soulbox

🟆Many Sites

I haven't considered our website's history until I checked out Neocities profile so that we can see how long our site has been around for. Five years. That's five years of not feeling a damn thing about this website. lol.

The first thought that came to mind was, Wow. Where did the time go?. Well, the time went nowhere. Into the void. Lost in mental space. I can't seem to properly reflect on our own site's progress without it being weird or wrong. I'm being a bit dramatic but there's a lot that comes with the websites we build.

We back up most of our websites in our external hard drive. From the sites that got hosted to the ones that were for coding practice. I don't feel like counting the folders because the files are sprawled across multiple folders for some reason (can't stay organized for shit) but I want to say that we've made over forty pages / sites or something around that. Just... for no reason. I was doing a lot at the time, though. Driven to learn as much as I could. I can also be a perfectionist. My sites used to be very colorful and animated but then my tolerance for such things changed. Too many effects can trigger migraines which can also trigger seizures. Scrolling backgrounds and other animations can trigger motion sickness. As an example, I have a hard time playing Persona games (JRPGs) these days because of the flashing and animations. It's not impossible or something that I have to completely avoid. I just have to be careful.

This layout went through so many god damn variations, I thought I was just going to give up on having a site in it's entirety. lol. To me, web building is an art and one part of the creative process is getting to know yourself. Who are you and what kind of person are you trying to show to the world? After five years of embarking on this creative journey, have I been able to find who I am or the type of person that I want to become? Well... no. In fact, I've learned that the self is void. But that's partially why the design is a lot more simple this time around. lmao. Its easier to manage and look at so my mind doesnt have to stress about what it's presenting.

I can't seem to keep a specific theme for too long because I'll change it eventually. It's a problem of mine that's been around for many years, long before I discovered that there's more than just me running around in my brain. I think I started noticing it around the early Tumblr and Twitter era. I had the same issue with usernames as I would go by a different name every so often. It probably sounds like normal behavior because I was a confused teen during that era of social media. However, flip-flopping between identities and accounts was no less chaotic and somewhat unusual to me. Thankfully, we seemed to have settled with the username, soulbox (named after an area in NieR Automata).

I'm not really an old web person despite what my age might assume. The memories of my younger internet days are vague and I don't think I was that attached to the online space anyways. I played a lot of virtual pets. Had an account on early deviantArt. Played a lot of browser games. I dunno... I'd say my online experiences was average. I remember my parents telling me, "It's like video games. You don't believe everything you see on the internet." I took it from there. I think I was more mystified by our printer than anything else. I printed so many pictures of animals and Sonic the Hedgehog characters. lol. As for art, I've been drawing for as long as we could remember and I got my first wacom tablet back when I was a young teen. I used Paint Tool Sai and kept practicing until I was able to sketch on the canvas without having to sketch on paper first and then scan it.

We used my fursona for the site. I haven't used my OCs in years. My characters went on some kind of mental hiatus because I wasn't sure what to do with them for a while. The hedgehog, Nyx, is a personal character and not a representation of the website itself. I tried making a site mascot and failed miserably.

Even though my web building is chaotic, here's the first site hosted on Neocities...

Like I mentioned before, web building gives the user an opportunity to shape an authentic self but I have no idea what it means to be "authentic" or whatever. I go by many names and that's about as authentic as it's gonna get lol. There's no such thing as an authentic or real self. But I want to make my site more comfortable. What do I mean by comfortable? I dont really know so I go with "less likely to cause problems". lol. There's always a level of disconnect with everything I do. It may not look like it at first glance and I'm glad it doesn't. I'm glad I'm able to mask as well as I do. But the reality is that the feeling is still there. It can be subtle or it can be very big. The things I create are like an mirror - an object that I usually avoid unless I'm having a good day. My own face feels alien to me. It's not my own. Or I feel very neutral about it. Sometimes my website feels like that too.

All of the site changes feel dizzying. Warped in some kind of blurry mess in my head. Confused and unable to find itself in the mess. I'm sorry for anybody with the unfortunate displeasure of encountering me. lol. I wonder if I can turn this confusion into some kind of strength but I don't think I can.

That all said, just what am I trying to achieve here? I don't know. I just like making things sometimes.