Hello World
December 04, 2022 (actually posted shortly after midnight so more like early morning December 05, 2022)
It turns out that it's actually completely possible to teach oneself html and css over a long weekend! After several days of procrastinating on my actually important projects by tinkering with my new personal website, I created what I think is a very nice-looking layout to start out with. I might re-vamp it later, but for right now the vibe that I get is a mix of 90's hacker and haunted forest: like a Bigfoot hunter if that Bigfoot hunter were very queer and didn't care for conspiracy theories. . . . I should probably take a screenshot and add it to this post sometime so that it'll still make sense next time I change the layout.
I have a bit more that I would like to get done on my "About" page, but otherwise, I think that I'm in excellent shape. Now my main priorities are:
- Clean up the code on the pages I built first; and
- Start adding actual content!
I haven't fully decided what I'd like to use this site for. That's one of the things that was appealing to me about starting a personal website: if I decide that I want to pivot to some entirely new interest, I can just add another box to the navigation menu. I like the idea of building the site out rather than on top of itself. That's something that's always bugged me about social media: the format is set. You can grow vertically through the timeline just by posting in chronological order, but I'd like to grow horizontally too! I don't want my posts about solo-ttrpgs to crowd out book reviews.
Not that I use much social media: just in the five days since I started working on this site, I probably did more "social networking" on Neocities by following cool sites (and even seeing some of them follow me back!) than I ever have on Facebook or The Bird App.
(Actually my main social media is Tumblr, but I'm not currently planning to link my blog. That absolutely might change later, but for whatever reason I just usually feel more comfortable keeping things separate.)
I was motivated to make this site after I got (maybe a little too) invested in reading about the FTX crypto exchange collapse. (The MuskE Twitter Purchase also played a role, but while I've been hate-following crypto news for a while, I just don't think about Twitter very often.)
If you're reading this and not familiar with what happened, here is a link to Molly White's horrifying-but-entertaining writeup on her Substack newsletter about the situation. This link is to part 3 of 3-as-of-time-of-writing, but the two earlier parts are linked on the page.
I like to think I've been a skeptic of cryptocurrency since I was a little kid overhearing my parents talk about Bitcoin in 2008. I thought it sounded kinda silly. I maintained a sort of gut feeling that it was a bad idea, but as an adult I decided to look into it and properly do my research, particularly once the 2021 NFT craze started to take off and I started hearing talk of "Web 3" and other buzzwords.
It is bad. What people call "Web 2" is bad but "Web 3" is all of that and worse.
I really don't want a future where everything's on blockchains and immutable. Humans change. I don't want everything online to be a transaction. It just feels like Ayn Rand's fantasy formalized into code and it makes me want to gag. I already dislike how corporate the web feels, and I fear that it'll get worse in the future if we stay on the track that we're on.
While starting a personal website isn't going to ~fix the internet~ or anything like that, reading about all these crypto exchange collapses got me reflecting on what I would want the web to be. And I think the web's the thing. I want to interact with people and just vibe. I want a little corner to myself where I can look at other people's cool little corners. I like the idea of being able to link to neat sites I find, and for people to be able to find mine if they want to. But I also want to be able to just tinker away and release my work into the void. Basically, whether anyone sees this or not is less important to me than the idea that people are finding it more-or-less organically. All of that in mind, starting a Neocities seemed like exactly the right decision.
I could go on, but it's getting very late for me at the time of writing so I'm going to have to call it here.
