hello gay people in the computer!

INTRO

Hello all people of the internet.
Be gay as hell. This is my final message.
...
Actually, it's my first message. This is the first semi-official post I'm making on my brand new neocities site. ...Actually, more of a construction hazard sign with a rambling note taped underneath.

Apologies if anything sounds bizarre. Any grammatical errors, nonsensical sentences, strange tone, etc. must be afforded to the fact that I am exhausted as hell. Retail jobs during the holiday season are suffering. I am very tired and very sore, and yet my brain will allow me no peaceful rest until I type up some bad website copy and post it. At least I expect few people if any to ever actually read this, so there's that.

WEB DESIGN

WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING HERE?

This section is going to be long as hell. Mostly, I'm going to be rambling to myself about the process so far so hopefully one day I can look back and laugh at how much of a n00b I was. Feel free to skim, or even skip.

So! I am not yet a webmaster. I am nothing but a webamateur. They say it's best to start before you're ready and learn by doing, right? I realize the appearance of the website itself is uninspiring in its current state. Plain. One might even say I slapped two clashing png files into a template, changed a few colors, and called it good. Because that's what I did. It looks like total ass. This page is in the roughest rough draft state I can bring myself to display. Hopefully the appearance will improve very soon. At the moment, most of the links go nowhere, so enjoy some croutons.

The decision to write some stuff on here despite the shabby state of affairs is partially fueled by the embarassment of having my index page sitting lazily around with fresh out the box default filler, which looks even worse. I also didn't realize that neocities posts an update notice every time a HTML file is saved. I suppose there's no functional difference between the HTML files and a live page, with no real way to mark a page as "private." Not that I've been doing anything crazy in here, but my initial naive assumption that I could simply create a "temp" without linking it to the home page in order to fuck around coding in pseudo-privacy was apparently totally unfounded. Combined with the lack of live previews for the neocities HTML editor, I've been spamming my newbie editing efforts out to the world unknowingly since I signed up 2 weeks ago. Yikes. In the future, I will try to do my editing in CodePen, which has the nice bonus of additional backups... I think? Or. Somewhere else.

There's probably a better way of drafting this post than typing this as a draft in a .txt file in the Neocities editor or an extremely basic HTML markup converter. Maybe Codepen would be better, but it seems like a pain to format as I type.... I'm vaguely aware of tools like Wix, but with AI slapped all over their site, that's going to be a no from me, chief. Anyways, using that type of builder won't help build skills to do more complex things that the engine isn't designed to handle... I vaguely remember some kind of web development tool in the Adobe suite, but that's an absolute no also for multiple reasons. Linux compatability and insane subscription prices aside, I get fucked over by Adobe often enough at work. -_-

I'm grateful I have at least an extremely surface level knowledge of HTML from screwing around with tumblr themes back in the day, there's something nostalgic about squinting in confusion at the inner guts of a template in utter befuddlement, desperately CTRL+Fing for hex color tags and wildly guessing what I might be editing. All that work making my bad RP blogs look as fancy as possible, and then tumblr gutted custom themes and forced everything into the same semi-broken dashboard view. So sad. Since then, I've messed around a little on toyhou.se too... Got distracted in the middle of writing this by scrolling through and thinking about old OCs. Maybe sometime I'll make a section on my site for a similar purpose. Looking back, the templates I was using there were pretty simple, and I bet I could make something that I was more excited about if given the whole screen to play around in rather than just a small chunk. 

In the meantime, I'm using sadgrl's layout generator, which is a lovely tool for new users. (The resources provided on the site are super useful, thank you so much!)

COMPU-SPLODE

Unfortunately, any coding dreams will have to wait for a night where I'm not already super brain tired. And, more importantly, when I'm on a different computer. My poor 6+ year old laptop is officially starting to give up. Using Windows 10 right now (which demanded extended security updates due to the Great E-Waste Event EOL that happened in October) and I am once again confronted with the fact that most people don't have to deal with a computer that puts itself into sleep mode completely unprompted every few minutes at random. Not very helpful for productivity, and I worry I'll lose something important mid-edit. The limit of tabs I can open before I start getting nervous is much lower than what my scattered ADHD brain wishes to operate at. I recently hit the physical limit of a measley 128GB storage when trying to use the Wii Backup Manager the other day, and that was definitely a tipping point. (Not even mentioning the fact that if I'm remembering correctly I somehow broke Chrome so badly that the only font that loads is Courier New. Normal device.)

Installing Mint on a bootable USB was extremely easy and helped overall performance a lot. I can actually open Discord consistently instead of being forced to use my phone! But.... Running Linux, I experience total freezes that necessitate a hard reset instead of the abrupt techno-narcolepsy of Win10, which is fine for web browsing but even worse for productivity. It boots faster (yay!) but if I'm actually working and haven't saved recently, I'm fucked. I'm on a lightweight version of Mint with no Cinnamon and even that's struggling with my whopping 4GB of RAM, I'm scared to open two programs at once.

