About

The Site

I'm not typically the creative type; I tend to prefer learning a skill or competing at something for its own sake, such as learning languages or playing fighting games. Occasionally, I'll feel the urge to make something, and I find myself trying to create something for roughly a month before I get bored. In the past, I've tried programming my own gameboy rom, tried making a Thief II level in DromEd, and I translated -albeit not to completion- an unambiguously cursed children's show. This website is another outlet for the occasional creative bug and I make no promises to update regularly.

The Name

I have spent an obscene amount of time living my life the way others wanted me to live. I went to college because my parents wanted me to have an education despite a complete lack of direction on my part, and ended up getting a Bachelor's Degree in Accounting. For what it's worth, I'm still proud of that degree; I worked hard for it, I became a much better writer, and there are some aspects of finance that I still take interest in, but the purpose of education is to prepare yourself for your career.

My first day in accounting was one of the worst days of my life; it hit me like a truck: I'm in the wrong field. The office was comfortable enough, I was more than smart enough for the job, my managers were nice; I don't have many nice things to say about my co-workers though. What kept creeping into my mind every single day though was how little meaning my life had. I wanted to die. After holding out for 10 months, I quit without notice. I was sick of feeling that my days were pointless, sick of taking orders from bossy co-workers, sick of being stuck inside all day, staring at a screen, pretending to be busy. Quitting that job felt sublime.

I came up with the name of the site some time after I left; I really felt like I had lost my mind, so it seemed appropriate to engrave that feeling into the site as I started building it in earnest. These days I work as an electrician; it's hard work, but I love it.

The Aesthetics

Like most people, I steal at least a little bit of my style and formatting from somewhere the fuck else. While I was on the internet before the Social Media era, I didn't actively us the internet until around the early/mid 2000's, but there were still plenty of sites developed in the 90's that were relevant that I'm heavily inspired by. In particular, I really love the look of things like RPG Shrines, with its repeating background that serves to add texture to what are otherwise sparse pages. There's a simplistic beauty to the look. I am aware that not everyone approves of the burgundy background/yellow text look, but I wanted something unique to me and I just happen to really like dark burgundy.

The frame around each article was more or less stolen from Cidoku's "Why I Love Precure" page; all I really did was shrink the size of the frame. I think it does a really good job creating the illusion of a foreground and background, rather than having the text rest on the background texture itself.

The main font in the title and navigation is called Kabel BD, which is heavily associated with the subtitling of the early seasons of precure. I don't rely on subs anymore, but I'm still very fond of that typesetting. The color was supposed to be a reference to the color of the font used when Nagisa spoke, but it's slightly off; it's the same color I used during my Flowering Heart translation, so it can be seen as a reference to that. I had to do quite a bit of research to get the outline just right and make sure the font shows up on computers that don't have the font installed, since most people don't have it installed by default.

The banner for the site was created in Gimp, using an edited screenshot from episode 12 of Healin' Good Precure; a particularly infamous episode, as it preceded the 10 week hiatus incurred by Corona-chan. I'd say it fits the "Madness" monicker fairly well.

Foreign Language Guide

This was in fact the original premise for the website when I first created my account here on Neocitites, but I fear it has become somewhat of an afterthought in recent times, even though language learning remains my primary hobby. I'll get around to making it useful I promise.

Flowering Heart Archive

As the name implies, I'd like to collect all of the work that I did -and posts that I made- in one place, to make them available for as long as possible. All of my efforts should still be available on Twitter, but I rather detest Twitter along with the rest of the corporate web. I have half a mind to delete my Twitter outright like I did with Facebook, but I make no promises one way or the other. It's not as though my Twitter account is actively harming me the way having all of my personal information online via my old FB account does. Were it not for Flowering Heart, I wouldn't think twice about it. I don't know if Twitter will even be around in 10-20 years, but it definitely has more reach than this, and I do want the people who are interested in my unfinished translation as much of a chance to find it as possible.

To this day, I'm really surprised that nobody -at least to my knowledge- has attempted doing a machine translation for the show. I don't approve of AI translations myself, but most people are more than comfortable with the technology, so I'm surprised that I haven't come across it yet. Maybe that's just more proof that the show is cursed, who knows.

Miscellaneous

As previously stated, I've largely left the corporate web, save for a couple of sites that I'm only technically participating on, but I would still like to publicly voice my opinion on topics that matter to me, regardless of how little reach I have.

While I adamantly disagree with her politics, there's an article written by Amy Hoy called "How the Blog Broke the Web", which makes a good case against writing what are effectively public diary entries and displaying them in reverse-chronological order. There is something about the human brain that tends to devalue writings as they age, as though a well written article is less worth reading merely because it's 5 years old. If I had to offer some constructive criticism, her very own website can be used as an example of why 'newest-first' order can be helpful. Just for example: In her "Vote" article, it's difficult to tell exactly which election she is referring to, as she insists that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the United States.

THAT ASIDE, I do think she makes a good point, so I came to a compromise. The articles in the Miscellaneous section are alphabetically ordered, for those who absolutely must know when something was written, publishing and latest edit dates are provided in the bottom right corner of every article. The latest article will (theoretically) be tagged as such in the article list. I think it's important to be able to know when something was written, but I wish to avoid making what I write inherently disposable.

Future Plans

I've been considering hosting this site on my own server instead of relying on Neocities; no beef with them at all, I just think it would be cool to properly own what I make here.

I have considered adding a guestbook or some way for people to provide constructive criticsm of my articles. I have a giant stick up my ass about censorship, but I also really don't want to feel stung every single time I came on here because I felt morally obligated to provide a platform to people that decided they want to hate my guts. I think I'll compromise by setting up an e-mail account just for this site, but -much like with the site itself- I would like to attempt hosting the e-mails on my own server, because I think it would be neat.