ALRIGHT, LET'S DO THIS ONE MORE TIME

Okay yeah, so the folder name for the site is wichitalk2. a wichitalk3 exists. i stopped updating in april, around 2 months from my high school graduation. the first version of wichitalk started with a six month countdown to graduation. Now, I'm leaving for college in 5 days. "Survive High School" doesn't really work as a manifesto anymore. I've been floundering about it for a while. I read mariteaux's piece on a lack of passion neocities, and yeah, it got in my head. What the hell was my website even for. I put HTML and CSS on my resume, but that couldn't be all my know how would lead to.

In wichitalk's dead zone I committed to a college, gave a presentation on post-roe surveillance, read too many substacks, and worked a shitty job. I lurked old internet fourms, and I am still spending way too much time on instagram (today, it's kind of a freshman orientation essential). I made a couple new verisons of this site, and I realized one of the big problems. My designs were too complicated. Updating it was a total pain in the ass, because my website was full of graphics and devoid of anything that excited me. One of my favorite websites, Eric Xia's, has a low tech design chokefull of awesome content. Another one of my favorites websites, internet based ghosts is an esoteric archive of internet content. What's the pupose of wichtalk going to be? My own esoteric library. I'm not all that interested in running a blog. Something like a common-place book/cursed wizard's text is more my style.

You can't spend near nine months on neocities without starting to stare at body's of water and/or tar and thinking "hm. could throw my phone there." But it has been nine months and my phone IS NOT at the bottom of a tar pit. I have read an inane amount of internet manfiestos, and I love their fire. The point of a manifesto is the fire, and this one is soildly wishy-washy. It would be dishonest for me to say I've cast off social media. I loathe the surveillance, the captalism, the monotony. I still use it. I was impressed by the group of teenage luddites roaming brooklyn when the NYT profiled them. I wanted to be one of them. I've come to realize It's not going to happen. I'll have to find away to be an enigma with an insta handle. To quote one of my favorite tumblr posts, "interesting dichotomy idiot, what lays outside it?"

When I'm working on a site, I feel like me. Authencity is a vauge, infuriating concept until I'm writing HTML. If my phone isn't going into the tar pit anytime soon, then I want an active personal website. Neocities feels like the opposite of alienation. I find creative work that surpises me, feel like I'm seeing actual people. Among all of the political reasons to make a website, one of the most compelling reasons to do it is the sheer fun of it. I'm having such a good fucking time, and after four months I like feeling that spark. I want a site I can contiune into college. I want to run an archive of the interesting things I find. I'd like to send some emails (okay, that's a lie). The point is, I have spend months trying to figure out what to do with my domain, if anything. The answer I've dug up is that I can do whatever the hell I want. That is what is so exciting about it. A webpage doesn't come pre-defined. It's mine for the taking.