I've finally gotten my site to a place where I'm happy enough to share it around more, so I'd appreciate any feedback!
In particular, I'm wondering: one of my goals for this site was to have a place where someone who didn't know a thing about Faction Paradox could get a decent idea of what it is. As someone (presumably) unfamiliar with the series, do you think you have a grasp on what it is and how you could get into it if you wanted to?
A couple days ago, I watched Peanut Butter Falcon. I thought it was a super beautiful and touching story about how people should be allowed to live their own life on their own terms. The ending didn't quite resolve everything neatly in a way that felt realistic, but it was still a really satisfying ending, with the penultimate scene containing both the movies biggest triumph and what was probably the biggest tragedy. Highly recommend this one.
I finally saw Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. I really liked it, but it's definitely got a lot of Sam Raimi-isms that a lot of people seem to dislike. I thought the silliness and comic-bookiness really added to it though.
I saw Multiverse of Madness recently too. I thought the plot as a whole was just kinda alright, nothing especially interesting to me, but I liked that it more-or-less took itself seriously (my biggest issue with most of the MCU), and the visual style was amazing thanks to Sam Raimi. I think I'll always prefer comic book movies that embrace being comic book movies rather than ones that feel embarrassed of their roots. Also, the music fight scene was the best part of that movie, and probably my favorite fight scene in any Marvel movie.
The Archie Sonic comics are great! Ken Penders' stories are of questionable quality, but at least they're interesting, and Ian Flynn's stuff is great. And yeah, the TMNT comics are a lot...weirder, than the TV show. I haven't really gotten into TMNT, but that's actually why, from what I have seen, I like the comics more :omg:k:.
I definitely sympathize with having trouble keeping up with ongoing series - especially with changing writers, it's hard to even tell if you should keep reading a series, or if it's gonna turn to crap with a new writer *coughcoughBendisonSupermancough*.
I haven't read those Batgirl series, did you like them? Tank Girl is an absolute classic too.
I think it's pretty cool when websites have music play in the background, it adds character to the site and lets your viewers see what kind of music you like! I do often listen to my own music while I'm browsing, though, so it can be very jarring to have music play out of nowhere.
The best way I've seen it done is, when a site has a page where you have to click an icon to actually get into the main part of the website (I know the name of these type of pages is somewhere in my memory, but it eludes me right now - whatever), they'll have something that says the site automatically plays music, and has an option to disable it! I actually don't disable the music very often, but just having a warning lets me pause my own music - or, if I'm really into what I'm listening to, I will disable the automatic music.
I definitely feel you on some of this. My advice, as someone in basically the same scenario, is this: don't dwell on how much "better" things were in the past.
In the past, the Internet was the wild west, and that came with a lot of good things: everything was personal and almost nothing was for-profit, there was little advertising, most sites felt unique, etc. Don't get me wrong here - if I didn't appreciate and value those aspects of the old web, I probably wouldn't be on this forum, or even Neocities in general.
But with that being said, the old west had a lot of gunfights too. On the old Internet, it was very easy to be totally anonymous (which was a good thing in a lot of ways!), and there was very little connection from the Internet to real life in most cases. That, combined with just changing culture in general, meant that you could get a lot of pretty nasty insults and terms being thrown around casually. Of course, that depended on where exactly you went, and that's still the case now, but I think in general a lot of parts of the Internet are less tolerant of a lot of stuff that you don't particularly wanna see when you're browsing than they used to be.
It's also undeniable that the technology has advanced since then (though maybe not as much as it could have if designs weren't so standardized). Lots of the stuff that creative new websites do would be impossible on the older web - some of MelonKing's stuff in particular stands out as an example!
While yes, the general culture of the old Internet was better in a lot of ways than the modern Internet, the facts are we live in the modern day, and there's no way to turn back time. While most of the Internet is more corporatized and more standardized than before, the web-revival movement exists and is pretty active, Neocities exists, and there's still a ton of cool stuff out there, some of which couldn't even exist before; you just have to look.
It's best not to dwell on the past, and rather to embrace all the good things about living in the present - and focus on how we can build a better future.
