Frequently Asked Questions

Hopefully this page will answer some questions you may have had about my work or this website. This FAQ is based off of feedback that I've recieved from both professional sources and otherwise. If you have any questions that aren't answered here, or would just like more information on anything on the site, my email is always open! My contant information is on the sidebar, or you can just click here to send an email.

Website

Why does your website look so weird?

I have a couple excuses for why my website looks like it came straight out of the early 2000's, but it really all boils down to the fact that I am operating this entire server myself. Since I learned HTML and CSS and other frontend goodness just to make this site, the frontend is going to be expected to be pretty bare-bones as I'm still learning all of the cool HTML tricks and haven't decided if I want to mess with JavaScript yet. Another reason is that since I'm hosting this server on a regular residential internet plan, my upload speed is pretty bad, so I want to keep the server as small as I can so the loading times aren't unbearable.

Those are the excuses I give people when I don't want the conversation to last too long, because the main reason that I wanted to design my site like this is pure nostalgia. It wasn't too long ago when the world wide web was just about individual creativity instead of the corporate ad-infested dystopia that it has become. This entry has already gone on too long, so I will stay my vitriol and leave you with one of my favorite quotes by Jenny Odell from her book How to Do Nothing. If you want to learn more about my philosophy on the internet, check out the IndieWeb.

"The villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction. It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms and affect the way we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live." - Jenny Odell

How are you hosting your website?

This website is a passion project that was built and deployed entirely by yours truly! After I discovered projects like the IndieWeb and Neocities, I was inspired to go try my hand at making my own site. I grabbed a Raspberry Pi that was collecting dust in my bedroom, gave it a fresh install of Ubuntu Server and got to work. As of now, my only expenses for the site are the domain name and the electricity used to operate the server, no website builders and no cloud computing, and I wouldn't have it any other way. My entire write-up on this website is on the Projects page, so check it out if you have the time.

Me

What do you do for fun?

Aside from playing with servers that take up far too much of my time, I do have other things I like to do when nothing is broken. Since around 2018, I have been playing the electric guitar and probably won't be quitting any time soon. I play a lot of metal and punk rock, but have been trying to branch out into some other genres like rockabilly. Until I turned 18, I played with School of Rock (just like the movie) in Chesapeake, Virginia where I got to play on stage with the rest of the group in front of a decently sized crowd. If I ever find any high quality videos of me playing up there, they are going straight onto this site. Aside from playing music, I also enjoy tabletop games, mainly Warhammer 40k, but I'll have fun with basically anything that isn't Monopoly.