Because I was inspired by this:

A Website To End All Websites | Henry From Online

How to win the war for the soul of the internet, and build the Web We Want.

Henry From OnlineA tiny website by Henry (from Online)

It's a longer read but 100% worth it. In another life, I was a web designer and this piece by Henry (or @strange.website) really resonated with me. Before I get into my why, let's talk about Henry's much more eloquent explanation.

He starts with:

"The internet is bad."

We were given this vast, holy realm of self-discovery and joy and philosophy and community; a thousand thousand acres of digital landscape, on which to grow our forests and grasslands of imagination, plant our gardens of learning, explore the caves of our making. We were given the chance to know anything about anything, to be our own Prometheus, to make wishes and to grant them.

But that’s not what we use the Internet for anymore. These days, instead of using it to make ourselves, most of us are using it to waste ourselves: we’re doom-scrolling brain-rot on the attention-farm, we’re getting slop from the feed.

Self explanatory, and well put. He then cleverly goes on to use the automobile as an analogy, something as an American I definitely understand:

Again, read the piece if you're a millennial or Gen Z or if you've ever used the internet because it's a wonderful, nostalgic romp into what the internet used to be and could've been.

Ultimately, he proposes an answer to this quagmire we've all found ourselves in:

"It's personal websites"

Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.

So, here we are. As someone who grew up as the internet grew up, my fondest memory of dial-up AOL is convincing a classmate to be my girlfriend in the evening and me getting dumped immediately the following day - she realized her mistake had consequences in real life. An entire love story via a modem making those old, beautiful sounds.

For me personally, I find Instagram to be vapid and I haven't really used it lately. It's a brain damaging, mental-state killing endless scroll. As Henry says above, wasting ourselves.

Will I miss out on the latest culture drama? Absolutely. Thankfully. Will I miss something from a friend or family that I would've wanted to see, sadly yes. It's a trade-off and one I'm ready to make. My inspiration comes from films, books, music and I plan to stick with it. I want to follow all of YOUR blogs, keep up with your life in the way you want, on a medium you own.

Further, if you haven't seen The Social Network recently, I recommend re-visiting. David Fincher saw it all coming and I think this film will play just as well in the future as it did on release.

So, therefore, welcome to my personal website! Not hand coded and not as cool as Henry posits but it's a good place for me to say things outside of work - there might be a spicy take or two but mainly it'll be nerd-shit, cameras I like, travel and whatever else.

So, as the kids say, smash that subscribe button and/or please please please reach out direct! Call me or text me or I'm on signal, let's go back to actual connection instead of gestures broadly whatever all this is.

-rc