SievePlate

Thoughts on drawing every day for a week

2026-02-14T14:00:00+00:00

In 2025 I took on a "New Year's Resolution" to generally get things done more. To this end I took on a little "forum game" on a site frequently. The goal I set for myself was to do at least one drawing a week. I would check in every month, and the punishment for failing would be a six day mute. My goals were to practice more and find some motivation to draw. I also wanted to get over the anxiety I have about posting things I do because they're not "good enough."

Some notable events throughout the year were a fun Drawpile I took part in in April and managing to get a commission in August. Drawpile is always fun and I'm glad to make progress on commissions. Other than those, I did do a range of Various Things which is nice. Oekaki-style drawing, lower resolution pixel art, and the occasional Blockbench model. Looking back I would have liked to have used Blender and Godot more. I've been meaning to practice those...

It's nice to push yourself and it's nice to surpass your limits but I can't really justify pushing myself that hard again any time soon. Maybe if I suddenly gain a ton of free time I can try doing weekly drawings again. But for now I'm just taking a break and focusing on more important things (which is why this blog post took so long...).

It was nice to experiment with different techniques too. I didn't change art style drastically or anything but doing at least one drawing a week allowed me to do some relatively rapid iteration on some things I was thinking of trying. I'd like to think my linework and shading improved...

Towards the end of the year I decided I don't need to put every drawing on social media which in retrospect was maybe working against the goal of getting comfortable with posting bad drawings. But I don't think posting on social media is good for my sanity in the first place so it's probably fine.

All in all I'm glad I did it but I don't see myself doing it again any time soon. I think I learned a lot from it though. I hope the series was interesting to keep up with for those who did.

Hallways

2025-03-18T22:00:00+00:00

"SIXTY?!"

– Eldog (2025)

pencilvoid is a public menace

– Superstarxalien (2025)

I'm not usually one for jams. I'm a pretty slow worker by my own admission, and deadlines stress me out just as much as they motivate me. So I don't really remember why I thought participating in the cerv.id classic was a good idea.

I guess I just wanted some motivation to do something? This year I've been trying to worry less and do more, which resulted in the weekly drawing series. The cerv.id classic asked me to produce a functional (and hopefully fun) custom level for Dr. Robotnik's Ring Racers, a kart racer high in technical complexity, built on Sonic Robo Blast 2, which itself is built on the original Doom's engine. Making levels for an engine that goes back over 30 years is definitely An Experience.

Concepting

I decided the first thing to do was think of a visual theme, which proved to be a bit difficult on such short notice. I had some vague ideas of a more moody aesthetic, taking place indoors, with a kind of clinical appearance, but no specific setpieces came to mind except for one. At the time I figured this was no matter. Then the jam prompt rolled around.

Your submission must be both a functional Race and Battle map!

Needless to say I was a little intimidated...

Race and Battle are the two primary game modes in Ring Racers. Race is, as you'd expect, racing. Do laps around a course faster than everyone else, while dodging hazards from the track and other racers. Battle is player-versus-player arena combat, similar to Battle in the Mario Kart series. Drive around a relatively small arena, using items to beat up other players and chasing down UFOs which give you special power-ups when you strike them. At this point in time I was already aware that a level could hypothetically support both game modes but I had no idea what such a level would look like. It didn't help that I hadn't (and still haven't as of writing!!) played a single round of Battle in my life.

The layout

View video at source

Fig 1: the map as it was on January 1 2025. This video shows Race mode. (video hosted on file.garden)

View video at source

Fig 2: the map as it was on January 1 2025. This video shows the Prison Break minigame, in Battle mode. (video hosted on file.garden)

I managed to produce some simple layout concepts on the day the theme was revealed. My initial strategy was creating a track that circled around more open rooms; the track would be for Race and the open room would be for Battle. Seemed simple enough.

As always, the music was locked in from the get-go: de_cache by BLKSMIITH. I tend to pick music early as for me it helps guiding the visuals and pacing of the level. This music was more aligned with the initial concept I had in mind, which I ended up not executing exactly as I pictured it, but I think it still ended up fitting the level well.

For quite a while, the rooms you see in figures 1 and 2 were the entire level. It was proving difficult to force myself to come up with setpiece ideas. Eventually, I decided to try borrowing a setpiece from an existing level I liked. I followed up those rooms with two thin paths arranged side by side in a "wave" shape, inspired by a similar room in Ring Racers' Marble Garden Zone. From there the path split continues with some other ideas that came to mind, like a wall ride and a jump with trick panels, a special type of spring panel which start a quick time event which lets the player dash in a certain direction.

