D-Man's WEB

MESSAGES

6/10: Added a bunch more MIDIs today. Some nice Jazz tunes and a bunch of themes from the original Ranma 1/2 anime. I am watching the original anime now and it's really good! The soundtrack is also very nice, worth checking out. In other news my JLPT test is less than a month away and I'm feeling good about my passing chances. I'm not quite there yet but if I can keep it up for a month I hope to pass N4 level. After that I will get some more free time on my hands to focus on the site again. I have some ideas for writings as well as some improvements I want to make to the page.

5/28: Come check out my new page! On the MIDI-Hall you can find a collection of MIDIs files I found while foraging on the Internet Archive. Is this just another way I am avoiding responsibilities in real life through spending hours collecting old things from the internet? Hell yes. Should you care? Hell no.

4/29: April was a slow month in terms of updates but I am not slacking off. I am working on the seventh episode of Old Net Stories and about halfway done. The story will be about a family of missionaries living in an east-asian country and the events that shape their lives. I am not working on anything else at the moment and probably won't be for a while as I am taking the JLPT language test in july! I try to study Japanese everyday now and having this test coming up really gives me a strong motivation to persist. I will keep working on Old Net Stories, but probably nothing else until the summer.

4/4: Old Net Story #6 is almost done! Meanwhile I impulsively registered the domain name oldnetstories.com today. I'm thinking of turning the project into an independent entity from my personal page. I haven't thought this through at all, but I enjoy writing and researching these articles a lot and I want to see where this path takes me if I keep going down it.

3/18: Went to see Godspeed You! Black Emperor in concert last night. A dream come true. Been listening to them since uni but never went to their gigs before. What an amazing live experience! That being said you can now deduce where I'm from so nationality reveal I guess...

3/12: Made some progress on the neighbours page today. Writing nice things about other people is tough! Please let me know if I got your pronouns wrong and I will correct them. I have a few half written poems and articles on my drive, but nothing close to being done.

3/3: Last month I have been lacking inspiration to work on my site or any writings. This morning I wrote two reviews for movies I recently saw. I am spending more time studying Japanese language again and I really want to keep it up this time. I'm going to apply for a JLPT test this summer to test my skill. I hope this will be an extra motivation to continue studying. This could lead to less frequent updates to the site in the next months. Let's see how things play out.

1/29: Working on the fifth episode of Old Net Stories! I have been breaking my head over this story for two months because there is just so much to talk about here. The article is going to be about one of the most fascinating, unsung heroes of the old net and his online endeavours. I'm halfway done with the article and work is pretty busy right now, so it may take a while before I can publish it. In the meantime, enjoy karma being delivered on the tech-bros.


1/10: I am in a very creative state at the moment and kind of writing all over the place. I'm working on two different articles, one is almost done and will be about death, but in an uplifting way! The other one is going to require some more research into 90s camcorder videos on Youtube. I'm also working on a secret project that is probably going to take me a couple more months to complete but is really something different from what I have done so far. Sadly I did not yet find the time to work on the Neo-Neighbors page, but I promise I will do it soon! Finally I am thinking to do a nationality reveal at 50k page visits. It will allow me to write more about things happening in my corner of the world. That's all for today. Take care everyone!

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2024

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12/19: As we approach the end of the year, I am feeling pretty tired. Don't have a lot of inspiration to write at the moment. I have some ideas but for future writings but nothing concrete yet. I really enjoy writing the Old Net Stories, but the bottleneck here is finding an interesting story. It takes a lot of time and patience to navigate archived geocities pages. I don't know what next year is going to look like, but 2024 was an emotional rollercoaster for me. Lots of changes in my personal and professional life and amidst all that I decided to start this website. Recently surpassed 40k views and I'm really thrilled to see that so many people found my page and enjoyed it. Your feedback makes me happy and convinces me to continue pursuing this project. I don't know where this yourney will take me, but it has already given me a lot. I wish everyone happy holidays, please spend some time with your loved ones. Get offline, go outside, take a walk and contemplate on this wild year. My gut feeling tells me that the years ahead are going to me even wilder.

11/27: New old net story coming up! This was a very fun and nostalgic rabbit hole about an obscure film. Hope to finish it today or tomorrow.

