Prologue

Hi, friends! It’s me, present Toni! I’m here to let you know right before you start reading this freaking thesis paper of an essay, long enough to start any website with a bang, that this was not written by present Toni! It was written by 20-year-old Toni about eleven months ago as of July 7, 2023! Yep, the date on the post is accurate. I have been wanting to start working on this site again for a while, with the goal of finally bringing it out of its prolonged gestation period, and since deciding to drop out of school, (let’s talk about that later) I finally have! My work on this site, though, has come in very sparse bursts of energy (as most things for me do) and this latest one was sparse enough that it’s a miracle that this post is still even topical at all! Therefore, this is a disclaimer that not all information here is completely accurate anymore and that is why. Enjoy!

Well, Here We Are.

It’s taken well over two years, but I finally have a website that I’m comfortable with. As I’m writing this, I’m making a final run-through of the website and making sure there aren’t any unforgivable bugs before I upload everything to the repo and merge it all together. A big part of that has been making sample posts, testing out each category page and seeing how nice Jekyll (the blog-aware static site generator I’m using to make posts on here) is gonna be to me throughout this journey.

One of the last instances of babysitting I’m doing for this little site before then is pushing a post to each of the four blog categories. I already did one for art, music and text, and the only category left is writing. Writing is special, though; I made the writing blog specifically for posts longer than two paragraphs. That being the case, I decided the first post in the writing blog should be something considerably special. This is going to be a retrospective of when, why, and how I made this website, the struggles I went through, the failed attempts of yesteryear, and my hopes for the future.

For anyone reading this on the day the website drops, please, for the love of god, do not expect perfection on the first day. While I’ve built a few websites in the past, there are quite a few firsts that come with this. This is the first time I’ve ever bought a domain, made proper CSS animations, used Jekyll… hell, this is really the first time I’m extensively using GitHub for a project. It’s probably the most unsafe and unstable project of any kind I’ve ever made. Suffice to say… please forgive me if there are any immediate mishaps! That being said, though, I’d really like you to talk to me about any bugs or sub-optimal things you find on this website at any point. Now, this was originally gonna be a lot longer so let’s get right down to it before I get bored again and neglect this essay for another two months.

When Did You Make This Website?

The first time I ever seriously tried my hand at web development, I was 18. I’d been on Twitter for a little while and was getting more and more disgruntled about it every day. This was before the most horrible parts of 2020 were even a sparkle in our collective eye, so the fact that I was already disgruntled with the site to the point that I felt I needed an escape says a lot. That’s when I was told by a friend of mine about a beautiful little free hosting site called Neocities! I felt like it was exactly what I needed and started learning more about HTML and CSS as soon as I found out I could use it. After a couple days of work, I had a functioning website!

…A functioning website that I abandoned almost immediately. Neocities, as great as it is for a lot of other creators, turned out to be pretty daunting for a web design newbie like me. I had a lot of different categories in the navbar that I never used, I had to deal with how sluggish it felt to actively put content onto a Neocities site, and the timing of me making this site was about as bad as it could get. Once quarantine started, I had about as much motivation as a block of tofu, and it ultimately ended in the site’s demise. I left it unused for a while, and then in August of 2020, I ended up beginning my transition!

After I found out I wasn’t male, I ended up just completely tearing the website down. I wasn’t proud of it, it was unusable, and it didn’t represent me. After I took a little while to get acquainted with the situation I was in, I decided to try and revamp the website completely in the second half of 2020! There wouldn’t be as many categories, the color palette would be totally different, it’d look so much less boring, and… I ended up abandoning that one too. I think I abandoned it before I even completed it, actually! After a few days of mindless design work, I realized it wasn’t really doing much for me either.

After that failure, I abstained from web design for a few months. During that gap, I spent a lot of time on Twitter. The doomscrolling lengthened and lengthened and my anger regarding it got more and more passionate until I decided to completely ditch the platform just to prevent things from getting worse. I needed something healthier to replace it, though… and I chose to replace it with a Neocities site! In retrospect, I kind of feel stupid for trying to do the exact same thing with my website three times in a row, but nevertheless, it would become the final incarnation of daytona.neocities.org!

