Some of you might be wondering, "Hey, why three websites? Why not one?" And some others of you may now be wondering, "There's a third one?" (There is indeed a third one; the path to it is not obvious, nor is it hidden. You'll find it if you look.) Some of you may not have even noticed there was more than one. I'm kinda assuming you got here via the IndieWeb Atlas, but that's not always a valid assumption, is it? You might've seen the Frutiger Aero of it all peeking out from the NeoCities browse page and found me that way.

It's still a valid question. Why do it this way? Wouldn't it be easier to just have it all in one space? Sure. Probably. But, my friend, organic growth never follows the path we think it will.

Collaging on Company Time

I work at a job where I frequently must be on a computer, but do not always have something to do on the computer. I'm public-facing about half the time, and like many public-facing positions, the higher-ups have decided that books are a no-go; but you can do whatever you want (within reason) on the computer, because then you look like you're doing work! I think this is bullshit, for reasons I mentioned in my last post.

What did I do? I ended up on Reddit. I mainly looked at design subreddits, especially architecture ones - I'm a little bit of an architecture and landscaping geek - but my forays into decade-related design subforums (r/80sdesign, etc) led me in turn to all sorts of ~*~aesthetic~*~ subreddits. One of these was Frutiger Aero.

Despite how my blog makes it look, I'm not all-in on the FA aesthetic. There're elements I like, elements I don't. There are some really interesting (and troublesome) implications about "the future" contained within the stock photos and other visual assets of FA, but I'll save that discussion for a different post. There's also a really interesting sort of proto-art-movement contained within Frutiger Aero that I think separates it from other "aesthetic" subgroups and puts it more in the vein of subcultures like Goth. I'll save that for another post, too.

Relevant to this post is that through r/frutigeraero I stumbled on the Frutiger Aero Archive. It's a really fun site to poke your nose around; if you haven't, go, follow that link, come back here later. In this archive I found all those FA stock assets, and it gave me an idea.

I guess I'm an artist. OK, I am an artist, because I make art. (Earlier this year an artist scoffed at me when she asked me if I was an artist and I said "sorta." You make art, so you're an artist, she said.) I was feeling the bug to make something at work, but didn't have access to my regular staples for digital art - ClipStudio and Blender - nor could I justify using up too many more office supplies doodling or making paper airplanes. But I did have access to Canva.

Canva is a browser-based design program, mainly for posters and presentations and other 2D visual aids. It seems to be employed as the graphic design tool of choice for people who aren't graphic designers, with a heavy emphasis on corporate use cases. I'd used it a few times, but never really explored it.

Here's where these threads wrap back together: I took a bunch of the FA assets, saved some more photos from google images, and started making collages. It was fun! Genuinely, I had such a great time making collages using FA assets that I started looking for more beyond what the Archive could provide me. Thankfully, Canva seems to have an agreement with some stock photo company or another because they have a huge library of assets - very quickly I was messing around with those, too.

Of course, it wasn't long before I was pushing the edges of "Frutiger Aero" and then ditching it entirely for other things. In short, I ended up with a lot of work I was happy with. Some of them I slapped together in 15 minutes, some I took an hour or more agonizing over. In either case, I decided I wanted to preserve them somewhere.

I had posted some of the FA stuff to reddit, where it was received decently (which I say mostly to segue into sharing this video, which is a redditor using one of my favorite collages as inspiration for a painting. I really hope they finish it because they're doing such a good job so far!). But I didn't entirely trust that reddit was the right place for the collages to stay; the whims of social media companies can be capricious, and the architecture supporting them is often... fraught. Furthermore, I had all these collages that weren't FA, and where was I supposed to post them?

I didn't want to just keep them on my work computer, either. If I quit, I still want them to be somewhere. Space on my personal computer's hard drive is at a premium, too, so that was out. Plus, I've had hard drive failure before - they needed to be somewhere a touch safer. And, maybe, y'know, I wanted people to still be able to see them.

Firefly Lanterns

I had never made a website before. It sounded like fun. I don't remember how I had heard of NeoCities - honestly, probably a YouTube video or the comment section there-of - but after looking into it, it seemed like a good fit for what I wanted with my art. So I made an account, which I called Firefly Lanterns. Why? I like fireflies, and I like lanterns. There's some greater symbolism to both that compel me to use them in some of my online personas and professional work, but that's really what it boils down to.

