About the site

The modern Internet dumbed down some of the ingenuity of many creative types. It will only get worse with AI, not better. AI will unlock creativity, but it will also harm organic creativity that developed traditionally through hard work and in all honesty - misery. I'm not being a sage, just stating a fact about many of the best artists and the lives they lived. So who knows, maybe it's a good and bad thing that creating won't involve as much suffering moving forward?

Some creatives have gotten worse at creating as the tools have gotten better. Their best source of talent was their process - not the tools. The tools back then were just a part of their process, not the whole process.

The main issue with many that I see these days is that they started relying too much on automation to fill in the wrong parts. Don't get me wrong, automation is great, but when used in the right place. Using automation for everything is foolish.

Many could have made something great, but instead they seeded all of their talent to the machine. This is a shame because many have forgotten the talents that made them unique in the first place.

Does this mean I'm anti tooling? No, I'm pro-tooling, but I'm anti "everything-tooling". Everything-tooling is what's being pushed by technologists with no artistic talent to make up for the fact that they will soon be automated entirely by people that can still produce something new and unique. Many of these technologists that want you to use tools for everything are really just coping with their own shortcomings in creativity and wanting you to eventually be more like everyone else. So they offer you more of the same. A way to be like everyone else.

Why did I build my site the way that I did?

Instead of trying to create something unique brick-by-brick online, like what was done for many years by artists and creators, many have used too many preassembled parts. It starts to all look, feel, and even sound the same. I rejected this methodology for this tiste.

The reason that I built my site the way I did was to get it right, brick-by-brick, and to keep the artistic integrity as high as possible while using the minimum amount of tooling possible, The reason I had to reject using a builder outright was because I wished to make this site about the process of producing something that isn't the same as what everyone else has chosen to do. I wanted to continue to create what is here over the course of my life. It's meant to be a work in progress - never quite perfect, but never far from it either.

This site uses The New Entity Standard™ for navigation. You can learn how to use it here: Controls. This is a way to use a website in multiple ways beyond clicking and scrolling. I designed it myself to help make websites more accessible. The standard is a work in progress.

I use Python, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Linux, Bash, and some other tools to make this site work. I code it live most of the time without an IDE, using a text based editor with no assistant. I wrote the features here from the libraries up. This site has been an effort to get all of the required components right at the highest order that was practical. For some, that would mean using WordPress or SquareSpace. Those are great resources and there is nothing wrong with doing that, but for me - it was practical to try a higher-order build that allowed for nearly unlimited customization and performance. That was the artistic objective from the start.

Why make customization an artistic objective? Because it was possible and helped keep a limited creative scope on the content. The content is meant to improve naturally over the years.

Constraints while building out are not bad - they're good. They're what shape something into a unique fixture. Yes, I could've done it faster with a builder, but the objective wasn't to be fast.

Each part on this site was started out while I was more or less a Novice in understanding the entirey of what needed to take place. I did have some preset understanding of the parts and that helps. Over many years of iterations, I became an expert at each of the required components running here today and am now also an expert at the entirety of the system running here too. I restarted it over the years with things like "JavaScript only", "Ruby on Rails", PHP LAMP stack, and more. But now the project runs the right technology only and it won't change much from this point forward.

The objective was always to deliver what you see here today - but to keep it mine. Brick-by-brick, I built and rebuilt this simple site until it did exactly what I needed it to do. The comfort was in the thought of that from the start.

This pushed me at times. It wasn't easy to do this, but easy wasn't an objective either. Doing what I wanted to do was the objective. In the end, building this site was still practical, fun, and rewarding - although it wasn't as easy as it could've been done using what would've made it just like everyone else and their efforts.

If you want to understand my personality, read the last line again. It summarizes my outlook on life fairly well...

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