Hello! If you're reading this, you're either ridiculously early, or you scrolled back all the way to my very first blog post!

Firsts of anything are always tough. Where do we start? Maybe over here? Ooh, or maybe over there? Or maybe we do this first? Aahhh, too many options!

But, I digress. I figured I'd start by answering two questions: Why make this, and what will I use it for?

Why did you want a website?

A couple reasons:

1. It seemed fun,
2. I love learning new things,
3. I love being able to talk at length about topics I'm passionate about (of which I have many), and
4. modern social media deeply pisses me off.

Reasons 1-3 are pretty straightforward, so let's talk about number 4: Why I've grown frustrated with modern social media.

One of my favorite things in this world is connecting with other people. But unfortunately, due to circumstances largely outside of my control, I struggled to find that type of connection when I was in school, so I found it on the internet instead. Not ideal, but it was better than complete isolation.

Looking back on it, I noticed that the era of the internet that I experienced during my childhood seemed to be around the beginning of the enshittification era of the internet. I initially saw it on Roblox with how the most prominent games were drifting further and further towards prioritizing money over passion. Later, once I was old enough to care about and comprehend more complex topics, I realized the insidiousness of modern social media algorithms, as well as how deeply unsettling and risky it was to be placing critical components of my social life in the hands of megacorporations who could take it away at a snap of a (probably AI-automated) finger.

By now, the enshittification of the internet has reached a severity such that anyone who is even the slightest bit tech savvy has some major grievance with some platform, and I'm certainly one of those people. So, instead of hopping from platform to platform to platform hoping that one of them will eventually be the one I can rely on, I might as well build my own little corner that I know won't die on me as long as I will it to survive.

Now, you might be asking: "But Steven, you're hosting your website on Neocities. Doesn't that pose the same risk?"

And you'd be right: If something happened to Neocities, this website would disappear from the internet. But you know where it wouldn't disappear from? My files!

If it comes down to it, I can figure out self-hosting and simply reupload everything exactly as it was before. And as fun as it is rallying for decentralization, having a lot of people in one place is still helpful in a lot of ways.

What will you use this website for?

Right now, my only plan is to use this to practice webdev and to make blog posts about anything and everything I want to talk about. I love to reflect on things, so expect to see a lot of posts where I go needlessly in depth on something that doesn't really matter. If you want to know what I'll talk about, go check out the about me page.

It's possible that some of the posts I put up here, including this one, will eventually become outdated. And that's fine! I'm aiming for this blog to be more of a way to look back on what I was thinking at a specific moment than a source of truth for anything.

Anyway, that'll be all for now. Hope to see you again!