baby's first post
I'm getting close to finishing my website, so I figured it was time to finally make an actual first blog post instead of using the placeholders provided by Zonelots.
And anyway, you're probably wondering why I've invited you here in the first place. The truth is, I'm really tired of social media and trying to present myself online in a way that feels inauthentic, so I wanted to make a separate online space for myself here, and I thought it might be nice to share it with you.
I first became aware of a movement back to personal websites when I stumbled upon this video by LuvstarKei sometime within the past year:
Since watching this video (and a subsequent one titled Exploring the indie web and finding the CUTEST personal websites!), the idea to build a personal website has been bouncing around in the back of my mind for the past few months.
I noted in the "fun facts" section of my about me page that I started building personal websites as a hobby in the late 90s, but it has been almost two decades since I made a website for fun. I started trying to make my websites more professional around 2007 or 2008 when I applied to fashion school and first tried to sell my art on CafePress, and honestly that took a lot of the joy out of it for me. Because I grew up in a time when it was encouraged to make a career doing something I loved and what I loved was making things, I tried too long to turn my hobbies into a career and it took me years to realize that trying to monetize and promote myself on social media was ruining my enjoyment of those hobbies.
Over the past few years I've been reclaiming my enjoyment of the hobbies I had tried to turn into work to make them fun again, but for some reason I hadn't thought to apply that to my website despite picking up CSS again in 2021 to redesign my Gaia Online profile. It was only until I watched Luvstar's videos and actually thought about how much I used to love making websites with aesthetic but not mobile-friendly layouts that I realized that this was something I was missing: a place to share my hobbies and interests, another enjoyable hobby in itself, and a space for me to express myself without constantly being marketed to and hindered by algorithms.
I don't know if anyone will even read this, but I've never really been good at following social trends and either way I'm done making things just to build a following or get engagement. Maybe I'll come back to social media at some point with the same approach I'm bringing to my hobbies, but right now I'm just tired of it all so I'm going to post my stuff here instead.
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