Checkpoint 5: Priorities

[nepenthee]

Happy new year, everyone!

As you can guess, things have been quiet around here as December was a busy month. I hope you’ve had a good holiday season, and can start fresh in the new year.

We have one more month until the challenge deadline. How are your shrines coming along? Do you have a preferred order of tackling things, and how do you set priorities in light of the deadline? What are your thoughts on uploading a shrine in unfinished state?

I hope we’ll pull through together and can kick off 2026 with some new shrines! :D

Feel free to use this post to chat about other challenge- and site-related things.

Comments

[nepenthee]

I procrastinated through nearly all of my off-time in late December because I was so exhausted from work and socializing in the last months of the year, holidays included. The biggest thing I did for a while was restart the layout's header (first and last draft from 2021), which fills me with hope. For better or for worse, the new draft looks very different from what I had always envisioned for the rest of the site, particularly the graphic edits I want to make... so at this point I'm not sure yet which direction the layout will go.

Last weekend, I finally duked it out with the summaries and translations, finishing 2.5 pages. That leaves only about a page of personal commentary to write (excited!). Will have to think about whether or not to make drastic cuts to the rest of the text if I have enough time during the event, because I don't want the text to be the primary or sole focus this time. Once that's out of the way, I hope there's enough time left to take care of the visuals. If not... I may have to cobble something basic together and do a visual revamp after the deadline.

On uploading shrines unfinished: I've participated in challenges before where I knew towards the end that I wouldn't be able to fully finish the shrine in time. I'd prioritize the pages crucial to my vision for the shrine, and to my interpretation of the subject; visitors should be able to grasp my angle and narrative and infer where the rest of the shrine will go. That means postponing not only sections such as the media gallery, but also, depending on the subject, part of the relationship section (not all relationships are equally important), select analysis pages such as symbolism, later parts of summaries/descriptive pages (the visitor doesn't need the whole story to see the themes of the story and my personal vision), and so on.

While I prefer to upload shrines fully finished in terms of content because I conceive their components as a unit, I have learned from said previous events that defining the essentials – by which I mean your own non-negotiables – that need to be done by a deadline works wonders to actually get shrines finished. The ideal in your head will always outdo what you are capable of making, but only what you have crafted can be shared as your own accomplishment (your own MIRACLE); finishing a project requires and means finding out what's feasible by actually turning it around in your hands, not in your head, and then coming to terms with it. And if I've done my best during the event period, either the momentum will carry me towards my own personal finishing line shortly afterwards (and shortly may mean some more months), or, if I'm exhausted, I will take a break and resume work soon because it's all still strongly present on my mind and I don't want to lose it by dallying.

Also, something I wish I'd factor in more often as encouragement not to get everything perfect in the first version: Getting to revamp my own shrine later on has consistently been SO MUCH FUN. The bulk of the work is done, I don't have to wear myself out by stretching myself in all directions, I've spent enough time with the thing that I know what bothers me about it, and am distant enough to pick it apart. I can fully commit myself to messing around with the layout to achieve my true vision, polishing the content to my heart's content, and following up on little details I've always wanted to pursue further.

[blaubeermars]

Dear Lethe, that sounds very relatable, honestly. After such an exhausting period, barely having any free time and then slowly easing back into things makes a lot of sense. The fact that you still worked on the header shows that the project still matters to you, even if everything feels a bit messy right now.

Your approach to unfinished shrines sounds really reasonable. Focusing on the parts that are essential to your view of the theme instead of trying to do everything at once is probably much healthier. In the end, people don’t need every single detail to understand what you’re trying to say.

And, to be fair, I think I’ve personally never uploaded a fully finished shrine (oh my god lol), so the idea of submitting something that’s “good enough” and then continuing to work on it later is actually pretty comforting. It honestly makes me feel calmer, because I tend to work on personal projects for a hundred years (O_o). It’s clear you’ve learned what works for you from past events, and the fact that you enjoy revisiting and refining things afterward fits that mindset really well.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that you find a good balance between what you’d ideally like to do and what’s realistic right now.