what a year...

incredible that i managed this because this is the most broke i’ve been in years, then again when you have no real job you have the flexibility to say "yes" to every opportunity for cheap travel, plus i swear every dollar goes twice as far in japan/china... anyways, let’s get on with it.

1. Please introduce yourself. the other day i stumbled upon the wikipedia page for a 10th century torahic scholar that described him as "an exegete and controversialist" and i almost went and replaced everything in the "profile" section on my index page with just that. but really i mostly consider myself a "humorist", you will notice i’m careful to never describe myself as a writer, this is because in their heads most people instinctively translate that to "loser". 2. How long have you been making websites? since fifth grade, when my parents sent me to some kind of daycamp in the cramped computer lab of this dubious local science museum where they showed us how to make sites using this drag-and-drop webapp/hosting service called weebly that may or may not still exist. i immediately took this knowledge home with me and used it to create a website for this club my friend and i had started that had taken the whole grade by storm for a month or so (it was based around collecting this merit slips teachers handed out for good behavior, it’s complicated), i envisioned a whole media empire and even started building a studio in the basement to film a news show for it... but then everyone’s interest in the club subsided and mine along with it so i gave it all up. the basement studio was then repurposed for a politics talk show where we meaninglessly strung together a bunch of buzzwords we’d heard ("Obamacare!") while sounding authoritative and sipping water from coffee mugs because we weren’t allowed to have coffee... luckily, everything we taped is lost because for the video camera we only had a single miniDV cassette to film on that we were constantly taping over parts of. that’s the kind of crap i was getting up to before my creative energies were subsumed by minecraft... 3. And what got you into the hobby? the internet is real life now, shreds of the real world rotting slowly across its extent 4. What kind of website are you most interested in? websites with CONTENT, by which i mean writing. 5. What’s your workflow? Do you plan your websites out thoroughly or do you come up with the design as you go along? it’s an... evolutionary process 6. Please link to your biggest inspirations.

incessantpain.neocities.org aaronsw.com slatestarcodex.com spikejapan.wordpress.com thelastpsychiatrist.com mattlakeman.org 7. What’s your favourite part about making websites? the part where it forces me to actually finish writing stuff and polish it up so it’s ready for "publication" online 8. And the thing you struggle with the most? the design 9. Do you keep the same layout on all of your pages? Or do you use different ones? although i’m never recognized for it i consider myself something of a layout innovator with some of my non-blog/essay pages, i think it’s because "layout" has kind of a loose definition around here that refers less to the physical arrangement of content (as i think of it) and more to the general aesthetic vibe of a page. for example, you could make a madoka-themed page with pink color-scheme, frilly borders, madoka graphic at the bottom, whatever, then only swap out the colors to darker ones and change the graphics to turn it into a homura-themed page and people will be like "wow, great new homura layout!", but if you keep all the same pink elements of the madoka theme while completely changing the size/positioning of the constituent elements for a new page, people will not really consider it a new layout. really though this is just a complaint about semantics, people using the word "layout" when really they mean something more like "theme"... 10. How confident are you with CSS? i will admit i dabbled in web development for years and made maybe half a dozen websites without really understanding CSS, over that period i read a bunch of explanations of the CSS box model without ever really getting it, i was just too intellectually lazy to put in the effort to wrap my head around it, i just used WYSIWYG editors like the aforementioned weebly or macromedia/adobe dreamweaver and fiddled with stuff until it looked right. then at some point i started playing around making my own css files, struggling for hours to get things to look like i wanted them, and at some point i realized: wait a second, after all this messing around i think i actually understand what the box model is now??? i thought for a bit about using this newfound understanding to write a clear no-bullshit explanation that past me could have understood, but on second thought i don’t think the lack of a clear explanation was the problem in the first place... 11. Do you know how to correctly use <dl>? i think this question might be in here because of me... i wrote a little blog post called have it your way mdn web docs three (!) years ago about this exact issue... 12. What is your favourite HTML element? <dl>, actually... it’s on the homepage and like half of the pages linked up there on the navigation... i used <dl> to make this page for all the previous years so i was able to just drop these into a file without having to write any new css rules... 13. If you’re making a new web page from scratch, what is the first thing you do? i start by copying this 20-line blank template with the standard head/header i use for every page on the site, i frequently misplace the template though so usually i just recreate it by taking a random page and deleting everything except for the first 20 lines. 