Wow, as someone whose first website was made on Neocities, it is super crazy and super cool to meet people like you who have so much experience. I'm very excited to see what kind of website you end up making!
As for my other interests, I like... anything Jim Henson-adjacent.
This is super cool to me, I'm a huge fan of The Muppets and Jim Henson's stuff in general. Have you ever seen his film Time Piece? It was an experimental short film, one of his few works to not feature puppetry. I think it's overshadowed by his work with puppets, but it's a pretty amazing film.
Anyway, hello from one newcomer to another, and I hope you enjoy your time on the forum!
I like a really wide variety of comics, and have for a pretty long time. In terms of superheroes, I know a lot about DC and not very much about Marvel, and a few of my favorite characters are Superman, Animal Man, and Green Lantern (Kyle Rayner is my favorite Green Lantern, and Green Lantern is definitely my favorite superhero right now).
More recently, I've been getting into Disney's Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck comics, originally created by Carl Barks. These comics are made by companies which license the rights to these characters from Disney, and not Disney itself, which means they tend to have a little bit more "bite" to them than actual Disney cartoons a lot of the time, with stuff like social satire being present pretty often. Interestingly, these comics were super popular in the world as a whole, but their popularity fizzled out in America pretty soon after Carl Barks first created them. This means a lot of the newer Duck comics are from European artists and writers, even though the one who created them was an American (Carl Barks). The biggest exception is Don Rosa, an American artist/writer who is often regarded as the best person other than Barks himself to write Duck comics.
I really like these Duck comics because they very effectively capture a feeling of adventure. A pretty common story formula for the Donald Duck stories is that Donald ends up having to go on a hunt for some sort of treasure, often due to some sort of bureaucratic failure (there's the social satire :omg:k:smile:. In these stories, they'll often go through 3 or 4 different settings all around the world, and they always feel very distinct. There's a lot of comedy in these stories as well, but the emphasis of the stories usually feels like it's more about the adventure than the comedy. I don't like Scrooge McDuck comics as much as Donald Duck comics, but his comics are also pretty great, most of them having Scrooge either trying to defend his riches against a perceived threat (real or otherwise) or trying a new scheme to make more money.
What's also nice about the Duck comics is that they're pretty loose on continuity, and there's no specific reading order. It's a nice breath of fresh air from superhero comics, where each story is building on 70+ years of continuity. In the Duck comics, there's just a consistent setup, and each story is a standalone thing, which can pick up elements from earlier stories or not, depending on what the writer feels like doing! This means you can just read any story you find interesting in any order.
Disney comics fans have also created a really helpful index with information about the different comics stories called Inducks, which I consider one of the coolest sites on the internet.
Anyway, this turned into a long post about Duck comics, which wasn't quite what I intended, but that's alright haha. If anyone else likes to read comics, please reply and talk about what you've been reading lately!
I'm getting into Usenet myself, do you know of any cool active newsgroups?
I must admit that for me, I was interested in Usenet mainly to see the way fandoms were in the early days of the Internet, so I haven't really looked into how they are nowadays too much. I do know that alt.toys.transformers is still active, if that's at all up your alley!
Hello everyone, I go by the alias of AloeVega (taken from aloe vera and the Vega system featured in the Green Lantern comics). I prefer they/them pronouns and masculine honorifics. I never really experienced the early internet personally, but I've always sort of had an interest in looking at the history of fandoms and the ways they communicated, which lead to me checking out a lot of Usenet archives and old Web 1.0 sites. When I started looking at these, it struck me how much more personal and less corporate they felt compared to the modern internet.
My main interests personally are mainly in the areas of science fiction and comic books. I really like Doctor Who (mainly the Classic series) and its spinoffs, especially Faction Paradox. In the realm of comics, I read a ton of DC stuff, and in particular I like Green Lantern and Superman a lot. I'm also really into music. I'm a jazz musician irl, and I spend a lot of time listening to different stuff - I'll listen to just about anything, but my particular interests are in jazz, funk, hip-hop, punk, and anything avant-garde or experimental.
I don't really have a website yet, but I'm planning on making one, and when I do you'll be able to find it at https://aloevega.neocities.org/
Looking forward to getting involved with this community!
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