11/21: Implemented the new CSS on all pages now and made the transition to the new frontpage! I am very happy with the new look but please keep in mind that the site is still a bit barebones right now. I plan on further decorating down the road. Things are still messy. The filmpage is not done by any means and I might change the design alltogether there. I still need to create a new stylesheet because now everything is done with internal CSS so making changes is time consuming. I intend to keep working on making lay out improvements over the next weeks.

11/19: My website redesign is well under day. If you go here you can see the new site! Apart from the darker neon theme, I tried to make the home page less text heavy and more mobile browser friendly. Currently it's a bit of a mess on the site and I'm looking for the right timing to abandon the old home page and switch to the new one. Bear with me for a while, I'm hoping to have finished the transition in a few weeks. I will be keeping a copy of the old homepage online for historical purposes :)

10/21: First efforts on working towards an updated CSS of my website. I created a new page where my films reviews will appear. I decided to only focus on film reviews since it was already 90% of the content anyway. The working title is Filmpage and I'm thinking of adding other film related sections, like my top 20 all time favorite films, trailers of films I'm looking forward to or a collection of movie stills I like. Nothing is decided yet but it's fun to brainstorm. Feel free to check out the new Filmpage as it's being made.

10/16: I'm working on an article about Chinese hot pot restaurants. Ever wonder why there are suddenly so many popping up in your city? I can tell you it's not a coincidence. It should be done in a couple of days

10/4: As we approach the end of the year I'm starting to feel an itch to create a new CSS for my website. I want to go to a more minimalistic frontpage, replace the site updates to a separate page. I also want to make a separate page links to my Neocities neighbours and add more detailed descriptions. Lastly I want to feature links to my writings more prominently. I will probably start working on designs in the next weeks and hope to move to a version 2.0 somewhere around the new year. In terms of writing I don't have much up the pipeline right now. I do have some ideas of topics I want to talk about, but nothing concrete yet.

9/10: Hello internet. It's been a slow couple of weeks in terms of updates. Work and family obligations have been keeping me busy so I have not had time to update the site much. I am writing an article about buying DVDs and why I recently cancelled my Netflix subscription. It's almost done so I hope to publish it soon. In other news, I am preparing to write a novel! Ever since I was a teenager I have wanted to write a novel. I love sci-fi and I had lots of story ideas over the years, but I never felt the timing to start writing was right. Since I began this site, I noticed that waiting for the right timing is probably the worst thing you can do. There are always reasons to postpone, but life is too short to wait for a perfect moment that may never come. So currently I am taking notes and brainstorming on the outlines of the story. I want to write a sci-fi story set in my home country because science fiction tales tend to take place in countries like USA or Russia but never in my boring backwaters. I hope to write something that combines genre sci-fi with literary elements. Whatever it will be it's going to be in my native language. I'm currently reading Dune to get some inspiration on world building as well.

8/20: More Perfect Union is such a good Youtube channel. Pro working class, pro union and against capitalist bullshit. I just watched this video where a leftist talks to people at a Trump rally and it is such a healing experience. It is fascinating how much I agreed with people wearing MAGA hats during the 11 minute runtime of this vid. We need a lot more content like this. We need more ordinary people, having conversations about the things that unite us. The United States are said to be a deeply divided, polarized country, but when you watch this video you start to doubt that. I have never been big on talking about identity politics or migration for this exact reason. The people in power, the corporate elites of the world, want nothing more than to see us demonize each other over LGBT+ rights, migration and abortion because it keeps the real enemy, late stage unregulated capitalism, out of the spotlights.

24-07-10: Started a new project today! Sometimes I really enjoy doing repetitive tasks like scrolling down an endless list of archived Geocities pages and opening the links one by one to see what's behind them. Oocities is a Geocities preservation project that has sites divided by neighborhood and country giving you just enough restriction, but more than enough randomness. Inevitably I stumble upon the occasional gem or internet mystery and that is where the "Old Net Stories" project comes in. This is where I will write short articles about my journeys on this dusty corner of the internet. The first article is up now so check it out!

24-06-20: Just wanted to share this powerful text written by Neven Morgan that I've seen featured elsewhere on Neocities. How it feels to get an AI e-mail from a friend. It captures perfectly what worries me about the implementation of AI in our daily lives. The internet, social media and smartphones have already severely impaired our capacities to understand each other, as well as made people feel lonelier than ever. Having an AI representative send out chit-chat mails to your friends is only going to make things worse.

