07.16.25 // 2:52pm

Wow! My first blog! I don't anticipate using this a terrible amount... but it might be a fun way to write down and chronicle my thoughts. I'm so forgetful these days!

I first stumbled upon Neocities when I was on call with my boyfriend and passively looking up information about the yaoi paddle. It was a site called peachgummy, and inspiration struck me like lightning! The stylish graphics, the pictures taken with the retro digital camera dated 2024 -- it was so beautifully nostalgic. I forgot places like that once existed on the internet, and the discovery that there was an entire community devoted to this preservation of nostalgia instantly made me want to be a part of it.

I didn't grow up with Geocities. I was on the internet from a very young age (too young, really), and I experienced lots of iterations of the web, but never Geocities. I was part of multiple Freewebs sites devoted to Pokemon, for example: people on the IGN boards would form "teams", and each site would have a chatbox and... that was pretty much it. I lurked on Livejournal, but it was on its way out by the time I found it. Later, I discovered Neopets, with its petpages acting as little html hubs for character docs on the roleplay forums. That was my first real first foray into HTML and CSS: it was so fun that I later went on to get my degree in it. That was not fun... but is also a blog for another day.

Looks like Freewebs doesn't exist anymore... RIP, Team Rainbow.

There was one particular petpage layout that EVERYBODY used and that I WISH I could find, but try as I might, I can't seem to. It was a simple layout: white background, black text, big headers. I took it and splashed it up with more color, and of course made everything bigger (to this day, I hate how small people make text), and I was really proud of myself. It's stuck so much in my mind, a lot of this site's layout is derived from it! It's where I developed my love for Verdana. No other font compares!

Pretty sure I used this exact Sunnyneo layout for my Pirate Kougra's backstory back in the day. I mostly roleplayed with humans, though... roleplaying Neopets wasn't actually that popular on Neopets, go figure.

People did crazy things on Neopets, and I see people doing incredible stuff here on Neocities, too. It's absolutely amazing! I admire everyone's skill. I tend to like my webpages simple and unified, so I'm pretty satisfied with what I have now... but the fact that people can get so creative is incredible. Here's just a couple amazing websites I found while getting inspo for my own site!

• soapbubbleseal
• christinee
• ordainednotion

My favorite site I stumbled across was seafare, and I took a lot of inspiration from it while building my own site. The site is so simple and clean -- it's like breathing in crisp sea air! I wish my site looked this nice. Also, in the quizzes section of this site... I saw a link to a quiz I made! Specifically, this Final Fantasy XIV one. Small world!

Anyway! This should be enough text for me to test the layout on this bad boy, I think. I don't think I'm going to do a scroll box... I think large chunks of text look better with some room to breathe. I'll probably do the same with my character pages... and fanfiction, if I ever get there. Problem is, so much of my fanfiction is NSFW... and it feels kinda weird to post here. Hmm. I'll have to think about it. We'll see!

Thanks for reading!