Around this point the design philosophy begain to crystallise. The level played into claustrophobic and awkward to traverse roads, with sparse rings and boosts to help you up steep slopes or past awkward jumps.

After the previous rooms came the map's centrepiece, which has been lovingly described as the "really thin fuck you section".

The path is about one player wide, but you could fit two players side by side if you tried. There were also no rings initially, and the green sneaker panels on the second part force you to boost right before a sharp turn. I hope that the name bestowed upon it is becoming clearer.

My main motivation for this part was just that I wanted the level to be harder, and felt like doing something players would balk at since I had already attained some sort of status as the guy who makes Hard Levels. I'm aware that a level you made will inherently be easier to you, but I still felt like it could use some spice. At the time, falling off the path would just drop you back on, but unlike the rest of the level, you wouldn't automatically advance any further. You have to complete the entire thing...

This room sort of ended up crystallising the level's design philosophy, in a serendipitous way. In Eldog's words...

"When you think about it this is the truest form of skill expression... the track is your enemy."

As an aside, I don't really recall thinking about how this room would be experienced in Battle mode. I did make sure it could be traversed in both directions, so there's something...

After this, the layout was coming close to completion but I needed one or two more rooms to close the loop. I felt that the design style had changed a bit as the layout progressed, so I wanted to bring it back together. The next room used the same style as the first one, with a path circling around an empty space in the centre. This is also where I put the map's centrepiece.

If this site's landing page didn't clue you in already, I subscribe to the idea that Giant Spinning Shapes Are Cool. I felt that the level could use some visual flair, since at this point it was clear I wouldn't be able to draw the level's textures in time for submission, so I spent a few hours putting the sprites together for this (which was relatively easy) and programming it (which was relatively hard). Doom engine, being over 30 years old, doesn't provide functionality for 3D models, so to create something like this and make it functional in the Software rendering engine I had to make each side of the octahedron a separate entity. This object is actually related to my OC setting I've been working on for a few years, but I can talk about that in its own post...

After this room, it was fairly straightforward. A simple downward slope and a jump connected it up to the start of the level, and the circuit was complete! Configuring the map for Battle was relatively simple too. All I needed to do was place a few Battle-specific objects (some sixty-odd prison capsules) and write some scripts to let the level automatically adjust itself to be more playable in Battle mode. All in all, I managed to submit the level a couple days before the deadline.

After the showcase

The reactions to the level were about as I expected. It was fun watching bots try their very hardest to complete the level and just barely making it in the end.

We had some time to clean up and improve on our submissions based on the feedback given in the showcase. Around mid-February, Eldog floated an idea by me on Discord...

Wait... can I float a suggestion by you
What if you made that floor the like... Wacky Workbench bouncy floor
that fucking shoots you up at a million miles per hour
and then made the ceiling instant death
so you get one chance to recover with fastfall before you die
if you're lucky

I put together a script for it in about 15 minutes, and initial results were interesting.

View video at source

Fig 3: an early version of the bouncy floor gimmick. (video hosted on file.garden)

This gimmick ended up being really fun to use, enough so that I sprinked it in around other parts of the map. It has this unpredictableness to it that I think ended up fitting the level and the game as a whole really well.

Looking back

I feel that overall, this endeavour went surprisingly well. I didn't get to execute the aesthetics the way I initially planned, but I think the intent of the level concept came across well. Funnily enough, in the livestream chat during the showcase some people proposed visual themes that were surprisingly similar to the concept I initially thought of.

My biggest mistake was probably not planning ahead as much as I could have. A substantial amount of the month was spent sitting around thinking of level setpieces, which is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not ideal when you have a deadline. For any newer mappers reading this, I would suggest to try and think of at least a few setpieces beforehand when you're concepting a level. Having a clear idea of how you want your level to feel to players will help a lot for guiding your hand.

As of writing, the updated version of the level with the new gimmick has been submitted and will be available for everyone to play alongside every other participant's submissions too. Look forward to enjoying everyone's levels!