With this one, though, I had the brilliant idea of making the spotlight section! This would be something seen on every page that gets updated every day. I basically thought “Hey, I watch so many YouTube videos… maybe if I find a good one every day and put it on the spotlight, I’d be compelled to update the site more often!” …You can see how well that went if you go on the site right now. I was distressed after this attempt. I wanted to make a space for my creative output, but I thought it just would never come to fruition. At this point, it had been almost a year and a half since my first attempt to make a Neocities website, and it had gone badly every time. Had I lost? Would I have to give up and go back to wasting my life doomscrolling through Twitter?

Well, if I wanted to avoid that horrible fate, I would have to do something entirely different. I didn’t want to put much thought to it for the moment, and so I left my creative output to Discord. I mean, Discord is nice and reliable! …Right? Regardless, I’d been managing a Discord server called The Toni Zone for almost two years at that point, and just for fun, I decided to go scouting one night for domain names. It had become a habit of mine ever since the last time I attempted a Neocities site; I mean, who knows? Maybe someday I’d find something I’m interested in. On that fateful night in May of 2022, I searched for toni.zone, and by some absolute miracle, it was still available.

Do you ever just find something that… beckons to you? Something that’s meant to be yours and is just asking for you to take it? That was this. I couldn’t believe it wasn’t bought already! After a couple days of mulling it over, I bought it as soon as I found out it was only being sold for a few dollars over on another site, as opposed to the 30 dollars it was being sold for on Google Domains. As soon as I took the plunge, there was no turning back. I had to put something in this webspace, and I started by outlining a few new web design philosophies specific to this attempt.

Putting in that much money was enough to get me the first boost of motivation I needed. I had to make my site worth the money it costs to maintain, and a big part of that would be making the site about things I’m passionate about. You’d think that would be pretty obvious, but it was a part of the process I often botched when making previous websites and abandoning them immediately. I was right in thinking that making things vague would turn out to be a pretty good idea, so I made the first two categories of the site “music” and “art.” I also enjoy writing things from time to time–I’m an extremely avid Notepad user–so the third category would be writing! Great, but… something was missing. I, for one, was missing Twitter. Well… one part of it, anyhow: the part that made pushing content to the site so unbelievably easy.

Neocities, for all the good they’ve done, always made it such a damn drag to push new content to your site. It was really built to harbor smaller websites rather than infinitely growing ones like toni.zone. That was a lot of what pushed me away from the platform as a whole. Thus, I decided that a streamlined workflow would be my keystone principle, and my fourth category would be “text,” something to fill the hole that leaving Twitter left in my heart. That all being said… there was a whooooole lot I decidedly didn’t miss about Twitter, and those things I didn’t miss make up a big, enormous chunk of why I wanted to make this site in the first place. I keep talking about “creative output,” but you can meaningfully put your creative output anywhere on the internet; you don’t need to buy a domain to store it. Accordingly, of course, having it all in one place was not the only reason I wanted my own website.

Why Did You Make This Website?

Twitter is an absolutely atrocious platform. That’s the reason, and I couldn’t stress that enough if I tried. I could end this part right there and be totally satisfied with the message I put out with it. Notwithstanding, let’s get into a few particularly angry and italic reasons as to why exactly I left in greater detail. Well, for one, the platform was built solely to breed addiction. Much like all other Fortune 500 tech websites, it’s being maintained by a soulless corporation too rich to possibly give a care about anything besides profit margins. As a former user of Twitter, I was made a victim of addiction and I was put into a dopamine cycle by this corporation to make them richer against my best interest. I just couldn’t keep dumping my thoughts and my art onto a platform that has no problem with taking advantage of innocent people for advertising money.

Also, did I mention that the site looks like dog shit? Twitter was designed with mobile phones in mind. That’s a great decision, considering most people use Twitter from their phones. What makes it less great, though, is the fact that the website is designed for mobile phones, even though Twitter has a dedicated mobile app! They’re compromising how the site looks on a computer screen because they think more people use Twitter from the web browser on their phones than from a computer! To boot, even if the entire Twitter design language had a good reason to revolve around vertical screens, it still wouldn’t have any reason to look so unnecessarily boring, corporate and samey! I mean, Microsoft Excel has more style and flair than Twitter does! What, do they think using more than one color other than black or white would scare people off or something? Don’t beguiling colors get people more addicted to things?

