This neocities is not my first website. Before Neocities i had a .tk domain which pointed to the now defunct google drive hosing service. At one point, google allowed you to host HTML files publically on the world wide web. From 2013 to 2015 I paired that with very short .tk domain and ran a similar blog to share my creations with the world. I also used the Editey editor to edit my HTML web pages. All in all it was basically the same experience as running this site, having an online code editor + instant updates to my webpages + a cool domain name was pretty fun. Then at around the same time in 2015, .tk became totally swamped with spam and became a blacklisted domain suffix... AND google drive shut down it's web hosting option. My site was left without a host and a name. I tried to host the site over logmein hamatchi, but it proved too confusing at the time. I didn't have any income at the time, so paying for a domain/hosting was out of the question. Sooner or late I found neocities, and it immediately clicked with me. What made it even more accessible was that Neocities was not blocked by my high school's firewall, so I could edit my website, and browse others in the school's library without any problems. At one point I was even editing this site on my tiny iphone 3Gs screen. Not sure how I did it, but I absolutely did.
Before running my .tk blog, I actually had a wordpress blog that's still up. It's called [redacted for privacy] if you're curious to the type of things 5th grade me was posting back in 2011.
Before that, I used to write local web pages. I made home pages that would basically only exist for me on my local machines. They were very crude, and being that I wrote a lot of it on my hand-me-down windows 95 laptop (and the fact that I was very young), those pages are looking extremely crude, even compared to this one. I couldn't even embed the gifs I made in pivot animator into the web pages in internet explorer 5.
I have an intrusively vivid imagination, but whenever I set pen to paper to bring the ideas into the real world, my head is filled with static, and it immediately becomes extremely difficult to produce anything. It's very painful to see what others create and know that you have that drive, that passion, and that will within you, but whenever you try you find the walls growing taller and taller. With this in mind, I my creative impulses lead me from inventing physical things to inventing software, and from inventing software for destkop to inventing software for the web. And from the creative side, i started with making a few forms of animation, then landed upon making video games as a perfect marriage between my inventive and artistic side. Although I still do work in games today, making websites can require just as much creative energy and engineering, plus it's just more accessible to me at this point in my life than anything else.
I've always been a library kid. My parents took took me to my local library to get books for basically as long as I can remember. I've also had a long time affinity for older, simpler things. TBH i have a pretty deep seated complex about being a unique person, so being drawn to old and outdated curios was something a very young me latched onto very strongly. Old cars, old machines, old books, old computers, as long as it was old it was interesting to toddler me.
As I got older, frequenting the library sort of transformed into surfing the world wide web for information. I had pretty unrestricted access to the internet from around the age of 8, but I spent most of my time either brainrotting on youtube or obessively combing through wikipeida articles for random facts about technology.
I'd also like to note here that I'm a pretty anti-social individual. When I was a kid, I rarely would go out to hang out with friends, or family for that matter. Not for any bad reason or anything like that, both me and my parents are very antisocial by default, and have historically perfered solitude over everything else. Even though I'm trying to break out of my shell more since college, my social battery is incredibly small. If i ever came accross as being distant, weird, or otherwise unsociable, I'm very sorry. The reality is that my lifestyle didn't change at all during the pandemic.
What does any of this have to do with neocities?
I'd also like to note that I moved around a lot as a child. Before the age of 18, I lived in a grand total of 8 houses, not including any college or high school dormatories I lived in. I'll never forget the eerie feeling of waking up after my first night of living in a new house and being disturbed by the new scenery. disturbed by the lack of lived in aura of the new place, and disturbed that this new place just isn't home. That wore off after a few months, but by the time my comfort was totally there, the land lord wanted to sell the house for more than we could pay for it, and we had to find the next place.. or something similar to those lines. Or maybe the recession hit and the city wanted to raise our taxes by ten thousand dollars. Or maybe the house we were in was just too small. Whatever.
Simply put this site is home for me.
Although that was something I came to realize earlier on, I don't think that was something I truly materialized as a philosophy when posting here until I was diagnosed with autism.
I've spent so much time trying to follow in the footsteps of others, or trying to match the vibes and aesthetics of those that inpspired me, but now I've realized that even though it was fun and vital for me to make those steps, my site has been pretty shallow up until now.
