"I sent my men to fetch the headsman, I perceive they succeeded."

05/29/2026 Vodalus 0.1.3.1

sooooooo, it's been a minute....

you're inevitably going to ask what happeded. the simple answer is that i have still been grinding behind the scenes.

as time has gone on, and this site has grown in scale and scope, a LOT of issues with dumb decisions I made at the start have come to bite me in the ass. i want to rectify these, but it looks more and more like this will be a project which takes longer than vodalus took to create

i want to refactor to TS, add tests, segment some of the hellishly unmaintainable code, &c., but finding the time when i have other projects to work on is hard enough.

i've also been working on 'the most complicated board game ever' as i've teased in the chat and it's really put my workflows and knowledge to the test. i don't think it will ship anytime soon, but i am making slow progress on it.

i think going forwads, things will be slow, but i am still working on this site. maybe in the future i'll do some more themed months with rapid changes, but so much of this project has become maintenance as it has grown, and that burden can only be lightened by a lot of manual work.

all this is to say: vodalus is not dead! (but i am inside)

i will see you all when i have more news to report

- (hating C) jolenta

04/24/2026 Vodalus 0.1.3

code review is done! i've audited the code (it was not as bad as i thought in most places, and much worse in others i have simply left in a hell state for when i refactor things later). there's still AI code but way way less of it than when this all started. mostly everything since about a month ago has been artisinal, handcrafted, shit.

stuff coming your way:

• modals are gone. mostly everything that was a modal is now a XP-style window for style consistency (and code cleanliness)
• you can now have 5 windows open at time on the convene page. multi-window gambling has made it's promised return
• dark mode is gone. it won't be missed, tbh
• new home page or whatevs

that's kind of it. haven't been working on this much as i've been using my time off for "rest" (ugh, ik).

oh yeah, i forgot:

• new page: the botanic gardens

i said to myself: "what do vodalus.org users love most?" the resounding answer my mind retunred was dronishly clicking buttons for hours on end. so, now you have a whole new button to push! there is a scoreboard on the home page and the top clicker gets a special new tag....
it's rough around the edges for now, but feel free to get started on clicking.

last thing left is status indicators (i've been dreading this...). see you when i finally bother to do that.

- (caffeine-addled) jolenta

04/18/2026 Vodalus 0.1.2.5

i'm not bumping the version number on this one since it feels weak. This week was tax day and I am drained. PTO is inbound which means The Great Code Review (TM) is inbound. Changes will continue to be slow as I go "who the fuck wrote this dogshit??" for two weeks straight

mostly all i've added this week is frontend changes. i've lost a lot a time to a thing i think i have to scrap until i'm better at this :(

• fun little guys of the sun and Lune
• new cursors (these are the ones from my work laptop, might change them)
• oh yeah vodalus now has it's own hardware and isn't running off my PC. specs are on the about page but yay virtualization!

i wanna ship (haha) a few more things soon. namely slide-in announcements are done as are a few other things, i just haven't wanted to do backend lately :p. who knows, but that's all for now

- (tiredly) jolenta

04/10/2026 Vodalus 0.1.2

this one's gonna be controversial i imagine....

• added some fun little animations to the sticky buttons (chat page mainly rn)
• wrote a few new js files for features that are nearly ready to ship i just need to polish them (soz)
• new font.
• working on some of the style consistency on the site
• oh yeah, new sidebar who dis? real ones know i always default to this double box style for things (i just like it) but i like the way it looks
• purple...lots of purple...and some stars

obv vodalus is changing rn, so please be patient (i know things are ugly i am working to fix it). some exciting new features are global announcements outside the chat (so you know when i'm rebooting) and page transition effects! been slow with changes lately because work is rough rn and i am drained. see you next week.

- byebye jolenta

04/03/2026 Vodalus 0.1.1

hallo oomfies. some cool shit coming your way today:

• some new style elements on the chat page/around the site
• some cool cursor effects i stole on the atrium page
• moveable windows???? i found a guide for this and liked it so much that i basically rewrote the whole thing to make it like this. very XP, very cool.
• overhauled notifications. you'll see them on the tabs and windows now, so you can browse and know when to come back
• tons of little changes
• oh yeah, DMs are here. you can even dm yourself (good for phrase storage)

That's all for now. I've been grinding some CSS courses and I think I'm understanding it more now, and writing all these bespoke js imports instead of working on Kataharine has made my javascript much better and less reliant on clankers. See you for 0.1.2!

- xoxoxo jolenta

04/01/2026 Vodalus 0.1.0

Hello lovelies and welcome to April. The theme for the month is........ i don't know yet

You're now going "what?! come on!" and I know. This was going to be the month of chatting right up until the very end, but the more i troll the indieweb, the more I notice Vodalus's core issue:

We got no swag.

So I'm thinking I'll split my efforts this month between frontend and chatting at first, and see which has a strong draw.

