It's such a deceptively innocuous question, isn’t it? I always feel a little panicked when someone asks me about my hobbies. What can I say? I draw serious fanart for very goofy source material. I write 10,000 word screeds on the vagaries of an anime character’s sexuality. I embroider. I weightlift. I speak Chinese. I browse places like r/woodworking and wistfully picture a world where I was bold enough to buy a set of hand planes. I like to dabble in a little bit of everything.
It might be a little funny of me to say this, given that I’ve really only just started doing any coding on a website, but there really is something so liberating about it. I’ve been trawling websites for the past month or so, and I’ve seen more creative and inspirational stuff than I have in years! It’s incredible how much work goes into spaces like this. It all has this weird ephemerality to it, too – sure, a lot of these sites are probably downloaded onto personal computers, or future-proofed in some way, and, as they say, stuff on the Internet “lasts forever” – but there’s also the inevitability capitalist entropy, right? Like Adobe killing Flash. Who knows what the next cataclysm will be? I feel this weird urge to consume as much of it as I can – to follow down all the little rabbit holes and absorb all the cool, weird, esoteric stuff I can find before it all vanishes forever.
I sound like a sap, but I’m really grateful to have stumbled on this type of community!
I think it's almost mandatory for every newcomer to Neocities (and the web revivalist movement as a whole) to post some kind of write-up on our opinions of modern consumerist culture. Far be it for me to shuck tradition.
I don't think it's possible to write a more incisive condemnation of the unique brain damage rendered by the internet than one essay I read from the 90's - which, ironically, I can't find now. Should I summarize it? Or should you, the reader, just remember an oblique reference in the back of your mind? Keep it there, unexamined, and imagine that I imparted some deep wisdom on you just now. Maybe, if you're lucky, serendipity will lead you to the same essay.
For me, personally, it's hard not to be cynical. I always get into a sort of moronic doom spiral - any time I start journaling, any time I get even the littlest bit retrospective, my hindbrain goes into defensive lockdown. You can't post that! That's cringe! You're part of the problem! True liberation is accepting that interfacing with the internet in any creative capacity is cringe. Hell, creating anything is cringe. You're taking up space in real life, right now. You've eaten food that could have gone to a starving family. What I'm trying to articulate here is that you must not tie the value of your creative output to its quality. Your life is not given meaning by its virtue. Your art is not justified by its beauty. The gold standard isn't real, Calvinism is dead, we're taking up space on the internet and posting cringe for the simple joy of posting cringe.
Of course, what this section is really doing is letting you know that I know that no one's going to read this. I'm divesting myself of the embarrasment of being invested, you see. It's an emotional step back into the comforting embrace of post-ironic sincerity: as long as we keep singing about the "death of cringe culture," it'll be true sooner or later, right? "I didn't want my stuff to be popular anyway - I'm posting it for me!" This, too, is a symptom of the internet brain damage. Everything is a performance, even when the theater's empty. There's no way to engage with the online world in a genuine capacity; everything is calculation, nothing is genuine. How can it be? You have to consider a post; you have to grab your phone, open the app, choose your tags, weigh your words, and at that point, what is there left to propell you to make the post? Anything you put online can only be a shrine to your own vanity. The only way to win this game is to not play.
But hey! Maybe nothing I've said so far will resonate with you. You might just have your shit more together than I do! I called this a "moronic doom spiral" before for this exact reason - I know this line of thinking is flawed. I consider people who can maintain a positive, productive outlook in such high esteem. It's thanks to them that this website even exists! I've linked a few of them on my Links page. Maybe go check them out, when you're done here?