As this new little passion project is getting its claws in me, I guess it's inevitable that I want to start it out with something a little meta. I've been thinking a lot about what I'm doing with this website.
There are so many sites on the indie web that start out by talking about how the modern web is too fast and homogenized and corporate, and obviously that's why I'm here but it's probably why you're here, too. I don't think I need to rehash why we're both on neocities today. But I do still have the same questions that everyone trying to be more intentional about internet space curation ends up having as well: What am I doing here? Why this space? What am I hoping to get out of this endeavor?
This is an art project, in some ways, sure. A way to sharpen up my older website-building skills and see how much I can build from scratch, low file sizes and low overhead. But I could've been doing that on my local hard drive the whole time, and I occasionally have done exactly that in the past. I am publishing it for a reason. So why do I want this space to be both personal and public? Is this an archive, an art project, a microcommunity hub, some combination, or something else entirely? What are the values I'm trying to live up to here? What do I get out of this? And what about you, whoever you are?
The very initial planting of the seed was done by a fellow poet who suggested I should have a website for my poetry. When I explained that I didn't have a real social media presence anymore, he said that was good and that I should still have someplace to put my poems and point people when they want to find me. I don't know that this is quite what he meant. I haven't thought much about how I'd like people interested in my writing to think of me, certainly not enough to design a website with that goal in mind. But that is, still, one concrete thing I'm trying to do here--have a stable web presence for the weird creative pursuits I desperately want to do more of.
I came back to writing poetry in 2020 with the idea that I wanted to do something just for myself, something creative and unmonetizeable and free from the limits I had to place on myself at my day job. I was quite surprised to eventually find a bit of community and connectedness in it, the shock of other people caring about some of the same things I do and thus caring what I have to say. Lately I've been feeling at a generalized crossroads that has me wondering if maybe there are some other whys I just haven't discovered yet. I think it will probably be good to come at this website from a similar place.
Five goals, that maybe together make something like a guiding philosophy:
- To practice amorphous and unprofessional creativity
- To allow disparate ideas and parts of myself to interconnect and coexist naturally
- To do for some hypothetical future internet travellers what other deeply genuine and unabashed corners of the internet have done for me (that is, to invite a feeling of connectedness over a shared humanity, shared intensity of interest, and shared struggle to make the messy thoughts fit in the organized internet tubes)
- To lay out my thoughts as if I were explaining them to others, and in doing so better learn what I actually mean
- To, possibly, be understood
We'll see if I change my mind over the course of actually using this space. Thanks for coming along with me. :)