14. Do you know JavaScript? not really but i know enough python to bullshit my way through, at a fundamental level programming languages based on the same paradigm (e.g. object-oriented, functional) are basically the same, you just have to learn the syntax and a few quirks like how they handle types or memory management. i make up for not really knowing the javascript syntax by taking code snippets from online, then doctoring and cobbling them together until i’ve assembled whatever it is i’m trying to make. 15. How about PHP? there is no use for such occult arts on neocities 16. Does your website have a theme that you stick to? depends on what is meant by theme, if visual then obviously yes, if topical/ideological then vaguely yes (hint: name of the site) 17. Are you more focused on content or design? guess 18. Do you own a domain name? If not, would you ever want to? suboptimalism.net (too cheap to pay for neocities supporter to set a custom domain tho) 19. What do you think of nostalgia-focused or "retro" websites? i was about to absolutely roast them but then i realized to my horror that ever since i changed to this new styling a couple months ago, technically my site now counts as "retro"... 20. Is your HTML valid? Do you even check? oh i definitely do not check, as long as the page displays correctly i move right along, browsers these days are pretty robust to minor errors so you don’t have to be super precise, a couple times i’ve discovered i forgot to close some divs at the end of a page months after the fact 21. What are your opinion on buttons and banners? yet another symbol of the relentless oppression writers face on this platform is that many sites won’t even bother linking to you unless you have the wherewithal to produce a little 88x31 bauble for them to take home and paste it in their collection, sometimes right next to that of one that’s done little else besides produce said bauble. 22. What do you think of button walls in particular? boring, although every button wall is technically different, in a much more important sense they all end up looking the same. i don’t wanna be just another brick in the button wall... 23. If you started over again, would you make something similar or completely different? i would probably use the opportunity to make something completely different 24. Are you envious of other people’s websites? no i have better things to envy 25. What text editor do you use? sublime text 26. Why do you use that one? i used to use notepad++, a holdover from the old gaming days when i’d have to edit mods or server configuration files, but found myself increasingly reluctant to open it because it’s just kinda ugly, like a lot of old open-source software. popular adoption of FOSS would skyrocket if they could attract just one single competent designer to overhaul aesthetics, unfortunately those designer-types are very sensitive to their environments and could not possibly survive the rampant uncoolness of the open source community so they all go off and work for some company that’s like 50% vibes like apple instead. anyways, at some point i saw some list of recommended text editors, took the leap on one (sublime text), and never looked back. it’s simple, it’s slick, and like WinRAR it’s got basically an infinite free trial, you just have to click away an alert window nagging you to buy it every 50 saves or so. if the possibility exists to pay for it then it’s got to be good... 27. Do you host your image files on your web server, or on another host? on my own "web server", in my time i’ve seen too many voids left on webpages from pictures getting removed from the various free image host services that have come and gone. i remember back when i started on neocities one of the trends was to use discord of all things to host images, as word spread that you could use it to host stuff for free forever people abused it so much that they of course ended up patching it out, leaving many a graphic-heavy site looking empty. it’s really not that hard to host a ton of graphics if you just compress them, but it seems like many people are not at all cognizant of file sizes anymore... 28. This might not be relevant to you, but what’s your opinion on the Neocities vs. Nekoweb debate? as i’m technically a nekoweb user (i’m using it to host my april fool’s joke from a couple years ago, hidamari.nekoweb.org), i’m eminently qualified to speak on this topic. first off, nekoweb serves a vital purpose as a pretty similar alternative that people can threaten to run off to whenever they’re somehow displeased with the management here, the same role canada plays for the US. for some reason there’s a significant contingent of neocities users who seem to believe that Kyle Drake is some evil tech overlord running a secret enshittification long con on neocities that he’ll put into action the second they let their guard down and thus they interpret everything with the worst faith possible, like when iframes broke a couple weeks ago a bunch of users INSTANTLY assumed it was part of some sinister drakean scheme rather than a glitch. i think a lot of that happens because drake keeps his distance, he’s pretty hands-off and doesn’t communicate openly, as opposed to nekoweb owner dimden who’s quite involved in the community, you can easily show up in the official nekoweb discord and harass him if you’ve got complaints. i’m sure there’s many who prefer the nekoweb approach but personally i’m more of a fan of the drake’s "distant benevolent overlord" thing, it’s a good way of staying impartial, avoiding getting mired in meaningless day-to-day drama, and focusing on the big picture. i think it’s better for the