📝 Rediscovering my love for Web 1.0

Once upon a time, I used to make websites by hand. Like, a LOT of websites. Terrible, awful websites loaded with animated gifs and far too many chapters of my Mary Sue fanfics. Those sites have, thankfully, been forever lost to time. I kind of wish I had saved backups of them somewhere since they hold a ton of nostalgia for me, even though thinking about them makes me cringe so hard.

I still have a soft spot for writing websites out by hand, though. There’s just something so charming and fun about web design from the late 90s and early 2000s. I miss it quite a bit. The Internet felt a lot more chaotic and messy, which I think I prefer to the modern algorithmically-generated attention economies of social media. (I need to stop here, I don’t want to bore you with yet another Modern Internet Bad Old Internet Good essay, there are already far too many of them here on Neocities.)

Daikon released Choju Yokai Giga on Steam last week, and I thought that was as good an opportunity as any to relearn HTML and make a classic fanpage. (Or shrine, as we used to call them.) And it was a lot of fun to make! I present to you: 鳥獣妖怪戯画：旅行案内所 // Choju Yokai Giga: Guided Tour.

Mouseover icons!! How early-2000s is THAT!!

It is still under a TON of construction, but I wanted to show it off already because boy oh boy do I love the layout, inspired by The Boktai Database and Distant Skies fan sites. I am quite pleased with how it turned out, especially the “cards” in the navigation columns. Daikon did most of the legwork of editing the game assets into the images used in the layout. Thanks, Daikon!! Also thank you for making the whole dang game!!

We also did a full playthrough of the game and included Daikon’s commentary on how to get past the bosses, plus background information on the game’s design and development.

All in all, this has been such a fun project to work on. That’s another reason I wanted to make a website: I don’t want it to be over! This is my way of getting to stay in the world of Choju Yokai Giga.

As for this site, I’ve added a Sites page. Right now it’s a bit sparse, but I hope to eventually fill it up with more fanpages and the like. I’m already thinking about what kind of site to make for Nice Disc: The Last Hot Blood. I have a bunch of other site ideas, but I don’t want to say what they are in case I never end up actually working on them… I mean, look at how neglected my bitsy journal has gotten, yeesh.

Speaking of my lack of follow-through: I know I have been royally slacking on the Game A Day entries at Indie Tsushin, as well as skipping over a month of Happy Hour. I’M SORRY. This has been a surprisingly busy and hectic time for me. I do have a ton of Indie Tsushin backlog entries that I am going to try and get up over the course of this week, fingers crossed. And we are DEFINITELY, knock on wood, DEFINITELY coming out with another episode of Happy Hour this Friday. PINKY SWEAR!!

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