Site Background
Why did I make this site? Well I already had a blog up and running on Wordpress, but I didn't like the way it looked. It looked way too corporate looking and I didn't have any real control over that aspect of it. Everything was handled by the Wordpress software. Also, I had always liked the way that older Web 1.0 sites from the 90s and 2000s looked, and then I remembered Neocities. I had a friend who had made a site on Neocities a while ago and I thought I would try it out. I thought the HTML would be hard to learn at first but it really isn't. It's deceivingly easy actually. Not only that but building this site has rekindled my love for computers and the digital world.
I created this place so I could host my blog and distribute my books. Since the pandemic began, I realized that I really like writing, couple that with a life long dream of mine to run my own website and you get this place! Mr. Rogers once said that he considered the space between the viewer and the television to be sacred ground. He saw the huge potential for good in the format of TV, he also saw it being used and abused by people who didn't realize how much good it could do as he had. That is how I feel about the internet. So much good can and has come out of it. It is a truly beautiful invention. But it is also being abused heavily by many of its users today. The internet used to be tons of diverse and interesting websites where you can find and interact with all different kinds of people, but it has since colaced into a few very corporate and bland websites. Facebook, Twitter (not calling it X), Reddit, YouTube, Tiktok, Instagram, it's all the same shit. It doesn't feel human like the internet of the past felt.
Couple that with the rise of AI slop content online, the internet is increasingly corporate and inhuman. It used to be an escape from the real world, it used to be, and now, it is the real world. We spend all of our time on the cookie cutter social media sites that I believe are leading to a degredation in human culture. The internet used to be a space for diversity where you would have tons of different specialized forums and websites where you could truly express yourself. But you can't do that anymore on the major sites.
Ultimately, I just want to make the world a better place. One person as a time. I want to be a part of a movement to make the Internet a better place. I hope that this website will be a small part of that. Go out and make your own website!! Take back your soul from big tech!! - Joe
Tech background
I guess writing about your personal history with technology is a common theme on the smaller websites so I will give it a shot! I have always loved technology. Ever since I was little I was fascinated by computers and the internet. The first computer I remember using was a green iMac g3 in my dad's office. And my first expierence with the internet was playing Seasame Street flash games on that machine. I was fascinated by it, the see-through green shell, the UI, the browser (Firefox will always be my favorite browser), it was all so fascinating to my little mind. Eventually, my dad gave me his old iPhone 3g around 2010. He had preinstalled tons of games on it and I was enthralled with it! I remember watching videos on it under my covers at night, stuff from the golden age of YouTube. Smosh, Super Mario 64 speedruns, lots of videos about Mario actually, videos of Rube Goldberg machines, tons of neat stuff. I loved YouTube and I loved this new digital world. Eventually I discovered Wikipedia and as a kid who loved learning and reading it quickly became one of my favorite websites alongside YouTube.
There is this book that I think I bought at a school book fair called Cool Tech published by DK. It was a kids guide to the world of computing and the digtial world and I loved it! It had detailed but easy to read explanations of the history of computing, the internet, smartphones, video games, and ecetera. I read it obsessively and I still go back and read it from time to time nowadays. I think this book was at least somewhat responsible for my love of tech growing to what it is now. Around the same time, I read two books from that Who Was/Who Is kids biography series about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. It was also around this time I realized that what I wanted to be when I grew up was a game developer.
Since the only computers I had really used at that point were Apple devices, I fell in love with the entire Apple product line and ethos. I loved their skeuomorphic design philosophy (a part of what my generation now refers to as "Fruitger Aero", even though Aero was a Windows thing and OS X's design was called Aqua). It was so beautiful and refreshing to look at, I remember hearing Steve Jobs said it was designed so that you would want to lick it, and it worked. As such, my first computer was a 2014 MacBook Pro. I loved it, I was most exicted for it because it meant I could play Minecraft on it. This was around the same time that Apple decided to ditch Aqua and make everything flat and boring and too be honest I kind of hated it. I remember I got a program on my MacBook that enabled me to change the icons back to the Aqua varients which was a lot of fun. I had come to realize that actual programming would require math skills and I to this day hate math and am unable to wrap my head around it. But that didn't stop my love of tech.
As I grew up, I began to grow tired of the limitations of my MacBook. You couldn't upgrade the ram, you couldn't upgrade anything honestly, and I wanted to play games that you couldn't get on a Mac. So around 2019, I got a Lenovo gaming laptop that came with much more storage and could run all the games I wanted. It was a great machine and it served me well for a good few years. But it was also Windows, which I was never a big fan of. Eventually, around the time Windows 11 was coming out, I decided to dual boot Linux just for fun, and I fell in love with the Linux world. I admire the philosophy of the free software movement, free doesn't necessarily mean free of charge, moreso it means you are free to crack open the source code and inspect it, modify it, or turn it into your own revision of it. I saw it as a breath of fresh air when compared with the closed soure and proprietary ecosystems that I had been using for years. Linux is an entirely free and modifiable operating system and their are many different variations of it out there. I decided to completely ditch Windows and replace it with Linux Mint.
