Hello there! - (26/06/2025)

Well hey there stranger (or friend who is looking through my website) - welcome on in to my website, and to my blog!

What is this? Well - a dumping ground for all sorts of things, really. Hopefully. We’ll see. I enjoy writing things down, even if any writing I tend to do online becomes a bit of a jumbled, overly verbose train of consciousness.

Off the bat - if you don’t know me - my name’s Scorpia (Yes, I did take the name of a character from “She-ra and the Princesses of Power” and use it as my online moniker. If Baldurs’ Gate 3 came out a few years ago, I’d probably go by “Karlach”). I’m a big furry, occasional fictionkinnie (perhaps less so these days, but I still have a folder of character avatars) and I love to talk about all things I’m passionate about.

That will probably be a lot of these blog posts, really - me flapping my arms excitedly in a text format. Even if I’m just writing it for me - I’m having fun.

So - let’s start with this website! it’s been a fun little project of mine over the last couple of days to get this up and running.

Before

This isn’t the first time I’ve written this website – though it now exists in a much different format than it once did.

Day to day, I do most of my programming in the JVM-based LISP Clojure. It’s great fun to write, and I’ve always somewhat dragged my feet when it comes to using proper web technologies. So, my original website was a bit of an anomaly.

In essence, it worked like this:

• A Clojure webserver, serving a number of routes. Each route was a full webpage, returning Hiccup-generated HTML.
• There was a lot of generation logic involved, which you can still see hints of in the current site:
  • OC pages were generated based on the folder structure inside public/, and described via EDN files for each character’s metadata.
  • (It was pretty convenient: I could add new images, and the server would pick them up on the fly)
• The server also served static assets out of /public.
• All of this was being served by an NGINX server.

It all ran inside a DigitalOcean droplet, alongside a few other hobby projects. (Not the cheapest setup, but it was handy for running GMod servers and Discord bots!)

As you can imagine, though - not exactly very “standard” for writing a website like this, and not very easy to add new pages too, as I had to go through and restart the process everytime I made a clojure code change.

Plus - it did tie me in pretty heavily to some kind of server like DigitalOcean, which felt a bit overkill now I was only really running webpages on it. (Some of the pages on here now were separate index.html pages also served by NGinx).

After

Just a few days ago, my lovely friend Aeir introduced me to Nekoweb. I hadn’t heard of it before - though I was familiar with Neocities - and it instantly scratched a nostalgic itch I’ve had for a while.

I knew it was time to move my website over. Partly because my DigitalOcean droplet bills were quietly nibbling away at my wallet, but mostly because I love a good project - and my website needed the love.

All in all, I’ve probably spent around ten hours over the past couple of evenings (and maybe most of a lunch break) porting things across and refreshing the site’s look and feel.

On the tech side:

• I upgraded to Nekoweb’s Patreon tier - partly to support something I believe in (bringing back the spirit of the old web), and mostly because I wanted Git access ;P
• The site is now generated using Astro templates, styled with Tailwind, and reuses many of my existing assets.
  • Side note: I love Tailwind. Anything that spares me from writing raw CSS is a win. For whatever reason, utility classes just make sense to my “not-a-frontend-dev” brain.
• The pages are still technically “generated,” but now it happens at Astro’s build time rather than dynamically on a server, and the built files get pushed to Git.

Perhaps I immediately overengineered it, but I like the stack I’ve gone for - it’s been pretty easy and fun to add new pages in (like this blog section, built based on a folder of MDX files!) and not too arduous to get the old ones working again.

On timetravelling

Ever since I first played Hypnospace Outlaw (still only slightly crying about Dreamsettler…), I’ve been fascinated by personal homepages - especially those echoing the era of Geocities and Angelfire.

Most of my early internet life was spent on pre-moderated web forums (“Newsround Chat,” anyone?), then graduating to PHP MyBB-based forums and similar corners of the web. So - early to mid 2000s. A little too late for the heyday of Geocities, IRC, or MUDs (as much as I wish I could’ve lived through them - I would love to play a MUD). Even the forum era I did grow up with feels like it’s slipped quietly into history, and I think it’s been mostly downhill over the past couple of decades online.

I strongly believe that everybody on modern day social media has grown to hate social media. It’s a giant, miserable mass of shortform posts, filled with people that don’t really want to be there, but have slowly lost access to alternatives. Whatever sense of general interconnectedness online did exist has been eroded by corporations and advertisers, to be replaced by giant online brawling matches and shitflinging fests that drive up engagement numbers and print money.

I wonder how sustainable that really is.

Either way - it’s something I’ve been phasing out of my life, especially as I’ve found communities to settle into outside of social media. I’ve found a lot of calm in getting away from the panic-inducing rage machine. It’s nice that other people feel that pull, too. A wish to return to our personal homepages - our sanctuaries, built by our own two hands.

I’ve found a lot of comfort in turning back the clock to that time - diving into the various archives of Geocities pages like a digital archaeologist (see restorativland). People didn’t really have the experience or guidance available for making their webpages back then that we do now (nor did they have the wonder of Flexbox), but they were stitched together with duct tape, low quality gifs, marquee tags (bring those back) and passion.

My favorite finds are always the personal ones: blogs, thought dumps, messy art, unfiltered poetry, candid photos. They’re the digital breadcrumbs that people leave behind - and they get harder and harder to find in a world served by algorithmic timelines that only exist to show you see the worst humanity has to offer.

Told you it would be a jumbled train of conciousness, didn’t I? ;)