Wonderland of the Wastes

A Blog About Opinions on Trpgs, The Internet, and the Digital Wasteland

This is an attempt at another neocities blog, though I’m not quite sure what I’m doing just yet. We’ll talk more about me later. Right now, it’s more important to create the website first and understand how I’m going to format this thing properly since I’m not one for web development. Eventually this place may become more robust, but until then I’m kinda just stuck with what I have here.

My earlier attempts at a website were kind of a failure! So here’s to hoping this one comes together a little better.

The first thing I want to promise is no ads. The second is no unnecessary Javascript. I want to keep this as close to plaintext as possible, both for the sake of compatibility and aesthetics. I want to mirror this blog on both Gopherspace and a personal Gemini Capsule, which are read-only text protocols that I find extremely valuable in rebuilding a broken and doomed internet. We won’t see an apocalypse of the physical in the coming decade, but one of the digital. Learning moderation in hardware, software, and web design can help start a path to a more sane and cleaner feeling internet. That does not mean a safer nor infantile internet, just one where ads are a thing of the past and big data loses all vitality.

Unsurprisingly, my interest is in older practices of internet design. This includes the plain html web pages like the one you’re seeing right now, and the more interactive, terminal-based searching of databases and interacting with the digital world primarily through text. VoIP has had very little innovation over the last three decades, JS has turned the information superhighway into an information tollbooth, and the transition from text to video and instant-gratification social media has made the world a lot less great of a place to be. We all own massively overpowered machines for our personal use and all we do with them is browse and argue the latest news story on overrated, feature-sick popsites and excuses for social centers.

I’m not a minimalist. I just believe the natural and ideal implementation of the internet is primarily its simplest form: pages of text that you either read live or download the file of for later reading. Maybe I’m too idealistic and extreme in that belief, after all I’m the last person who would willingly give up gifs and images if I didn’t need to. However it can’t be overstated that the web has more or less been poisoned into being a massive commercial for companies who would kill you if they didn’t think you could give them the correct amount of money (as dictated by them, of course.)

Perhaps this ramble will take up a second page later and this one can be updated to be more of an index for usage in later blogs. Now, though, it’ll do as a test site.

08 Jun 23