Early 2000s Nostalgia

Lately I've been practicing HTML/CSS and building little pages for fun. I find it very relaxing, kind of like designing a Christmas card. I also appreciate how different it is from drawing.

It's easy to see if something comes out broken and you can comb back through the code to fix it. With art you have no way of knowing if you've done something "right". Looking at your own art is like looking through a funhouse mirror. You can spend 10 hours on something and think it looks great, then see it again after a few months and be horrified (or sometimes it looks much better than you originally thought). It feels refreshing to just get a webpage "right" and then move on. I see a lot of people have been keeping diaries/blogs on Neocities and they look so cute and personalized. I would like to try it! Hopefully once we're out of the busy period at work I'll be less exhausted and can think about stuff like that.

I've been approaching HTML as a beginner, although I actually used to be pretty good at is as a tiny kid building pages for my neopets. HTML has changed a bit since then, but it's funny how things can come back to you after they've been dormant for so long. That's been happening a lot to me specifically in regards to Neopets.

For example, there's been discourse lately around secondhand clothing and resellers. As in, people who go to thrift stores as soon as they restock and scoop up any valuable items to turn a profit on Depop. For people who can't afford luxury clothing, this ruins the magic of potentially finding something amazing on the racks. When my friends were talking about this my first thought was "oh, this was how Neopets worked" LMAO. When you take a first-year economics course they explain how competitive markets will always eventually iron out the possibility to make an economic profit, and I guess that works for anything from Balenciaga and Faerie Paintbrushes to wages and rent prices. When you see patterns replicating themselves everywhere and even in virtual economies, it really illustrates how self-organizing our behaviours are and makes me wonder how much capacity we actually have for change.

Neopets is also to blame for putting me down the weeaboo path. Like everyone else I loved Pokemon and Yugioh but when I came across a pet page that was dedicated to Inuyasha I think it fucked my brain chemistry forever. Eventually it started airing in my country and I became obsessed; at the time I had not seen a cartoon that had plot and character progression like that, was serious but fun and colourful, and the OPs/EDs were so stylish. Looking back now I see Inuyasha was basically an episodic romcom/saturday morning show but at the time I was too naive to realize we were never getting closer to resolving the plot lol.

I went back to see if Neopets even still exists, and it does, though it looks like it might be better off if it didn't. It seems like it's become a overmonetized husk of itself. That's just from a quick glance though, maybe there are still players who are getting something out of it. idk.

Aside from all that, my life is fine although I'm a little stressed from work. It's always really busy towards the end of the budget year. Hopefully when April comes it will calm down but I'll also be responsible for even more stuff starting then... so we'll see. Everyone else in my department is also overworked which makes my job so much harder and it also means I can't complain to anyone about how busy I am lolol.