For many years I tried to really lean into that cyberpunk aesthetic. I would (and still sometimes do admittantly) look for new cool telnet BBSs to vist and post links to. I went on JanusVR, and my mind was absolutely rewired to what a VR internet could look like. You can see from my VR experiements in 2016 and eveutual culminatory project in whomst.zone (desktop only) that I was really really trying to emulate the experience i had on Janus -- each webpage is represented by a virual room with interactables who linked to other vastly different interactive 3d worlds, with friends! My laptop at the time was actually destroyed in an accident right after I installed Janusvr, and by the time I finally got another laptop that could run Janus, the community had largely died (hah). Yeah the idea of exploring virtual worlds with friends is a bit played out now, but keep in mind this was all before VR Chat was on steam, and before the NFT/Metaverse hype train made everything lame. Janus was very decentralized too, so anyone with access to a web host could integrate a Janus world without changing how it looked on the normal web. It was so much fun to visit a random website and realize it had a Janus world hidden inside of it. THAT felt like the future of the internet. The decentralized nature of hosting your own world, and the mystery of a world hidden behind the facade of a webpage was mysterious and sexy. I wanted so badly to replicate this feeling on my sites, so I kinda slowly but surely implamented the parts that i liked with tools that were more easily accessible... the platforming based movement, the big weird artsy worlds, the portals you can walk into that trigger links to other pages, the music... But I didn't communicate the vision, and after burning out on whomst zone + google fucking up support for the version of A-frame I was using for mobile ended all of that.
I guess when I say this site is home to me, it's something that I come back to that's going to be here "no matter what happens"... I use the quotes because of course all good things come to an end, but for as long as I can, I know there's a six letter domain I can punch in and see all the things I like on there. After I got diagnosed with Autism, it's become very important for me to have this space. I can think about things out loud, share things with people, and record things that I would have otherwise forgotten about or misfiled. It's nice to just have a place that I can be weird and chaotic on. I no longer care about super flashy graphics and all the old school pazzaz that gets all the clout on this page, what I really like is having the space to be as creative as possible without the burden of keeping a format nor guise of professionalism. I'm the most creative when the stakes are low and the atmosphere is relaxed. As soon as I start treating this place like a job with deadlines and due dates it immediately stops being fun.
That's why I stopped with the home page blog, that's why each page has it's own style, that's why I don't care about grammatical errors, and thats why i don't really do many long term big projects anymore. A ton of really small ones are where my heart lies. I like being able to open a fresh webpage, and gush about some bullshit nobody cares about like Nadesico or Orguss. I want this to be a random site somebody finds in 20 years that might give them a stupid little chuckle before they move on. Doing big fantastic solo (i still do big group art projects don't get me wrong.. stay tuned for that ahaha) projects would be fun and fufilling to me sure, but I don't think I can really do that without dissapointing myself yet again. Keeping things casual keeps it fun and keeps me motivated. Ever since I dropped all pretenses, I've had so much fun coming up with silly little articles for this blog. I literally have lists of shit i wanna talk about and do on here. Shitpost journaling can be a hobby and an artform too.
Here's some blurbs about where my head was at at differnt points of the site's history. I'll go much more in detail than what's availible on the rabbit hole page.
At this time I was replacing my old site, and I kinda just threw up a little doodle I did to fill the space. Like many of the other sites done by young people, I didn't have much on there since I didn't have much to say at the time. I think this version of the site was up for a few months before I decided to sit down and build out a page layout. I was 15 at this time. The main page is lost, but here's the image I drew.
Vaugely 80s inspired character. I drew this on my HP Compaq 2710p laptop. It's got a fully wacom tablet built into the display, making it really great for drawing. At the time this was cool, since graphic with screens in them were very expensive, while this laptop was onlu 80 bucks. Nowadays, I've seen this same laptop go for under 50. QUite the deal if you don't mind windows vista and a hard drive that probably needs to be replaced among other issues ahahaha.
Though looking back at my other designs, it's obvious that my main website was nothing compared to what I have going on now. Most of the site during mhy high school years was a link dumping ground and an impersonal list of broken promises and the fleeting emotions about the things happening in my life at the time. Of course there were the one offs and the VR projects, but by and large my site was a mental pitstop for me.