Terminology

Setpiece: A short section of the level which presents a specific focus to players, such as a tricky path to traverse. A level can be considered a bunch of setpieces chained together
Spring panel: A type of floor in the game which launches the player into the air upon touching it.
Trick panel: A special type of spring panel which starts a QTE. Completing the QTE allows the player to dash forwards, upwards, or to the side.
Rings: Items in the game which players can pick up and use for a small speed boost.
Sneaker panel: A type of floor which grants a stronger boost when a player drives onto it.
Prison Break: A minigame taking place in Battle mode, where players have to hit prison capsules spread across the map on a time limit.
Prison capsule: The targets in Prison Break.

See the sunrise

2024-11-06T14:00:00+00:00

In tumultuous times it's pretty easy to lie down or sit on your hands, wishing the powers above you that control your life had things like "empathy" or "basic respect for humanity". This is an entirely normal reaction, and you're not wrong or evil for it. But what's most important is never giving it all up.

The most important thing to you is to focus on the things that are immediate and directly in front of you; the things you can control. Any positive change you can effect in your own life will help keep you sane. Forming and strengthening community bonds is invaluable. Be there for others and they will be there for you.

You probably hear people throw around "it gets better" often, and it really can sound like bullshit when you weigh your options and it seems like nothing works out in your favour. But really, the truth is as long as you are alive you will survive to see the sunrise. As long as your heart is beating, you can eat, breathe, and continue to exist.

Everything you can do to make your own day or someone else's even a little bit better is worth it.

Thoughts on colour in pixel art

2024-01-12T17:45:23+00:00

Note: this is an adaptation of a post from a social media platform, with minor edits for grammar and context.

User deetvleet asked:

i love the colours in your artwork! how do you choose them?

Thank you! Colours are one of my favourite things to experiment with and so I’ve ended up with a relatively streamlined process.

I usually begin with a palette of 96 colours called springboard-96. I made this palette myself as a starting point for mixing new colours as I develop the art piece. Below is a sample of the palette.

As an aside, I meant to make a 256-colour "extended" version of it but I never got around to it.

springboard-96 is an edit of an edit of an existing palette called Journey by PineappleOnPizza. In its current state, springboard-96 encapsulates my use of colour fairly well. Some notable features:

The greyscale ramp hueshifts from purple to green. I like this because it gives the darker greys a more grimey feel. It works especially well for drawing metal.
Red has a unique hueshifting pattern. Initially it shifts towards pink as it gets darker, but after a point it starts getting warmer again. I like doing this because it accentuates the pinkness of the main shade and creates a nice balance of warmth and coolness within the colour ramp
There's two green ramps. I like green.

When it comes to rendering objects and characters I usually pick 3 tones for each material: a main tone, a shade tone, and a line tone. I avoid making these 3 tones a perfect linear ramp if possible. I like to change the hue or saturation of the line tone so the shade tone isn't directly inbetween the main tone and line tone, if that makes sense. Sometimes I will also move the shade tone closer to the line tone.

For example, we'll look at Ocha's hair:

I've listed the hue, saturation, and value of 3 of the 4 tones her hair uses. You can see the hue of the shade tone is a lot closer to the line tone, while the saturation is closer to the main tone. "Biasing" the hue or saturation like this can help to make each colour stand out while fitting nicely in a ramp (generally keeping value linear is best, but anything can work).

Additionally, playing around with "non-standard" huestifting can be very rewarding. Usually you're told that light tones should shift towards warmer hues and dark tones should shift towards colder hues but switching it up can produce interesting results. In Ocha's hair, the hue shifts from yellow to green, which gives it a nice natural or earthy feel when combined with the low saturation. The highlight also shifts towards green which helps to emphasis the general green-ness of her hair while letting the beige prevent it from becoming overpowering. Additionally, the main tone is pulled from springboard-96 so that's an example of how I use the palette to mix new colours.

Overall, the most important things to my process are to mix new colours as I need them and to be Weird with colour usage. In the spirit of minimalism I generally try to use as few unique colours as possible, so finding a balance between that and mixing new colours as I need them can be a fun challenge as well. Thank you very much for the ask!

Terminology

Ramp/colour ramp: A gradient, or series of colours, formed by blending a colour from light to dark.
Hue: Commonly referred to as "colour". In this article I use the word "colour" to refer to a specific combination of hue, saturation, and value. Red, green, and blue are examples of distinct hues.
Saturation: The vibrancy of a colour. Lowering saturation makes colours appear more grey or washed out.
Value: The brightness of a colour. Lowering saturation makes colours appear darker.
Hueshifting: A technique in which the artist changes the hue of a colour slightly as the brightness of the colour increases or decreases.
Palette: A selection of colours for use in art.