Sorry, I just don’t usually get a natural opportunity to bash modern corporate web design, so sometimes I get carried away and start sounding like a YouTube reviewer. I have a lot more to say about that, but that’s for another day! Hey, you know what else sucks about Twitter? Neo-Nazis. Being honest, I personally haven’t had many experiences with Twitter Neo-Nazis (except for one guy I mostly ignored who was mad at me for being pansexual) but I don’t think that would’ve been the case had I stayed on Twitter for longer after I started transitioning. Hearing what other people have had to go through has been sickening, though. I’m not in a place to talk in detail about it, but… I don’t quite think I need to justify why I hate Nazis, if that’s okay. You know who does think that, though? Why, it’s the richest person on the planet, Elon Musk!

Well, while I’m honestly not sure what his direct feelings on the subject are, I know he likes to bastardize the term “free speech” to manipulate people as much as any other modern rightie, and I definitely know what kind of horrible shit he thinks falls under that term. Oh yeah, if you’ve been living under a rock for the past month, Elon Musk is buying Twitter. There is no denying that he’s gonna change Twitter to make it better conform to his opinions on things like that, so I believe this has to do with the topic at hand. Obviously, Twitter already made me sick, but the fact that it’s now being spearheaded by a man who fired someone for testing positive for THC before going on a podcast and smoking weed himself just makes me happier that I jumped ship when I did. He’s actively making the world worse, and he’s bogarting money from people who actually need it so he can use it to blast off on his space yacht once the world inevitably becomes unlivable because he’s actively making it worse. He’s just… out of touch, and now he’s the owner of one of the biggest social media sites in the world! The cruel irony of that alone would be enough to make me take my leave, had I not already.

I’ve already been quite loquacious in this essay about how Twitter has affected my mental health, but I wanna go into a bit more detail about that. See, the fact that the Twitter interface was designed to be dizzyingly vertical does not just have to do with mobile phones. The more vertical the design is, the more you’re compelled to scroll, and the more you scroll, the more ads you see. That sends the user into a dopamine loop, which can reliably siphon money from advertising corporations into to Twitter’s revenue! Of course, this can be said about all social media platforms, even the (relatively) good ones; that’s how they make money. With Twitter, though, this can come with, ahem, “unfortunate side effects” provided by all the other content on the user’s feed. If the user gets addicted to the platform, which they likely will, they will undoubtedly start practicing doomscrolling. No, I should clarify, it’s not necessarily unique to Twitter, but I’ve experienced it more on Twitter than any other platform ever created.

Have you ever noticed that almost all news is bad news? With all the talk of war, shootings, disease, bigotry and death that newshounds like to shove in your face, a piece of substantially happy news is about as rare as a well-meaning millionaire. Obviously, that’s because bad news is more immediately shocking and addicting to consumers. This addicting bad news, combined with Twitter’s addicting design, develops into a dependence on doomscrolling: unceasingly scrolling through bad news, especially after the receptors in one’s brain communicating that they shouldn’t are silenced by external factors. Naturally, I fell victim to all of this and adopted doomscrolling into my life for over two excruciating years.

“Oh, but Toni, that’s your fault!” some of you may be saying. “You get to choose the content you see on Twitter! You must have just been following bad people. The vitriol you spread about these big corporations is so harmful! Why don’t you try living a second in the other side’s shoes for a change?” …Okay, maybe most of you aren’t that stupid, but this hypothetical counter-argument implores me to mention the Twitter trending tab: a list of fleeting, hot button topics firmly stationed to the side of the feed. You can’t turn it off, you can’t change what you see by default, and it’s filled to the brim with war, shootings, disease, bigotry and death. Moreover, guess what you have to do once you click on a link in the trending tab? More scrolling! As Twitter has grown richer, it’s slowly turned into an interwoven network of different mind games designed to gradually increase the length of time its users are compelled to use their site for, no matter how much it hurts them. By the way, trust me, I’m far from the only one who’s been hurt by it.

