what's up with this site, anyway?
"Gee whiz, this site sure looks weird! I wonder if the creator is some sort of weird, time-traveling eldritch entity that's out to murder us all or something..."
Was that a quote you could've plausibly said? Worry no more! This site does look pretty weird, and that's by design! The whole idea behind it is to be as simple, small, and thoughtless as possible! I'd like to explain those individually. As for the "eldritch entity" allegations, I'd like to remind you that I have the right to remain silent.
- simple
This means I will not use any fancy frameworks, javascript, static site generators, or that entire category of stuff. I want a website I code myself, with my own two, human hands. Any unnatural, stiff, or dumb wording is proudly mine.
click for high quality version :3
This means I have to do a lot of duplicated effort, it's inefficient as hell, and gives subpar output. But it's what I like, so I'm doing it anyway :)
- small
This requires a bit of explaining. You may have noticed that the website is very size-optimized; I've compressed everything the most I can, and generally I try not to be wasteful with our bandwidth. Why? I dunno, I guess I saw one too many videos on dial-up and thought "hey, wouldn't it be neat if my site could plausibly be loaded on dial-up?" and the rest is me being in a sunk-cost fallacy. Besides, I find it very fun to see how much I can minimize the file sizes with the same technologies we used back in the '90s (PNG, JPEGs and GIFs only are the constraints I've put on myself). For example, the "created by a human with a heart" badge by cadence (you should check them out btw) was 5.5kb as a .png. Pretty slim! But by converting it into a gif, I was able to halve the file size to 2.78kb with no quality loss I can see! I think this has something to do with color palettes and I'd probably be able to achieve the same result with .png if I knew how to work the file format better, as well as my tool of choice, ImageMagick, but overall I'm happy I managed to do that!
My very loose guideline is that the page should be able to load with a 56kbps dial-up connection in 5 seconds for main pages, meaning a 35kb "budget", and the rest, like this article, is on a best-effort basis without sacrificing what I'd like to show.
A huge inspiration for this style of website is the Low Tech Magazine, a magazine I very regularly enjoy reading and which has some, if nothing else, really thought-provoking ideas. I'm of the opinion that constraints drive creativity, and creativity drives imaginative solutions to problems you didn't even think you had. We live in a really maximal age, so something being minimal for once feels very against the norm, and I like that.
- thoughtless
As much as possible, I'd like to just type stuff in and publish them. I don't want to worry about my writing being perfect, or whatever I make not being good enough to show. I want to just *write* for once. A website's perfect for that, in my opinion. A large part of why I made this website is to just get something out there. I don't want to wait for inspiration anymore, I just wanna create and let inspiration flow through me, whichever form it takes. A bit high-concept, sure, but it's something I enjoy doing.
