the 5th of june, 2023 was the last time i ever updated this website until a year later, in june 2024. i was thinking of deleting this website alltogether, but ultimately i didn't, not out of pride, not out of a feeling that i would lose this community that i was a part of, but because of apathy. boo hoo, right. one of the things that got m eback into updating and writing again, was the need for a hobby, a community. i checked back on so many neocities sites i used to frequent, until i realised how many of these links and 88x31 buttons led to the same page.
so many pages that i loved to frequent were offline. the thing about neocities is that these are more than just websites. these pages are extensions of peoples personalities, the code behind their websites are coded with blood, sweat, and (in my case), mainly tears. so many pages that i've seen shared one thing in common - art, links to other websites the webmaster thought were cool, tacky but cute pngs, buttons and blinkies - all gone. by extension, it could be said that with the birth of a personal webpage is like the toss of a pebble into an ocean, creating ripples, splashes, changing the environment around it - but the death of a webpage is the pebble sinking to the bottom of the ocean, getting buried in the sediment below.
god, take me back to where we were all worried about web 3.0 being the home of NFTs and cryptocurrencies..
now, it's clear that web 3.0 is shaping to be something much more ugly and something quite scary.
back in 2021, when i started okaynana (formerly known as gusonana), i was sixteen years old, playing with dall e mini thinking to myself, "haha, stupid AI can't even draw a stick person correctly". now, whether we like it or not, AI is much more advanced and we have the live with that fact. but the matter of the fact is, AI art especially completely lacks the soul and (emotion?) that human created art has. so much so, that AI has made me believe in the human soul. that brings me back to neocities. so many human-created webpages have the feel that what i'm looking at is a labour of love that contains the webmasters essence, spirit, soul, whatever. so can you see why it upsets me that people delete their old webpages out of embarrasment or fear?
i think it's rediculous to assume that people nowadays should delete their social media and set up their own personal webpages on neocities. fuck, even i can't stay off of social media, yeah i guess i managed to stay off tiktok, but it took me soooo long to actually learn how to code this website.. if you can manage to code your website, go ahead and get started now, it's so rewarding! but even if you can't or don't want to, don't stop posting art, poems, manifestos, writings, whatever on any of your social medias. don't do it for others, do it for yourself. and, if you already have posted your media online, don't delete out of shame or fear, keep it up there for others to enjoy. you'll be surprised to know how many people will find joy in it so many years later...
from nana