This website is the result of several years of playing around with HTML but never fully committing to making a personal website. I've always enjoyed markup languages and find the process of organizing and designing things in them very satisfying (even if it's sometimes a little frustrating.) Despite putting together many versions of this page I never really made the final step of getting a domain and publishing the work that I had done. Part of this is that I'm honestly still a little unsure of how to do that without a service like Neocities, but it was also because I hadn't seen much value in having a website until recently.
I grew up in an era of the internet where I was familiar with what a personal website looked and felt like, but they were being phased out in favor of larger applications that hosted smaller social media profiles. I had a Tumblr in high school and found it both a convenient program to curate my own personal hipster aesthetic moodboard as well as an effective place to put my artwork and music out there and have it actually be seen by people that I didn't share physical space with regularly. This effectiveness that early social media had at broadcasting it's initial users' work to larger groups of people without having to do the marketing legwork of traditional media was really enticing, and I was told by multiple sources at the time that you shouldn't build a website anymore, just a good social media presence.
It's been a while since that has been true or even relevant. Artists don't have the ability to reach a new audience on modern social media without paying money and/or distorting their art to fit a mold that barely resembles the original intention of the work. Even if you find an audience on that platform, people have generally become so sick of being on these applications that creating more content for them just feels like a weird betrayal to the audience that actually comes to look at your work in the first place.
This is where I want to make a point to say that I'm not saying things used to be better. I believe that sites like tumblr are partly responsible for, or at least complicit in, the shift towards the Enshittification state of the internet that we see today. Lowering the barrier to entry for creating your own space on the world wide web isn't inherently the problem here, but we traded the effort needed to learn how to create these sites for a convenience alternative that demands that you make art in a certain way that.
I won't go into a full anti-social media screed here because most of the people reading this now probably have heard these points before and don't need to be convinced of them further.
I have made this new website however and I have been asking myself why I think it's worth spending the extra time on here making another place that is at best a vanity project and at worst just another advertisement for my artwork. Even with some more of the freedom of making content that has less boundaries than the modern social media platform, I'm still in danger of making an exquisite replica of the hipster aesthetic moodboard that I had in high-school.
I'm 28 now, over a decade removed from the height of my tumblr usage. I have moved on to working on real-world relationships with people that don't talk (at least to me) about websites and the "old" internet. I am weary of placing too much value on these long abandoned formats for shouting into a nearly empty void, but something is still compelling about making this space. It's the creative in me that wants to have a digital art project that I can iterate on, experiment with, and make something that I'm actually proud of. I want to be able to make a discrete page for every multimedia project that I wind up actually completing without having to wonder how it's going to fit next to a screenshot of a show flyer that I need to promote. I want to share the work of others in an array of small plant drawings that I took way too long to format for such a silly purpose. I want to be able to write these long rambling posts and feel like they are a genuine expression of my thoughts rather than just a way of news-lettering my friends within a strict character limit.
I don't believe things are going to get a whole lot better for the internet or anything, but I don't want to have gone out without making something that felt representative of myself in the end.
So if you are here, I'm glad you're willing to read the words that I have manically assembled. I will keep on writing them here until I inevitably decide to go off the grid altogether like many have done before me, but not before making something that I can actually be a little proud of. I'm not going to suggest that you would be better off making your own website but life is too short to feel stuck in some app that is designed to make you feel bad. Do what you know in your heart to be right.
I'm sitting in Doppio again. It's been an expensive week, I've eaten at least one meal out every day since I started a new lease. I'm disappointed in my lack of frugality.
I've taken the four flaps of a square cardboard box and forced them to fold over one another every day since a week before I started a new lease. It saves on clear scotch tape, but every time I performed this little trick it risked permanently creasing one of the flaps and crippling a box. Maybe I was just doing the technique wrong.
Four fully loaded boxes of varying size and material sit next to a bare wooden table. When all of these elements are combined in a ritual called "unpacking", they create a new object called "my desk".
There is a lot at stake when performing this ritual. If done carelessly, you will spend every day thinking about your home's inefficiency. You will wonder why innocuous tasks feel like burdens and slowly forget other ways that they were once done. You'll feel your feet sink further into the sand every time water rushes up to the shore.
I'm forced to take a photo of every blemish in the wall to create a catalog of defects for my new landlord. Meanwhile I'm scheming against her, planning to bore small holes in the plater walls. Hopefully she doesn't notice. I'll hide them behind frames holding pictures that I chose to protect because I can't help but make an association between their imagery and home
There are cables in our backyard which hang low to the ground. A garden of weeds beneath stretches up and has wrapped itself around the wires. This climb brings them closer to the sun, they only need that and the rain.
I set up a modem in my kitchen and feel normal again.