wist.cafe

mourning neocities

Like a lot of Zoomers who got interested in learning HTML/CSS, I got my start from Tumblr themes and Neocities. Actually, my first exposure to HTML was a poorly coded niche community art app for children, and then CSS as well from editing my userpage on a wiki site. (I want to talk about the disaster of that art community sometime in a different post, because it's lore is actually fucking weird.)

I used Neocities on and off from 2018 to 2022. I made and abandoned a number of blog-centric sites because I get burnt out when people start following it. I don't like the attention that much. I don't want to see how many people are following it. Those things might just be my own personal hang-ups, but it didn't feel good so I left. I still cherish those sites, but you can only do so much and I was interested in learning more advanced ways of doing things. Now I get to choose my own hosts and domain names and services and software. It's not free like Neocities, but that's the price you pay for freedom…(?)

Neocities really is still a great site in theory. I love everything else about it, its simplicity, features, and its core ideas but the community is just grating as fuck. From what I hear, there's a lot of petty drama no one gives a shit about because 90% of its active users are Twitter and Tumblr migrants who never lost the annoying identity politics and callout culture. Someone is accused of copying someone else, someone is attention whoring on their updates tab, someone is shittalking someone else on Discord… who fucking cares? I mean, it's somewhat amusing, don't get me wrong. I just hate how normal it is. I don't want those types of people to be the ones orbiting my site. I'd rather have zero audience in that case.

I created this site to be my own personal project. I don't link it anywhere so I'm not sure where any of the analytics traffic is coming from. I know most of it is probably just indexing bots or spam requests, but how many of them aren't? I use meta tags to try to discourage as much of that stuff as possible. Maybe there could just as well be an actual living person besides me reading these entries. I have strong lurker tendencies, so I understand.

thank you matt and trey for your cultural impact on american society

I haven't been working on my site much as of late because I've been binge watching South Park. I've been a fan of the show since I was a little kid, like even back in 2010 or so. Yeah, I was too young to understand most of the violent and sexual jokes but I first watched it because my brother would watch it and continued to enjoy the show. I've seen a lot of episodes both new and old, but I never sat down and watched all of the episodes in order. I went back on where I left off last time I was binging it months ago (middle of Season 5) and I'm on Season 13 now.

I always thought it was really funny how popular South Park is among fujoshis, both Western and Eastern. Even over a decade ago they were around, and they're still going strong. There's a lot of really good art out there from female fans, even if a lot of it is super OOC for a show about being racist to every demographic and poop jokes. I'm actually curious about what non-American fans enjoy about the show given how much it is heavily steeped in American political and cultural references. Though, on the other hand, Osomatsu-san is one of my favorite shows of all time, even though it's really Japanese. They both fall into the CBDCT niche even if it's unconventional, but clearly women love fucked up and weird male characters with interesting dynamics. I don't ship any of the characters in South Park despite being a massive BL shipper, but there is a lot of cute and good art I like. I think it's funny how Matt and Trey clearly don't have a problem and even enable it given the Tweek x Craig episode.

I think off the top of my head, my favorite episode is the Michael Jackson one (The Jeffersons, S8E6) because Michael Jackson jokes are fucking funny as hell. My favorite character has always been Stan, but I also like Kenny, Wendy, Butters, and Ike a lot.

anxiety spiral

I've got a really bad habit of looking at and reading about things that stress me out in an attempt to quell my fears and phobias and sometimes they work, but sometimes they generate me new anxieties. It's a good thing that I don't think I would ever be a medical doctor because I would be depressed pretty much every day of my life.

sometimes we should all care a little less

One thing that I've started to think over the past few years is that people weren't meant to be this... exposed to so many other people. Obviously, the abundance of information and the freedom to write anything you want is a wonderful thing, but I think having to read so many faceless or vague individuals on the internet that we would never have encountered otherwise is doing something. Example: You could easily enter a comments section on Youtube or TikTok or Facebook or whatever the hell and read the stupidest shit you've ever seen from hundreds of people within the span of minutes.

I have to wonder if we will ever adjust to all of the extreme anti-social behavior being encouraged in people nowadays, all fueled by the internet. By anti-social, I don't mean being awkward or introverted, I mean actual vile behaviors in even children who consume everything you put in front of them. The anonymity and lack of repercussions of posting haphazardly on the internet obviously don't translate to real life, but some people are really that annoying and/or attention-starved. The internet didn't invent being a disingenuous asshole, but it certainly didn't help.

random thoughts on accessibility (and the internet)

I think it's a really lazy cop-out for people to dismiss "accessibility" as a politically correct thing as an excuse to not have to develop their own website (and skills by extension) further. I'm talking about this in the context of more hobbyist-oriented web development. Lame dismissal of reasonable concerns aside, it's probably like "oh, another annoying thing you have to worry about, even if you're inexperienced" but it's really not super complicated. I wouldn't call myself an expert on it by any means, but I do feel like it comes to me intuitively as a concept. It's like... why not make your life easier?

I think learning practices like semantic HTML should be a requirement. Besides providing a better experience for people using accessibility features on their device, semantic elements are also just cleaner and make the organization of your HTML easier to navigate since you're actually communicating structure on a very bare-bones level without having to make guesses based on visual hierarchy. It has a "lawful or neutral good on the alignment chart" feel. Well, I'm guilty myself of using <div> and <span> elements as well as px units on this site on the day that I'm typing this, but I tried to keep them contained to purely cosmetic elements. I mean, we like to have a little fun here, and it's not like using <div> and px is forbidden once you enter semantics land. Like most things, you have to understand the rules in order to subvert them.

Personally, I don't mind adding several extra lines for media queries in order to fix extremely simple sizing issues on small screens and windows, and the end product is usually more reliable anyways. You could insert some anti-smartphone and modern internet arguments here, but if that's the case, then I don't see a point in trying to convince you otherwise, because I feel like that deserves its own discussion. Obviously, it really depends on your site's contents and intentions, but in most cases, it's actually extremely easy anyways. You can literally just test every screen size possible in browser developer tools.

There's also like, using actual readable colors instead of using low-contrast text that nobody can even read. Like, that's probably the first thing you'd actually think of. I think I just feel this one from the Tumblr era where putting pastel pink text on a white background was extremely desirable. Also, some people balk at the idea of light mode but apparently dark mode is hell for people with really bad astigmatism, and it's not like you can just get new eyes in that situation.

Another accessibility thing is making sure your site is generally viewable to most people regardless if they are rich asshats with powerful computers or not. (I say this, knowing full well that I intend to drop upwards of $2000 on a custom PC some day.) To me, this means trying to minimize bloat and not going overboard with media and scripts. I grew up on the internet using lower-end Android tablets and Windows laptops, so I can empathize with this heavily. I love hacky CSS and HTML tags like <article> that negate the need for extra Javascript. Simplicity and organized chaos is just a lovely thing.

Alternatively, I suppose that there are also some people out there who fully intend to make their site as visually hostile and off-putting as possible, like a "don't like, don't read" sort of thing, and I honestly respect the hell out of that too.