The initial idea was just to make a gallery for my collages. Something simple, straightforward. A repository, a warehouse, where these pictures could go and I could be satisfied.

As with most of my projects, the scope didn't stay small. Too ambitious for my own good half the time; most of my projects have failed because I made the scope too large. I'm working on it. Anyway, pretty soon I started having all these other ideas: I wanted the main page to be an image of a fantasy campus, where each building or area would be a link to a different section. The art gallery would lead to my collages. An observatory would lead to links to interesting places around the internet, floating across the page like constellations of stars. The guestbook would be a botanical garden, and I got it into my head that I would add a plant to the garden for every person who commented on the guest book (I assumed that I would be getting very little traffic). The list goes on.

This was a bad idea. Well, no, it was a great idea for someone who had ever even once used html or CSS or javascript before. That person was not me. So after floundering for a bit trying to bring this big idea to life, I fell off the other side of the hill and decided to cut out everything that wasn't the art gallery. Thus, Firefly Lanterns was made. Honestly? I was alright with it. It's clearly my first website, but it does what I need it to do; I don't intend to ever go back and make it any better.

That was that. I made a website, I was satisfied enough with it.

And then something kind of silly happened.

The Charlier Cut

I was looking for more reasons to get up from my desk. I hate sitting for too long, just generally. I don't think office work of any sort really suits me and that's a big reason. There are work-related things I can do while up from my desk, but they're terribly boring. Sometimes I'd practice Tai Chi, but I can't do that all the time at work.

A coworker of mine had recently shown me a little card trick - a fairly simple one, "self-performing" as it were. That gave me the thought to pick up a pack of cards myself. I wanted to be a magician when I was a little kid, and I thought to myself, well, why not? I'll just practice some simple tricks while I'm wandering around off-desk and it'll keep me entertained as I'm keeping an eye on other things. Don't have to fully invest myself into becoming a stage magician or anything - just need something to keep my hands and mind occupied.

So I grabbed your basic Bicycle-brand poker decks from a nearby convenience store and looked up some tutorials. According to everything I could find, if you want to do fancy card juggling ("cardistry") or sleight of hand, you gotta start with the basics. And the most basic of the basics is the Charlier Cut.

The Charlier Cut is a one-handed card cut, and it works thusly: In one hand, raise the deck of cards squeezed between your finger tips, so that there is empty space between the bottom of the deck and your palm. Then, loosen your grip just enough that some of the cards fall from the bottom of the deck into your palm. Now, keeping the rest of the deck up in the air, use your index finger to flip the fallen cards vertically, turning them into a kind of wall. Allow the raised cards to fall from your fingers into your palm next to this wall, then, finally, flip the wall of cards onto the top of the deck. You have now performed a one-handed deck cut.

It sounds complicated, but once you have it down, it happens in a flash.

...is something I would learn eventually. Because, you see, doing it the first time took me three days.

Yes, for those first three days I struggled. I kept dropping cards, for one. And I mean the whole deck. I would also struggle to get the cards anywhere close to their proper positions; I started to think my hands were too small (this is a ridiculous thought, if you've ever seen me in person). I kept trying, failure after failure, feeling absurd for both trying and failing this "most basic of the basic" of card techniques.

Then, on the third day, I got it. It worked. So of course, I had to try again.

It took another few tries, but I got it. Slowly, awkwardly, but I did the cut. So I had to try one more time. Once is a fluke, twice is two flukes, but three times is a pattern.

Four tries later, I did it - a rough, trembling, terrible, but ultimately successful Charlier Cut.

I stood there, between the aisles, the stacks, the palettes, the inventory, staring at this deck of cards in my hand for God-knows-how-long (probably like 5 seconds, at best).

And something clicked.

I can do anything.

Really, what I meant was "I can learn to do anything," but the way it came out of my mouth was "I can do anything." It was like a switch flipped and, truly for the first time in my life that wasn't a bipolar manic episode, I felt capable. Fear and doubt left my body and all that remained was this confidence that I really could do anything I set my mind to.