2024

As a bonus, check out enchanted-sword's dashboard-unfucker userscript, which reverts the dashboard from the Twitter clone design to the previous design.

Districts Retrospective 2

2023-09-30T12:39:30+01:00

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Districts, listing of listings:
Look on my site, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level rats stretch far away.

—Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias", 2023 remaster (real)

Districts is gone. I am going to assume my scathing review manifested a drone strike which obliterated it from orbit, and left in its place a single rat. I attempted to contact the One Rat for interview, but it did nothing but spin around.

What could this mean for Neocities? Will more sites be replaced by rats? Are rats going to take over the internet? As we all know, before Districts was tragically murdered it was the most-visited site in existence, surpassing YouTube at 24 trillion unique visitors every day. It makes sense that the One Rat would pick such a large target. Don't be surprised if you visit google.com only to find yourself redirtected[sic] to ratgoogle.com .............

Short Districts Retrospective

2023-08-18T20:32:00+01:00

I don't think Districts "failed". It just stopped. I won't pretend I have any idea what happened in the owner's life that caused them to stop updating it for over a year, but it wasn't a sudden stop. As of writing, the last update was in January 2022 and the one before that was in March 2021.

I probably wouldn't be writing about this if Districts wasn't so huge. As I write this it's still the fourth most-followed site on Neocities. I guess what this situation makes me ask is why Neocities users tended towards such a centralised structure for website discoverability. The only comparable site I've stumbled upon so far is NeoCities Neighborhood Directory, which has about 20% of Districts' following.

It's genuinely interesting to me how even on a platform designed to allow freedom we tend towards the centralised structures we're normally forced into. Districts still receives about one comment a week asking to be added. To me, this says a lot about how we view the old internet in modern times. Districts and similar sites like Neo-Neighborhoods arguably come across as if they're designed to evoke Web 1.0 nostalgia. However, the resemblance is largely aesthetic. Users have a tendency to act as if a service will persist functionally forever and become dependant on its existence rather than using independent and less hierarchical methods; for instance, adding buttons or joining web rings (though these methods are not without flaw). In short, a lack of long-term thinking. This isn't as severe of a problem as it would be if Neocities didn't have built-in tools to discover websites, but it's a good example of how modern internet usage habits can't really be shaken off so easily.

I can't really fault Districts or any individual Neocities user for this, though. It's just what we're used to. Social media sites can shut down or make their site unbearable in the name of profit or get bought by a billionaire having a mid-life crisis. They're inherently transient, and we just have to deal with that. Also, Districts is just a fun concept so it makes sense that people would want to get involved. I don't think this is a problem with a solution, or a problem at all. It's just how we are as people.

I would like it if Districts "came back", but I would like it more if the human running it took their time and worked on it at a sustainable pace. Maybe while we're waiting we can support some other directories.

Relevant links

Districts
Neo-Neighborhoods
Ongezell's Web Database

Note: An earlier version of this post included a small investigation into who could possibly be running Districts and why it hasn't updated in so long, but I decided to scrap this because that would be rather invasive and also I am not a detective.

SRB2 WAD & PK3 icons in File Explorer

2023-06-25T22:57:37+01:00

Here is a simple and relatively easy way to use SRB2's WAD and PK3 icons in File Explorer on Windows.

I can confirm this works in Windows 10 and 11. Can't make any guarantees for earlier versions of Windows or other operating systems. Additionally, it's not straight-forward to undo; as far as I know there isn't any way to revert it to the icon it was using previously other than locating the ICO file yourself. Only do this if you are very sure you want every WAD and PK3 on your computer to be a reference to SRB2 until the end of time!!!

Fig 1: Two icons on the desktop. These are both stored as ICO files.

Downloading necessary files

First, we need to prepare our ICO files. The ICO file format is a type of image file that Windows uses to visualise files, folders, and programs. These are used in File Explorer and places like the desktop and taskbar.

Making an ICO file requires specialised software due to the way it stores the image data. But thankfully you don't have to worry about that. I've already made them so you can go ahead and download them here. Put them somewhere easy to find and remember where you put them!

You'll need to download one software tool for this: FileTypesMan by Nir Sofer. This is a free software utility that allows you to modify the data associated with each file type your operating system knows about. Download the version appropriate for your operating system. If you're unsure which version to download: get the x64 version on Windows 11, get the x86 ("normal") version on any other version of Windows.

