It's second day!

Your most recent special interest:

So, that's a good question! The thing is, I don't think I've picked up any NEW to me special interests in quite some time. Over the last few years I've only been reconnecting with ones that I have had throughout my life, most of them from my childhood to early teens. There's quite a lot of them. Eventually I want to turn this into a space where I can celebrate each of those more. A lot of them I still don't even interact with and forget about at times.

So I'll answer this by talking about the special interest that I've recently successfully reintroduced into my life and have been spending a lot of time with~

Webdesign and web connectivity!

Really, how people interact online in the first place. If you've spent any amount of time on Neocities these next sentances will not be new to you. I really dislike how the modern web is set up and how people interact and share with each other. Namely corporate social media sites. For the longest time I vaguely and wistfully wished to go back to the internet days of old. Nostalgia can be a rough thing though, and I kinda just ignored those feelings and tried to make those sites work for me but I could barely ever motivate myself to post more than once every few months, at best.

But this isn't just doing things 'the old way' for the old ways sake. And I'm super excited to see that the folks running the site this is hosted on are very much considering the future of web delivered content as a whole.

I wish I could talk at length about the specifics of what I hope to see in the future, but the truth is I am only just getting back into web stuff as a whole, and I have so much to learn. It was a big reason for choosing a static site in the first place. So I wouldn't overwhelm myself with worrying about server side languages or security and I've limited myself to not using any libraries even, just to keep things as basic as possible for now.

So instead I'll talk about my history with web design!

Also probably a story you've heard before. My interest in web design first started with the site Neopets. You were allowed to open your own store to sell in game items to other players, and they even allowed you to use HTML to decorate your storefront however you wished! This blew my mind as a teen. I felt like I had been let in through some back door and was getting the chance to see how everything that I had been interacting with actually worked.

Example of a newpets store, this one is by user dijakin2109 and is very pretty. They were pretty basic back in the day but that didn't stop me from struggling to make my own!

There were no tutorials for me to follow, just page sources and examples to go by. As so many others had done I found other designs that I liked and started tearing them apart to cobble together my own storefront. Oh boy was it messy. Oh boy were my designs probably terrible. I would share them with you but I lost my password to that account nearly a decade ago.

I had a lot of fun doing this, I was more than excited enough to get through many of the struggles, even the frustration that was aligning divs properly. I know enough now to know that some of the things that I was trying to do back then were just not possible with what was available to me at the time. And even now a lot of them would have been pretty hard. Thank goodness for flexbox. Centering divs both vertically and horizontally used to be a nightmare. If it werent for that I think I would have given in to using libraries sooner.

I am still a bit flabbergasted at the state of web design practices. The fact that there isn't a simple and accepted answer to make responsive designs that work on mobile is not the future I expected to be in. But there are some pretty good practices available out there.

From there my interest turned to all things programming. I was entirely self taught but I found myself wanting to get more involved. My interest turned towards a video game that I was playing at the time. It was a smaller private server (a non official server of a game run by fans of the game) for a game that I liked a lot called GunBound.

This is gunbound. A worms inspired tank strategy game with cute artwork. The official game was made by Softnyx, a developer out of South Korea.

I ended up becoming a GM and eventually Admin on that private server. I really wish I had anything to share from those days but, none of my designs actually went into the game. I did design one avatar item and a splash screen that were used. But those are now gone. I spent more of my time moderating in the game and on the forums. But eventually I did work on some of the programming. My biggest success was troubleshooting a major memory leak in the code that was causing the server to crash. I learned about some really neat tools like memory watchers and was able to find out exactly which line of code was causing it. It was a lot of fun!

I ended up making 3-4 designs for the website, as well as a few designs for the game launcher. But none of that ended up going anywhere. This mostly had to do with me. This might be a story you hear about me a lot here but this was at a point in my life (from ages 14-18) where I was starting to get very depressed. I was not dealing with difficult things in my past and was also struggling with a lot of stuff going on at that time. It became harder and harder for me to actually finish anything and eventually I just stopped alltogether. That time kinda marked the period of my life that lasted over a decade of where I was really too depressed to create all that much. A pretty dark period in my life.

And that's mostly where my early story of web development and coding paused! In those ten years I made a few attempts to get back into programming. The closest I got was sticking to a C# lesson for about two months before giving up on that.

Pretty depressing I know but things are looking up a lot more these days! I feel like I have a much better space to work on things and explore. As well as I have picked up a lot of skills that are helping me along the way. One of the biggest ones is learning to recognize what is most important to complete a project and keeping that in focus over all of the shiny and exciting things I might want to get to right away~

I've got so much to learn about web design and programming as a whole

But I'm so excited to do so! There's a lot more stuff out there now and it's kinda overwhelming but theres no end to tutorials and articles explaining everything. I feel like now is such a good time to be learning these things.

My interest going forward is going to be helping to craft a different kind of connected internet. I'm really interested in the concept of IPFS to create a distributed internet over our nearly centralized one.

Other people have so far said it in better words but I'll give it my own try. The outside world feels so restrictive and locked down these days. The people with the money have been saying who gets to do what where for quite some time. They're trying to do the same with the internet and have been pretty successful so far. I feel like taking back our spaces starts here with the internet. It should belong to noone and everyone, just like the earth we live on. And that starts with disconnecting from the centralized sanatized and controlled mega servers and making our own spaces out here on the fringes of the web. And hopefully someday soon creating a new kind of internet and connection.

Adding looking into converting my site to be IPFS distributed on my todo list...

May your divs align properly on your first try!

-Clareon The Critter