New Look, Same Great (?) Flavour
7 September 2025
I've been revamping my site again. I'm sort of always revamping, or rethinking. The homepage + blog were nice, and I was proud of what I was able to learn with them, but I wanted a site that felt slightly less "young".
There're a few reasons for this: reason one, I'm turning thirty this year, and while it does feel fundamentally extremely 13 Going on 30 (in that I feel much more like a preteen trapped in the body of a 30 year old than an actual real adult person tasked with things that matter), I wanted my site to feel more in line with the kind of fun slash playful slash adult energy I'm hoping to soon infuse into my real life wardrobe and possibly even decorating scheme.
The other reason is that I keep designing sites for characters and thinking 'damn, this looks great. pity it's just for this character and not for me though...'. Realising that I am in fact a character in my own life was very satisfying for me. So I've harvested some ideas from previous projects to pull this together. My code is always kitbashed together so we'll see if this causes any problems in the future.
Of the changes I've made, I'm very proud of this whole set-up.02
Part of my main inspiration and desire to code is to see things represented physically and see if I can recreate them in css + html. I draw a lot of inspiration from physical design, print design (zines, magazines, newspapers, so-called 'coffee table books', and so on).
I like trying to represent and replicate the feeling of an extremely physical item such as a magazine online. There are some real drawbacks to a print-first design mentality, the easiest to spot being the layout. Unless you're rocking a vertical monitor (which I really do want, for discord and manga and whatever else), the layout styles are set-up different and I never want to make my adherence to trying to create something in another medium to lead to worse design.
I've always been of the 'good artists copy' mentality, in that I think you can learn a lot from trying to recreate something. I've spent a fair amount of time trying to recreate various magazines' layout design in the past (in Pages and Photoshop, mind you, as InDesign still scares me). Now that I know (enough) about coding, it makes sense that desire would transfer over here as well.
This might feel stupid, but part of what I love about the neocities side of the web is that it feels less 'cheap' than a lot of cookiecutter layout-based sites. Or if it feels cheap, it feels cheap in like, a DIY / zine / shot on video kind of way. So many sites today feel cheap in a 90s office building way. Cheap without any charm. And it's not that I want my website to look 'expensive', but I at the very least don't want to give off that cheapness that feels endemic to the listicleslop factories of the world. You know?
Anyways, all of this to say that I have been thoroughly enjoying revamping my site. I hope I'll write here more, or create more interesting pages. I want to use it more, and use social media less, as I can tell that one brings me joy and the other mostly just serves to stress me out. And if I'm not going to be touching grass any time soon, I may as well enjoy it. Right?