Much like I said a few paragraphs ago, I could end this part right here and it would be completely fine. A year or so ago, what I’ve written so far would have expressed all of my feelings perfectly, but alas… things just have to get worse. If you’re keen, you may have noticed I’ve been very adamantly avoiding talking directly about one specific thing so far: capitalism. If you decided to read this post and you don’t already know me very well, you might be inclined to believe that I’m not the biggest fan of capitalism, and you’d be completely right! Moreover, I’m also not the biggest fan of capitalism’s latest sin: NFTs. I haven’t said the F-word yet in this post, because I only want to say it once to bring emphasis to something I really think needs it.

NFTs fucking suck.

Let’s go over why, shall we? Let’s say I want to mint an NFT. What does that entail? Well, to mint a digital file into an NFT, you have to create what’s called a smart contract. Smart contracts can differ between NFTs, but for the most part, they’re blocks of code that:

point to a URL that contains a file (like a PNG of a stupid-looking monkey, for example)
define terms that the ~~sucker~~ investor will agree to upon the transaction
generate a bunch of data (the non-fungible token proper) to be sent to the blockchain as proof of who got scammed by who

Contrary to popular belief, that is what the NFT is. Not the stupid-looking monkey PNG the smart contract points to, but the random-ass data it generates that gets sent to the blockchain. What you’re actually buying is cemented in the smart contract itself, which varies wildly between NFTs, and 99% of the time, it’s nothing more than bragging rights. Bragging rights, by the way, that cannot be reasonably enforced by anything except the blockchain, because the whole point of blockchain technology is that it’s decentralized. Thus, what you’re doing here is equivalent to burning your money. Well, you know what? At least burning your money can keep you warm on a cold night. With this, you are literally giving it away for nothing. You’re sure as hell not gaining anything tangible, and the value of anything else you gain is entirely reliant on how much you care about impressing awkward white guys in sunglasses and weird vests. And all this isn’t even getting into how much energy it wastes! The reason more people don’t know they’re being scammed, by the way, is because the entire process is much more complicated than it sounds, and the whole thing is completely abstracted by sites like OpenSea, Nifty Gateway and… Twitter!

Yes, I’m still on about that! The final gripe I have with Twitter is the fact that they’ve adopted the concept of NFTs (and abstracting them) with open arms. This is a development that happened after I left the site, but what they’re apparently doing is allowing you to spend three dollars to turn an NFT you own into your profile picture. The only benefit you get out of it is that it turns the shape of your profile picture into a hexagon, which promptly became the Twitter equivalent of a Post-It that says “kick me” on it. As much as NFTs are slowly creeping their way into every social media platform, the community and the most prevalent on Twitter, and that’s just the icing on the cake as to why I absolutely despise it. Any doubt I had that Twitter (and by extension, all Fortune 500 internet corporations) never cared about anything besides their revenue was absolutely eviscerated by the fact that they were so immediately eager to support this scam. A big reason I left Twitter is that I just don’t wanna pay attention to it.

How Did You Make This Website?

But let us draw the curtain on this sordid scene, and turn to more pleasant surroundings. I’ve been involved in web design, on and off, for about two years now (as I’ve stated.) That came with gaining a lot of knowledge about HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which came much more naturally to me than most, because I was already an avid programmer in languages like Lua, C# and Python. In this day and age, though, it… absolutely did not have to. In fact, if you’re looking into web design as a job, you’d probably be a lot better off first mastering a website builder and learning how to lay out sites in a way that appeals to corporate hiveminds. I’m just trying to have some fun, though; for now, other people need money much more than I do. That being so, I decided to learn how to build websites from scratch with nothing but the clothes on my back and the grease in my hair.

