This was going to be a microblog post but I started having more things to say and it felt like it was getting to be too long. I've been thinking a lot about my website and just how happy it makes me to have, work on, and look at. The same sentiment has probably been shared a hundred thousand times, but it really is so fulfilling. It reminds me of when I had a MySpace and spent hours working on my theme and hunting down the perfect graphics for my page. That is something I have also always loved about Tumblr throughout the years, being able to set and customize the theme of your page on the desktop site was always something I've enjoyed being able to do. I remember many years ago when Facebook was starting to become a bit more popular, a friend introduced me to it and the lack of profile customization was so strange to me.

Something else that feels really fun and special about having a personal website is that I can just... put whatever I want on here. I can dedicate a whole page to Sam Winchester, showcase my model horse collection, and yap about bullshit on my blog. Social media has become riddled with this feeling of performing for an audience in a sense. I've always tried to be authentic on my social medias, but there's a sense of being perceived on there that gets me thinking a little too hard about my captions or second guessing posting that story. But on here? It literally doesn't matter. Sure, people on Neocities can see my site and read my little posts and stuff, but it feels different. I really do like that you can find and follow people on here, it's just enough of the social to give you that feeling of community. I enjoy browsing other people's sites, the creativity and passion for their projects is very inspiring! But when working on my site, that icky feeling isn't there.

When I think about platforms like Instagram, I'm sorta filled with this sense of dread? I dunno. I made my instagram in 2012, and it was much different back then and is actually what inspired me to pick up photography. Now, it's just a monster of an app. When I was trying to run my photography account, it just felt like too much pressure to always be posting and maintaining an "aesthetic" feed. That blurred over into my personal account as well and made me hate even posting. Several years ago, when my overthinking and anxiety was at it's absolute worst (highly contributed to by people in my life) it also made social media a hellhole for me. I'm much better these days, but I think those experiences left a taste that I can't quite seem to wash out.

I do still use my Instagram, (yes I'm a hypocrite) but after having it for 14 years (just realized that is pretty much half of my life, wow) it feels like a little photo journal/archive of those years. I did find a tool for exporting and creating a webpage archive of my IG, which I have finished setting up, but it has a lot of personal photos and stuff that I don't know if I'll host it anywhere.

Tumblr is another social media I feel the need to say more about. I fully allow myself to indulge in all of my "cringy" fandom behaviors on there. Sometime after I turned 25 I had this full circle moment. It was after the Loki series, and it sent me back deep into my Loki obsession. It reactivated that part of my brain like a sleeper agent. 16 year old me was so BACK. I realized I had always been like this. In 5th grade I was so deep into Invader Zim, I wrote fanfic with my self insert OC and took it to school and my classmates were reading it like rabid little vultures each time I had a new chapter. Even as a young child I would be obsessed with certain characters. There was something about acknowledging that part of me had not changed and was integral to who I was as a person that kinda unlocked something in my brain. I truly stopped caring about being perceived as weird or cringe for liking fictional characters. I think as I had gotten older, I had started to feel like it was weird and silly to still be into stuff like that, so I was a lot more reserved about it. But now I embrace being 30 and reading/writing fic and being obsessed with The Character(s, there's a whole roster at this point).

I feel like that seemingly derailed a little bit, but it's relevant to the meaning behind this site for me. It's a place to indulge, be a little weird. I'm a collector and an organizer with slightly sentimental hoarding tendencies, so having a place to archive and keep bits and pieces of my life in a way that's not just a display for social media feels very special to me. It's all mine too, I'm not at the mercy of some big tech corporation that could shut down or delete my account suddenly. If Neocities goes down, I can just host my site elsewhere. To me, it's sorta the ultimate "profile page" in a way. Sometimes people stop by and say nice things, but there's no pressures in the way social media has.

I wasn't even planning on writing a long ass blog post about this tonight, but I haven't written anything in a while and felt the thoughts bouncing around in my brain. Just got a lil in my feelings about how cool personal websites are and felt like I needed to go on a whole tangent about it.