I've always been somewhat of a people pleaser. I don't like disagreeing with people, or causing conflict, and I know it's made some people think that I'm a bit aloof. I don't think I awoke as a person until I started seriously writing down my thoughts on here and other places. The difference is staggering. All through 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 my updates were very short, terse blog posts with links. I had some visual do dads going and a lot of interactive stuff, but that was mostly it. Don't get me wrong, I had a lot of fun coming up with new cool layouts, and curating lists of links, but in the year 2024 that I'm writing this, I can't help but feel a twinge of sorrow when I go back to these posts and find that half of the links are dead. In a 2020 update, I tried to turn this site into a point and click adventure game. I took screenshots from houses that were for sale on trulia.com and drew over them in a trippy MS paint art style. I then placed an image map over the rooms and made it a sort of interactive adventure, where each page is a room in the house and content is found by interacting with stuff in the room. I worked REALLY hard on every part of this project, I even curated a playlist of about 100 songs that very perfectly shifted vibes from one to the other. Unfortunately the playlist was hosted on youtube and once channels started getting taken down, the playlist's vision was destroyed. I also set up the site to have "hours" as in the point and click adventure sections would only be open at certain times of the day, or week. Before each open session, I 'd prepare some drastic update to the thing that would make the site even more fun and interactive to use. I'm sure you could imagine how this moderately involved process might cause one to burn out creatively. And that's exactly what I did. I was in college and juggling an internship during this time, so trying to stick myself to deadlines for a fun little thing like this was not it. I felt so dissapointed by how it was turning out i scrapped the whole thing and designed a more conventional, if lazier, home page.
And I think that's another thing that's driving me to make this site filled with more original content - you can't really control what other people are doing on their sites. Years into the future all you can really try to garuntee is that your own content will be availible to check out.
The design after this one is pretty sick if i'm being honest. The landing page is full of these random, mostly low-light, photos I took in my area. I really like this aesthetic, and I randomized the landing image so each time you visit it it cycles through a different image.
No need to go to that page, try cycling through them here! All you need to do is click on the image below to see another picture!
The site itself was just okay. I went for a rather flashy psuedo desktop design. Browser tabs were burried in windows that could be opened or closed. I also made a pretty neat logo with p5.js. That's right chat, if you visit that page you'll see some shitty real time 3d graphics, right in the browser. However, this whole design took me a hella long time to figure out in CSS, and I eventually dropped it since the design was just too much to maintain. Updating new pages was just too annoying, and I found the format to not only sparse, but difficult to manage over time due to the way I was placing things on the screen.
As you can see this era's 2020 website was pretty game dev focused. I tried to re-invent myself before any major update. This made every new look update feel like a brand new site with no content. That really isn't the vibe I wanted to go for
In around 2019 I became a frequent user of a few yik-yak inspired mobile apps. As apps died and were reborn, the user base became a highly concentrated group of shitposters that absolutely hated each others guts. It was a toxic place, that I really regret spending my time in, but it was in this time I became kind of addicted to microblogging. Like at this point i started to get why people spend so much time on these sites. Posting is fun. Bullshitting is fun. After these sites eventually all imploded on themselves and the user base went its seperate ways, I was left with the urge to post, to comment, to like, and to doomscroll. I started spending a lot of time on twitter.
I eventually got banned off twitter (tho i am still on there tehehehehehe now on blusky), and getting banned was a wake up call to me that I don't own any of these platforms. I still wanted to microblog tho, so I put my developer skills to good use and a neocities webpage into a twitter feed.
How did I do this, you might ask? I made a discord bot that checked a channel in a discord server with just me in it, and when a new message came in, it added it to its own database of messages, rebuilt a webpage based on that database with every message that it ever recived in that channel, and uploaded that webpage to neocities. TLDR - I made a discord channel relay and format messages into microblog posts on my website.
This discord bot is no longer active, but it was a very cool way to get into the habit of blogging and writing shit down that I cared about. It was also a really really fun way to shitpost.
the link, if you're wondering
In between ramblings about gundam and other fiction I was obsessing over, I found this little curio of a quote
Has anything really changed since then? I'm at the point in my life where expressing myself using language is the most accessible mode for me. So it's only natural that my home site would slowly but surely begein to fill up. Also, visual assets take time to make. Now that I got a full time job and other commitments, I can't fully commit to bigass artsy stuff. I find it kinda funny tho, since I don't think i really ever cultivated a visual artist image for myself despite always wanting to, and being surrounded by people that had.
