The official Shiftine canon

This document is developed an official explainer of who Shiftine is, how to identify her, and how is she significant to Reinhart’s personal life.

Shiftine has reflected a decade of Reinhart’s passion in both technical and fantasy aspects of ICT, as she herself was evolved from Reinhart’s original character (OC) projects dating back to 2014.

History

2014-2015: Early life as an Original Character (OC)

In 2014, Reinhart was bored, looking at his classmates over DeviantArt who are drawing things that are called as “OCs”. “Oh, it’s my Original Character,” they said, which primarily consists of manga-styled characters and some random doodles.

Reinhart became interested, but not knowing how to draw properly. His sister was taught manga drawing techniques by one of Reinhart’s classmates, but he wasn’t interested to spare some time for. So he kept his ideas of imagining his original characters. Yep, they are a couple of superheroes of tech world, just like the people’s perception of “Anak IT” (tech wizards) today.

2016-2018: A video game on tech wizards

He then expanded his ideas of the tech wizards, which are real, and after being inspired by video games and the True Worshippers Kiddie’s Yesus Besertaku, he started wanting to build his own video game, perhaps in the platformer (e.g. Super Mario Bros. and Sonic the Hedgehog) featuring the two wizards: Charlie and Charlene.

The game’s concepts are still broken and unfinished, but well, there’s a whole new theme song made by himself. And the background story of the couple was well-defined as the following.

Once upon some lines of code, lived a pair of twins who are being unwanted by a family. They are left by their parents for many years. Even their parents forgot about them.

The twins walked along a path across to the Hacker Kingdom, which is far far away. During their journey, they have tried to survive from Wicked Hackers around the forest. Wicked Hackers are harmful to the Kingdom. Those hackers are often stealing lines of code from the Kingdom. The King prepared an army of hackers to defeat them. Unfortunately, the army failed.

After the twins entered the Kingdom, a sorcerer adopted both of them. Soon, the sorcerer give name to the twins as Charlie Sweetstar and Charlene Sweetstar. What a similar name!

The sorcerer teached them magic for years, the magic that can defeat the darkness of the Wicked Hackers outside. The sorcerer did not teach magic to others because they can destroy the Kingdom. Even the sorcerer did not tell and teach the King about it.

Soon, Charlie and Charlene mastered all the sorcery of hackers, and start to defeat the Wicked ones. They started the journey to the forest near on the App Valley, then on the Import Hills. Both of them successfully defeated some of the Wicked ones.

The news spread to the entire kingdom. Then, the King called both of them to the castle, which is known as the 127.0.0.1. Some civilians are also calling the palace 0.0.0.0 or localhost.

[!NOTE]

At that time, Reinhart didn’t know that his story contained elements that are against the true Christian belief. For instance, he first knew about occultic elements in common video games in 2019. His renewed interests in Christian faith in 2022 also redefined how his original characters should appear and behave.

2019-2020: A college hiatus and being an OOP fanatic

Reinhart had to take a break over his past works to focus on starting his college life. Not much things were added to the concept, but his family was in a life-threatening issue that required Reinhart to stay silent in the digital world. At least, no more real faces on Instagram.

Another significant movement made by Reinhart is the invention of the phrase “Interface in Polymorphism”, borrowing Object-Oriented Programming terms including interface and polymorphism to describe what Bhinneka Tunggal Ika actually stands for. He considers computing system multiculturalism so much that he became a proud owner of three laptops running Windows, macOS, and Linux running in one place. Not to mentions having an Android phone and an iPhone altogether, and now an iPad and Android tablet!

2021: A rediscovery of the old wizards

Due to significant amount of stress caused by loneliness and the COVID-19 pandemic, Reinhart fell sick and hospitalized for the first time in his entire life. He started to think of creating a digital, automated entity (aka. a “bot”) that expresses his unique tech interests to the public, and automate some of his mundane tasks. Defintely sounds like every developer’s dream!

And several iterations later, Charlene rebirthed as Shiftine. And Charlie, too, but for the safety of Reinhart and his family, he chose to hide inside the appearance of the male character, especially when interacting with the digital world.

2022-present: The life of a permanent (>_ )

The threatening family case was long gone, so it should be safe for him to open up his real face. But Reinhart felt that his (>_ ) is so overpowered that people are starting to identify himself as his original male character!

The (>_ ) is unique enough that he found his new identity from it, both on digital and real life. So he decided to embrace his life as his own created male character, paired with the female counterpart, and that largely explains his obsession with Shiftine: being together by an original character imagined since the early same days of his IT professional career.

Purpose

Shiftine’s purpose have changed over time, from a leading character for a video game, then a webcomic, before finally settled in “being a fictional representative of how createes should respect the creator.” Similarly, the ever-Shift Reinhart still keep his interests into his original characters, so he can “learn to manage his creations in the same way of how his Creator managed His creations, including him!”