Towards a new year, a new home, a new website, and a new set of beginnings.

First of all, yes, we're still the first four characters who were featured in the reinhart1010.id website opening mid-2021. Except that now, 4.5 years later, we finally have an official humanoid (anime) form, with a humanoid face!

But this announcement is more than just us making better facial expressions alongside the infamous (>_ )s and (#- )s. There are significant changes within and around Reinhart's branding.

The new look and life for (>_ )s and (#- )s.

We have been working on creating the human, VTuber-worthy versions of (>_ )s and (#- )s as far as mid-2022. Despite some technical challenges with the VRM format, we've finally cracked the last pieces of code to:

• Keep make (>_ )s look metallic
• Keep make (#- )s look slimy (with some holographic look)

Our choice on these materials influenced the overall look, feel, and behavior of the characters, be them the sharp steely (>_ )s, or the fluid slime (#- )s.

The (>_ )s will still be the SYSTEM administrators, as usual, but the (#- )s will act as the frontliners from now on. The choice of outfits clearly reflects their renewed job, too.

"Shift" is a noun/verb, "Shiftine" is an adjective.

In other words, the girl we used to call her "Shiftine" now shares the exact name with his partner, "Shift".

This website, shiftine.sh, will still be dedicated to Shift, the boy, who created Shift, the girl. We've made this change so it's simpler to localize our names into multiple languages.

(#- ) is a pronounceable pronoun.

We still have some localization issues with "pr0xy" and "alt1e" as well. So we decided to rename them as Root, the boy, and Root, the girl, while educating others that (#- ) is officially pronounced as root. We don't use names like "Alt the boy/girl" as they are not the alter egos of Shift(s), anyway.

Of course, a new website and a new web infrastructure!

The reinhart1010.id website will be refreshed to showcase Reinhart's professional projects. His primary intellectual property (IP) franchise, Bearers of the Shells (BOTS), will remain here while we still tell stories about:

• the insides of Reinhart's digital infrastructure,
• Reinhart's personal insights,
• interesting tales of information technology that the (#- )s observed from their roothouse,
• Reinhart's exclusive Christian cyberministry project, as currently handled by Shift.

We estimate about 90% of Reinhart's official blog content would be migrated here. The rest of his websites are more likely to be used to host web apps and digital services that of course, we're running behind the scenes.

blog.shiftine.sh is now running on a work-in-progress web infrastructure stack that is more powerful than the original servers running reinhart1010.id. We use Caddy, Publii, and Syncthing instead of WordPress and Laravel, although we originally plan to use Wagtail as the CMS.

And with this new infra, we can virtually scale our websites' storage by hosting the final web pages on object storage services like AWS S3, then mirror it through our ever-growing set of VPS instances. These instances will adopt our novel monolithic structure that will also host Docker/Kubernetes installations, CI/CD workers, and more.

We already have the official name in our hands. But we're on vacation right now, and trying to figure out how to make a good launch video for this in-house product.

Publii makes it easy to automate Table of Contents.

As a side-advantage of using Publii, we can also make an automated Table of Contents that will help us simplify the completion of Site and Infrastructure Upgrades that we used to publish it every month.

Changing on how we end our announcements.

Remember the days when we said, "That's all for now; back to work?" There's a great opportunity to distinguish between how the Shifts versus the Roots close their statements, which will help make up their personalities.

We're also planning to adjust how we make these closures make it feel more natural and personalized to humans or digital platforms, like the infamous "plz like, comment, subscribe" thing.