about

*drops everyone here like an inverted claw machine*

Why “Toyshelf”?

A riff on the Toyhouse name, and more relevant to me personally. The original thought was that all these characters are effectively “shelved”; they’re mostly kinda just Sitting There, Existing, not taking part in any ongoing or previously-certain story.

I say “original thought” because this hasn’t been 100% true from the getgo, and as of August 2022 it is extra not true because imagination went brr again and I decided to dump stuff here early.

Some shelves are dustier than others, let’s put it that way :V

Why not use Toyhouse?

The Cool and Friendly Reason

• Coding everything from scratch offers me all the customization. At the time of writing every page follows the same template, but hypothetically, I could deck every single one out individually with CSS if I wanted to; no premium membership necessary!
• Relatedly, I am a strong proponent of owning one’s platform. Is Toyhouse a social media website? Not really, I don’t think. But would I rather go “my city now” anyway? Heck yeah.

the snooty elitist reason

• I have an irrational internalized-cringe-borne aversion to treating characters like “toys”; if they don’t have a story, I’d hesitate to call them full-fledged Characters™.
  • Obligate disclaimer that this is a Me Thing, not a value judgment on Toyhouse or its users! Hell, if I’d discovered Toyhouse earlier into my internet adventures, I might be an avid user today.
• When I do have Characters™, I want their traits to come across through, y’know, the story, and not by spelling everything out in wiki-esque character profiles.
• And yet! I am not immune to “characters” without established canons. Some of them are designs that have stuck around for some significant degree of time (as in I didn’t just draw them once and then forget); others are interconnected somehow, possibly, but since I haven’t gotten around to coalescing any sort of Story Canon besides the context of those connections, they occupy a similar canonical limbo.
• Figured a Toyhouse-esque site would be a good compromise between having an info hub and committing to an Official Repository™, so here we are!

TL;DR am full of self

[something about characters being “for sale” or “design theft” or anything of that sort]

Yeahhhhhh nah I don’t approach characters this way. I believe that you can’t truly “own” a design or concept, and thus have zero interest in chasing people down for “stealing” my ideas. Hell, if you’re inspired by something I do, I’d probably love to see it!

Characters are not copyrighted commodities, to me. While it would bug me to see a blatant uncredited recolor, I’m not gonna lose sleep over it. I wholeheartedly encourage people to do whatever they want with any ideas, visual and/or in writing, that they want to play with.

Can I [do something with] your characters, specifically?

Go for it, man. If you’re making money off it that’s going to make me sad, though. A royalty would be nice. :(

(Should go without saying, but I would very strongly appreciate credit in some way, since you are using my characters specifically. (I would appreciate credit for looser ~inspiration~ too, as covered above, but I recognize that’s more of a gray area.) And please don’t suggest I endorse whatever you’re doing unless I actually, like, do.)

(P.S. Have I mentioned I probably want to see the thing you make? I want to see the thing you make!!)

Do these laissez-faire ideas about originality and creative “permissions” apply to all your work?

Hell yeah, dude.

Who even are you?

I don’t know how you found a-flyleaf’s toyshelf at a hyphen flyleaf dot github dot io without knowing who a-flyleaf is (and if you did I am very curious, I don’t use analytics, consider saying hello), but!:

Hi, I’m a-flyleaf, and I’ve been drawing and storytelling since I was a little kid. I used to write & illustrate stories about my family as anthropomorphic animals going on whimsical fantasy adventures, and now I bury myself in bullet points about regular-ass Homo sapiens and their dysfunctional relationships. Unrelated to that, the artstuff has also spawned some weird critters over the years, which I went ahead and made homes for here too. I end my sentences with periods a lot less frequently than this paragraph may imply.

Thanks for stopping by \o/

about site

Made over the course of a month, on and off, with the same tools as everything else in the a-flyleaf.github ecosystem: Jekyll + good ol’ HTML + CSS.

Techy explanation for the “backend site generation” date-fudging that comes up with certain art:

• Art pages and their thumbnails are generated automatically.
• To grab the image URL, the layout pulls from the page date in YYYY-MM-DD format.
• Because it only looks for date information, different art posts can’t share a date.

There is probably a workaround, or a better way to do it from the ground up. I’ll figure that out if I need to, but for now this doesn’t come up often enough to warrant it.