and then came that sweet windows xp startup sound. my friends in middle school downloaded aol instant messenger (aim) onto my computer around 2001 or so and everything changed. i was 11 and this was my first time interacting with not only people i knew offline, but some strangers- nothing dangerous though. and of course, smarterchild. i started using other instant messenger services like yahoo!, icq and msn- i had em all. from there i became really interested in what the internet had to offer. i remember going to various sites to get quotes, buddy icons and such to put in my aim profile and searching for bands as well. i remember hearing evanescence’s bring me to life on the radio and going to the computer and putting their name in google (i was so proud that i spelled it right lol). back then there were music videos on yahoo and this was pre-youtube.

somewhere along the way this lead to music downloading/file sharing. i was too late for napster, but i’m pretty sure my dad used that lol. i used kazaa, limewire, bearshare and some of the others. i’m sure this is what caused the demise of many of my hard drives. luckily, most of the stuff i downloaded was legit music-if not terrible quality. but yeah i still got viruses.

i expanded my horizons to learning basic web design/graphic design. i used to start fanlistings for harry potter things and such on geocities, but never finished them haha. i was using paint shop pro to make graphics since it wasn’t as taxing on my pc. i was pretty good with it and i had downloaded all these different brushed and textures and such. and tutorials helped as well. i sued to make these name blinkies and such pixel by pixel. i had my own domain name at one point- oceansmist (lol idk ok). i had lots of ideas for site content (some ideas somewhat taken from m and j-14 magazines- i started to really get into celeb gossip then) that i would write in notebooks (now i just type them into notes), but unfortunately (or fortunately) nothing ever came to fruition.

the next chapter is…myspace! the other time i came in contact with people i knew offline. by this time i was in high school so i had a decent group of friends. myspace always felt like a popularity contest, but i never really felt much pressure about the top 8 thing. once again, i was just focused on making my page look awesome. honestly, i don’t remember too much from my myspace days except finding some pretty cool music on there. [edit jun 3rd: with some digging i was able to find a couple of old layouts that i used on createblog and hot-lyts! i have placed them above this paragraph. seriously, going through some of the layouts on createblog was a like going through a friggin capsule of what things were popular at the time. you can take a look for yourself. note that the last layout was posted in 2010.]

which finally leads me to neocities! i looked into the community and discovered that people were making websites from scratch (like the geocities days) again! seriously, i've been so inspired by everyone's sites! since i never finished a website back in the day, getting this site off the ground was a big step for me. the idea for this site is to have a place to share my interests, improve my html and css skills, hopefully have some more original content that will be posted in the future, and most importantly to have fun! it'll be nice to have to something like this to look back on.

congratulations to you if you actually read all of this!