I want you to realize how silly this is, in context. Learning to do a little card shuffle in three days is not what anyone, including myself, would call my highest achievement. I moved across the world and learned a new language. I overcame substance abuse and addiction. I have a master's degree.

And yet, of all the things I had ever done, it was this "most basic of basic" card techniques that turned the lights on for real. Silly, right? Absurd, ridiculous. And yet, true.

So I decided two things, immediately: first, I would learn how to make a one-handed card fan, which I'd always wanted to know how to do. Second, I would make a website.

The IndieWeb Atlas

Back in college, I had an idea: make a website that aggregated all sorts of free and accessible educational resources in one place. Accessible education remains extremely important to me; I'm what some call a "lifelong learner," which I guess is true but isn't a title I use for myself (I think everyone learns their whole life, some of us are just more intentional about it than others).

I never made that website. It sort of spiraled into this techno-communo-anarchist fantasy about building an collaborative digital nation state or something. But, I thought - why not get back to the core of it? Why not now? I can do anything, right? So I can do this.

So I began aggregating links again. And then, I found... Weatherstar. I don't actually remember how I found it, but it triggered a flood of memories. I started to remember all these other websites I had seen before that I thought people should know about; they weren't educational in the traditional sense, but you could learn something from them, for sure. And as I added those in, I started finding more... and more... and more.

At this point, I was fully into the independent web. See, I'd been looking to divorce myself from "social media" websites for a while - if you want a fuller description as to why, check out my last post - and finding the indie web again was a breath of fresh air. I thought that there must be others like me who had no idea that the internet outside the social media ecosystem still existed. I thought: I would like to guide them there. Show them some starting points to these long and interesting roads out into the wilds. There's a big, beautiful internet out there still, folks, it's just not on Facebook or YouTube or Reddit.

Thus was born the IndieWeb Atlas. A few pages of organized links in a google doc turned into a website.

I decided I wanted this one to look a little... better than my last one. I didn't want it to be "professional" in the sense of modern website design sensibilities - kind of misses the point, doesn't it? - but I did want it to be usable without too many headaches for the viewer. So I went looking for templates. I found one I liked as a base, then took the code from my art galleries for the auto-sizing section columns, slapped them together, and started adding links.

The link directories expanded much more quickly than I was expecting. Once I had the website up, I decided I should go searching for more to add to it. I combed through other people's link directories, reddit threads, and hell, I even just searched "interesting web sites" and similar to see what would happen. It turned into a treasure hunt, detective work of the sort I like. Looking for new websites was fun in its own right - the Atlas was meant to be a useful resource, but at the same time, it turned into a trophy case displaying the findings unearthed in my digs.

The Atlas grew large enough that I started making subsections. I made a news section to keep track of major updates - mostly for me, I didn't figure anyone else was reading them - and then started fiddling with the navigation. I separated out and combined pages, of which you can still see remnants in the urls.

More recently, I gave the whole thing a new coat of paint and added a top navigation bar for quick reference to subsections. But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself. Before that, I decided to make one more website.

The Fan

Oh, I figured out how to make a one-handed card fan, in the meantime. I'm getting a lot better at it, too!

A Future Worth Promising

I struggled with the idea of a personal website for a long, long time. I'd never had a blog. I also struggled a lot with shame that made a social media presence difficult for me. I was the sort of person who would delete posts in anticipation of bad reactions that I made up in my head. I was the sort to delete whole accounts and then remake them from scratch when I felt like I had done something embarrassing. It's easy to be avoidant, y'know.

The past couple of years, I've been getting better about it. I streamed on Twitch for a little bit. Unedited, long-form content. Mostly it was playing video games, which I stopped doing because I realized I didn't really want to stream video games; what I wanted was to spend time with my friends. I started inviting friends on more and more often, until I rarely had a stream without at least one other person - streaming with them was wildly fun, but I think I felt pressure to "be entertaining" that got in the way of actually enjoying my time with people I cared about. I didn't like that.

I finally ended up quitting because my ISP throttled my upload speed for reasons unknown. What a pain. But, honestly, aside from some Sunday-night Stardew with friends, I was on the road to leaving the streamer hobby anyway.

