~/garfish

The title is the slightly adapted opening line from 2Chainz’s ‘Birthday Song’. Not a bad song, not a great one, certainly an unforgettable music video. What we do and why we do it is often inextricable from who we do it for. I’m not that kind of scientist, but it seems uncontroversial that as social animals, we do many things that appear intimate and self-facing for social reasons. At least in part. When we look at ourselves in the mirror, we are only superficially looking at ourselves. To an extent, we want to see what others see when they look at us. As opposed to a diary, a blog does not have the appearance of being self-facing. It’s an emphatically public medium. So why am I writing? Who am I writing for?

Short history of the page

The page started out with a fairly generic look that is documented in this post. That post also contained an honest analysis of what worked and didn’t work for me in that first draft. I liked the Tokyo Night styling but found that it clashed with the fish tank themes and hated the font. I struggled a lot with the page not being Neocities enough, because I loved other peoples creative retro stuff with GIFs and tiled backgrounds everywhere and really nice pink/peach themes. I failed to provide examples back then, but I was talking about sites from the ‘recommended’ page, like PetraPixel, Lazer-Bunny, Sakura Dreams or doqmeat.

I also started to realize that I don’t really have any use for pages other than the blog. But my instinct at the time was to try and push the styIing more into a generic Neocities aesthetic and go harder on the fish. Both aspects I found theoretically fun and wanted to explore, but my concluding sentences were prescient.

The deeper I dive into Neocities, the more I see other, more sober designs and other blog-first pages without shrines. […] 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.

I have already written about my thoughts on how ethical I think coding with AI is and how I currently feel about bot sitting as a coding tool, as well as the current state of this page as a product of bot sitting. To round off this collection of initial meta posts, wanted to give a comprehensive recipe of my current workflow to create the page and its content.

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.

I am making this website for myself to learn about web design and development. I use various AI tools to write HTML and CSS, because I love seeing quick results and learn well by looking at and modifying code. I do not use AI to write content on this page unless specified otherwise. I do not use AI to generate images or other media for this page. I will experiment with generated ASCII-art, because I feel that is ethical-ish.

When I first wrote this disclaimer, it got me to reflect more deeply on where I draw the line and why. I am not sure I have a definitive conclusion.

I would describe myself as a skeptic of AI and a hater of its evangelists and most implementations/‘products’. I do not like the way that a lot of it tastes of the same get-rich-quick, break-things-move-fast, quasi-religious scam soup that comprises most of the modern technological scene.