About me

D-man's WEB is my first homepage since way back in the late nineties. I'm a thirty something dude who on the one hand grew up on the internet, but also vividly remembers a time before it. I grew up having only a MS-DOS PC at home and being pretty happy with that until one day dial-up internet was introduced. I remember how badly I wanted to go online, but my parents didn't see the need for a new computer with windows 95 running on it. It wasn't until the early 2000's that we had our own PC with broadband internet, I must have been an early teenager at the time. Before that time I could only go online when visiting friends or family members with internet and I would always take the opportunity to do so. I loved to browse fansites from my favorite TV shows like Dragonball and Pokemon. The internet seemed like a magical place back then and I think it was because surfing the internet was a journey of discovery. You would find a dragonball fansite and through the affiliates list stumble upon other cool friended sites. What we call going down a rabbit hole now was actually the normal way to surf the web in the late nineties.

So now it's the early 2000s and I finally got my own internet at home. That's when I really got into sitebuilding. I never really got the hang of HTML and CSS back then, but I used a WYSIWYG editor on Geocities to make my own pages. I tried making a DBZ fanpage but felt they were done to death already. So I turned by focus to my latest interest which was Harry Potter. I made this website called HP Club. It must have been an ugly turd of a webpage but boy was I proud of it. Why? Because it was mine. I built the thing myself, spent months refining it, adding links, images, gifs, information about upcoming movies. It was a passion project and I'm sure I was one of the only viewers of the site, but it was mine and that was enough.

Sometimes I wonder where we went wrong with the internet. I discovered Neocities a few months ago and I remember how it fueled this fire in me. A fire that was almost put out by years of spending time on the modern internet. I've been a Facebook user (but quit years ago already), an avid Redditor (not anymore) and a big Youtube watcher (still guilty of that) and I felt pretty content living my life on the internet in this way. But when I discovered Neocities I remembered what the internet used to be like. I felt moved to see that there were still people longing for the old internet and before long I was one of them. Now I spend my free time teaching myself HTML and CSS like I should have been doing 20 years ago and It's just so rewarding. My goal is to make D-Man's web a place to call my home on the internet. I also hope it will give me a platform where I can post all my writing, poetry and other projects I have somewhere in my mind.