sticky tape on the windows

"No matter how bad it got, at least I never idolized a billionaire"

Green sea turtles have been an iconic endangered species since the 1980s, mostly due to bycatch in fishing nets and taking adults and eggs for food. I have core childhood memories of watching Steve Irwin talk about sea turtle conservation in front of a beach full of nesting green sea turtles.

After 45 years of conservation efforts, their population now meets the IUCN criteria for Least Concern rather than Endangered.

For a species with such a slow life history (it takes green sea turtles decades to reach sexual maturity) and a nearly global population, this is a Really Big Deal. This is the kind of long term conservation victory that many of the amazing humans who started working on green sea turtle conservation back in the 80s didn't live to see.

The backgrounds for the entire series were done on black paper, a first for any animated show. It's Batman, which means everything is at night and incredibly dark. So, the majority of the backgrounds were going to be black anyways and using black paper would cut down on the time it took to create all of the backgrounds. Adding color over the black paper instead of the traditional method gave it a much more stylized look that helped make it iconic.

It also forced some other creative choices, such as using an airbrush to do all of the background art. During the early testing, they found that using an airbrush was easier to apply paint with than a paintbrush and that it looked better. Airbrushing let them be more experimental with painting techniques, such as the spattery fades you can see in the "Bane" and "Deep Freeze" title cards above or the soft, deeply shadowed face on "the Last Laugh." The overall effect of airbrushing on a black background is a much darker, moodier vibe than could be achieved with a traditional approach.

Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog

Early this morning, we received an email from @namecheap.com that the domain neocities.org was being suspended because of a court order from New Delhi, India (a jurisdiction we don't operate in), which was for an unrelated court order about a sports streaming site on a different domain.

Our domain, neocities.org, was NOT listed in the provided court order document, but Namecheap took the report at face value and suspended the domain anyways, and told us "We have to resolve the issue with the complainant in order to have the domain unsuspended." As in, a legal firm in New Delhi.

Amazingly, we were somehow able to contact their office even though it's midnight in New Delhi, and they acknowledged that taking down neocities.org was a mistake and not what they wanted, and told me they are going to email Namecheap to try to get them to restore the site as well.

So the legal firm that sent the complaint -and- us are both trying to get Namecheap to unsuspend the domain, but as of this writing, they have not responded to any of the requests and we are trying all means to get them to escalate this to a higher priority.

At this point, we have no control over this, only Namecheap does, and Namecheap are the only people that can fix this mistake and unsuspend the domain. Until then, there's nothing we can do to restore service to the subdomain sites and the front site (the custom domain sites still work).

We are already on the phone with an enterprise domain management company and will be moving to a different registrar soon, but we can't even transfer the domain out of Namecheap until they remove the suspension, so either way we're still stuck for now waiting for Namecheap to do something here.

The internet is increasingly becoming dangerous to operate on because of crazy laws and orders like this. A bunk legal complaint in one country, which we aren't even based in, aimed at one alleged infringement issue, has just been converted into infrastructure-level damage against an entire platform