24-05-27: Started working on the Free Materials Exhibition page. I decided that this page is going to replace the collections page when it's done. I'm very excited to have finally settled on a format. There is still a lot of work to do, but if you want to take a sneek peek feel free to do so here.

24-05-05: Writing this from my holiday destination. Its really nice to be out of my daily routine and the weather here is much better than where I live. Yesterday my site hit the 10k viewer mark. I am thrilled to see so many people have been visiting my page! Meanwhile I am not standing still, but rather operating in slow mode. I am writing a new article but I have so many thoughts about this topic its hard to turn it into a readable format. Its going to be about smartphones, gratification and a bunch of other things that I have mixed feelings about. Im also writing a piece about my experiences on Reddit. Finally Im looking into making the site responsive for mobile view.

24-04-22: Alright kids it's time to show you all this Youtube classic. The fact that 'Ghost Ball' happened is rarer than all the planets in our solar system perfectly aligning. The fact that someone was out there to record it AND managed to say 'ItS a GoWsT BaWl!1!1!' in the funniest way possible is even more unlikely. The celebrations at the end are the icing on a cake of funny Youtube video perfection and another 47 minutes of partying would have been completely justified. But true legends are marked by modesty and thus, Ghost Ball came to be.

24-04-12: Been a little busy recently with work, private stuff and preparing for a vacation. I have no idea how travel is going to effect my productivity on this site. Either I'm going to be writing and posting a lot more, or not at all. Since this site is a hobby project and I hate creating content just for the sake of looking alive, I'm just going to go with the flow and see what happens. I am currently writing an article about travel and how my views on travel have changed over the years, but I can't say when it will be done yet. I still have loads of ideas for articles and projects, but time is limited.

24-03-25: New section alert! On the rotations page I will add short write-ups about films, music, books, games and other art I have recently enjoyed. The articles will be sorted chronologically with newest first. I'm note sure yet what this means for my current rotations marquee on this page. I will keep it on for now though.

24-03-19: Working on some stuff now but my creativity levels are low. Writing an article about Bombay Bicycle Club's latest album. Also I really want to share all the amazing sites I found while GIF hunting but I'm still brainstorming on the format. I was thinking to create a sort of permanent exhibition page about the bygone age of freebie/free materials sites that were prominent in the late nineties but disappeared once people stopped making their own websites. The subculture was especially big in Japan. This will probably take longer to develop but I think it's important to make these wonderful sites and creations accessible to the public. This could totally be a collab project if anyone is interested. I'm looking for people who have a better understanding of graphic design and art than me and/or who can read Japanese.

24-03-12: Do you ever worry about something so much that it disables you from doing anything fun or relaxing? Like you don't allow yourself to have fun until you resolved the issue you're facing? That's where I've been at for the past week. The issues feel beyond my control and I don't know when they can be resolved. Could be tomorrow, could be next year. The not-knowing what you're up against is the worst part.

24-03-04: In my search for interesting gif sets, which is proving to be quite the rabbit hole, I found this ultimate Kao archive. I'm not collecting Kao myself because there are already plenty of other people doing it, but this collection is pretty insane. More than 10.000 Kao are collected here. Visit Canuck's House of Kao.

24-03-01: Began working on the collections page. I really enjoyed hunting the old web for these monkey gifs, through gifcities and reverse image searching I was able to find over 20 so far. I'm going to collect old sets of gifs here that I find interesting and also hope to learn more about their origins along the way. This is proving to be extremely difficult so far, but I like a challenge. It would be awesome if I can give credit to the creators some day.

24-02-24: My capitalism piece is done! Writing and coding this was hard work! I think I'll work on something lighter after this. Maybe add some sparkles to the about page.

24-02-22: Just wanted to point out this very interesting project from fellow Neocities inhabitant Astraplex. The Buried Dreams project is an online gallery of artwork found on abandoned personal websites. I think it's such a nice way to but the old web in the spotlight and it shows just how easily the past is buried on the internet. It feels similar to a drawing you once made but stuffed away in a drawer, only to find it years later when tidying up. Check out the Buried Dreams project!

24-02-19: Sup internet! While working on my capitalism piece I came across this interesting article analysing Ghibli's Spirited Away as an anti-capitalist allegory. While I did understand the anti-capitalist message of the director, I did not realise how deeply the message was embedded in the story. Read here.

24-02-14: Added podcast recs to the link page. Next is Youtube channels. I'm working on an article about my beef with capitalism. I want it to be engaging and personal though as there are already so many great informative sources on the problems with capitalism.