But why, though? Why would I waste my time learning three whole programming languages (or a programming language, a markup language, and a stylesheet language if you’re a snob) just to get worse-looking and less coordinated results than I would’ve had I used SquareSpace like all the YouTube cartoon reviewers talk about? Well, that’s a question so good it warrants me going on a multi-paragraph tangent to answer it! I don’t like the direction web design has gone in the past, well… fifteen years. I’m sure most of you reading this have heard either me or someone else express their disdain for the new web in the past, but hear me out. Harkening back to the days of Geocities and Angelfire in the early 2000’s, after the internet had left its trendy, primordial era of the late 90’s, web design was… fun! Sure, some people couldn’t make a coherent, functional experience if their life depended on it, but things had texture, personality, shape and variety; hell, even the freaking SpaceX website did! Remember how hard I bashed Elon Musk earlier? That says a lot.

However, if you go to spacex.com nowadays, what do you get? That’s right, a big, giant JPEG that takes up the whole screen, just like 99% of websites. Why? I’m not entirely sure, but here’s the theory I’ve always had. Minimalism became a trend in the early 2010s; great! Design lives off these little fads; I love them to death and they just give us something new to hold onto, each one practically a time capsule of that point in the history of design. The 90’s had grunge and funny arcade carpet patterns, the 50’s had jellybean shapes, pointy stars and TV sets, and the 2010s would have silhouettes, simplified forms and sparing colors. But… then, big companies stumbled upon a bastardization of the minimalist trend I like to call hyperminimalism. In regards to web design, it focused on simple shapes taking up the whole screen, color palettes so inoffensive and dried out that they would bore your grandfather, and–that’s right–big JPEGs.

When this flat, sterile, corporate design language became homogenous among what felt like every single presently-maintained website on the internet, mobile browsing was exploding in popularity. In the late 2000s, it was barely a viable option, but by the mid-2010s, more people were browsing the internet on their phones than not! However, even before that turning point, it became evident to corporations and people alike that mobile screens were tiny, and websites were big and bulky. You just can’t fit something meant for a computer screen onto the display of a mobile device. This meant that optimizations needed to happen; even if apps were the way people usually used the internet on their phones, you had to accomodate the still extremely large population of mobile browser users. How could that be done, though? Well, hyperminimalism checked every single box and then some; designs were easy to see on a small display, not distracting, and most importantly, extremely cost-effective. That would be particularly important, because Silicon Valley was still trying to recover from the horrific 2008 economic crisis [amazingly, citation needed], and little did they know, they were on the cusp of another one in 2020!

So, what’s the catch? Hyperminimalism was trendy, it took less time than anything else, and people wouldn’t complain; they just wanted to use the site, right? Sadly… they were right. All of the big businesses ended up adopting it, followed by little businesses, followed by, of course, the web builder sites. From there, any schmuck with an internet connection could make one of these hyperminimalist sites. Hell, they barely had a choice! Listen, I’m not going to deny that people have different tastes. Not everyone is gonna hate hyperminimalism as much as I do, and hey, if you don’t, more power to you! The point is, though, that this train of thought is what led to the design of the website you’re looking at currently. Logically, in a situation where I want to make a website, and how profitable it is takes a backseat to… literally everything else, the most important thing in terms of style would be to stand out. Standing out, by the way, isn’t too hard in the world of current web design. All you have to change is where you start, which is exactly why I decided to start from scratch instead of using a web builder.

Something else in graphic design that I’ve always had an attraction to is aliasing. If you don’t know what aliasing is, then you might know what antialiasing is. And antialiasing is (obviously) just the process used to combat aliasing. If you don’t even know what that is, though, I don’t really blame you. The need to know about antialiasing has been all but completely phased out; it’s all done automatically these days. For the uninitiated, computer monitors are made up of pixels, tiny square tiles that are all situated next to each other. Since squares are only made of vertical and horizontal lines, those are the only two angles a line can be drawn at (if you’re only using black and white) with the ability to be displayed without any compromises. Thus, if you’re only using black and white to draw a line on any sort of diagonal, it ends up jagged, like a staircase, because the monitor is trying to use horizontal and vertical lines made by the pixels to approximate the look of that diagonal angle.

