Do your part to support japanese artists on tumblr by following the らくがき (doodle) tag so you see newly uploaded pieces of art that often get 0-5 notes at best
A fun little side project, I took a tiny bunny from Sylvania Families (Calico Critters in the US) and built out an ork killa kan around it. The bunny isn’t glued in or anything, it can be removed.
an anecdote i think ive neglected to share with you up until this point is about this one time when h.p. lovecraft was part of a round robin exercise with a bunch of other well-regarded pulp weird fiction writers
the resulting story, “the challenge from beyond” is, frankly, not….good. like, at all. what it is, however, is HILARIOUS, particularly when conan the barbarian creator robert e. howard, taking his turn at the writing wheel directly after that other howard, slam-dunks every single generally accepted round robin rule about not contradicting things that the previous writers have already introduced/established in the story, not dramatically shifting the tone, etc. STRAIGHT IN THE GARBAGE in one of the most gloriously petty displays of trolling/ Fuck That-itis i have ever seen in this kind of game (and i mostly hung out with the creative writing + theater crowd in college, soooo)
basically you have lovecraft being lovecraft, going on and on and on, making the protagonist faint from terror a solid three times in maybe 1,500 words (just a guess there, i didn’t actually bother to count), and concluding with a HORRIFIC REVELATION:
But even this vision of delirium was not what caused George Campbell to lapse a third time into unconsciousness. It took one more thing—one final, unbearable touch—to do that. As the nameless worm advanced with its glistening box, the reclining man caught in the mirror-like surface a glimpse of what should have been his own body. Yet—horribly verifying his disordered and unfamiliar sensations—it was not his own body at all that he saw reflected in the burnished metal. It was, instead, the loathsome, pale-grey bulk of one of the great centipedes.
yup. dude turns into a grotesque giant centipede alien monster and TOTALLY LOSES IT. truly, this hellish transformation is too great a burden for his fragile human mind to comprehend, let alone bear while remaining conscious, or sane–
but wait! ENTER ROBERT E. “CONAN THE BARBARIAN” HOWARD:
From that final lap of senselessness, he emerged with a full understanding of his situation. His mind was imprisoned in the body of a frightful native of an alien planet, while, somewhere on the other side of the universe, his own body was housing the monster’s personality. He fought down an unreasoning horror. Judged from a cosmic standpoint, why should his metamorphosis horrify him? Life and consciousness were the only realities in the universe. Form was unimportant. His present body was hideous only according to terrestrial standards. Fear and revulsion were drowned in the excitement of titanic adventure.
THE EXCITEMENT OF TITANIC ADVENTURE
talk about mood (and philosophical outlook on existence) whiplash, right??!
the best part, though, is that he KEEPS GOING ON LIKE THIS for about four more paragraphs:
What was his former body but a cloak, eventually to be cast off at death anyway? He had no sentimental illusions about the life from which he had been exiled. What had it ever given him save toil, poverty, continual frustration and repression? If this life before him offered no more, at least it offered no less. Intuition told him it offered more—much more. With the honesty possible only when life is stripped to its naked fundamentals, he realized that he remembered with pleasure only the physical delights of his former life. But he had long ago exhausted all the physical possibilities contained in that earthly body. Earth held no new thrills. But in the possession of this new, alien body he felt promises of strange, exotic joys.
etc., etc.
…and then george-as-centipede monster goes on a STRAIGHT UP BLOODTHIRSTY RAMPAGE like some arthropodian conan and then just totally CONQUERS THE FUCK out of the ENTIRE centipede planet because why not and someone please make john darnielle write a song about this, i am begging you
this is a website packed to the brim with website building goodies , including a website layout maker that is the easiest and most user friendly maker i’ve encountered! perfect for creating your own neocities (it’s free!!) , the code even has helpful tips in it for those new to html/css!
i also recommend w3schools.com for quick and easy to follow chunks of html/css tutorials! gifcities is a goldmine for old neocities era gifs, and blinkies cafe is perfect for making your own blinkies!
i can’t wait to see everyone’s websites in the coming weeks and months! remember, it’s fine to take it slow and let it look silly, that’s always been the point of websites like this :]
ps check out our neocities and feel free to drop yours in the replies :]
“i miss the old internet” “we’ll never have websites like the ones from the 90s and early 2000s ever again” “i’m tired of social media but there’s nowhere to go”
HOLD ON!
personal websites and indie web development still very much exist! it may be out of the way to access
and may not be the default internet experience anymore, but if you want to look and read through someone’s personally crafted site, or even make your own, you can still do it! here’s how:
use NEOCITIES! neocities has a built in search and browse tools to let you discover websites, and most importantly, lets you build your own website from scratch for free! (there are other ways to host websites for free, but neocities is a really good hub for beginners!)
need help getting started with coding your website? sadgrl online has a section on her website dedicated to providing resources for newbie webmasters!
HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are the core of what all websites are built on. many websites also use JS (JavaScript) to add interactive elements to their pages.
w3schools is a useful directory of quick reference for pretty much every HTML/CSS/JS topic you can think of.
there is also this well written and lengthy guide on dragonfly cave that will put you step by step through the basics of HTML/CSS (what webpages are made from), if that’s your sort of thing!
stack overflow is every programmer’s hub for asking questions and getting help, so if you’re struggling with getting something to look how you want or can’t fix a bug, you may be able to get your answer here! you can even ask if no one’s asked the same question before.
websites like codepen and jsfiddle let you test HTML/CSS/JS in your browser as you tinker with small edits and bugfixing.
want to find indie websites outside the scope of neocities? use the search engine marginalia to find results you actually want that google won’t show you!
you can also use directory sites like yesterweb’s link section to find websites in all sorts of places.
if you are going to browse the indie web or make your own website, i also have some more personal tips as a webmaster myself (i am not an expert and i am just a small hobbyist, so take me with a grain of salt!)
if you are making your own site:
get expressive! truly make whatever you want! customize your
corner of the internet to your heart’s content! you have left the
constrains of social media where every page looks the same. you have no
character limit, image limit, or design limit. want to make an entire
page or even a whole website dedicated to your one niche interest that
no one seems to be into but you? go for it! want to keep a public
journal where you can express your thoughts without worry? do it! want
to keep an art gallery that looks exactly how you want? heck yeah! you
are free now! you will enjoy the indie web so much more if you actually
use it for the things you can’t do on websites like twitter, instead of just using it as a carrd bio alternative or a place to dump nostalgic geocities gifs.
don’t overwhelm yourself! if you’ve never worked with HTML/CSS or JS before, it may look really intimidating. start slow, use some guides, and don’t bite off more than you can chew. even if your site doesn’t look how you want quite yet, be proud of your work! you’re learning a skill that most people don’t have or care to have, and that’s pretty cool.
keep a personal copy of your website downloaded to your computer and
don’t just edit it on neocities (or your host of choice) and call it a
day. if for some reason your host were to ever go down, you would lose
all your hard work! and besides, by editing locally and offline, you can
use editors like vscode (very robust) or notepad++ (on the simpler side), which have more features and is more intuitive than editing a site in-browser.
you can use ctrl+shift+i on most browsers to inspect the HTML/CSS and other components of the website you’re currently viewing. it’ll even notify you of errors! this is useful for bugfixing your own site if you have a problem, as well as looking at the code of sites you like and learning from it. don’t use this to steal other people’s code! it would be like art theft to just copy/paste an entire website layout. learn, don’t steal.
don’t hotlink images from other sites, unless the resource you’re taking from says it’s okay!it’s common courtesy to download images and host them on your own site instead of linking to someone else’s site to display them. by hotlinking, every time someone views your site, you’re taking up someone else’s bandwidth.
if you want to make your website easily editable in the future (or even for it to have multiple themes), you will find it useful to not use inline CSS (putting CSS in your HTML document, which holds your website’s content) and instead put it in a separate CSS file. this way, you can also use the same theme for multiple pages on your site by simply linking the CSS file to it. if this sounds overwhelming or foreign to you, don’t sweat it, but if you are interested in the difference between inline CSS and using separate stylesheets, w3schools has a useful, quick guide on the subject.
visit other people’s sites sometimes! you may gain new ideas or find links to more cool websites or resources just by browsing.
if you are browsing sites:
if the page you’re viewing has a guestbook or cbox and you enjoyed looking at the site, leave a comment! there is nothing better as a webmaster than for someone to take the time to even just say “love your site” in their guestbook.
that being said, if there’s something on a website you don’t like, simply move on to something else and don’t leave hate comments. this should be self explanatory, but it is really not the norm to start discourse in indie web spaces, and you will likely not even be responded to. it’s not worth it when you could be spending your time on stuff you love somewhere else.
take your time! indie web doesn’t prioritize fast content consumption the way social media does. you’ll get a lot more out of indie websites if you really read what’s in front of you, or take a little while to notice the details in someone’s art gallery instead of just moving on to the next thing. the person who put labor into presenting this information to you would also love to know that someone is truly looking and listening.
explore! by clicking links on a website, it’s easy to go down rabbitholes of more and more websites that you can get lost in for hours.
seeking out fansites or pages for the stuff you love is great and fulfilling, but reading someone’s site about a topic you’ve never even heard of before can be fun, too. i encourage you to branch out and really look for all the indie web has to offer.
i hope this post helps you get started with using and browsing the indie web! feel free to shoot me an ask if you have any questions or want any advice. <3
