Hello!! Welcome the dozen or so dears who I sent this blog to on startup! After five months, I've finally finished the main page of this blog enough to launch it. Some of you have heard me talk about this quite a bit by now, but for those who haven't and for those who I will come to know in the future I want to provide a little overview of why I made this.
Why make blog when code hard and instagram free?
I decided circa January 2025 CE to stop using instagram as the last of my social media apps to go besides youtube and discord (spotify T-T). Meta as a company is just really disgusting, and a goal of mine this last year has been trying to live up to my values and be honest with myself about why I do things and why I'm not doing something else. For the most part I'm happier without instagram, but I do miss sharing artwork and long-form writing with friends (since discord servers tend to only be made once every 2 years and its still a nerd platform, and youtube just isn't quite suited for blogging.) This website is my solution to that problem and to another one I had, which is not getting to make art often because of uni! All of the images you see on the page were made entirely by me except for the black hole gif on WIP pages and the bg of the enter page, which is a collab between myself and a friend. I've also just wanted a website/blog of my own since tumblr imploded, and it feels like I've made a little hermit house where I can shelter from the rain and decorate exactly as I would like. I love that the entire site reflects my taste down to the layout and level of simplicity. In the process I also dragged myself tooth and nail through learning the basics of programming. Getting to break away from social media companies and Amazon web services has felt really, really good, and it's only a little weird that there are zero terms of service or content moderation rules that I'm beholden to. I also have to worry a little about random trolls trying to comment slurs, but thats what the password is for. I'm really glad I did this and have zero regrets, especially because it was frustrating and I felt horribly insecure most of the time. I never thought I was really capable of coding something like this even with help, especially in under a year, but I did! There's a shiver up my timber whenever I think about javascript or C++, but I used to feel that way about HTML too. Most important, I practiced being scared and uncomfortable and still trying, which might help me do it more often!
Whats gonna go on here?
I plan to use this main blog part the most, and for it to feel from the outside like a millenials's substack mixed with a tumblr blog. From looking at all the posts ideas that I wrote down in my notes app there will be a lot of mini-essays, reflections on self-reflection, and media/book reviews! The level of complexity for this blog isn't anything insane, but the things I did add are meant to make it more interactable, navigable, and awesome. On the top is the navigation bar where you can click between the different pages. As of right now the only one finished is the blog. If you click on the logo up top it will bring you back to the enter page where you can read a randomized quote of the day that is sometimes silly and sometimes serious. Then on the left you can sort through my blog posts by topic using tags (like tumblr). On the right there's an archive that lists all of my posts in reverse-chronological order and lets you jump to any of them. Lastly, right below every post is a comment section! The little star also lets you leave a like –permanently, it was a pain otherwise– if the post is a banger. On mobile this is the same but they stack on top of one another vertically in order of tags, posts/comments, then archive.
Those other pages
There are currently two other pages that are under construction that you might have noticed at the top of the page titled "Library of Things" and "Artwork". "Library of Things" is a term that (according to wikipedia) describes "any collection of objects loaned, and any organization that practices such loaning". When finished, I want to have the page set up where you guys can look through a small database of my belongings that I'm willing to loan out. I want to make a system for submitting tickets to borrow items and specify days, pick-up/drop-off availability, etc. I'm pretty excited about it because I like community systems that decrease unecessary consumption and help save money. The buying of one-off car tools or other items that we can't afford to purchase, store, or use regularly is exactly what I would like to help people avoid. Later on I might add a feature so that people can submit their own items to loan out, but we'll see how much demand there is for it and how difficult it is to code. It's a possibly pretty demanding thing to schedule and organize and follow through on regularly if someone does loan out items. The second link is artwork, which I have less planned out, but it will in some way display my artwork as well as 3D crafts if I'm particularly proud of them!
The creation of the blog
Making this website took about half a year, although there were really two different periods of working on it. I started half a year ago and stopped after two weeks, did nothing for two or so months, then started again and stuck with it until now. So I would wager if I had been out of school and doing this all the time like I approach a drawing I'm obsessed with finishing, it could have taken a month and some change. Here are some pictures that might show you a rough timeline of the progress!
6/18 (I started on Neocities at first)
6/19
8/3
8/30
9/???
10/22
11/28
12/12 (brief contemplation of brown)
That's all I've thought to share! Thanks to everyone who's here for the launch of this!! It means so much that you read this, and thank you to my partner who helped me code this site and my friends who were my play-tester-monkeys throughout! I might not have done this without you guys. Also I bought this domain for the next five years, so god please enjoy these posts.
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