long-term stability of the service, and having been up for over a decade is actually another advantage neocities has, proven longevity (it’s "Lindy"), though nekoweb’s situation has certainly improved recently with dimden escaping ukraine and all. also, i think drake has a good track record when it comes to those rare moments when he has to intervene for the health of the platform, like banning federi and divsel. now, let’s talk nekoweb sites and userbase (fair warning, the source for this is entirely Vibes). there are some subtle differences in the nekoweb userbase vs. the neocities userbase, i think nekoweb generally skews younger and strangely international (the average seems to be, like, an indonesian teenager who loves anime), and nekoweb doesn’t seem to get much of that neocities "long tail" of random boomers and schizos using it to host sites without interacting with anyone else at all. it’s hard to put a finger on exactly but on nekoweb i feel like in general the sites tend to have slicker, more "modern" aesthetics, a breath of fresh air perhaps for those sick of all the "nostalgic" sites. if i had to guess, the nostalgic sites tend to choose neocities over nekoweb because neocities, being over a decade old now, is more "retro". the nekoweb sitebox thing is cute but does seem like it’s ripe for all sorts of abuse, also you encounter many sites where it looks like they put 90% of their effort into just the sitebox, the actual site is just bare scaffolding. that brings us to my mine complaint, i feel like in general nekoweb sites have a lot less meat on them, most egregious is that there’s this one barebones "wip" site that’s been in the top 5 most followed since basically Day 1 of nekoweb and in that time has made zero substantive changes, my ritual when i open nekoweb every couple months is to go check in and make sure that yup, nothing’s changed. my personal theory is that it’s because a lot of nekoweb users are hanging out on the official discord instead, on a lot of nekoweb sites you can faintly detect the shadow of background discord dealings and drama. although nekoweb likes to be smug about how it has no dirty social features like neocities, in my opinion that’s completely cancelled out by the fact that they push an official community discord. to some that may be a selling point, nekoweb has a centralized community of the sort neocities hasn’t really had since the fall of yesterweb, although there’s always the danger that the discord swallows the community and it changes from "web host with a community discord" to "community discord with a web host", no matter what though when you have a big discord server you’re always going to have a bunch of hangers-on extremely active socializing in the "community", but who don’t ever actually partake in whatever the community is supposed to be focused around, they just hang out and chat about other stuff. i’ve actually watched in slow motion as a discord gets completely taken over by the hangers-on before, a while back i was at the arcade and someone there invited me to a local arcade rhythm game discord, i ended up unceremoniously leaving two years later when i realized that even though it was still pretty active, it was just like 5-7 "regulars" constantly debating in the #politics channel (even though they were all hard leftists lol), on a whim i skimmed one of their message histories and found that it had been well over a year since his last rhythm-game related message, in fact none of the "regulars" seemed to have anything to do with rhythm games anymore... 29. How much server space would you estimate your main website takes up? 177.9mb, still got plenty to go before i hit that 1gb limit... 30. Do you keep local backups of your files? every so often i’ll think about this and click that convenient "download entire site" button at the bottom of the site file viewer, there was one time a couple years ago i accidentally deleted the entire writings folder and had to restore it from patchy internet archive snapshots and drafts on my computer, a couple things i rawdogged and wrote right in the neocities editor did get lost forever. the master copy of my site is kept on a usb drive i always carry around in my wallet (like a soul gem :^), i refuse to learn how to use "git" so that makes it easy to transfer between different computers. 31. Do you prefer simple or highly visual websites? as long as it’s done tastefully i don’t care 32. Do you stick to certain colours? Do you do that on purpose, or is it your subconscious? i’m colorblind so i’ve just accepted colors are not "my thing", i choose a safe pattern that doesn’t seem to offend and then stick with it all the way 33. Have you ever thought about quitting? Why? yes, but explaining why would require an opus... 34. Do you have many webmaster friends, or is it a solitary hobby? well, i have friends who are webmasters, but it’s not like that’s the basis of the friendship, it’s not like we mainly discuss web development stuff, in fact i’m pretty uninterested in those sorts of technical discussions 35. Do people in your real life know about your website? many of my friends do but i avoided telling them for quite a while, eventually i started making a lot of vague references to it and they BEGGED to see it, i still held the line for weeks and didn’t show them until one day when i was kinda drunk and finally relented. they said stuff like "wow this is so cool, why were you hiding this" before proceeding to not really read anything on it and forget about it within a couple days, so i guess i was worrying about nothing from the start... 