Luckily, I have a new laptop to pick up in a few days. I've been worrying if I made the right choice or maybe should have picked a desktop, but I definitely don't have the spoons or time to research an alternative and cancel the order in time, so here's hoping. My brother says it'll be like switching from a tricycle to a Porsche and that any of the options we picked out should be good. I trust him! I'm sure it'll work out.

WE CARRY ON

The current layout will not be forever. Hell, the current appearance of the placeholder stuff I loaded into the template looks bad despite a half-assed attempt, and I fully intend to fix that before I go crazy coding. I desperately want to have a very cool looking very custom site. In the grand scheme of things, I'd even like to have several pages ideally resembling immersive point-and-click adventure games, with hidden sub-sections of interactive furniture. Obviously, hugely ambitious and it'll take a lot of time to learn enough to even start to attempt it, as well as a lot of asset creation. Since I want to see how far I can push myself in an effort to spoof a flash game type feeling, the more complex pages will inevitably be desktop only, aspect locked, and all kinds of other nightmare bad practices. To make up for that, I want the corresponding blog pages to have a version designed specifically to be as accessible as I can manage. This is why I chose the sadgrl layout builder: nearly every other template I looked at was simply not designed to be responsive whatsoever. I know many people don't care about mobile browsers, but I'd like to try to build on decent bones starting out. 

On a more basic level though, I really need to figure out how to make blog posts into a more post-like... post. I'd like to have a more formal template with dates and tags. Something searchable. Tumblr obviously has those features built in very easily, but... Surely there has to be a better way than just creating a whole new HTML file for each blog post? Or slapping formatted text down, creating a divider, creating an infinite scroll hellscape and calling it good? A cursory search suggests Zonelets, but I'll have to do more research.

Finding visual assets is apparently a way bigger task than I thought it would be, and my main point of frustration tossing together the template. I gotta find somewhere with good resources. Praying to the aesthetic gods for a bountiful harvest. Once I find out where the hell my drawing tablet went, I can probably spend some time making custom stuff and color-editing things to fit. And then, horrifyingly... I must figure out how the hell to code those images onto the site. The journey ahead of me is a long one, but thankfully I am a stubborn motherfucker. We persist.

-

PERSONAL YAMMERING

I have been listening to a lot of femtanyl and STOMACH BOOK's excellent GOODNIGHT HYPNOPOMP album, though it's funny that Modify by Lemon Demon came up on shuffle while I was working on the site. I really need to get off Spotify... Kind of funny that I managed to convert my girlfriend to an alternative, but I'm still paying it instead of trying to swap. I think sometimes I want to make a change to better alternatives, and then I end up putting the new fancy thing up on the shelf as a "nice" thing that is reserved for some indeterminate point of getting my shit 100% together, like fine china that I'm not allowed to use... I don't really want to pay for Youtube Premium either, though I'm starting to find it annoying to have the tutorials I was watching on the TV stuck on my girlfriend's account and therefore inaccessible on desktop. Maybe I could jury-rig ad block on the TV somehow? It seems funny that I'm starting to think about learning how to make YT videos considering all my other efforts to de-Googleify myself, but considering the other options for video content are TikTok and... What, Instagram maybe? It doesn't seem like there are any satisfactory alternatives.

On that note, I really need to set up my Proton stuff more than just my email. Especially that big calendar I said I would make. I should also use Milanote more to organize my thoughts, find an actually functional to-do app and look into a better place to write other memos than just the easily corruptible Notes app on my phone. Customizing the UI on that thing sounds fun too, even if I probably shouldn't crack it and flash a different OS. After ages of not having any projects going, I must obviously start one million quests all at once in order to restore balance to the world. 

I'm probably up later than I should be on a work night. Didn't realize the time until I heard my cat meowing in the distance. Apparently instead of coming to get me or meowing near her food bowl, she'd climbed over to stand on my empty side of the bed and yowled her little head off like usual, as if I were sleeping. Silly goose behavior. 

Apparently I've had a lot of pent up yappage? I forgot how long writing takes. Definitely did not expect to crank out 2k words either. Fucked up if true. Probably these posts will be less long in the future, so don't worry.

SITE IDEAS

• Landing page!!!
• Figure out better blogging
• Guestbook
• Pixel cliques? This tiny library is adorable!
• Document ventures into Linux
• Cortana public enemy #1.... Disabling AI + bypassing win11 requirements
• Console modding? Wii and 3DS 
• Game reviews?
• Favorite movies / music / books / etc
• OC pages
• Shrines
• Buttons / Stamp collection

In any case, it's even later at night and I do unfortunately have work in the morning. Here's praying that people will be reasonable. Peace and love on planet Earth. Be gay always.

Listening to: GIRL HELL 1999 - femtanyl
Eating: Domino's cheesey bread

POSTED 12/22/2025