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It's 2023 and the internet is a fucking SHITHOLE, BABY! Time to put that good good compsci degree to good use, huh? Yeah, let's put an incomprehensible stream of consciousness on the public web, that's a good idea.
AT LEAST IT'S ON MY SITE.
(Skip to the "tech ramble" heading to not feel click-baited. this is just a massive personal ramble for the first half. it adds to the experience <3)
For those who missed my """"lore""""" because honestly how could you not, in about two decades I have jumped from forums to deviantart to tumblr to twitter to back to tumblr, to oh god what's happening (car crash sfx). In the meantime I finished compulsory education, university, and worked my way thru software dev and game dev roles. Most of my time online was spent on the usual fandom activities, and the most recent chunk of it I spent (like 7 years of it lol) posting Splatoon ocs and memes. yay!
I'd say my "peak performance" was on twitter. I had a fairly good streak on it before it got pulverized into a joke, I found a cozy little nook for myself. no hashtags, we die like men. my homies just sharing art and um. doomscrolling. Tumblr's been pretty much the same except make it ~11 years and it's... a different realm. You decide in which way. In any case, tumblr's the only place I frequent these days, and not even 100% at this point. what the fuck is this new dash. tumblr live?? i don't care. Sad part is that I think I've only got 3 and a half homies left in there from the vibrant days of pretending to be social on social media. rip
Here's my main grievance with my time spent surfin' and ~Content Creating~. I have been dumping significant amounts of art and writing into the nether, and most of the time I couldn't be assed to categorize it properly or bump it up the ephemereal stream of shitposts and discourse. I was already tired making it, fuck the marketing, I'm not even selling anything! My artists in the crowd can relate for sure. Also, I'm a big fan of the "word of mouth". Nothing worse than knowing I'd end up on some random guy's feed by the whims of the algorithm and I feel a smidge of dread knowing that someone will go "wtf is this shit" from miles away. Babe, it's not for you. (but I agree lol wtf is this indeed)
Jump ship even for the conservative few times I did and all of it becomes a faint blip on the radar. What is that artist doing now?? god idk, try tracking url changes and the next timeline-based socmed where they could've bailed. oooh shiny new Thing Of The Month, reshare repost! attention span -2. god forbid you make someone read >140 words unless it's some provocative thinkpiece written by someone who doesn't know half of what they're saying. Sorry it's getting a bit "we live in a society" but try getting a job outside your creative domain and you just can't keep up with the Content, can you? Why would you? The motherfucking thing tempts you away from your nicely curated experience with every suggested post and whatever crap platforms come up with so they don't lose a quadrillion in share prices. ugh
I dug the vibe of the "indie web" around 2021, and had a whimsical time browsing the plots of digital land everyone cultivates here. I made this neocities domain in 2022ish, learned some CSS and had a flex ass website where the hue would change every half second. sorry for burning your processor's resources on my disco website, but it was fun <3 It had an massive "UNDER CONSTRUCTION" in the hopes I'd add some sort of blogging/scream into the void functionality.
1 year later
hoo shit oops! no progress. more on that later (I blame myself wanting to overengineer things)
This overlaps with the time I made an active decision not to overshare or use a private twitter account as venting grounds sometimes turned nsfw doodle dump grounds. I'm glad stopped that. Though I didn't really journal or have any other outlet for this sort of stuff. Also, getting buried time and time again in the infinite information streams makes you feel fairly insignificant! Cue low self esteem, low creative energy, low everything. dw I worked thru it 👍 If not I wouldn't have dared putting this online.
Grievance number two: your shit can blow up outside your realm. It always happens when you put stuff out there, sure, but social media just has a saucy way of doing it. If you're putting generally advertiser-friendly things out there it doesn't really matter, though I prefer when art bears the burden of the person behind it. CAVEAT: THE ORDEAL OF BEING KNOWN. This is something I struggled with sooooo much fml. I have a lot of personal weight behind my art, and nothing puts me more to a halt than the constant worry of "oh no what will a hypothetical viewer think of this". I have a niche. I don't want to be forced out of it. I explained to myself over and over again this negative reaction is just our species' inherent need of approval in any sort of social spaces. social media.... oh. fuck. this is a mistake. never put anything ever again online. (no)
I got an ask on tumblr recently from someone who seems to have seen my stuff circa 2016-ish. I would consider that a real interesting creative period of mine, where I took some risks while not having any fucking idea what I was doing! I WAS (briefly) FREE! And very seventeen. This kind anon absolutely made my day saying how they read my fic back in the day and recently recognized my ocs from my art style. OH THE JOY OF FEELING KNOWN! By then I already accepted that the worth of what I'm doing can't be measured by notes and likes and whatever, but brother it helps if you get out there. it's not nice to keep something as liberating as the act a creation just for yourself, I learned very recently.
