Shadow Yoshi of Stardust Fields launched a new network today called the Super Mario Fansite Network, which is a group of fan-created websites centered around Nintendo's Mario franchise. It also serves as a directory of current Mario fan sites, and archived sites from the past. Honestly, some of the old Mario fan sites were so good that I often find myself taking a trip down memory lane using the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive), of which I gladly donate to annually!

I'm not sure what causes fan sites to go dark like they do. Sometimes you'll return to a link to see that the domain registration had expired. Sometimes the site is still online, but the last update was several years ago, despite how seemingly normal or mundane the last update was. The Koopa-related fan site Lemmy's Land was like that. Some visitors might naturally wonder if the webmaster suddenly died or something! Or maybe other webmasters just lose motivation one day? It's hard to know. Thankfully, Shadow Yoshi was able to get into contact with the not-dead webmaster of Lemmy's Land to try to revitalize that old fan site as well!

I'm not one to talk, as even I was unable to produce a single update on The Bowser Shrine between 2009 - 2012 without explanation. The website was online the whole time, but aside from my "Long Period of Inactivity" post on August 10, 2009, I didn't make another post until my "The Bowser Shrine Hiatus Explained" update on November 2, 2012. That huge gap still exists in my update history.

The reason for the gap was me focusing on my struggle with headaches related to digital screens, which unfortunately has been going on for over 20 years now. Thankfully I have more good days than bad now, because it was the opposite back then. Sometimes I can go on stretches of inactivity when I'm having some difficulties again, and I will need some long offline time to reset (like playing golf!)

And then of course, life can just get in the way sometimes as well! There are many reasons for fan sites to lose their activity levels. I must unfortunately admit that I've only ever noticed the pool of active Mario fan sites shrinking year after year. Most people prefer social media platforms. I still think fan sites can offer their little niche advantages though, such as the ability to offer entire Fan Fiction sections! (I'm aware some folks are still waiting on some recent email submissions! It might be a few weeks yet!)

I will prune my Links page from time-to-time when I notice some sites go dark/offline/inactive. Gulp... after testing a few links at the top, I can see that it's time for another cleanup round soon *sigh*. It's always sad each time. The SMFN is yet another resource to reference to see what other fan sites might still be out there. It's kind of like one of those old webrings people would have on their Geocities pages when the internet first went mainstream in the mid 1990's! Us Mario fan site webmasters have to stick together!

Summary:

• 1 link added to the Links section under "Mario Universe Fansites"

The Bowser Gallery at the Super Mario Wiki is the most valuable source for finding all of Bowser's official character art over the years. One can't beat the crowd sourcing effort and the great platform they have there. I realize that many of my sections like Bowser Renders has fallen very out of date. I plan to catch up one day, but in the meantime, I have been spending my efforts trying to find stuff that doesn't yet exist.

I never owned a Nintendo 3DS myself, but I was aware that Mario Kart 7 released exclusively for that handheld system. There was a really cool render released with the game that showed Bowser crushing a barrel (demonstrating physically how he crushes the competition!) I always thought it was really cool, but the transparent image was always itsy bitsy!

I recalled that there were wallpapers released with the game as well, and that there was a larger version of this render, just with an added background. I have no idea why it always seems to be wallpapers of all things that contain some of the highest resolution versions of official Mario character art from the source. I tracked down the offical Mario Kart 7 North American webpage on the Wayback machine, but I wasn't able to find a section with wallpapers on it. Thankfully, the Japanese versions of the official game sites always seem to be left online forever instead of taken down like the North American versions, so I was able to find a Wallpapers section for Mario Kart 7 still online.

With that Bowser-like greed of mine, I once again asked Tony if he was willing to offer his surgeon-like precision again to cut Bowser out from the wallpaper into a transparent PNG. He did such a great job on getting a much smoother and higher quality extraction of Bowser from the Mario Party 2 wallpaper in the last update.

And above is the result of Tony's amazing work once again. I really have to learn how to do such smooth cutouts like that. Perhaps using a more modern program instead of one that is 25 years old might help!

There might be a colorshift in the cutout due to differing colorspaces. When downloading the source image wallpaper, I noticed that it displayed different color hues in Firefox (more saturated) than it did in my image editor Paint Shop Pro 7 (less saturated). Personally, I always prefer Bowser's colors to be more saturated. Perhaps I will try my hand at doing a cutout using a program that displays the same colors as Firefox does in the future to see if I can get a compariable result.