36. Do you update your website very often? How often is "very often"? although there are many sites that update more frequently, i think i’m unrivalled when it comes to consistency and substance, every update is on average 1000+ words and i have never gone more than a month without updating since i started. sometimes i fantasize about travelling to Bainbridge Island, WA and sabotaging that weather station that robo-updates to neocities like every ten seconds, it displays its exact geographic coordinates right on the page... 37. And the overall design, do you change that much? Why or why not? not really, it’s a lot of work and not really my focus, i’ve got a kind of "if it ain’t broke don’t fix it" attitude, plus i’ve always hated how the big apps/sites feel the need to do a completely uncalled for design or UI refresh like every 2 years, probably only so the design department can justify its jobs, or because some manager is gunning for a promotion and needs a big "project" to lead. i admire the few major sites that are basically fossilized and haven’t changed their design in decades: craigslist, 4chan, orange reddit (hacker news). despite this, i did make a major change to the site design relatively recently, though i’ve also been considering changing it back... it’s just hard to decide because i seem to be encountering people with opposing opinions on the design in alternation, my own feelings swaying back-and-forth... 38. Is your website more you-focused, hobby-focused, or outside world-focused? por que no los tres? 39. Do you do web design professionally? i pretend to, it’s a simple answer for the boomers who ask "so what do you do during the rest of the year when you’re not putting up christmas lights?" this year i made a big deal about how bad the tech job market was ("worst since the collapse of the dot com bubble!"), hoping that things would make their way up to the grapevine and eventually end up as a wall street journal headline along the lines of "TECH JOB MARKET SO BAD CS GRADS WORKING AS CHRISTMAS LIGHT INSTALLERS" 40. If not, would you like to? And if you’re comfortable answering, what do you do for work? probably not, modern web development seems like an abstracted nightmare where html/css have become something like assembly languages that you never touch directly, instead you write in weird languages skinwalking html like "JSX" and then it all gets compiled into some incomprehensible mush of an html file that browsers are somehow still able to interpret. 41. Do you communicate with people by email very much? yes, too much maybe, i think the emails i send are so long that people get intimidated and stop responding, i need to search for new marks... what i’ve discovered is that like with many things, people are shy and you can’t wait for them to email you first, instead you have to Just Do Things and take the initiative, anything at all works really, i don’t usually have any idea what to send so i’ll send emails where the whole content is just what’s in the subject line, stuff that could have just been a neocities or guestbook comment, and it’s surprisingly effective... 42. Some people reject social media and use websites as a replacement. Do you keep social media outside of your website? as someone prone to extended one-sided yapping i find a website to be the best medium for myself, though i do also lurk on X Formerly Twitter to steal essay ideas from short tweets (and there was that one time a year ago i sent my first DM ever to that hitchhiker and we had a wonderful little coast trip) 43. How about instant messengers? Do you use a mainstream one like Discord or Telegram? Or something like Matrix? Do you avoid them? over the course of my decade-long gaming career i flowed with everyone from skype to mumble to teamspeak and then finally discord, still dominant after its meteoric rise like ten years ago. i don’t use it so much anymore, not because i’m avoiding it but because i don’t really game anymore, and gaming is still ultimately the main thing that connects people together on discord. however, my former minecraft arch-nemesis/business partner/friend and i still use it to coordinate our business schemes, which isn’t even that wild because there’s this enterprise software "slack" that’s basically just discord marketed to businesses. i do sometimes wonder if it’s time to just throw my hat in and start a discord cult... 44. Do you listen to music while you work on websites? If so, what kinds of artists? if it’s not already obvious from how rarely i speak about it i’m not really a big "music guy", i’m not some freak that hates it and doesn’t listen to it at all, it’s just not a huge priority like it seems to be with a lot of people. my only audio equipment is one shitty pair of gamer headphones that are falling apart, i’ve never used "spotify", and even though i know from osmosis all the hip underground bands and albums people with good taste listen to, i just never bother to seek them out and put them on, instead i just kind of serendipitously stumble upon new songs from them being mentioned in books, or hearing them on the radio, or the youtube algorithm. now of course it’s not like i’m just listening to Top 40 hits, in fact i’m remarkably out of touch with modern pop music, instead i’m listening to pop music from like the sixties or foreign pop, like vintage nineties kpop. one thing is that i have a very 0 or 1 reaction to songs, the majority are meh but when i find the rare song i like i really like it, to the point where i can play it on repeat 8 hours a day for a week straight and not get tired of it (though i can eventually deplete my capacity to enjoy it). probably the most accurate representation of my music listening experience is season 1, episode 6 of joe pera talks with you.

