Formative inspo

When I was young I would catch some episodes of Dougie Howser, MD, and my only memory of it now are those scenes of him logging his thoughts into his computer. It made me want to have a personal computer to do the same. You could say he was my Carrie Bradshaw, as I've never seen Sex and the City.

Compilation

Felt inspired by this post to someday turn this blog into a book, a compilation of my reviews. It's not to make money or anything, but just to keep as a personal reading archive. It might apply healthy pressure upon myself too, to be more intentional with my posts, knowing it's headed towards an essentially permanent binding. Someday!

entrance May 2026

I just started reading (listening to) Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito and there's really nothing like a dark, ominous, gothic entrance to an ivy-shielded old manor, is there? There's always a carriage, too, and someone looking sternly out an upstairs window, and mud on boots first thing. Talk about setting a scene.

Writing woes May 2026

Every now and again I would find myself thinking too deeply about writing, i.e., what I write, what I want to write, the medium in which I decide to write, how to be successful writing. All of these while not actually writing, mind you. I feel like I'm too precious about my writing. I've created such a "writerly" identity for myself in my head, which is good in the self-assured kind of sense, but bad in the your-identity-is-your-prison kind of sense. I'm also too concerned about being thought of as a good writer. I put so much stakes into writing that I end up not writing at all.

I logged onto my Substack account again and found myself scrolling through my Notes feed, and started thinking whether I was overthinking the "owning your writing" thing. Whether I was overthinking the collapse of art in the age of tech conglomerates thing. Lots of writers are there and thriving, great ones, too, and they seem fine using the platform. Again, I'm being too focused on the medium and not the content. If I were to decide to start writing on there, which still is unlikely, what do I have to post? I have nothing. If ever, I would be posting book reviews on there, but I've only finished one book this year. I do eventually want to migrate some of my other book reviews from my old blog, as I have done for Saint Sebastian's Abyss and Cursed Bread, but a lot of them are simply bad reviews. Again, I'm okay with starting from scratch, I just think some of the reviews might be salvageable.

I don't know if there was a thesis to this post, but whatever. I need to read. I need to write. Everything else adjacent to it should be secondary.

Web hopping APR 2026

I hand-coded this website, with a lot of help from W3 Schools and coding forums. It brought me back to my Tumblr days when I used to obsess over my blog's design. For years I considered whether a web or UI/UX design career was also in my future, but I'm setting that aside for now, at the risk of spreading myself too thin. I think I have other interests and passions I want to spend more time on; the rudimentary coding I do on this website is enough to satiate my design thirst.

As a kid, when we got our first family laptop, I found my way to building "websites" on Microsoft PowerPoint. Learning the hyperlink feature opened up so many possibilities in my head: I built "websites," quizzes, game shows, anything that needed buttons! Clicking a button led to a different slide, clicking another button would lead you back to where you came from, or somewhere else entirely. I had so much fun.

In college, when I mostly stopped using Tumblr, I also stopped coding. Instead, I started a Wordpress blog and just used whatever minimal theme I liked the look of. It's when I first started book blogging. I only started "seriously" reading in 2017, and was immediately drawn to reviewing the books as well. Although I cringe reading back old writing, I'm glad the blog is still up.

I ran that site until the pandemic, when I decided to start hosting my book reviews on Squarespace (and with my own domain). Those incessant YouTube ads worked on me, unfortunately. I took the site down during law school, but I'm happy to start over. Squarespace felt a bit bloated as a platform for what I wanted to use it for. I customized my Squarespace theme within an inch of its life too, but I haven't gone this down and dirty with HTML and CSS until now. Neocities isn't technically a blogging platform, but you can build one from scratch. I love the control Neocities affords me.

Before I stumbled upon Neocities, though, I briefly considered whether I wanted to restart my book blog on Substack. I read and love a lot of newsletters hosted on it. However, I, for a few months over the pandemic, also had a newsletter over there, right before its boom as a platform. I thus saw firsthand Substack's devolution: it became less of a host for writers and long-form writing, and more like Every Other Social Media in existence, even though it touts itself as otherwise. They introduced a Twitter-like, infinite-scroll microblogging feature called Notes, and are now highlighting video content as well. There was a time when platforms didn't want to be everything. Instagram used to just be for photos, Substack used to just be for articles.

Beyond the reviews, this website represents my disillusionment with the modern internet. I've been online since I was 13, and I grew witness to the wider internet's enshittification. It's disheartening to see platforms with so much potential for building community devolve into money-hungry, AI-infested hell holes. The internet used to be fun, creative, supportive, safe. The internet used to just be a place, somewhere you can enter and later leave. It wasn't an all-consuming, omnipresent vortex. It's why I wanted to return to The Small Web. jackapedia puts it more eloquently than I could, but it truly is time to decentralize. Personal websites should be the future. There's so much more to the internet than mind-numbing social media.