Webmaster? Hardly.

The idea of what this personal website is or should be has changed over the two-ish weeks since its creation. Originally, I just wanted to make some kind of website to learn more about how HTML and CSS work and where their limits are. I had a few stabs at this before joining Neocities. The obligatory demo page in my school’s CS class. Back then, Geocities was still around and some kids had personal pages, but most of us were hanging out on a regional network called Kwick. A proto-MySpace where predominantly German teens were tinkering with flashy profile pages that were fully customizable with HTML and were making friends for life in open chatrooms. I still sometimes talk to A, who lived half a country away from me then, multiple countries now.

Last christmas, inspired by the Youtube algorithm that inspires most my hobbies theses days, I wanted to try my hand at full-stack development with HTMX and R plumber to serve a MySQL database from a server running R to dynamically display a table and some figures in a shiny-like dashboard. This was already ambitious given my experience level and refusal, at the time, to use LLMs for coding, but in addition, I had started using a ZSA Voyager, my first split-ortholinear keyboard, a week before and wanted to learn (Neo)vim at the same time. For those of you who have been down the same Youtube algo-road, you can probably guess who I was watching from the combination of HTMX, split-ortho keyboard and Neovim. I spent one week of evenings stealing myself away from family activities setting up Neovim with way too many plugins and language servers and another week figuring out the HTMX and plumber combo enough to get it to post and send successful requests to the server.

I was quite satisfied even though I never got to the MySQL part. My typing speed on the split keyboard had gotten so good that I could reasonably daily drive it at work, I had fun and laid my foolish ambitions regarding Neovim to rest. Vim mode in RStudio it is, back to real life.

How I found myself on Neocities

A confluence of different Youtube videos got me to make a site on Neocities. One I ‘watched’ (listened to with my phone propped behind the stove while making family dinner) a year ago about the personal web, I think it was this one, and one on bot sitting that I watched recently. I was really inspired by the nostalgia I got for the Kwick and Geocities days when seeing all the cool, featured Neocities pages and I was looking for a replacement for Reddit and Tumblr, the only social media spaces I still lurked on. I had stopped posting on social media some time around 2015 when Facebook started becoming a boomer paradise and I became anxious of exposing any real parts of myself to the internet. It just felt to vulnerable to be a real person in public on spaces that were controlled by corporations that were turning the internet from a refuge into an ever-present, algorithm-driven layer over reality with the end goal of monetizing private data. And I just hated the version of me that my old posts portrayed. I didn’t want to have been a real person with flaws and long pretentious posts. I wanted to be an anonymous, optimal human, entering the work force pristine and invented that morning. I wanted to be the impostor that did not have a syndrome, because my online presence could not prove me to be one.

As soon as I had made the first half-baked attempt at generating a page that had all the Neocities staples, a welcome page, a blog page, a shrine page, a link page and a hobbies page, I found myself writing a long pretentious post about why I use AI. And I loved every second of it. My original plan to make a completely anonymous page with my most recent generic online handle, Famous Garfish, and a fish-theme to go with it went out of the window. A different nostalgia gripped me. I miss writing long rants on Facebook. I always hated how I was waiting for likes and comments on them, but I miss being long-winded and pretentious. I immediately sent the first post I wrote to some colleagues. Gone the anonymity, the impostor exposed for the blogger he deep down is. The personal details provided in the blog posts are probably enough for someone motivated enough to find out exactly who I am. But since 2015, I had some light therapy (as in few hours, not UV light) and learned that it’s healthy to be openly oneself without fear of being found out. It’s a sign of accepting who you are and developing a healthy self-image.

Documenting fleeting states

All of this as an introduction to my first, and maybe only, state of the website. I have a habit of abandoning my personal projects and finding new obsessions, so who knows how long I will keep this going. I wanted to have a little review of this page as it was in the end of May 2025, roughly a week after its inception. Here is a little persistent time capsule I generated and modified a bit by hand, it is not a real page that ever existed, but rather a collection of elements of the original page to preserve its theme and feel. The microblog entries were generated by Claude, but the Welcome text is original. I left the generated microblogs because they are unlike anything I would ever write in a manner that feels perfectly appropriate to this early state of the website.

      UNDER          <°)))<  
      >=('))))>      CONSTRUCTION
              <°)))<
    

I really like the colors and the fish theme I stumbled into. The Tokyo Night theme is really nice and the ASCII-fish that Claude put on the 404 page initially has made it into various other places because I find it hilarious and whimsical. However, the colors don’t really work with the fish tank theme and since fish life is not something I am ultimately that passionate about, I feel that I didn’t have the drive to push it enough into that direction, so it kind of falls flat. The colors also feel too cleanly modern. Too coding-hipster Neovim. Too AI. I absolutely hate the Space Grotesk font that Claude picked out based on my prompt that was something like ‘futuristic, Tokyo fish tank’. I think in some ways Claude nailed the prompt, but I hate how Squarespace it looks. It’s a font I really enjoy reading and looking at, but it makes the page feel absolutely dead and generic. Like it was generated by a robot (it was).

So far the only parts of the page I actually have added content to are the blog and microblog. The latter mostly because I was motivated by the technical possibility and went to implement it because I wanted to know how it would work. The ‘Shrines’ page, I removed entirely. Even though I wish I was, I’m just not that Tumblrina or enough of a teenager anymore to be that enthusiastic about anything. Let’s see if I ever have enough time for my hobbies to fill the ‘Hobbies’ and ‘Links’ pages.

I think my opinion of this page and its state above is too skewed by what I like about other pages on Neocities. I enjoy looking at shrines and other peoples retro-styled GIF barfs. I love the handmade feel of their peachy and pink blogs with tiled backgrounds. But I did not make this page by hand, nor did I spend the same amount of time on it as the featured pages have. The deeper I dive into Neocities, the more I see other, more sober designs and other blog-first pages without shrines. Today, I really enjoyed n0thanky0u’s nihilistic, minimal, anarchist blog. Last week, I changed the colors into what I find a more Neocities-aligned Hanami-colored and pixel-fonted version. It might just be a different kind of generic, but I am more at ease with it. The next thing I have to change is the giant title header that makes this look like a 2018 wordpress blog. Not only to conform to the Neocities aesthetic, but because I find it super ugly. If I continue work on this website, I hope it will slowly transform from somebody else’s idea of a website with my content into a truly personal and lived-in space. Right now, it has too much new-car smell and too few coffee stains on the standard equipment seats.