"but wait, don’t you play a bunch of rhythm games?" contrary to what you might think, rhythm games are for people who hate music "elaborate on that." no 45. Do you keep everything you make on one website, or do you have more than one? i plead the fifth 46. On a similar note, do you keep to one topic on your site, or many? the benefit of a site like this is that you don’t have to stick to a single "beat" 47. Do you present your real self, or at least try? Or do you construct a persona on purpose? there was a guy on twitter that had met a lot of his mutuals in real life who observed that the people with online personalities that matched their real life personalities generally seemed well-adjusted, whereas the people who put on a persona online seemed twisted and evil, as if it had done something to them. "the mask eats the face"... it is best to engage in such activities in only limited amounts under controlled conditions like rituals or stage productions (cf. impro). NB: there is a difference between bringing out extant dormant alternate personae and putting on a persona, the latter is much more dangerous. 48. Have you ever made a good friend thanks to your website? yes, only guys so far tho... 49. Are you happy with the way HTML and CSS currently work? i guess, though they could stand to be a bit simpler, they’ve understandably acquired a lot of cruft over the past couple decades... 50. What are practices that you think people should avoid? introducing their site as "My little corner of the internet" 51. What about under-utilised practices, or things you think people should do more? i want to see stuff that ain’t like anything i’ve ever seen before 52. Do you use a lot of semantic HTML? Or are you guilty of generic structure? like 80% of my site is text in <p> tags so i think i’m doing pretty well, i guess a stickler could complain that i don’t wrap my blog posts in <article> tag or something. but it doesn’t really matter as long as it works, i mean if you inspect most modern websites so many of them are just howling abysses of endless nesting divs... 53. Do you consider different browsers? in my experience there are two types of browser: firefox, and everything else. i don’t really test things on firefox so my site always looks a little wonky in it, plus sometimes you’ve got to make compromises... 54. Speaking of, what’s your preferred browser? Convince your readers why they should use it. i don’t really care, they’re all basically the same, as embarrassing as it is to admit this i probably use chrome the most. this is one of my hotter takes but for a while i’ve thought all the autistic "internet privacy" stuff is way more hassle than it’s worth, it has almost no tangible benefit or effect besides making people "feel safer", similar to how installing a doorbell camera won’t actually stop your packages from being stolen, all it does is give you a 4k Ultra HD video of your stuff getting jacked nobody will or can do anything with anyway. i keep thinking about how the most boring nerds with nothing to hide fastidiously use PGP to encrypt their emails, meanwhile we’re now finding out epstein used his gmail account to send emails like "hey Bill Clinton wanna come to my island and molest children -je" for like fifteen years without even basic opsec practices like adding "(in minecraft)"... 55. And what OS are you on? the last version of windows on my desktop and the latest version on my laptop, whatever they’re called now, probably something involving "copilot". however, i’m thinking 2026 might be the Year of the Linux Desktop... 56. Do you have a strong opinion on that, or do you just happen to use it? i wish i was using Windows XP, which i still consider my native OS 57. Are your websites mobile-friendly? it depends on how you define "mobile-friendly", the bar isn’t very high on neocities because there’s a good proportion of sites that break completely on mobile. my site, on the other hand, scales to fit any size screen, which means that a phone screen will display the whole thing, just super small, everything is totally readable if you pinch and zoom in. now, i did make a lazy mobile layout that’s supposed to increase the font size and stack all the columns into just a single one, but for some inexplicable reason it doesn’t activate properly... 58. What are your thoughts on autoplay? No 59. What are your thoughts on webrings? Are you in any? they tend to suffer from insufficient maintenance and curation, which sort of defeats the purpose. i’m in one meme webring called "the one ring", it has nothing to do with lord of the rings, it’s just a webring for sites that are in no other webring, i came up with the idea one night in a neocities comment when i was really wasted on deep eddy lemonade vodka (dangerous stuff) in a dallas hotel room and siqu implemented it. nobody really tried to join it besides us except for one of those crazy webring collector guys already in like 20+ webrings, he even tried to pull a sneaky trick to make it seem like he wasn’t in any other webring... 