Return of the Magi was launched in January 14th 2023. This site is a subsite of Toji's World. Whether this will be a one-off subsite, or the first of many more subsites remains to be seen.
I developed this site for a few reasons. Firstly, it is a throwback to my old Evangelion site, back in the early 2000s, Enter the MAGI, before I shut it down, and moved on to another project. I attempted to bring Enter the MAGI back as a version 2.0 a few years later, though I shut it down not too long after the launch due to a lack of personal interest in the site. In the years following the shutdown of the site, I also dropped out of the Evangelion fandom and moved on to different things. All that remains of EtM now are a few incomplete archived pages that are slowly vanishing as time goes by.
Following the release of the Rebuild of Evangelion films in recent years, and even more recently, acquiring some of the Real Grade Evangelion kits of all things, I wanted to show my appreciation towards both the old TV series for getting me in to anime, and the recent films for reigniting some of my former interest in the franchise, by creating a site that is dedicated to providing information about both the TV series and films.
Finally, the desire to make this site stems from a feeling of nostaligia of the older days of the internet, back in the late 90s and early 2000s, where the internet was like the wild west, and Evangelion fansites (among other fansites) were a lot more common, compared to the current day where information on Evangelion has been amalgamated in to a small number of wikis. While there is no doubt that wikis have a lot more information, I feel they lack the personal touch and creativity that sites of the old days had.
About the Layout
The layout of this site was designed using Macromedia Fireworks, and the rest of the code was done in Notepad. I wanted to make a theme based on the Magi supercomputers that featured throughout the TV series and films - hence there is a lot of red and black used for the layout, along with the use of the emergency signs.
While this could be considered "version 1.0," there were in fact two more layouts before this one that were being developed, the first of which was all the way back in 2012. That layout was being devloped with the hope of implementing inline frames (or iframes) to display the main content, but I was not satisfied with what I developed at the time, and the layout, along with any further development of the site, was shelved for 9 years.
The second layout was developed at the end of 2020. Again, there was a desire to implement inline frames, but I was again not satisfied with what was produced. However, unlike what happened with the first layout, it would not be long after until I designed what would become this site's current layout.
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