If you've found this — welcome, friend :)
In 1996: I started my very first blog on Geocities 1. It was called "The Gryphon's Perch". (Yes, I was that kind of nerd). It featured GIFs [with transparent backgrounds] of images I thought were supercool: Dragonball Z and other anime characters, illustrations of (yes) gryphons, and so forth. I transliterated poems I loved from old, printed pages into HTML pages. I had one webpage with a title of "Random Madness", which consisted of miscellaneous musings, edgelord attempts at philosophy, and quotes (oh, so many quotes). I eventually added a "visitor counter"… it ticked up very, very slowly.
That very first website — along with a dial-up modem; a stack of [dot-matrix printed] tutorial webpages from the original "HTML Goodies" website by Joe Burns; and a healthy dose of encouragement and rivalry with my much younger sibling — taught me basic HTML, and started me down a a lifelong career building and maintaining websites.
I'm pretty sure we didn't have the word "blog" back when I built that first website. I think it was just called a "homepage" or…eh, "website".
In 2002: Skip ahead a few years, and I built something more akin to a blog in late college. It was pretty static, a pain in the butt to update. Still very angsty, but my technical skills and design chops were improving. At the time, I was dying to become a professional web designer. I was inspired by the likes of Hillman Curtis (I bought his book 2, and I thought he was a creative genius). My next big leap was into my very first Wordpress website. It was so long ago that I have no idea what version it was even running on.
Time went on…as it is wont to do.
I got pretty excited when I learned about Neocities a couple of years ago. I kept the discovery in my backpocket, and starting a micro site on their platform has been on my to-do list since then. So…here we are then. I'll keep adding to this biography. I'm also going to start keeping a blog on this site. It'll be the sort of thing I might post on social media, honestly, but longer form, with maybe a little less editorializing. I've thought of keeping a paper journal for years, but never made a habit of it, so this might help fit that need. I also am frankly very sick and tired of giving Meta, Google, and all the others ownership of my data, my photos, my words. So, this is an attempt at reclaiming all of that, as well.
Honestly, just setting up this page has been more fun and joyful that I even anticipated. And I think that's pretty great.
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