Things I'm committing now to shipping in April:

• Status indicators for the chat. Gotta know who's online to chat with in your newwwwww
• DMs. They're already here and they already exist, I just need to work out a few minor kinks to push them out to you all.
• Some semblance of a visual identity
• Another special chat tag to earn
• Details about a mystery project I am not yet ready to announce

That's a lot to look forward to (I think). I have a huge block of free time for the latter half of the month so expect a lot of this to ship then (or work to slow down a lot as I review the codebase).

- jolenta

03/27/2026 Vodalus 0.0.9.5

This one's kinda lame, but it needed to be done

• Added a sidebar toggle on mobile. So now you can stop complaining this site looks awful (it still will)
• Added an about page, as though y'all don't already know too much about me
• Polished up some styling for the chat mainly and a few other things
• Built better remote admin tools into the site so I can fix minor issues without having to SSH into the box on my phone
• I'm now using Gitlab for source control instead of randomly sorting files in my mind (supposedly this is better)
• many other small tweaks you'll never notice

I've gotten mostly everything I wanted for March, and after a special update next week I should be moving this Vodalus 0.1.0 (woo!!!), when we'll be adding our site to some places and maybe some webrings? But that's all for now. I have a lot of work to do before April....

- jolenta

03/23/2026 Vodalus 0.0.9.4

hello girlypops. you guys went kind of feral on gambling... so here's more

• 5 full adventures. Each a little easier than the last, until you leave Urth...
• Prestige! Finish the story too quickly? Want to dominate the leaderboard? Want something cooler than MASTER GAMBLER? Try and unlock the whole rainbow
• Added a place to prestige in the corridors (in the back of the atrium)
• Role tags are collapsed in chat to make it easier to read. You can pick one to display in chat, and the rest you'll see on hover
• Revamped the UI on many pages so it's less ugly. Journeys are so much nicer
• Added motivation to gambling

This is most of what was planned for March and then some. Most of my effort now will be prepping for April's event, but you may get a little more gambling here and there in the meantime.

- mwah jolenta

03/21/2026 Vodalus 0.0.9.2

This would probably be the 0.1 release, but I need to review a LOT of the code.

I'm prepping stuff for April's event (can you guess the theme based on the changes?) and it's led to a lot of changes and new bugs. I'm hoping to slow down here and take a while to review it all and clean things up.

anyways what you actually want:

• Dark mode. Toggle it in the bottom right
• new handling of users to enable things like colors in the guestbook and a member list in the chat
• slowly rolling out some Katharine features to prod. DMs/chat creation still aren't here for users yet, but coming soon TM
• There're some UX/UI changes for clarity around no one will ever notice but me
• moving things in the backend to be cleaner and reduce code redundancy
• there's now the marquee on the home page, enjoy that

that's all for now. things may slow or i may stay on this weird grind i'm on. too much of this codebase is unaudited now, though, and I see a lot of days cleaning it ahead
- jolenta

03/20/2026 Vodalus 0.0.9

A LOT has been added and changed. Let's go through it all:

• Gambling levels are here! Levels 1-3 have unique colors and decorations, and level 4 lets you set your own
• A secret to be discovered: Tzadkiel's Ship has arrived at the House Absolute, though it is being very specific about who boards. Perhaps it grants a special tag?
• Katharine API: holy moly the amount of bugs and security vulnerabilities changed could fill a post. Cursor did most of the work here (I am dumb and wrote the buggy code)
• Katharine is no longer just a chat. It's got multiple chats. VIPs will notice the VIP chat. DMs are supported but not finished yet (sorry!), and only I can make chats for now
• More Katharine changes: Announcing.... announcements! Journey's and phrases you redeem send announcements to chat(s) for all to see! Also useful for me
• a million small backend and admin changes you'll never see

What's still left to come in March?

• the one thing left for me is finish Tzadkiel's Ship
• I'd like to maybe add scaling to journeys, though it seems rather complicated
• I think it might be also cool to add 3 new journeys for the various levels, though this is also hard to implement

- xoxo jolenta

updates! 03/19/2026

Welcome to the March 2026 event! I'm in the process of finishing things up in the atrium, but I'm happy to announce that gambling is here!

What's new?

• Introducing Journeys: a way to struggle through Severian's story and earn a special surprise!
• Gambling levels: there are now 4 levels of gambling, tracked by the numbers of completed journeys you've made!
• VIP for the rest of us: by winning at gambling, you will be able to redeem a prize for VIP!
• Customizable name colors/sparkles: if you attain gambling level 4, you will be able to set a custom color and sparkle for your name in the chat!
• The Atrium of Time: a curious place where Valeria may aid you on your quest...

What's to come?

by the end of March I'd like to be finished with this update, so here's what's left to do:
• finish the CSS styling for the gambling levels, with each level having it's own name color and sparkle and a tag in chat
• Katharine change: Announcements have the power to be really cool for the chat (soon to be chats...). I want to add the ability to do announcements to the API, and make it so gambling winning and redeeming triggers it
• Maybe add a secret 5th journey for the (MASTER GAMBLER) tag...