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I've been boodling around the internet at large since around 2006 when a friend of mine showed me that Neopets was a thing. I was immediately obsessed. Mostly with Neopets, but also with the internet at large.
Like a lot of other families at the time, we didn't have internet access at home—and we wouldn't get it until around the year 2016. My first connection was through our local library and I cherish it to this day. Since I was so obsessed with Neopets, the first thing I did was make an account with an e-mail address that I made up completely. (It worked as well as you'd expect.)
Neopets is responsible for getting me into coding. I loved pushing the limits of what my lookup could do and making petpages and guild layouts and whatever else I could. I carried around my first scraps of code on a floppy disk that I would ferry between our ancient home PC, the library, and my friend's house.
Through Neopets I discovered other corners of the internet. There were Lord of the Rings meme sites, Beatles fanfiction, and, eventually, my own corner. It was either on Freewebs or AngelFire or any of the other myriad free hosts available at the time. It wasn't much. Just a page with a black background and far too much red text. (I was going through me edgy "not like other girls" phase.) I even remember setting up a chat box that I deleted in a fit of pique after I found out that one of my friends was pretending to be multiple people in it.
Over time, my interest in the corners faded and I moved to the mainstream. First it was Facebook (long since deleted) and then Tumblr (I still have an account there, but not the original one) and then Instagram (also long since deleted, this time for my own health and sanity). But recently I've been feeling restless with this new era of the internet. It's so overwhelming and quick to be cruel. I hardly even participate on Tumblr anymore. They've long since taught me that comments are mostly unwelcome and generally treated as hostile. So what is there left?
In mid-February of this year I was browsing some pixel blogs on Tumblr to find some nostalgic flair for my blog when I discovered someone's Carrd with links to resource pages on Neocities. I'd had Neocities bookmarked under "to check out" for some time, but never looked at it past its usefulness as a Tumblr alternative should the site ever actually go down. (It's been threatened and rumored dozens of times. At this point I think Tumblr, a Twinkie, and a cockroach are the only things that'll survive the eventual nuclear apocalypse.)
Well. The rest is here. It's been about a week with the website and I've already had such a burst of creativity. It's simple, but it's completely hand-coded (with the help of our good friends at W3Schools, Stackoverflow, and Duck Duck Go) and it's mine! Who knows, someday I might become a supporter and get my own domain and make another website and another and another and another-- but that's the future. And it's getting late. And there's so much left to code…
Fun with Picrew!
