTAC, that year, and got more heavily into costuming – it wasn’t just for Halloween anymore! I made around 10 costumes that year in addition to going to school, posting art, and redesigning my website a gazillion times.
2002: A Day at the Races
In 2002, I self-published a re-drawn edition of SunDowner 1 and 2 as one volume. It was super exciting! I also went to a bunch more cons – Animazement and MTAC again, and Otakon and Dragon Con for the first time. I also redesigned my blog again and again and again, renaming my blog A Day at the Races and my costume site A Night at the Opera. I closed down a bunch of my mini-sites to focus on my blog, costume site, and portfolio. My site didn’t get redesigned NEAR as much because I was so busy!
2003: Lunatic Dingo
In 2003 I burned out. Between college, the intense work of producing and self-publishing SunDowner, and my growing interest in costuming, I neglected my sites a bit and focused a lot more on sewing and blogging. In late 2003, Bad Candy officially became Lunatic Dingo.
2004-2008: A Night at the Opera
For the next several years, my main site stagnated as I focused more and more on my costume site. In fact I think it had the same black “tree sketch” front page for nearly 3 years!! Over time my costuming site took over as the main section of my website. By 2008, my blogger version of my blog had become nothing but a place for me to post surveys and quiz results, and eventually I abandoned it. (And hey I also got married in 2008! Yay!)
2009-2016: Kelldar.com
In 2009, I pulled the plug on my old domain and officially moved everything over to kelldar.com, which I’d already been using as a forwarding address. Blogger also stopped supporting posting to outside hosts, and since I still used blogger for adding updates to my costume site, I scrambled to find a replacement. I switched over to wordpress, and ported over my old livejournal posts (both regular livejournal and costume livejournal) to try to keep everything in one place.
2016-Now: Lunatic Dingo: the Exhibition of Questionable Content
Since 2009 my site has functioned as both my costume portfolio and blog. In 2016, I finally made the decision to port over all of my old blogger posts, in addition to going back into my 1998 HTML files and digging up what I could find of my old “Free Talk” segments my original site! I’ve also added back ALL of my old artwork, going back through 1998 – and I also went back to the site name “Lunatic Dingo.” (because kelldar.com was super boring right?!)
I hope you enjoy my 20 years worth of madness here!
(And, if for some reason, you’d like to read a bit more about my site’s looks and designs over the years, I dedicated a full post to here during my blog’s 20th birthday celebrations!)