An introduction...

Hi, im a 23 year old grown baby who loves the internet. I also love loads of other things that i use the internet to talk about.

I come back to neocities a lot, having tried to start a 'personal website' about three times. Websites of this kind arent new to me because i grew up looking at a plethora of fansites for the things i liked as a kid. The ones i remember best were warrior cats and pokemon themed, though all of my favourite sites are sadly now defunct (besides the cave of dragonflies yay). I even used to run my own blogs and websites as a kid; i started with wordpress blogs for the virtual worlds i used to play on, but my warrior cats site was ALMOST fully realised and hand-coded. I think this was part of an age where things were still decentralised enough that you could get away with making one fansite in a sea of them, talking about content thats already been documented nearly to its fullest extent, and that didnt even matter because the true charm of it was how YOU relayed that information. Not just that, but you could also include your own little creations and opinions and it added up to this unique identity only your site had. i would re-read pages about the same topics on different fansites just because i liked hearing about them from different perspectives and voices. and my aesthetics as a younger person were shaped by the free-to-use forum icons, signatures, html site templates and fan graphics i would find.

I cant speak for other people, but the centralisation of the internet over the 2010s really hurt my drive to make these things. Its like im afraid to re-tread ground thats basically been turned into a pavement at this point, or its like i dislike writing in my own voice. Even writing this out gives me this ick because it feels so redundant and pointless, so my previous attempts at turning this into a real personal homepage just haven't worked out beyond a simple css stylesheet.

It's at this point that i think most web 1.0 manifestos would talk about how evil the modern internet is and how making a personal homepage is going to fix everything, or like maybe something less hyperbolic than that. I get why, because its frustrating to have only four or five 'main' websites you ever want/need to visit, all of which are mostly intended to shorten your attention span, take away your individuality and make you easier to market to/reprogram etc. I think there are loads more reasons why its frustrating to only have a handful of websites you ever need to visit. But like its really boring to talk about it and i dont think i have anything i want to add besides being slightly contrarian, e.g. "I like that social media helps me connect with my online friends easier", "i like how easy it is to find new content i like through social media because otherwise it can be a genuine chore, especially given some of my special interests feel like they have 8 fans", "a lot of twitter profiles actually have more interesting things to say than your 500 aesthetic websites with nothing written on them". This isnt a critique of social media, and im not leaving it or anything. In fact i think the microblogging origins of social media lives on a lot stronger than people think. Like unless your timeline is full of advertisers and influencers 100% of the time, there are real people sharing their art, writing their thoughts, aka Blogging. Expressing themselves online, which is more than many neocities sites ive surfed through can say. I for one really love tumblr because it facilitates the same content as twitter, but its long-form, which is perfect for my crazy rambles about my silly gay little games. I think tumblr actually fills most niches i could want in a social media site, so for all intents and purposes i could move there permanently-

Okayyyy. Fine. I dont think tumblr is gonna spontaneously go defunct next week or anything but maybe in the long term I should get used to hosting my OWN crazy rambles about my silly gay little games. Theoretically a neocities site could work as a hub for all of the things i use the internet for, sadly minus the social elements. But i think its worth giving it a fair shot, which i havent done yet. So this is my own little manifesto of sorts- im going to try to make this site work as a blog for pretty much most of the long-form thoughts i have. Im doing this hoping that as i get used to updating this site with blog posts, filling it with all the other things i want to will feel more natural too and i can have a little return to form for one of my long-term childhood hobbies.

Please dont mind the spaghetti code on the site, or the barebones nature of it, or the pointless stimmy buttons i added on the top because i was trying to figure out how to code cute-looking buttons even though i had no links to put on them yet. Im hoping all of that will be fixed in good time, but plain and simple its not a huge priority right now, because I want to get used to actually filling up my site first.