Starting is always difficult, yet it's the part I most often enjoy. From not finishing a drawing in order to start a new one, to booting up a new save on Stardew Valley, to just finding another hobby to pursue. I'm always fond of learning from the start of something. When I made this neocities site last year, I had these great ideas to keep it up to date, to use the site as a way to get myself to share more of the things I make. But it initially ended up being another one of those projects that I worked on for a couple of weeks, shared with two or three friends, before abandoning it like so many other side projects. But lately I've been thinking a lot about how I use the internet to connect to people, or rather how disconnected I feel using the internet. A feeling I'm sure a lot of people share as more and more people start leaving social media platforms run by big tech giants like meta in favor of more personal alternatives. And so I too return to this website to share things, picture, drawings, code,... (and now even text posts I guess).
I'm also hoping that more of my friends make their own website. My ideal vision of the 'social' internet as I see it now is fully based on dodgy HTML code and copy-pasted CSS. With little webrings and forums, guestbooks and e-mail threads. There's this longing in it to my childhood, I'm sure of it. I have been on a nostalgia kick the last month, playing games on my old DS. I had lost the charger for it a couple of years ago and the DS has been moving with me from apartment to house to house for the last three years, uncharged and unplayed. It's also not the original DS I got back when I was six but a new 2DS XL I bought back in 2017 when I dropped and broke my old grey brick in another wave of nostalgia. This new one has homebrew installed which means I get to play any game I want. I didn't have a 3DS as a kid, so I hadn't played any of the games for it, still holding the DS and it's low res screens and plastic stylus makes me feel some kind of way. Feeling nostalgic for games I never experienced as a kid. That same kind of nostalgia I feel for this website. I was far too young to make webpages when geocities was a thing. Tumblr was also a website that went over my head, let alone that I had the courage to actually say anything online. Even anonymity wasn't enough to get over my social anxiety. Now, I'm finding great fun in getting to relive that era of the internet that seems so much more appealing, so much more human, not so coopted by huge corporations. So if you've made it this far in this post, why not join in on the fun? Making a website's not difficult! To my friends reading this: if you want help, I can help you along :) just send me a message and I'll gladly lend a hand or show you the basics! <3
Writing doesn't come natural to me, so I'm not fully sure where this blog part of my website will be going. For now, I'm thinking it'll be a place to put some thoughts into the world or write about what I'm currently doing. But hey, it's my website, I'll do with it what I want :) and I'll see you in the next one!