Intro

What am I doing on Neocities? I have my own blog that I pay hosting for and have my own domain for, and I ignore that blog mightily. I don't particularly know what to do with this site. Do I make another blog? Do I put in movie and game reviews? I have no freaking idea.

I feel like as I get older the nostalgia hits harder and harder. Hell, even 10 years ago, I famously was thrilled that streaming had become more and more prevalent, so much so that I ripped my entire dvd collection and sold it off to a friend for $1 per DVD. Now, I am buying many of those DVDs back, granted in 4K, but realizing that I kind of want complete access to my media at all times. I similarly collect physical video games in a time where people are moving to just digital. I have even started buying vinyl, despite not owning a record player.

And so here I am, lately, I've been nostalgiac for the old internet. I miss it. I hate the modern internet. I feel a yearning to get back to the basics of what was good and pure about the early days. I have thoughts on why this is and what I miss about the olden days of yore at some point, but it did occur to me that complaining about it doesn't so much as do anything, you kinda have to do something, and so I couldn't think of much better way to try to return to those days than to build a website in the style of GeoCities.

However, I am not one of those people who actually think that 90's websites all looked like Space Jam, with super obnoxious repeating background images, flashing gifs/text, tiny graphics, etc. That all existed but that wasn't entirely what was going on. We did use background images more back then than we do now, but we were still, by and large trying to make sites that looked good. We just didn't want to have a straight white background, that's boring. Personally, I know one of the things I always tried to do was to create a site that had fairly normal white background, but I used those repeated backgrounds in like the navigation areas of the site. For instance, I remember making a website that was dedicated to providing information about wildlife. It had a white background and the left and top navigation had a limestone like repeating background and then I made some matching tabs that look like notebook tabs like __/__/__/. My point is, I don't think we all were like "let's make people's brains hurt when they come to our sites!!" We were all in a new form of media trying our best to make things look interesting and mistakes were often made.

I think the main point I want to get from this is to get back to basics though. Sites like LiveJournal and WordPress and Tumblr made sharing our thoughts easier along the way, but maybe something got lost when we stopped having to build the websites ourselves. I know even when I first moved over to WordPress, I would customize the heck out of it, but as it got older and more and more complex, I favored just using existing templates instead because it got so complex it was just easier. AKA... the site became less ME. When you code everything, and have to figure out the layout and have to do all the labor needed to try to make your site look nice, it takes a lot more work yes... but it also is you putting a little bit of your soul out there for others to see and to connect with. All the short cuts made things easier, but it also largely removes the soul from the internet. And while I don't think that is the only thing that is wrong with the internet... maybe it's part of it.

All that being said, I'm not against using modern technology, that's not the point here. I had a moment when I first started of like "let's just go all the way back, no CSS even!" and then I was like nah... CSS was a good advancement really. It helped a ton make web pages easier to make look nice. I mean for all y'all out there trying to make things look like old Geocities... get rid of CSS and try to make your entire site using tables. That'll do it. I'm already looking for ways to make a basic method of to pull SOMETHING automatically without digging into PHP or make huge javascript scripts. I do want to avoid those as much as possible because both get ugly fast, though I am willing to go into javascript a little, I just don't want to get overloaded by them. But I do want to automatically grab sections from pages and put it on the front page, or barring that, create a site map or directory automatically so that every time I create a page, I don't have to go in and update one/many places to link it to the rest of the page. I think there are ways to do this with simple scripts, but I haven't put in a ton of effort yet.

The previous kind of assumes that I want to make some sort of blog where I'd be updating thoughts a lot (and I consider reviews to be kind of a blog). And honestly that sort of thing seems to be the best form for this that I can think of. I do think back of my older sites... the animal info website was very gratifying, but in the days of Wikipedia, seems redundant. I could make a fan page for something, giving thoughts about it, info about it, etc. But honestly, my mind is random, I don't think I've ever done great at concentrating a site on one topic outside that animal site.

One particular idea that I had was like a travelogue of media consumption. I've always been enthralled with sites where people blog about their games, and heck one of my old sites was the Life & Times of Kazarius (old name) hence the title here. That site logged my journeys through Asheron's Call and, at the time, had a decent amount of regular visitors. But I do want to get out of caring about people visiting, I think that is another thing that modern internet has gotten out of hand with. But I was thinking about, when I play a game, watch a movie, watch a TV show, whatever.. blog about it as if it's a travel site or something. Yeah it's basically a review site, but I kind of like the idea of sharing it as th e experiences that they are. Because experiencing media, is more than just dissecting it, it's about talking about who and where you are in life at that point in time. And maybe that is a more interesting way to talk about media, at least to me.