If you're just visiting from the internet, the title might be confusing. Neocities, my web host, is also something like a microblog site—a cross between pre-Elon Twitter and pre-Yahoo Tumblr mixed with Tripod—where you can follow creators whose websites you like. Well, at least 100 people seem to like this website, so hey! I'm doing something right!
I started this website in August of 2022 as an emergency de-phoning guide. It had just come out in the news that police agencies were using people's Google advertising ID's to identify protestors so they could arrest them, and I had been advocating for various means of ensuring personal privacy on Tumblr pretty much since I started my account there. The answer to the problem was, in my view, so simple that people couldn't see the forest for all the trees: split your phone back up into individual standalone devices. The index page was the entire site; just the de-phoning guide. Unfortunately, as time wore on for the next year, it became increasingly clear that the corporate feudal state was phasing out appless options in favour of monetising everything by requiring mobile apps for every facet of society, and de-phoning was no longer possible. As far as I know, police agencies still use advertising ID's to track people, which Android phones will broadcast even on Flight Mode.
Anyway, I decided to repurpose the website into a blog. I created a new banner and some simple button graphics and started writing in long-form again. I used to write like this a lot back in college and high school, and I won't say that Tumblr made me stop writing long-form, lazy brain set in pretty soon after I joined there. I realised that people were going to be less interested in reading a 7000-word essay about ethical relativism than in the puppy videos and Paul Blart memes commonly found on there back in 2013. I also discovered that a great deal more can be said by saying nothing; so, when other like-minded commentators would publish their thoughts on a subject, it wasn't helpful to simply restate their point with different phrasing.
The original point of the website—personal privacy—has never really gone away. In fact, I talk about not just privacy but also getting around corporate feudal roadblocks quite a lot still. I still think dephoning is possible, but it really isn't economically feasible for a lot of people, so I haven't looked into revising the original guide. I'm not going to mandate that people spend $3.500, smash their smartphone with a claw hammer, and stay off the internet forever just to become untraceable. As long as you can make yourself difficult to market to, you've already won this round; and that's what all my guides are for. For privacy's sake, this is why I don't have any real actual photographs of myself anywhere on the internet. The only ones that do exist are so woefully out-of-date, they won't help anyone make a positive identification if they see me at the store...
I have a confession to make. The thing that made me realise I shouldn't post pictures of myself online anymore had nothing to do with giant data concerns, and it even predates AI facial recognition. I made the mistake of directing someone from Tumblr toward my old Facebook account in 2013, where the picture I was using could only have been understood by people who went to college with me. It scared them off and I realised I needed to play my cards closer to the vest. Actually, keeping with the metaphor, I realised I needed to fold and leave the casino. I shut down my facebook account and every other account I had online where I'd posted a photo of myself, and deleted the sole photo of myself I'd posted on Tumblr. Now, I'm just Schroedinger's cat; simultaneously meeting and breaking your expectations of what I look like. My SimSelves give you a rough indication of what I look like, but they're not so accurate that you could use them to pick me out of a lineup.
All the rest of the personal info I give is designed to let you know if I'm a good webmistress to follow or not. Sometimes, where necessary, I'll change the names and locations of places or mess around with dates and times so you can't just look at it and immediately say, "Oh, she's from Newpeak, Sylvania." Like, at this point, if you're following me on Tumblr, you probably already know what state I'm from and what city I live in, but that's a different website.
Finally, the answer to the question everyone asks themselves when they come to my site: why does this place look like an 8th-grade computer class assignment from 2004? Personal choice. I remember when the internet used to look like this routinely. There was no such thing as a "mobile-friendly" website, because "mobile" referred to laptop computers. Everything here is optimised for a 56k landline internet connection. Maybe you haven't upgraded from Netscape Navigator on Windows 95, so there are no frames by default. Still images are often saved as GIFs in order to cut down the colours, 24-bit PNGs are saved as JPEGs for the same reason, music files are 128kbps MP3 or MIDI, "4K" and "UHD" have no meaning here. I'm a web developer in real life, so if I fancied it, I could make this site into a spectacle of graphics and iframes, just like everyone else's sites here. But I don't. This is the form I always wanted my personal site to have, so I made it this way.
Anyway. I want to personally thank every one of my 100 Neocities followers. Before coming here, I was accustomed to my work reaching 0 views by anyone who isn't related to me. So, I love to see the views counter on my dashboard going up everyday when I come to work on the site. I know that a few of those views are just search engine spiders, but most are from Viewers Like You. Thank you. Now, on with the show.