Date of upload: October 1, 2025
Whew, okay, so...I have a website now.
There are a whole number of factors that influenced my decision to finally take the plunge and make a NeoCities page. Part of it is wanting to make a space on the Internet that I can truly call my own, that people can take one look at and think, "Yeah, Nicole made that page!" Another part of it was my growing feelings of dissatisfaction with the algorithmically-curated cesspit that is the current social media landscape. I had steadily been weaning myself off of sites like Twitter due to the adverse effect they were having on my already-fragile mental state. The endless deluge of hostility, of countless "hot takes" and interpersonal drama that I had always existed at the fringes of...it had just gotten to be too much. And to think, this was all before Elon Musk turned that site into the right-wing shithole it is today.
Hell, I still don't feel compelled to make a Bluesky account, despite it supposedly being better than Twitter in a number of ways, because I'd already been burned pretty badly before, and I don't want to take that risk again.
So I figured...Why not just make a NeoCities page?
I first had this idea after stumbling upon the website of one of my more recent favorite Internet artists, tofokyo. Just, everything about their website felt like getting hit with a blast of cool forest air after what felt like a lifetime of breathing nothing but stagnant city air. In my opinion, it's always a good thing when you stumble onto something cool and think, "Oh man, I wish I could've made that myself."
Well guess what! I CAN make something like this myself, with enough effort!
Fast-forward to 2025, after the past year had hit me with a barrage of events that led to me becoming a shut-in for most of the year, I am now taking medication for my ADHD for the first time since I graduated high school, and, while watching the live premiere for ArpWire TV's GeoCities '98 mixtape, the topic of making a NeoCities page comes up. I am now hit with the idea of making my own website all over again. And then...nothing came of it for a few months. I was hit with the mental roadblock of "Oh, what if it doesn't turn out how I wanted?"
Then, just over a week later, Don Shnack's video on Donkey Kong Jungle Beat is released, and at the end of the video is a message about embracing failure, about not being afraid to take the plunge into something new. And just like that, that mental roadblock vanishes. Later on, I tell my therapist about my desire to make a website. With her encouragement, and some actual guidelines in place, I began on the long, yet fulfilling path to making a website.
Of course, I started with some beginner courses on HTML and CSS. Naturally, it didn't quite turn out how I wanted at first, and it was a bit of a crucible to get my code working, but as my website design buddy Joel told me, things breaking is part of the process. I didn't go full in on taking a web design course, instead choosing to learn as I go and taking info from sites like W3Schools where necessary, because I feel that helps facilitate the learning process more than trying to learn info that wasn't immediately useful in the moment from a full course.
Obviously this site still has a long way to go before I get it to how I want it to look, but I'm happy with the progress I'm making now. I can't wait to work on this site more in the future.
See you whenever I decide to do one of these next. ~Nicole