Fig 2: Example of a suitable place to put FileTypesMan.

FileTypesMan requires no installation and the files can be put anywhere. I would recommend creating a folder for it in your Documents folder as shown in Figure 2.

Applying the icons

Double click the executable file to run it. You will be greeted with a list of all the file types registered on your system. Scroll down until you find ".wad".

Fig 3: The series of windows involved in selecting an icon for a file type.

Once you find it, right click it and select "Edit Selected File Type" in the context menu. This will open a window. In this window you will see a field named "Default Icon". Click the button with three dots to open the "Change Icon" window, and select "Browse" to search for the WAD icon. Once you select it, double click it in the "Select an icon from the list below" portion of the window to apply it. After that, click OK in the "Edit File Type" window to apply it.

After this, the icons will refresh and the new icon will be applied! The process can be repeated for the other file types. However, I strongly recommend only doing this for WAD and PK3 files. This is because changing the icon for certain file types can potentially change the icon of other file types that share an icon. FileTypesMan will warn you if changing the icon for one file type could potentially change the icon for others, as shown in Figure 4.

Fig 4: Here, changing the icon for the .lua file type would also change the icon of the other file types shown in the warning.

And that's all! For future reference, this method works for any file type and any icon. Installing a new program that handles WAD/PK3 files or otherwise messing with program associations can overwrite your chosen icon, but you can repeat the process if this happens. You should also be in the clear to remove FileTypesMan from your system after setting the icons for your chosen file types. This can be done by simply deleting the folder containing FileTypesMan.

Feel free to leave any questions or comments on my Neocities profile.

Art Fight 2023

2023-06-19T12:32:00+01:00

I will probably most likely be participating in Art Fight this year!

That's basically all I have to say. I've wanted to participate in Art Fight for years but I've always been stopped by real life obligations and/or self-doubt. Neither of those have subsided this year but I've been waiting for ages so I'll participate anyways. It's actually kinda difficult for me to promise myself to do things like this because I'm terrible at planning ahead. If I want to do something I have to do it right away or I'll either forget or lose the will to do it. But I figured maybe my strong overcompetitiveness could win over my strong impulsiveness. Who knows? That's the fun of blindly throwing yourself into new things!

If you're reading this and you also plan to participate please let me know so I can attack you. In the competition, that is. I want to get more comfortable drawing other people's characters and I figure this way would be fun for both of us. I specialise in Funny Animals.

Websites you can never go back to

2023-06-04T20:50:14+01:00

Is the modern internet a hellhole? Yes. Is a return to the old internet the solution? ...let us discuss.

If you're reading this you probably use Neocities (which currently hosts this website) or are at least aware it exists. If not, Neocities is a free personal web hosting service. The site aims to provide a platform for free self-expression and creativity, the supposed antithesis of the modern web. The prospect of a space online that's entirely yours is understandably very attractive to many people, and as such Neocities attracts users in droves.

Oftentimes on other platforms I'll see a post urging readers to join Neocities immediately. Maybe they'll even link to some helpful developer resources like sadgrl.online's webmastery resources or W3Schools. I really do hate to make assumptions (much less incorrect assumptions) but I can't help but assume that these posts are more often than not written by people in the "honeymoon" phase of their Neocities journey. By that, I mean the first few days or weeks after creating a Neocities account where you're like "Woah! I can make a website! And other people can see it!" and you're more amazed and less focused on what you're going to populate your website with.

To be honest, it does upset me a little to see a site on Neocities that clearly had a lot of effort and care put into it but hasn't been updated in a year or possibly longer. The webmaster most likely retreated to social media. But, I do wonder sometimes: if your website really meant that much to you, why did you abandon it?

I don't mean to be unrealistic. I know that very often life gets in the way and prevents people from tending to personal projects (my site updates relatively frequently due to a lack of the aforementioned). But it is quite frequently that I spot someone who manages to update frequently on social media and yet their website on Neocities is stale and failing to meet recent OSHA guidelines. What causes this? Did they try Neocities and realise it wasn't for them? Did they like the idea but have a hard time learning HTML and CSS? Did they sign up just out of peer pressure?