If this teaches(?) you anything, make it this: consider your creative outlets. How do you use them? How do they influence your creations? What speaks to you, how will it speak to others, and to who do you want it to speak to? Then idk throw it into the void and pray it shines on someone. That's just how it ended up for us I guess.
myself, I'll still use at least tumblr, though I'm happy to get cosy with the type of people using neocities, and appreciate word of mouth and the intentional internet more. you're cool and you will survive the social media ice age that's to come.
TECH RAMBLE
I admit, all the posts on tumblr about "make your own neocities!" convinced me. okay, let's start. first off, you need a static website here. cool, we'll keep it simple, it's gonna be easy, I did this when I was 7, I thought. I didn't go for the 90s gifs explosion aesthetic, I couldn't work my style around it. I spent some evenings making mobile responsive sleek slabs of rounded-corner containers.
Here's the thing: I'm not a web dev, you can't pay me enough money to do it full time. Nevertheless, I don't mind dabbling in a bit of it for the necessary survival skills in today's internet, and I lowkey like that sweet feeling of "yeaaaah baby we have transferrable skills".
it was very Website
So I considered I can aim for more than just hand-written html+css after my first site version. I wasn't entirely sure what to do with the site, though I knew I'd want some sort of gallery, and to update it from time to time with my writing without having to pull my hair out or dedicate a weekend to it. also, the way I hand-built everything was a bit Ass.
I entered the world of STATIC SITE GENERATORS!!
Awesome in concept. Write pages without having html tags in the corner of your vision for the rest of your day. It's sweet. I just banged this entire post out on markdown in my code editor of choice in a random hyperfocus daze. (hate it when it happens I ACTUALLY HAVE SOMETHING HIGHER IN PRIORITY TO DO)
okay, what SSG options are there? LOTS. dear god, name a js framework thing and it has a static site generator for it. don't make me touch anything like that though, the whole npm management is just... yuck. and we're generating static websites for god's sake, why would you need so many dependencies.... anyway. (my opinion) (dont hate me) (maybe do) (it sucks imo) (avoid javascript bloat please please please)
I found Hugo, as you do. I used go(lang) briefly at work, so I expected (relatively) less bloat, and it has a single executable thing without any dependencies. I did the quick start guide and had a itty bitty site locally of lorem ipsums. nice. Oooooh, look, it has themes!
This is where I fucked up. Don't be like me. I went into the themes section without knowing what to use, it's like going to the shop hungry without knowing what to buy. a few TOO many possibilities for someone who had no idea what to do with their site. What's worse, I knew I was technically capable to tweak any of these to my own desires. oh no
static noise for a few months
Okay, it's 2023, twitter's a letter for some fucking reason and tumblr is getting a bit too cheeky with its userbase. I need that website.
I distanced myself from Hugo because, I shit you not, one day I couldn't remember the command line to export the site and start the local server. what did you say? docs? using -h when running the command? it's literally just "serve"? lol i cba
I looked through hippie ready-to-use blogging platforms, all fairly minimalistic and with a high focus in text content. It just never felt right to impose this much limitation on myself, I need muh flexibility, like, what if I ever want to put a desktop pet of my oc in the corner of every page. Priorities.
I had another browse thru SSGs, this time with one (1) good and clear idea in mind: let's just... make it a blog, for now. Maybe a html gallery too for said ocs if I have time for it. If I want to extend it, I should be able to do it easily. I settled for Zola, written in everyone's favourite baby: rust. not that it matters in the end, though I know some devs go hard on rust. good for it!
The quick start guide for it was very sexy. It showed me what it could potentially do without boring me or giving me information overload. This thing is also one executable and was a breeze to start with. I can't say it's better than Hugo, but my brain clicked with this better. It's also blessed in the most backwards sense that its theme library is way, way smaller than Hugo's. I actually chose a theme this time. It was relatively simple for me to modify it here and there, compared to other hodgepodges I tried.
This is all still a WIP, and still under the hypothetical UNDER CONSTRUCTION sign, though I'm feeling better about actually working on this over time and not, you know, leaving it in the dust after a week of working on it. In reality, a website like this is never not under construction, but I'm feeling a direction for the first time.
If you're in the same dilemmas as I was, for the love of god PICK ONE THING AND DO IT WELL. just one. don't get all the bells and whistles from the start. I used to shit on blogs when I was younger tho I finally realized why they're so popular, because 1) ez and 2) going takatakataka on a keyboard is fun and hopefully engaging for your readers. (🥺)
If you want to make your first website just for the sake of having one and you have a chunk of time to focus on building it, just go wild. no attachments. It's a rewarding learning experience. If you have some skillz under your belt and you want to set a stable base, definitely consider your options and what you like using and outputting, otherwise you'll never want to touch it. And go to the shops after eating, not before (this is general life advice)
thanks for reading, and happy exploring (I should have a minimal version of my digital garden up too, I'll definitely ramble about digi gardens at a later date)
and if anything on this site tickles you fancy, let's stay in touch. drop me an ask at echolocating.tumblr.com or mail me at ramenbowie@gmail.com if you're feeling old-school