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?
I post whatever I want here. 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 a few 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...) It's so new that scientists are split on whether it is detrimental or not. WHATEVER! I didn't like it, so I ditched it. Instead, I started from scratch and began to create. Now, that's what I and so many others do.