Making a Website, and Recovering from Burnout

The first coding language I learned was HTML. It might've been Scratch or JS I learned first at some dumb summer school class, but the first one that I think even caught my interest past "knowing it was important" was indeed HTML. I remember at the time Khan Academy kept acting like drawing a red circle in JS would get me a 6-figure job by the age of 13, so I persisted in drawing goofy shit throughout my school year on the CS courses to get extra credit for all the Khan Academy points I racked up. Regardless, I never ended up using any of it, in fact I've practically forgotten all of it. I'm not even in the same field now. All that remains is bits and pieces of Python from a high school CS class years back, and MatLab/Excel scripts I have to use to make graphs of data I'll never look at again.

With HTML being such a standout for me, I finally decided to take another stab at it. Since starting a Spacehey page to customize my profile in borrowed nostalgia of a website I never used yet yearn to experience, I realized my complete and utter ineptitude at HTML in my years of absence. It should figure that they'd only teach a 9-year old how to mark a paragraph, make a heading, and bold some test instead of actually make a readable website with decent formatting. Though in a complete twist of events, the fact that CSS is written in JS at least means I'm not entirely unfamiliar with every single thing written in it. However, even with the luxury of having a readable format as-is, Spacehey is limiting in what you can create creatively, so I decided to go somewhere else entirely for that pursuit.

Neocities, named after its spiritual predecessor Geocities, will just give you a domain to fuck around with no directions or strict limitations. After some deep burnout from a brutal 3 quarters this year, I decided that dedicating time this summer to finding a new hobby in making a website shall be my new self-directed summer project. Considering I've never assigned myself something like this, nor held myself to such a standard as I have during this project, I can only hope that I continue to have some spark of inspiration as I continue. But I've spent a good few hours last night alongside a majority of the afternoon and evening today coding the homepage of the website, with at least half of it spent slamming my head against a wall trying to find out how to add a background image with a blur filter through CSS. I hope that I can try and at least finish the homepage within the next week of work, since finishing the homepage means I'd have completed the general formatting for pretty much every page on the site. I'd just have to copy and paste a majority of the formatting and edit the main and article blocks to match the content of each page, which means it'd become much more of a deal of creative writing and retelling than coding.

Rewriting this article, I've realized I completely forgotten to mention the purpose of my website: I wanted to make an archive detailing all of me and my group's TTRPG history. A page for all my characters, page(s) summarizing all of our campaigns and one-shot stories, details of my own contributions to our homebrew setting, and maybe more if I can manage it. It gives me an opportunity to share my hobbies with others in an organized way, and hopefully give others who won't ever know me something fun to look through. A little place to fly my freak flag.

I think self-imposing a summer project, while new, might be a good way to spark my own creativity and break the deep burnout I've been suffering from. Even a month into summer, I still feel like I've barely gotten any energy or willpower back; I sleep in till the afternoons, stay up till the early morning, eat like shit, drink inadequate water, and definitely don't exercise my body as I should. I hope that by dedicating my mind to something and holding myself to it, I can find the willpower and self-driven dedication to hold my own body to higher standards for my own sake.

Even if 3 people read this, I'm glad you did. I do seriously appreciate it, even if you have no idea who I am. It'll always mean a lot <3