gay victorian astronomer

I started this site back in 2022, for no real reason other than that I saw a post urging people to create personal websites and thought it sounded like a fun project to take on. Since then, it's served a dual purpose of being a collecting place for my thoughts and ideas— both serious creative work and shitposting alike— while also being a creative endeavor in and of itself.

I'm not someone with a lot of nostalgia for the "old web," so I won't claim that this site is in any way born out of that, but I would say that my relationship with other social media sites is... complicated at best. They suck up so much of my time, to the point I find it difficult to pick up other hobbies. If my phone is always there, it's always easier to scroll than to do just about anything else. While I have found some great communities online, I equally feel like I am always on the fringes of them: too afraid to speak, and when I do my words are quickly buried in the algorithmic tide. And all that is to say nothing of the inability to choose your own experience on social media, or the looming threat of censorship.

In contrast, here my voice is the dominant one— if I did not speak there would simply be no website. The only way something can get buried or deleted is if I allow it; should something catastrophic happen and the site go down entirely, everything is backed up on my personal machine. Though the site is in some ways more lonely, since there are more limited ways for people to respond to me, it doesn't bother me so much. I feel less acutely percieved like this— it's peaceful. I like it.

Almost everything currently on the site was hand-coded by me! This iteration of the site's layout is heavily inspired by the site 404city, both the main site and their DNL 2000 desktop layout template. I mostly use the MDN Web Docs as a reference, but W3 Schools is also a good resource for learning HTML and CSS.

The window button graphic was made by me using Photopea; the background image is this JWST image of NGC 604 with red and black filters overlaid. Most of the photos on the site have a halftone effect set using Ezgif to help keep file sizes down.

The header font is Kode Mono and the body font is Exo, both of which I get through Google Fonts currently but I may switch to self-hosting these in the future.