Over the past few years I've been involved in all sorts of programming projects: some for fun, others badly underpaid. Unfortunately once money becomes involved you start to lose creative freedom to fulfil your employers' requests and corporate design shows its ugly head. This is where I started to gain some disdain towards front end development, even though I knew fully well that websites can look and be fun, having used the internet since I was a kid.

That caused me to prioritize back end development where funnily enough, you get more room for creativity since nobody cares what you do as long as it works. Nobody was checking if I was cooking the tastiest spaghetti or if I was making the gang of four proud, does it process the data correctly? That's all it matters to the client.

I have been browsing archival sites and the wayback machine for nostalgia's sake for a while but visiting them gives me the same bittersweet feeling as being at a graveyard: yes, it's nice I can revisit these places, but it's all gone! Everything here is dead!!

Neocities on the other hand is a strange mix of nostalgia for different phases of the internet and an inherent desire to express yourself however you want. Everywhere else there is a somewhat recent push towards everything being contained in 3 or 4 websites with near zero customization. It's repulsive. I don't even want to get into that.

So, after visiting some sites here I thought I should make one as a sort of portal to my profiles in other websites. At first, I set myself to replicate the look of the SX-Window for the Sharp X68000 with pure CSS, but then I thought about adding music or creating something related to cocktails, and about a month or so later, after finally having fun with front end, I arrived at what you can see on your screen.

- The CRT: I blatantly stole this from the intro cinematic of Majin Tensei for the SNES. I adjusted the colors to match the palette, and I also shrunk the ratio to avoid scrolling. Widescreen CRT monitors did exist so leave me alone!!
- The interface and cursor: They're from Diver's for the PC98, an adult game. I created some weird amalgamation of divs and images taken from the game, so naturally, it all falls apart the moment you zoom in. Don't do that.
- The cocktail avatar, favicon and social media icons: My first ever foray into pixel art. I used Aseprite and GIMP, and the avatar took me a whole day. Worst part is it doesn't even match the artstyle of Diver's but surprisingly I managed to create it exactly how I pictured it in my mind.
- The song is Remains by Ryu Umemoto from the soundtrack of the PC98 classic YU-NO.

As I'm writing this, I realize this tiny div isn't suited for reading long texts, so in the future I want to make a separate layout just for blog posts (if I don't forget I made this site in the first place). I also want to recreate the PC98's boot sequence and also some kind of jukebox...

The repository for my little corner of the internet can be found here :)