Me, myself, and this website

Who is this guy?

Hi I'm Gavyn or Urist or possibly even Urist_McGavyn depending on the context of where I am.

I'm 23 years old and my very unique passtimes consist of listening to music and playing video games! 

On a more serious note, I'm not actually entirely sure how to write about myself or describe what I "do" I sort of just "am" and I do things that I like :D

I spend perhaps a bit too much of my free time on the internet and evidently, my strongest passion is for video games, both as a way to have fun as well as a form of creative expression. And by "creative expression" I don't necessarily mean an artsy walking simulator about the developer's emotions, I mean creativity through gameplay, y'know, the type of stuff you only ever really see coming out of indie devs with an actual passion for the medium... sort of like sites on Neocities-!

Why Neocities?

Why NOT Neocities? I'm sort of repeating myself here but man, being able to design your own website quite literally however you want has got to be the best way to possibly do a social media site.

You wanna talk about sites for the people? Try maybe not constantly removing customization/personalization features year after year to the point where when I visit someone's profile on something like twitter or youtube, the only ounce of personality from the actual user is their profile picture and maybe a banner if you're lucky.

I'm sure there are some platforms that provide more than that but I have yet to see a single one that doesn't force the user to adhere to a highly rigid layout with little room for anything but text.

Of course, the bar to enter a site like Neocities is significantly higher, but that's what makes it so special and free from what plagues many other sites. And besides, HTML isn't some difficult coding language like many people might think of when they hear of it. With the right tools and resources it couldn't be easier to learn if someone is willing.

Palico?

So originally in like 2021 or 2022 I just needed a more consistant profile picture so I made it a screencap of a TerminalMontage video I love a lot. Sometime later in December I needed to put santa hat on my profile picture as one does, and decided to redraw it from scratch... Now I just keep drawing new ones entirely derivative of the original

I love this little guy...

Old internet > new internet?

Similar to many others, I have my own longing for the "old days" of the internet. It feels like too many places are too heavily sterilized and uniform in their design, especially since everyone decided that every desktop website should look like a mobile app. Youtube early in it's life, MySpace, and of course Geocities obviously come to mind when I think back on what would be "ideal" for me. It was like 5 years ago that I was thinking "man I sure do wish geocities still existed!"

It was all before my time but I loved to visit Cameron's World a lot, just casually browsing all of these archived sites from back when Geocities was still around. I get a lot of that same joy browsing Neocities now, especially knowing a lot of these sites are recent and still being updated and maintained! I look forward to joining everyone else and I'm glad to have finally joined this little subspace on the internet.

Why make a website?

Creative expression!!

It was soon after realizing I'm just kind of bad with a pencil and have too much of a perfectionist attitude towards anything I attempted to draw, I gave up on creative stuff.

For a long while it was hard to get into any creative activity until I discovered Neocities. Not long after, I mused over the idea of making a website but the final push was seeing a few other of my friends getting to work on theirs, making me realize there's no better time than NOW to actually get started on something.

So here I am now about a month or so after initially making the site with a nice, clean, mostly finished groundwork for me to put...quite literally whatever I want on it.

I don't have too many ideas for actual content but I couldn't be happier with the progress I've made. Website design is my favorite form of creative expression.

Why should anyone care?

well uhh... difficult question that one.

Personally, a lot of the fun I have on Neocities is seeing the personality behind people's sites and how they put it all together. Looking at people's interests has never been more interesting than seeing someone create and stylize an entire page for something they enjoy.

Does my site interest you? Cool! Otherwise...Not much I can do about that!