60. Do you have any web shrines? What do you like to see in that sort of page? i have some pages that could arguably be considered "shrines", but i think of it more as "homages" 61. Are your websites "cliche", in your opinion? not unless i want them to be... normally though i avoid cliché by all means necessary, and i’ve yet to encounter anything at all like my site... 62. What is your ideal website? Are you striving for that, or for something else? yes, in order to make my site i imagined "the best site on neocities" and then worked backwards from there 63. Are you an artist? Do you draw or design your own assets? i’ve sometimes thought about taking up drawing or illustration to make assets for my site, i feel slightly uncomfortable using art by other people even if it’s stuff like memes that have been passed around so much online that they might as well be in the public domain. what if the artists find out and hunt me down? 64. What are your favourite resource sites? i encounter many stunning photographs on completely random wikipedia pages, you can find some of them on the notebook page 65. Is there a habit you just can’t get away from no matter how hard you try? writing 66. What’s your biggest advice for a new webmaster? this is my generic advice for getting into anything, but don’t waste too much time on "preliminaries" like setting up the perfect development environment or reading a bunch of guides or manuals, roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty actually making something as soon as you can. 67. Do you keep all your styling in CSS? Or do you hard-code some? 99% of my styles are in a single site-wide css file, but i wish i broke more out onto individual pages because when i reuse and then change certain rules, it may have unintended effects... 68. What do you think of frameset layouts? i played around with these back in the day on my blog page but i got away from it because it makes it difficult to directly link to the content on the component pages 69. How about table-based layouts? i really don’t know anything about this besides it being a thing they’d do back in Old Timey-Times 70. Do you subscribe to the ideas of "one-column", "two-column" and "three-column" layouts? Do you use any of these? i’ve taken things a set further with my "five-column" layout, as seen on my notebook page (and recycled elsewhere too). i would do even more columns except that i haven’t figured out a way to do horizontal scroll using the mouse wheel, that’s a dealbreaker. 71. Do you spend longer on the HTML or the CSS? definitely the html, if you count all the time i spend marshalling paragraphs into <p> tags 72. Have you ever made a page with no CSS? It’s useful for your thoughts. no, but i’ve made a page with no html. did you know you can style xml files with css? 73. Do you ever find yourself making layouts with nothing to put on them? Or do you only make layouts when the need arises? the content almost always precedes the form 74. Would you consider yourself a beginner? Or advanced? Somewhere in the middle? in terms of raw html/css advanced, but i’d be almost useless in a modern web dev shop since i’m not really familiar with any of the "modern" web development frameworks everyone uses now, and of course neocities takes care of a lot of the nitty-gritty "hosting" stuff you need to do 75. Do you have a habit of looking at the source code of websites you visit? not unless they have something i want to steal, usually some minor graphical effect 76. How did YOU learn how to make websites? by making websites 77. Do you ever force elements to do things they’re not supposed to? of course, in fact i’ve always had a nagging feeling that there’s GOT to be a better way to offset my headings besides doing a transform using some magic numbers, then again it seems to have worked fine for years? 78. Thoughts on floating elements? this sounds like it’s one of those things that you’re supposed to avoid for whatever reason but i dunno, i used it sparingly in order to align photos in my blog index and haven’t had any issues 79. When you’re sizing stuff, what do you use first? Do you use px, em, %, or something else? %, it hasn’t failed me yet even though i’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to use it as excessively as i do 80. Do you have a favourite font? when i first made my website i spent a lot of time trying to find the perfect font, eventually i settled on one that was close but didn’t feel *quite* right. then a year or so later i was watching some anime and suddenly the subtitles appeared in exactly the font i had been searching for, so i immediately dropped everything and used MKVtoolnix to exctract the subtitle file and upload it to my site. i was so protective of that font that when i stumbled upon another site using it, i nearly sent them a cease and desist on the spot (they were spared because i couldn’t