24-02-08: Working on an article about J-dramas. Experimenting with Javascript a little bit for the first time. It will still take a few days before it's done. aaaand it's done!

24-02-05: This excellent video essay by Youtuber Accented Cinema explains how I feel about the current state of copyright laws and enforcement very well. As long as people are cerebrating their love for the original source, through parody, fan fiction or educational means, corporations should hold back with enforcing their copyrights. Also agree that copyrights in general limit the possibilities for creative innovation because inspiration is what drives us all to create. Disney was inspired by old fairytales, but let the world wait almost 100 years to allow it's fans to create their own derivative works based on Mickey Mouse. If you ask me copyrights should expire much sooner in order to create a fair balance. I think 25 years is more than enough to give creators exclusive rights to their work. This allows people to actually create derivative works based on their childhood heroes when they reach adulthood.

24-01-30: My first article is done! I didn't expect to ever make a shrine, but while I was writing this article I thought it would be nice to have the article have a different design from the main site. From there it wasn't much of a strech to turn it into a shrine instead. If any band ever deserved it it's Pinback. I have so many idea for articles, but not too much free time sadly...

24-01-29: Sometimes I catch myself feeling pretty tired from browsing Neocities sites, then I realise I'm trying to navigate the old web like I would navigate social media profiles. Neocities sites, unlike social media, don't follow a specific structure, I can't really filter on what or who I will run into. I come across people with vastly different ideas and lifestyles than mine and that's what makes it good. No echo chambers, no filter bubbles. It's a mind expanding experience. It does mean however that I can only visit a few pages before my attention is drained. I love to read people's journals and manifestos and whatnot, but you can't 'consume' the old web like we are used to on the internet of today. I have to accept this fact and slow my pace down a bit I guess.

24-01-26: Spent all night last night making my buttons. Next step is to make a box with buttons to friend sites so if you want to exchange buttons let me know!

24-01-25: As I was looking for buttons for my site I stumbled upon some old cartoon network ad buttons. Cartoon Network is basically my childhood in a nutshell so I went down a little rabbit hole today. I found a Github project where they stream CN shows from the golden era! I also remembered how I loved to play the games on the CN website, particularly the Summer Resort games. Another hero on Github made sure we're still able to play them today as the games are no longer hosted on CN's website and the shockwave player is out of order. Play the Summer Resort games here!

24-01-24: What's up internet? I started adding links to the links page. In addition to links to websites I am also considering making sections with links to my favorite podcasts and/or Youtube channels, but I wonder if it would be in the spirit of the neocities community to link to podcasts and youtube pages. Since podcasts are usually not linked to tech giants and social media I think they would OK to feature here, but Youtube channels will just generate more traffic to Google, so perhaps they don't belong here. If you have any thoughts on this leave a note in the Guestbook!

24-01-19: If you want to know a bit more about me, then check out the about page I just made!

24-01-15: A you may have noticed my homepage has seen a sudden increase of primate residents. I found these monkeys gifs while browsing the gifcities archive and I really like them. I would love to know if more of them exist. I found roughly 10 different kinds but I'm not sure where they originate from. Most source pages seem to be from Hong Kong so my guess is they originated there. If anyone knows more about them let me know!

24-01-11: Been listening to this very relevant episode of the Ezra Klein Show about how we can develop our own taste in the age of recommendation algorithms and it just reminded me of Neocities and all the creativity that people put in their sites. I think the decentralization of the internet can help people discover their own taste! We're creating a rich biosphere of websites here and I'm just getting started but already thrilled to be a part of it! Check out the podcast episode here

24-01-09: I found this really cool gif archive made by the Internet Archive. Type in any keyword and be amazed by an avalanche of gifs and banners from the heydays! GifCities

23-08-17: Created this page a few days ago. Getting the hang of HTML and CSS now.The idea is that this page will be the portal to my other pages, but some pages can also be considered as stand alone.I love the idea of a revival of personal websites where people can express themselves like we did back in the Geocities and Angelfire days.However I do attempt to make an unironical website, that is more than a trip down memory lane. Instead I will make D-man's WEB a place where I dive deep into my hobbies and interests in the hopes of sparking the same interests in others.I also want this place to be more interactive in the future, but I haven't decided on how to do this.Please come back here sometime in the near future to enjoy the content that I add. For now, check out some other cool neocities projects on the link below!