Same as it ever was


[28 August 2021] -- I'm kind of over Neocities. I'm just so sick of hearing about taking the web back and creativity and blah blah blah, when...everybody's frickin' site looks *exactly the same*. That is, a clash of horrendous bright colours, dreadful markup, bloody background MIDIs (gods, WHY), some nonsense about 'nostalgia', and the same five links to certain sites.


BNFs. I thought they died with LiveJournal. I guess not.


Like...I remember Web 1.0, because I was literally there. I am hella old. Like, years older than I look, act, or sound. I remember Web 1.0 that these people are trying desperately to emulate, and it wasn't LIKE that, dammit. Good webdesign was done on 1.0 as well. Not everybody -- especially not us kids who were devoted little LAINites before we even realised it -- was a slave to the Geocities pagemaker, and none of us would have even dreamed of using Comic Sans as the default font or using a dancing baby gif non-ironically. Everyone strove to find their own particular flavour of webdesign and certain tyrants rained hell down on those who encroached a little to closely onto their style.


Also: there...WAS actually advertising on Web 1.0, too. Everyone I knew gravitated to envy.nu or virtue.nu solely because they were ad-free free space. Plus, there were pop-up banners, kids. And pop-up banners that had their OWN pop-up banners that had their own...it was glorious fun, closing five hundred Netscape/IE windows you didn't open yourself, almost as much fun as background MIDIs being blared into your ears at 300 decibels! /s


(Like, I hated background MIDIs then, and I hate them even more now. It's not quirky and nostalgic, it's enormously annoying and horribly rude to people who listen to their own music while they idly surf...which I'm fairly sure is like, 95% of people.)


Whine moan bitch. I don't know. I just, I think there were some amazing parts of Web 1.0 that definitely, definitely deserve revival -- the simpler weblog, the personal page, the character shrine, etc etc, but nobody at Neo seems to want to concentrate on that. Just horrific layouts and some words about nostalgia for a time that the majority of the people there didn't actually experience.


Damn you kids, get off my digital lawn, etc. I know, I know. *sigh*


In other news, I wish you could make italic and bold text in gmi, but at the same time, I'm kind of horribly amused that you can't. Super basic and I love it a little. Although I am frustrated, because I wanted to throw up a few novels and prose pieces here, but unfortunately, they do require some very basic formatting. Oh well!


(...unless I'm barking up the wrong tree entirely and there IS a way to bold/italic in gmi, and I'm just an airhead bunny who missed it. It's always possible.)



/gemlog/