why make a website?

i've been admiring the indieweb/smallweb movement for a couple of years now. mostly off and on, remembering that the internet doesn't have to be so corporate, coming back to nekoweb or neocities to browse a bunch of awesome sites, and then think "well, i can't do that for x, y, z reasons" and giving up. repeat. i registered for neocities earlier in the year of 2025 and honestly, didn't know what to make my name on here. most of the time, i use the name jokermoreau (the name of my favorite mass effect character) but that didn't feel like the identity i wanted here. it didn't feel like it meshed with the project. so i thought of two things i liked - cats and matcha - and smashed them together. cute enough that it seems to fit in with the scene.

in the early 2000's when i was a pre-teen still bumbling around the internet, i was obsessed with surfing the web. i spent hundreds of hours looking at neopets pages, fansites for anime i liked, online rpgs about owning your own virtual cattery or horse ranch, and pixel doll artists' sites. i remember the awe i felt at the creativity of it all ... there was just so much.

eventually, despite not knowing anything about anything, i made my first website on geocities- sailor aqua's shrine. it was dedicated to a sailor moon oc i made (and it was truly awful LOL) but i had so much fun curating it. i practiced pixel art and used doll bases to create my own dolls (also, badly). i taught myself just enough html to be dangerous and make a pretty basic petpage for my lupes on neopets. unfortunately, i didn't stick with pixel art or web design or coding - so those skills never got as refined as they could be now that i am in my thirties. but better late than never, right?

like many people who have decided to step into this scene, i love the idea of my own creative and personal space. i love the nostalgia factor. i love marrying my interests and experiences as a young girl on the early internet with my life now as a grown woman. it's important to me to break away from the mainstream internet and how fucking awful it's become, and to put something out there that furthers the indieweb. even if this website isn't ever super popular or beautiful or anything, i hope to create something here for me that makes me happy and serves that purpose. and i hope it brings some of you joy as well and that i can get to know you, even a little.