In October of 2019, as a high school student, I created a website on Neocities. I didn’t have any particular reason for doing so; I think I thought a personal website was something that any reasonable tech-oriented person should “just have”, and this is a belief that I hold to this day. I spent most of the time on the early version of the site just playing around with HTML and CSS and following the Mozilla web development tutorials rather than having any actual content on the site. I found this reasonably fun.

I revised the site over the next two years, doing a rebuild in December 2020, and then firing off a couple updates in June 2021. The main actual “content” I ever added to my site ever ended up being:

  • An article recommended a bunch of different chiptune artists (actually, two versions of the same article, with one an “express” shorter version and the other a “scenic” version, out of consideration for my audience, enabling them to choose the article that best suited their attention span), and
  • A few pages about the music I had made.

Along the way, I followed other sites on Neocities, and even exchanged brief (very brief) messages with some of their authors on the inbuilt proto-social-media boards of Neocities, mostly choosing to admire from afar.

In August of 2022, having metamorphised into an undergrad engineering student, I became unnecessarily (?) paranoid about having a website about myself and sharing things with the world At Large, even though it was under a pseudonym. I also became concerned that I was spending too much time distracting myself on Neocities rather than being productive, which does seem like an excessively workaholic attitude to have, except I was in fact editing the site a lot during my exam season when I definitely should have been doing work; it’s always in times when I most direly need to work (e.g. exam periods) that I am most likely to end up doing something that feels productive but is actually not (e.g. typing up an article for a personal website), case in point being I am literally doing that right now. Thirdly, I was concerned about “being cringe”.

I therefore shut down the site and stopped going on Neocities around August 2022. Was this the right decision to make? I still think it was reasonable, although maybe I could have still kept in touch with people whose sites I followed on there.

In June of 2023, I made a new website: this one. turtle.business. This was more or less inspired by some of my colleagues having their own proper websites. (Let it be known that I was hacking together HTML before, or at least only very shortly after, it became cool.) The idea behind this one was to provide a slightly more professional outlet for blog posts (should I ever choose to actually make any good ones), although I am probably a fundamentally unserious person and will never accomplish anything truly meaningful in this life unless I finish building Unflaky or somehow acquire prescription-strength stimulants (JOKING).

In July/August of 2023, I wound up checking in on my old Neocities account (since I never actually deleted it), followed one of my former Neocities followers, lhfm, on Mastodon, and was somewhat inspired to see him still posting away all this time. As strange and parasocial as it sounds, I do kind of feel some sort of connection to him after reading through his slice-of-life blogs and opinions on random stuff like federated protocols or the Mongolian script or whatever. I think the best word to describe his site, and in fact most of the sites on Neocities, would be ‘cosy’, and I’m slightly happier about the world for them all existing in it.

Anyway, mainly because of this, I’ve changed my mind about trying to hide old work away from myself and others and feel like it was maybe kind of a dick move to take down my whole site somewhat abruptly, so I’ve decided to rehost it in its mid-2022 state on this site. It will not receive any future edits; this section of the site is purely an archive. You can check it out here.