Previous updates

As the title says, I'm back to work as of yesterday. Between that and the fact that I haven't thought of any additional features I wanted for my site, development has more or less ended besides any additions to my blog, R&R, or links pages that might come to me. I've been bouncing around some thoughts on some games I've been playing, but they haven't made it to text yet.

New media section! Reviews/reflections and videos! The videos page is just embeds from my YouTube channel, I don't know how to make them play nice with mobile without making them annoying on desktop (Full disclosure, desktop is my priority with this site). In the R/R section I've added an expanded version of a post I made on Cohost about the conditions of Elden Ring's release vs. Shadow of the Erdtree. I don't intend to write exclusively about video games in there; it's just that video games are the form of media that I'm most engaged with and thinking about.

I need to get a blog section set up too because I keep feeling tempted to turn the site updates into a straight up personal blog entry.

(Edit to add that I did indeed set up the blog section, as seen in the nav bar.)

Added a lot more links and a couple more food pieces. The food pieces make me feel like I'm practicing to write the personal story intros to recipes that everyone makes fun of and skips past.

I did it?? I did it!! The crafts page could still use work due to my not having any pictures of anything I've made on hand, but I still wrote some about the things I mean to include on that page so, for all intents and purposes, I've gotten all my pages made! Without expanding into 100 half-baked new pages! Yeehaw!

This whole process of website has been so satisfying. I made this whole modestly sized thing. I did that.

Next there's of course the craft page as mentioned, I want to make a food post about my recent flip from anti-salad to absolute salad sicko, and I'm also thinking about a media (mostly, video games) review/thoughts section. More than anything, I've got a post about my weird relationship with Elden Ring, the DLC, and the common criticisms of it percolating in my brain. I feel like I can't post it on any social media though because I don't want it to come across like I'm trying to fight critics or dump on fans (both of which I am). We'll see.

Delighted to be here on Nekoweb as well!

I'm through all the pages I intended to make and most of the way through the pages I felt inspired to make while working on the site. Yeehaw! I'm not sure if I should add a blog section, or how that's normally done. I'm resisting looking it up until I get done with all the already planned pieces of the site. I will not get scope-crept before I even meet the first goal, swear to god.

I'm a any pronouns (gender)queer in my 30s, working on a CIS degree despite its unfortunate acronym. I've been on the internet since 2001 but very new to doing a website. I learned my first HTML on dA journal entries. I'm off school for the term and work for the month for degendering surgery, so I've got time to take a proper shot at setting this thing up again.

Fun fact: I did make a fansite for DBZ on Geocities, but I didn't know what I wanted to put on it, so I left it at "under construction" with a header picture and repeating dragonball background and then immediately lost access to edit the site. Many such tales, I suspect.

I hadn't actually written anything meaningful at the time of my site creation, but I still wanted to comment on some things, due to the uncanny coincidence of picking development back up exactly a year later (I actually started reworking my design on 7/7 but I'm counting it). I'm always assigning cosmic meaning to numbers like this — I do think there's some kind of fateful flow in the universe making these things happen, even if the significance is entirely created within my own brain. But anyway

I didn't have any idea what I was actually going to do with my website, and it was really more of a project to learn how to build a site from scratch. (Should I consider that v0.1 and this v1.0?) I ended up planning a page for drawings, writing, music, video games, and collaborative projects; put one image on the drawing page, one school essay I liked on the writing page...and then got too busy with the condensed summer term and working overnight. I say "too busy" like I had no choice, but really, I made it easy for my interest in website to drop off by not planning ahead of time. And maybe that was ok? It was the ideal to end up with a full webbed site first try, but maybe all I needed it to be at the time was a pile of half-baked code and a good few days of experience figuring out how to center an image.

In the last year, I've finished my general prereqs and taken my introductory CIS class which included making some small personal webpages, not to mention the time I've spent reflecting and better understanding what I want to get out of running a website and, more generally, out of the time I spend online.

Most recently I've come to understand that, while I think it's possible and important to engage with social media thoughtfully and push it towards being a better experience for everyone, I don't think it's something I enjoy. Even on Cohost, which boasts a numberless experience, I can't get away from the feeling of having to perform, to post the best and get the most interaction. I still feel bad when no one finds my posts compelling enough to interact with even when it's a throwaway comment that I wouldn't mind being passed over in conversation. I don't know. I think the plain underlying philosophy of social media just doesn't work for how I navigate the world.

In that vein, it's felt really nice and fulfilling to just be me and my HTML pages these past few days. I write things and I shape elements and I don't have to care if anyone sees it or likes it. It's a website for me, and I like it, and it makes me happy to create.