Arisu started off as Drop-dead Fridays. In fact, it's had many forms. Everything started back to the point when I was around 8-9 years old.
I had discovered the virtual pet site, Neopets. I was quickly captivated by the not-so-intricate designs of the various items and pets. It was a dream of mine to, one day, win the petpage spotlight, so I constantly found myself watching the latest winners. I was in awe of their talent. I always said to myself, "I wish I could write/code/draw/design like that!"
I began to go on neopet fansites to expand my knowledge on the vast, broad subject of Neopets. I began to use different shop layouts, guild layouts, and petpage layouts. Even though I didn't make them, I felt like a million dollars.
Eventually I stumbled along the dreaded site genre: Dolls. Wether it be thugs, preps, cartoon, anime, custom made... to candybar (pure love!), I just loved them to death. I tried to go to every site I could, and quickly, my latest dream was, believe it or not, to have a famous site like Dollie Crave.
When I was around 10-11 years old, I had moved onto better times. I had discovered resourceful sites such as Aethereality, Komettails, and Hybrid Genesis. These quickly became my new inspiration, and my goal of the internet was set in stone: I was going to have a super-duper popular well known graphics site. Yup.
Despite what you think, I actually held onto this dream. On January 1st, 2007, I opened up my very first graphics site: Bloom Designs. I know, very boring name. Bloom was hosted by Taru Cha of Seigikan.net. To this day, I am extremely greatful to the wonderful Taru Cha, for taking in such a beginner.
Bloom had a surprisingly good start, I quickly filled my affiliation and sibling spots and gained 27k hits within the first 4 months. Around march or may, I renamed Bloom to Skylark. Skylark seemed like a much more appealing and original name to me. In the process of renaming, I switched hosts over to silverinches, courtesy of Jisuk. Jisuk, thank you dearly for hosting me, you're possibly one of the greatest hostesses I've met!
Unfortunately, not long after the move, Skylark became inactive. I just seemed to have gotten bored and lazy with it. I lost most of my designing inspiration and skill, but I still kept it up and practiced in my spare time to improve on my skills. And that, I did.
I put Skylark on a hiatus and decided I wanted to split it up into two parts: An Anime side, and a J-rock side.
That plan failed, as I neglected it, so it stayed up on that hiatus. Now, an entire year later (and a week or two), on January the 12th, 2008, Skylark is reopened, as a network known as Drop Dead Fridays. I chose the name Drop Dead Fridays because I liked the band Drop Dead Gorgeous, as well as Taking Back Sunday, and I liked the idea of a weekday themed network (thus, Rebellious Weekend and Failed Today Masterpiece tomorrow). So I combined Drop Dead Gorgeous with Taking Back Sunday (changing sunday to Friday), and voila; Drop Dead Fridays.
Drop Dead Fridays was originally planned just to be a personal network and blog. Then I expanded it to be shared with a good friend of mine, Bekka. And suddenly I decided to also add graphics and reads to this corner on the web. Rebellious Weekend was originally going to be a graphics site, but is now probably going to be a review site of sorts.
Even after all the renames, I still count this as my first site, as I had never closed Bloom/Skylark once.
As you may already know, Drop-Dead Fridays was opened on January 20th, 2007. I was extremely excited, and updated as much as possible, blogged whenever, and applied for affiliation at all sorts of places.
But like all good things, they must end.
One day in early february, Drop-Dead Fridays stopped working. I checked around Shukaku's domain and her hostees, none of them worked either. The following night, Shukaku signed on msn and I asked her about the isssue.
Sasusaku had been hacked, because of a mindless person. Their reason? They supported NarutoxSakura and not SasukexSakura. I personally find that a rediculous reason.
Because she was hacked, her host froze her account and deleted everything on the server. If she wanted it back, she would have had to have paid two hundred dollars. Now, that's a lot of money, and we know, she wouldn't pay it when their were other, less costly options.
A week or so before the incident, Shukaku had bought another domain, Hyouri.org. She had bought this on a different hosting provider, so it was 100% safe from the attack.
And thanks to Shukaku's generosity, she is now hosting me again, under Hyouri.org. I'm amazed still, she bought me another domain, she does so much for her friends -- I couldn't ask for a better hostess. I <3 you shuu!