find an email to sent it to, one of those sites where the only contact is discord, i’m too shy to slide up in dms) 81. Would you run a website with another person? How would that work? i could imagine collaborating with some sort of designer or artist on a site, in the same way that writers will collaborate with illustrators to make children’s books or visual novels 82. Do you surf the Web to find new personal websites very often? i do this all the time while procrastinating on finishing something up for my own site, to the point that sometimes it almost feels like my own weird version of "doomscrolling". kinda pathetic that i succomb this easily, for most people it happens because they’re being preyed on by big corporations deploying billions of dollars and some of the smartest minds to design the most addictive algorithms... 83. Do you bookmark other people’s websites? How would you feel knowing someone else bookmarked yours? when i was first starting out i thought i would be all neat and organized about saving sites and immediately bookmarked like three sites, then forgot to ever do it again. i looked just now and one of them has already gone down, i guess that shouldn’t be too surprising considering that since then the webmaster started a doomsday cult, orchestrated several murders, and is currently in custody awaiting trial. instead, i’ve just relied on my old tricks of keeping a tab open forever (yeah i’ve got like 100 tabs open on both my computer and phone browser) or randomly remembering some site every few months and manually entering the url. 84. What do you want people to be most impressed with when they see your website? "wow, why is this on neocities of all places?" 85. Are you interested in technology outside of websites? Do you collect? i have some random vintage tech, mostly focused on stuff that still works: two electric typewriters, this yellow sports walkman my dad discovered in my grandpa’s house in almost pristine condition, and i had a vhs camera i used to stream to twitch until one night i stumbled into it drunk and it fell lens-first on the floor and broke. there have been a few display-only duds, like a polaroid camera i bought off ebay for like $20 that didn’t work (remember, "UNTESTED" always means "NOT WORKING"), except one time i dropped the camera on the floor at a slight angle and it managed to spit out a disturbing photo of one of my classmates from below. he died in a sudden accident shortly thereafter (just kidding). over the years i’ve also inadvertently found myself in the possession of a modest collection of like seven laptops, just because i never throw them out after i switch to a new one... 86. How often and for how long are you online? something in me says my answer will always be "too much" if it isn’t "not at all", but then again, i think the optimal amount of internet use is not zero. the trouble is that the power and utility of the internet is in almost equal proportion to how dangerous and addictive it is, and the question of our time is how best to take advantage of the benefits while still avoiding the worst of the costs. 87. When it comes to your website, who is your target audience? AI web scrapers, think about it, this is an unprecedented chance to be remembered FOREVER even if you’re some nobody: "If you wish to achieve some kind of intellectual immortality, writing for the AIs is probably your best chance. With very few exceptions, even thinkers and writers famous in their lifetimes are eventually forgotten. But not by the AIs." 88. Have you ever been interested in XHTML? never heard of it. is that some kind of unholy spawn of HTML and XML? 89. Do you program in general? Have you ever written a program for use with or on your website, not counting simple JavaScript? not anymore really, writing code seems kind of boring to me now when compared to all the other types of writing. during my cs degree i wasn’t one of those guys working on side projects or contributing to open source in my free time, i couldn’t even force myself to do so to build up a "portfolio" for my "resume" like they advised. then again it’s not like the "passionate" cs students (as opposed to the cynical normies just there because they wanted a cushy tech job) did much of that either, they were all there not because they really liked code, but because they really wanted to make video games... all except for this one guy who genuinely seemed passionate about compiler engineering and parlayed that into an internship at nvidia or something, he’s probably super rich now if he hasn’t killed himself. ah, to have economically-valuable autistic special interests! i remember he was into vintage fire emblem games, those are always the guys you gotta watch out for... and also the hour-every-single-day joggers... 