It's actually pretty much always just the first thing. HTML is quite easy unless you really give a shit about semantic code or you're doing something ungodly with your page's layout. So why would someone not vibe with The Neocities Style™? Well, there's a number of reasons. Maybe it's "I actually just realised I have no idea what I would want to put on a website". Maybe it's "Updating a website long-term is actually a pretty big commitment and I don't have the resources for that". Maybe it's "The community isn't my style and I don't see any point being here if I'm not going to interact with the community". Those are all actually perfectly valid reasons to give up on Neocities. I would rather see nothing at all than a website consisting of an "about me" section and 5 pages with a work-in-progress GIF on them. But, there's still a part of me that becomes unreasonably upset at this.

I feel as though I can't talk about the old web and nostalgia without mentioning the Yesterweb movement. The Yesterweb movement is (was? apparently it's currently embroiled in some drama I do not want to get involved in) an online community aiming to bring back the spirit of the "old web" or "web 1.0". In my honest opinion, I don't expect this to go anywhere meaningful. I think it's an exacerbation of the same thing that causes people to become enamoured with Neocities but later realise this isn't for them at all. To elaborate, many of those (obviously not all) who subscribe to the Yesterweb movement or similar ideas are fueled by nostalgia-tinted glasses and misconceptions about how the internet used to be. It's not uncommon for some Neocities websites to contain a little manifesto about how the old internet used to be a wonderful place (the most negative description you'll read is "a Wild West") where everyone was free to be themselves with no restrictions or limitations on how they expressed themselves and also no one argued about anything ever and there was free cotton candy. This most likely stems from entirely justified criticisms of the current state of the internet: it is becoming less a means for people to connect and more a vessel for products to be sold and money to be made from scraped user information. Social media platforms are toxic and encourage negative interactions.

Was the old web any better? Not really. People just hadn't yet figured out you could make sell private information for money. The old web was just as toxic (if not more so, because over-sanitisation meant there was no compulsion to at least pretend you were having a good time). There are countless untold stories about forum drama that today's social media Main Character Of The Week couldn't hold a candle to.

I am aware that the Yesterweb movement is more than aesthetics. In fact, the Yesterweb movement aligns with my own opinion on the impact of nostalgia. My point of contention is that sometimes the kind of people who subscribe to the Yesterweb movement or other such ideas can come across as performative and uncommitted to the ideals it presents (I am an outsider, and I know this means I don't have as deep an understanding of what the community is like. But drama and schisms don't look good to an outsider.)

So what's the solution? If the Yesterweb movement is flawed and Neocities isn't for everyone then how do we fix the internet? Well, the best solution would be to end capitalism. But that'll take a while, so I'll present you with this instead:

Use social media less. I don't mean not at all, I mean less. You probably hear this all the time but taking frequent breaks from Twitter genuinely does wonders for your state of mind. Try to focus on parts of the web that improve the lives of you and other people, like checking in on your friends (really! you improve the lives of your friends just by asking how they're doing!)
Consider whether a personal website is really what you need. By this post I don't mean to say you should never sign up for Neocities unless you're 200% sure you can update it for at least 5 years going forward. I just mean you should consider whether it's something you're interested in and prepared for. You wouldn't sign up for a new social media platform or a new magazine or a new streaming service unless you were actually interested in what it had to offer, right? Neocities is the same.
Reconsider how nostalgia affects your views. This is where I circle back to the post's title. Nostalgia is almost never helpful. It's difficult, but you have to accept that things will never be exactly the same as they used to. That's just how life works. Instead of trying to rewind time, think of new ways we can improve the web and have the best of both the old days and current times. This isn't to throw shade at anyone who likes the 2000s web aesthetic — if that's what you like, more power to you — just be aware of the potential negative ramifications of nostalgia.

These probably come across as a little preachy. I don't mean to tell you how to live your life, but remember that if you want to make a change you have to start with yourself.

In conclusion, this post is not really what I thought it would be. I won't be changing the title though. This post is just my thoughts on nostalgia and its place in modern web culture; None of this is a call to action against the Yesterweb movement, those who subscribe to it, or general nostalgia for the early 2000s. Everyone has differing opinions and interests, and that's okay. What I ask of you is to consider whether your views on the internet are logical and reasoned or clouded by nostalgia. Maybe then we'll do a little bit better at fixing the web together.

First

2023-05-20T16:32:07+01:00

This is a test post.

Today I spent just over 2 hours retrofitting the site with Jekyll, a static site generator. This enables me to make Actual Posts and creates a distinction between the source code and build code. Whether either of those are good things is up to you.