That's not to say I learned nothing from the experience. I learned a lot about myself and, most relevant to this post, I dipped my toes into putting myself out there. It worked, and it worked beyond my online presence. I wear a lot more interesting fashion now, I talk to people a lot more, I'm getting more courageous about existing among other people all the time.

So, by this point, the idea of making a personal website wasn't scary to me. It was exciting! The IndieWeb Atlas was mine but it wasn't personal. I kept a sort of detachment from it so that it could exist as its own entity. Now I was looking to make a site that was an extension of myself, one that could not exist separately from me. Putting myself out there.

I decided to be a little bit more ambitious about this one. A certain thought had been bopping around my head since I had visited r/frutigeraero, namely, my thoughts on the phrase "the future we were promised." I'm of the opinion that nobody promised us a future, but instead, we have to promise ourselves a future. We have to make a future worth promising.

I think it makes for a pretty good title. A Future Worth Promising.

If there is one thing I know about myself, it's that I want to make the world a better place. I want to help people. If I had to make a website representing me, that would have to be front and center. It couldn't be the only thing, but it wouldn't be me if it weren't the big thing. No packaged presentation of oneself will ever be the full self; even a messy personal site like the sorts dominant on NeoCities are but curated facets of the larger self. No person makes a website that includes their totality. I wasn't worried about trying.

So I found some free code on the web and got to work. I was a little more ambitious about this one than the Atlas, in terms of coding: I wanted gloss and glass, I wanted scrolling text, I wanted little bubbles floating around. I wanted little easter eggs and surprises. I wanted the background to be one I had made (I started by using one of my collages as a placeholder and just ended up keeping it). There's still more I want to do with it, actually, especially in terms of little surprises to find, but I got a beautifully readable website that felt like me.

Oh, and you've probably noticed it, but the navigation bar on the side? It slides beautifully along the main content sections in such a satisfying way. Chef's kiss. Mwah. Couldn't be happier.

There's still a lot I want to do with this site. There are links to be shared, reviews to do, blog posts to write. I'm so excited about it, though. I'm so excited about sharing myself with the world. I can't believe I was scared of this for so long. No use crying about it, though; I'm here now.

Cyber Gestalt

So, here we are. Three websites.

Each website built at a different time for a different purpose and different vibe.

Each website links to each other in a small webring of me.

Each a different little facet of myself, in a way.

...

Aren't they all already one website, then, in a way?

They're already interlinked. They already represent me. Why not just... push them closer together? Merge them into a sort of multifaceted amalgam of a website, still distinct enough to serve their individual purposes, but entangled such that they are inseparable?

An amalgam of an amalgam... it's all we are, anyway.

Plus, wouldn't it be kind of fun? It's like a secret. A room in a house whose door isn't hidden, per se, just closed. A chance for secrets and surprises; I like secrets and surprises.

(Well, when they're mine, anyway.)

Yeah.

Sounds like a good idea.

Prelude

So that's the story. It's a simple one - probably could have condensed it down to "I made three websites for three different reasons and then decided to link them together unconventionally." But I wanted to share the whole shebang.

It's been a weird year. A long year. I feel different now than when it started. We're always changing, I know ("A man cannot cross the same river twice" and all that), but this year especially.

When I came back from Japan in 2020, I was reflecting on the self-growth I had done. I remember saying "I feel like I've done more growing in the past couple years than the whole rest of my life combined." I got affirmation from colleagues that they felt the same.

I never liked the whole narrative of the wealthy Westerner going to another country and finding their soul. It always felt exploitive, disingenuous. But I think there's an unexplored angle to it that makes sense - if you're in a place where you're willing to uproot your whole life and live in another country, you're probably in a place where you're open to change. Moving to a new culture probably expedites the process a bit, since suddenly you have to question even your basic assumptions.

I don't think a new country is a necessary ingredient, though. I don't think Japan changed me; I think it would have happened no matter where I went, or if I went nowhere at all. This year is a testament to that - I have changed a lot, without moving even from the address I lived at last year. I have grown a lot, perhaps not from a new environment, but perhaps by putting down roots in good soil.

It's such a small thing, making a website - three, even. But I couldn't have done it if I hadn't grown in the ways I did. I think there's a lot more to be said on that.

And I will. I will say more on that.

But that's for a later post.

TTYS.