The motivation behind building this site is not so much web dev as it is a simple place to host text. I’m not the best at theming, anyway.

Let’s go back in time a bit. It’s fall of 2021. I get a return offer from my internship, with a start date of August. I have a plan to graduate early, but I don’t tell my company yet. December graduates are able to start in February. Half a year of extra income is pretty awesome (especially with that sweet sweet SWE salary), but I had one post-grad goal in mind: I have got to fix myself. (You have to imagine this sentiment in the format of the below image.)

I have got to get normaler

At some point I searched for effective self-help resources. My extremely reliable sources? Reddit and my friends. One thing I wanted to solve was technology usage. It’s not so much that the technology was taking too much of my time, but that I didn’t feel in control of it. Sure, I close twitter within minutes of opening it. But it really bothered me that sometimes I would close it just to open it again, or I would open my computer/browser for another purpose and end up on twitter, not even remembering the action of typing in the URL.

I implemented my Reddit-and-friends learnings with several plans, hoping that if I threw spaghetti at a wall, at least one noodle would stick. One such plan was maintaining a longform blog for my thoughts. My original blog site was a private one, formatted nearly identically to this. It was a shitter twitter replacement: a place to write my thoughts not for consumption, but just to figure myself out. I had a habit of massively spamming a private twitter account but that was an easy recipe for distraction; the minutes really add up. While I think twitter really did improve my ability to write concisely, I was never able to dig into things and express the nuances of anything. Plus, it was pretty bad for my attention span.

In the 8-month span from graduation to August 2022, I had built up a comfortable daily routine. I would do some chores, help my mom with some errands, and then work on my hobbies. I would sit down and write when I had to. This was all fine until I started my job. Unsurprisingly, I had to cut some things out of my life to make space for the full-time career. I ended up prioritizing an in-person social life over many of my solo hobbies, one of which was the personal blog. I still continued writing, but in a much simpler format – just a notebook full of bullet points and a very long Google Doc.

Fast forward to last week. I was calling a friend to catch up. (Random name generator says I should refer to them as “Andrew.”) Andrew mentioned that they deleted most of their social medias and created a neocities site / blog. While reading their posts, I had an itch to respond to them, in the detailed way that would be incoherent over text or call. I felt the same when (RNG name, again) Nolan, my friend and college roommate, recommended books to me and I to them. I wanted to say much more about the books than “it was cool” but I felt really limited by text. And so it was time to create a blog site, again.

Of course, had none of the previous events happened save the last, a very similar result might have happened. But the emotions while creating this site are a culmination of everything.