At first glance, this feels like a limitation, and that is still quite widely accepted as truth, but I disagree completely. On the contrary, I think antialiasing (the practice of using more different colors to combat aliasing) is a much more harmful limitation in many cases. Aliasing is discussed perhaps most prominently in the context of fonts. It’s pretty simple to see how that can be the case; fonts are computer graphics made out of lines, and both lines and computer graphics are directly tied to aliasing. And one font brought up most prominently in that context is the one and only Comic Sans. You know about Comic Sans! It was designed by Vincent Connare in 1994 and packaged in Windows 95 Plus! (the expansion package for Windows 95) and all subsequent versions of Windows. Suffice to say, that contributed to it becoming a popular choice! Everything was fine with the font until about 2001, when Windows XP was released. See, every Windows version released up until that point displayed their fonts aliased in apps like Notepad, Paintbrush and Internet Explorer. With the dawn of Windows XP, however, that all changed and antialiasing reigned supreme.

Because Comic Sans was designed for Windows 95 from the very beginning, it was specifically designed to be readable on aliased displays, and in that respect, it succeeded with flying colors. But after that era, the font was not in its element anymore, and the hiccups overlooked in its initial design immediately became far more evident. Among other things, this led to Comic Sans becoming one of the most despised fonts of all time, serving as a prime example of how much antialiasing can suck. This was talked about in a fantastically magnificent video by Michael from Vsauce that remains one of my absolute favorite videos on YouTube. Another aspect of–wait a second… Blrblbublbiblbrblbiblblublbl. There we go, shook that off. Anyway, even though I technically can’t universally have aliased text on the web, I can always forego anti-aliasing on my beautifully crispy, crunchy early-2000s-esque graphics! Therefore, that’s exactly what I did.

I was originally gonna extend this rant about hyperminimalism and anti-aliasing and how I think it sucks and it’s all overdone even further, but the thought of that made my brains want to leak out of my head, so I’m gonna try and stop ranting as much from here on out. A huge inspiration for this site was Web 1.0. Did you know the web had versions? I sure did! Right now, we’re on Web 3.0 (which is actually called Web3 because it’s extremely pretentious and it wants to be quirky,) and it’s kinda awful and I kinda hate it. However, Web 2.0 was pretty dang spectacular and came with a lot of cool leaps forward in web technology! I’d name some examples, but there are too many to count. If you’re curious, look up the differences between websites made in 2004 and ones made in 2020. As a result, of course, I wanted the vibes for this website to be “Web 1.0 but enhanced with Web 2.0 tech!” Look at all those crazy slick animations that make the whole thing look like an XBOX when it’s really just a tiny blog that could’ve come from the mid-90’s!

You know what I needed for that, though? The super duper perfect technology. I don’t wanna go too into detail about the specifics here, but I bought the domain on Hostinger, which… while overpriced… is less overpriced than everything else. I kinda couldn’t afford Google Domains right off the bat, but Hostinger got me a website for pretty cheap, actually! I’m not sponsored by them or anything, nor would I ever want to be, but you should probably check them out if you want a cheap registrar for about a year before you can save enough money to pay for the rest of the years! As for the actual hosting service, I’m using GitHub Pages. People usually like to use GitHub Pages for tiny sites for coding projects, but I’m using it for a big, giant creative dumpster blog, and no one can stop me! I’ve been trying to go through everything rather quick, but that’s just ‘cuz I wanna get to the best part about GitHub Pages as soon as possible.

Remember how I said a bunch of pages and paragraphs ago that I wanted to focus on pushing content to the site as easily as possible? Well, meet Jekyll! Jekyll was made to integrate perfectly with GitHub Pages and act as a static site generator! You just… give it markdown files and it turns them into HTMLs. It’s so insanely easy to use, and they thought about everything from the get-go, and this site wouldn’t have been possible without it. A GitHub Pages site without Jekyll is like… a pug without a nose. Not much is different cause, I mean, ya can’t really see a pug’s nose cuz its whole face is that charcoal color and the nose kinda blends in, but it’s just not the same. Again, they don’t sponsor me or anything, but in this case I really wish they did… it’s just so spectacular.

Anyway, I’m done gushing. I was originally gonna talk about a bunch more stuff in this section, and in this essay as a whole, but… come on. I already have five thousand words written down, and I still gotta write the other dumb pages I have to finish up before I can get this site live. My brain is totally fried, I hope you understand, and I hope this friggin thing is long enough for ya. Wish me luck! ♥