This little corner of the Web serves as an outpour for me. Time slips through my fingers when I get into some good sci-fi or fashion. So why not adorn my works on these topics with digital tinsel and present them to the world?
Not to throw shade on social media apps, but I like being able to change more than my profile pic, not having to fake a life, and not frantically checking who viewed or liked my story every few hours. I don't have to worry about censorship, either. Or ads. Or algorithms force-feeding me content to keep me passively comsuming 15 second videos. Not even algorithms that monitor what ads I interact with. I don't have to be concerned about how anyone else wants it to be like. I have total control! MWAHAHAHAH!!!
I am a 2010s kid, so I never had the chance to get familiarized with what some may call the 'old Net,' or the 'classic Web' in its so-called glory days. Instead of the family computer, everyone in my household had a personal gadget or two. So, no, I never sent a cringeworthy "rawr xD" to my Facebook crush nor have I had a Myspace Top 8 lineup ruin a friendship. I did, however, hop onto the Tumblr Furby craze, and I did record countless Dubsmash dances with my cousins.
But a lot of my time on the Internet was spent passively consuming -- besides the occasional like and comment. Although watching my favorite YouTubers and their antics has been fun... I did long to interact with it on a deeper level. This lead to me to seek out personal websites from the 2000s, like those hosted by GeoCities, MySpace, and LiveJournal, to name a few. For hours, I traveled via the time machine that is the Internet Archive on the hunt for them. Newly inspired, I set out to create my own. With no idea where to start, I stumbled upon Neocities (a nod to GeoCities). Modern-day websites thrive here! So many of them -- and their creators are fueled by passion, not profit.
This discovery was the perfect opportunity to make some use of my creativity! I eventually did grow dissatisfied with the 'full-screen, "like-comment-share," then scroll' format that emerged seemingly everywhere. (Vine did it first; TikTok put it on crack. Yes, I still hate it.) Complaining about it won't do much, though. Plus, it's so new that scientists are split on whether it is detrimental or not. Neverthless, the only thing left to do is create. So that's what I do.