The Male Hysteric

Hello, I know it's been an eternity since I've posted. I tried to get onto tumblr because I was realizing twitter was bad for my mental health (just before Musk started fucking around with buying twitter prompting a potential exodus -- no seriously I was doing it before it was cool!!). Tumblr is actually a very fun site. I used it a lot from about 18-24 -- when Homestuck was The Thing, if that's any indication of what my experience was like -- left because my dashboard was out of control with content I didn't like (before the porn ban -- again, BEFORE IT WAS COOL!!), and now I've returned maybe a bit more mature and able to curate my feed better, though that's obviously not something I've been able to do with twitter so the big advantage I've had is "starting fresh." I've seen some basic-level craziness with the pro/antishipping stuff but for the most part my experience hasn't been too bad? The crowd seems to skew a bit young for me, though.

I do think some of the reason I've been able to miss some of the crazy is because I've mostly been blogging about Frankenstein literary analysis (with a little Dracula, now that Dracula Daily is the thing). When you're looking at a book as old with as much analysis already existing as Frankenstein it does a little to weed out some of the immature reactionary stuff, but there are still some number of people who can't separate text from blorboism, for lack of a better term.

I'm brain-depositary there if you're interested, btw.

Anyway, this is a really long preamble to the fact that I need a static site to store this stuff. I've been posting essentially fully-functional essays on my tumblr and tumblr is a really, REALLY bad place to store essays. I've been thinking of having a static or mostly-static site with maybe a guestbook for a while, to store an index of resources and some of my writing like media analysis essays or tutorials that need a stable web address for access. I have a LOT of complaints about how the internet functions now, that corralling people into a limited number of social media sites, algorithmic searching, putting everything on video, etc. has made it essentially impossible to FIND and KEEP resources stable online. They used to say that when you posted anything on the internet it's there forever but our corporate overlords have found that it's more profitable to make nothing last and force us to create endless 'content' for them to keep making inaccessible as their combines churn.

Anyway, possibly out of nostalgia's sake, I picked up my old Neocities site, cleared out what was essentially an art project/html practice site, and was looking to start building there. I spent a lot of time in elementary school building a static geocities site to host pixel art dolls I'd made and was reaching deep into these reserves when trying to build anything on neocities and kept remembering how I did things, thinking naively, with all my code experience as a mature adult that this could not possibly be the best way to manually build static sites, and then trying to look up what I was trying to do, and learning that, dear reader, it was -- I'm mostly discussing the lack of includes to make pages consistent, etc. This got me looking at static site generators like Hugo, making me wonder if I really wanted to go that route because I would really be learning something completely new here or if I should just do... something else, considering what I want to do, or to just go really retro in my site building and not even bother with stuff like real sidebar navigation on neocities.

So friends, if anyone is indeed reading my posts, I am asking for advice on what to do here. Do I continue on neocities and go full 1999 on this static site that I want to build, considering it's the equivalent of an online bomb-shelter anyway, or do I go find another site builder and host that can make it a bit more modern? I don't have my own domain name and would rather not have to subscribe to anything for now, but being able to download my site locally as a backup is definitely a plus. If you think there's anything else I should consider for this site, I'd be much obliged if you told me about that as well. Thanks.