Okay it's been like a week and I'm finally awake :3
It's still a little flashy, but I've slowly been adapting it for my needs. THe bank to post music at the top is cool, the subject matter sections in the center, and the basic info blocks on the side let the site feel pretty flexible. Retiring the main page blog was a great idea I think, it allows me to fill the home page with links to the curated mini sections I really want to be doing without sacrificing the site's home page aesthetic. Going all in on text and shapes keeps things quite simple and easy to scale. Plus I can do whatever type of design I want on the sub pages, so that makes it even easier and more fun to expand! I like it, and I probably won't change it too drastically from here on out.
I didn't know where to put this, but I did wanna remark on community a bit.
Contrary to popular beleif, neocities IS a social media website. You have the option to enable likes and comments on every update you make on here, there's a public view counter and a followers list. You can even post ON neocities without making an update to your website!
Am I social on neocites?
Less so. I used to be way more involved, and I'm sure my long term correspondents on here can attest to how active I used to be in discord groups and collaborations. I'm just an anti-social person really. However, as time takes its toll on this platform, the symptoms of the eternal summer become highly apparent.
What do I mean by this?
A lot of young people join Neocities, create a website, and dissapear not long after. Now there's nothing wrong with this. People change, and nobody should feel compelled to stay anywhere. And I mean you kinda do see this on all websites, though it does tend to become more apparent when you run into a site that's just full of dead links. Neocities is all about the old web, which itself is all about linking to stuff. If I link to a website and that website dies then people are gonna think my site is not being maintained. It's unrealistic to expect the web master to know the status of every link on their site at all times, though it is something I think about. In my view this kinda makes neocities perpetually feel like it's on the cusp of dying.
I guess the abundance of static content does have that effect as well right? Neocities is pretty much the opposite of the spammy nature of all other social media websites, so just because it hasn't been updated the same day doesn't really mean that it's dead.
However, you know the end is near when you start seeing posts like "sorry I haven't been active". (I'm guilty of this too, don't worry.)
I think what I'm really trying to say here is that I'm lamenting the treatment of websites as the quaternary priority when it comes to expressing oneself online. When I was doing some research on indie video game companies in my area, I found that of all the studios that were around, the ones that had a website tended to not update it at all. This goes for indie studios, AA studios, AND AAA studios. I'm not sure how emblematic this is of all industries, but I just wish people saw more beauty in crafting and maintaining webpages. It's such a beautiful and fun way of expressing oneself... you can literally do anything you want! ANYTHING YOU WANT! Yet more often than not we see a twitter page that was posting yesterday, a youtube page that uploaded 11 months ago, and a website that was last updated in 2018. I undestand people aren't really privy to going anyplace that isn't a big name social media site (especially where visibility is concerned), but creators who do not care about that you must know that running a website will always give you more freedom than any normal social platform. I'm also aware that social media sites try really hard to supress links that leave the platform, so I'm sure that's made people less willing to put energy into places that probably won't be visited.
Then again, I speak from a really weird perspective since I'm on the internet in all my waking hours. Being terminally online and a neocities user feels a little hypocritical by principle, though i'd say it's a lot like working in new york city and living in the new jersey suburbs. Not complete tonal whiplash, but enough for it to be noticable.
I think the current iteration of this site is getting way closer than any other version to what I want to cultivate here.
The site Empty Halls was my primary reason for making a neocities. I really really love the feeling of being utterly lost on the internet. It's got the same allure of urban exploration almost, but it's much more accessible since it's on the internet. I also really like journaling. I used to do it a lot when I was a kid, however there was an incident where my math teacher bullied me in front of the entire class for writing in it. For many years after that I found it very difficult to pick up the pen and talk about myself. You can kinda see this in the nature of my short and terse older posts. This site was a link dumping ground for so long.. i wish i had vented more back then. I'm sure you guys have seen some of my other more recent posts on here, but ever since I got diagnosed with autism i've developed a bit of a fear that I don't really know who I am. Forcing myself to write at length about things that I care about has done wonders for my mental health, in that I'm just generally a lot better at processing information, note taking, and remembering things. I use all of these skills at my current job, so bazinga! Shitposting is helping me succeed in my IRL job!
So yeah, journaling, a FUCK ton of random content that intrests me, a little bit of chaos and unhinged energy, and a general resource.
Ngl sometimes I come here when I'm feeling sad and posting/reading old stuff cheers me right up.
Real talk, I want people to come on this site and think I'm an insane old wizard.
This site's intended meta is something like
Yume Nikkified Wikipedia for you.
Dragon Slayer 2: Xanadu / Super Hydlide for me.