Something From Nothing
Finally, after half a month of doing nothing with this repository after creating it, I am writing something to put on it.
18 days ago (according to commit history), I used the Gatsby starter blog template to generate this whole layout. I then proceeded to tear down quite a bit of it to get it down to its bare essentials. I'm still in the learning phase of trying to understand how Gatsby works, but I've poked around enough to feel like I can probably figure out whatever I want to do.
There's a bunch of things that I might end up writing about in this entry, so it may be a bit all over the place.
Overall, this site will just be a place for me to put whatever I want on it. I don't have a lot of experience with writing about things, so I'm using this site as a way to practice transforming thoughts to text.
Over time, the idea of having and maintaining a personal website became more and more alluring to me. I mean, if I wanted to directly talk and interact with people, I would probably just try posting on social media.
I feel like I would maintain something like this for different reasons than why I would maintain some social media profile. As someone who has honestly never meaningfully posted content on social media (meaning, someone with no experience other than lurking), I still can't break the mental barrier of it feeling "performative". Like, if I want my posts to actually be interacted with, then I feel like I need to make "good" content, whatever that means. I can be pretty confident that only web scrapers will ever actually access this site, so I feel like I can be a bit more genuine in my writing. I mean, there are other factors as to why I'm trying this angle. Social anxiety plays a role too.
While I do think that social media (in terms of being a tool that can connect you to people, not an algorithmic echo chamber nightmare realm) provides positive benefits, I think that it's incredibly unfortunate that everything looks the same. Sure, you get general ease of navigation across the board, but I feel like you lose out on a lot of personality. One of my main inspirations is The Cave of Dragonflies, which just absolutely oozes personality and charm. This site gives me this feeling of playfulness and personality that I don't see on other sites. I wish to have my own Marquee of Doom. It's just fun.
Having a personal website like this allows me to have very fine granular control over all aspects of the site.
I don't know the direction that this site will go in. Right now, it's incredibly basic and doesn't even look good, but I'll figure it out (I would start with a less bright theme).
Until next time