90. Speaking of programs that help you make websites, what do you think of static site generators (SSGs)? Have you ever used one? there’s one part of my site generated with an SSG, see if you can figure it out. people often think the whole site is generated with one because it has a consistent visual style/layout, but no, that’s just because i only use one css file. 91. Do you keep a hitcounter? Why or why not? well even if i cared about them, those numbers are fake anyway... i guess the nice thing about a hitcounter is that it only goes up, unlike some metrics you could track... 92. Do you frequent forums? Which ones? unfortunately reddit and then discord basically killed forums, discord even danced on their grave by adding some shitty "forum" feature for channels that nobody uses, in the same way that after killing physical bookstores amazon opened a few of their own in random malls. back in the day i was always on the forum for whatever shitty minecraft server i was playing on at the time, it was part of the standard minecraft server setup back before things like discord existed, even small servers would have a little website with an associated forum and "donation store". transitioning between them was pretty easy because most were all run on the same service called "enjin", you could join a bunch of them using the same account. i was almost always a pretty prolific and popular poster on them, my posts would get showered in likes and i’d often top the "most liked" leaderboard to the consternation of server staff members who always felt like the position belonged to them, beloved as they thought they were by the populace. it actually was pretty hard to outdo them since they had armies of bootlickers that would show up to like every single throwaway post... 93. Do you write your page content directly into the editor, or do you prepare it elsewhere, like a text document or a Word document? i usually write a draft in a word document and then transfer it into an html file, which is also a good opportunity for editing. now i know a couple years ago i made a big show about my word license expiring and switching to a typewriter, which i definitely did keep up for a good couple months, but then one day i was trying to get some huge thing i’d already written out of a word document and expired-license-read-only word wouldn’t even let me copy stuff from it, so in a rage i googled "pirate microsoft word" and turns out it is actually comically easy to do, i just had to paste one line from the first result into the command prompt and it was done in under five minutes. since then i’ve gone back to using word, but i have to admit, i’ve been thinking recently about taking the typewriter back out for a spin, to avoid distractions and as a conversation starter... 94. Do you think you appear cool to others? A more accurate answer now: do other people ever say you’re cool? [Coolness] is that dimension of social life in which it really does become true if enough people believe it. The problem is that in order to play the game effectively, one can never acknowledge this: it may be true that, if I could convince everyone in the world that I was [cool], I would in fact become [cool]; but it would never work if I were to admit that this was the only basis of my claim. In this sense, [coolness] is very similar to magic. 95. Are you embarrassed of your old work? Have you ever deleted everything out of shame? quite terribly, but everything on my writing page is undated and people don’t seem to be able to tell the difference between newer stuff and my awful "juvenalia" from 3 years ago. i’ve never deleted anything from my site (on purpose), i just remove the links, the most ancient broken pages like this one can still be brought up if you know the incantation to summon them. 96. Would you close down your website if you couldn’t update it, or would you leave an archive? the fact is, it’s already too late the second you put anything online thanks to all the archive sites... might as well maintain it yourself if it’s not too much trouble 97. Do you reveal a lot about yourself on your website? Or are you more secretive? it sometimes surprises me how you can write tens of thousands of words about yourself and still miss so much... reality has a surprising amount of detail. it has been said that the best way to conceal one’s self from others is not to be reticent, rather it is to overshare tons of trivial details (so people think you’re an open book) while carefully avoiding the important things... 98. Are you willing to reveal who your best online friend is, and/or if they have a website? i guess i’d have to hand the title over to the OG, my former minecraft arch-nemesis/friend/business partner... we’ve known each other for over a decade now and been so many places... eye-watering sums of money have passed through our hands (mostly on its way elsewhere, unfortunately)... 99. And do you optimise the images on your website? a bit, but not too much for obvious reasons 100. We’re out of time! How do you feel after answering 100 questions? ....other than exhausted. oh please, i didn’t even break a sweat