Since returning to this medium, I found myself curious to see how my old HTML and CSS coding handled their nearly 20-year existence online — and I am… disappointed. Previous projects I completed back when we didn’t have our fancy WordPress and site building options offering WYSIWYG for micro-transactions now look outdated at best and have disappeared at worst. My Flash creations? Gone, little more than a broken image on a blank screen. One project seems to have completely lost all trace of coding, the writing inexplicably stricten from the Web. Hours spent extrapolating from Leonard Koren’s Wabi-sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers to explain the American Aesthetic? Wasted (not in the sense of time, but rather in the sense of a copyrighted video game screen alerting you that you’ve just been got).
Ah, and then we have the website analytics. Oh, the flood of bots, spiders, and data crawlers: it sounds repulsive, actually — especially the spiders. Keep your eight-legged freaks. I fought Joro spiders enough over the summer that I nicknamed one bulbous specimen “Jorogumo,” a Japanese name for a spider demon. Spoiler alert: I won that battle when the Streamer expressed concerns that the invasive species kept getting too close to his bedroom window. Some of you are more familiar with Nezuko, but I rather liked Sango as a demon hunter. Oh, where was I? Inflated website analytics! As I suspected when returning, I am essentially screaming into the void — the various countries that house the data centers still only count as AI collecting information, which is unfortunate (and perhaps mildly disheartening).
Be that as it may, I choose to forge onward, practicing my craft — a dying craft — because my heart so desires it. Carefully choosing words and considering my grammar and level of diction, I tap the keys for my own sake because the need to be creative outweighs the hope of reaching an audience. I will have plenty of time for speaking to a group of my peers next month, anyway, and I will learn more about conference presentations in March. Eventually, someone will hear it. Even if they don’t, why should that matter? The goal was to get in front of a classroom and make students feel safe, supported, and nurtured. Over 6 years later, verbal and written feedback confirm I am remaining true to myself. So what if I’m not doing what my peers are doing? So what if I’m different? Who cares? After all, it was roughly January or February of 1998 when I decided to stop trying to fit in and start trying to make myself happy. At what point do I reclaim that part of me fully?
The project withstanding the Internet’s changes, the Mystory, reminds me that I am allowed to be unapologetically me. I know where I came from; I haven’t let that stop me from choosing to be whimsical in the face of doom and gloom. Makenai! I will not lose!
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