Because this was an image edit cutout out of an official wallpaper, I'll still refer to it as an Unofficial Render on the Bowser Renders page. However, Tony has now earned his place as the first to be listed multiple times on the Fan Contributions page!

Summary:

• 1 new render added to the Bowser Renders section under "Unofficial Renders"
• 1 new wallpaper added to the Bowser Wallpapers section
• 1 repeat contributor added to the Fan Contributions section

My email inbox has been a lot busier lately thanks to new folks finding The Bowser Shrine and writing in! I'm not sure if that's due to the excitement surrounding the Super Mario Galaxy Movie or what, but it's certainly been nice! I've actually become short-term backlogged by some new fan contributions!

One such new fan is Tony. I say "new", but apparently he had first found the website about 15 years ago. Something reminded him of the website, and he checked back all these years later to see if the site was still alive. Not only is it still alive, but it might be one of the most active Mario fan sites that still exists!

My fan site might be old (like me!), but I take pride in the fact that some of my obsession, dedication, and dragon-like hoarding skills from multiple decades ago has resulted in some Bowser preservation that might otherwise have been lost to history. One example is the Bowser lunging render from the Nintendo 64 era. The only ever surviving depiction seemed to be saved on my computer (and subsequent floppy disk or CD backups) from the beginning of the century.

I remember finding a Wallpaper of Bowser in Mario Party 2 from a Mario fan site in the year 2000 and saving it. Later when I made The Bowser Shrine, I cut this Bowser render out from the background using Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7 (also from the year 2000). Dare I admit that to this day, I still use that program for my image editing needs because of how used I am to it (or I might just be super old school).

I believe I used the "Freehand" tool with selection type "Point to Point" and clicked around the border of Bowser using straight lines. I didn't have a "Feather" value set, nor any anti-aliasing, so the end result looked a bit rough and jagged with mouse tooth edges.

In some back-and-forth email communications with Tony, he revealed something that made my ears perk up: he's an artist! That means he actually knows what he's doing with these digital image editors! I asked if Tony thought he could excavate that dinosaur better than I can/did, and in Tony's next reply, attached was this smooth-edged, transparent, much more professional-looking job than my version!

Apparently their method wasn't too much more different than mine. They used GIMP (also an old program, but one that's received updates over the years unlike my PSP7!). They selected the "Pen" tool, then very carefully marked a path around the edges of Bowser, then cut it out and cleaned it up a bit. They mentioned that it took some patience.

Compare below my version on the left versus Tony's effort on the right. On this black background they may look almost identical, but if you compare them by flipping back and forth between two tabs, it may show the improvements a lot easier:

As mentioned, unless both images above are loaded in separate tabs and flipped back-and-forth between the two, the differences will be very hard to notice. It's mostly in the smoothness of the edges. I tend to have some perfectionist tendencies sometimes, and I always knew that this extraction could be done better. Sure enough, it was able to be greatly improved thanks to Tony's efforts! A perfect character like Bowser deserves this type of dedication!

I've mentioned it several times before, but it's worth mentioning it again: N64 Bowser is my most favorite depiction of Bowser of all-time. A lot of people have a certain fondness to how the 3D renders of Mario characters looked in the Nintendo 64 era. Somehow the textures seemed so much more realistic. The characters were lit well and cast believable shadows. Bowser was a very saturated deep bold orange in those days, and I thought he's never looked better. It was hard to believe they even had the computing power back in 1996 to generate these images!

The tone of the style I love best. This isn't your clumsy oaf comic relief version of Bowser. This is more like the T-Rex or raptors seen in Jurassic Park, hellbent on destruction. The rage in his eyes and ferocity in his face gives clear indication that he is unwilling to be reasoned with. His metal studded collar and arm clamps look so heavy and unforgiving. His head is massive and seemingly a third of his tank-like body proportions alone. This was a Bowser that was genuinely feared. Bwa ha ha ha!

I recently started a new file on Super Mario 64 last weekend just for old time's sake, and I beat the first Bowser after collecting 8 stars in only an hour or two! Looks like I've still got it!

I will always wonder where some of these source digital images came from to make these wallpapers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A lot of people still had dial up modems that were very slow, and a lot of websites had bandwidth limits. As a result, many large images were shrunk down to pitifully tiny sizes by today's standards. Hopefully the original raw full resolution images still exist in some Nintendo vault somewhere...

Summary:

• 1 updated render added to the Bowser Renders section
• 1 contributor added to the Fan Contributions section