I recently watched a video essay about profile pictures and it got me thinking how interesting of a concept they are. It can tell people a lot and becomes part of peoples online image of you. Do you use different profile pictures for different sites? What made you choose a particular picture? Do you remember your first? I would love to know about peoples experience with the purely online concept
Oh, I remember my first! It was a drawing of a ninetales that I did on a sticky note when I was really little. I kept that for a few years until I changed it to a picture of Kiba from Naruto when I was about eleven or twelve.
Generally my pfps have always had something to do with whatever fandom I'm in at the time. It makes me happy when I choose a character to represent how I feel and everyone sees me as them! Currently my pfps across platforms (just tumblr, discord, and youtube for me) is my favorite character from The World Ends With You.
although on Melonland I've been using a pixel gif from Whimsical. I really love using gif pfps but those are generally not supported on modern social media platforms. I have a small collection of old em:ha:punk gif pfps that I found while looking through myspace archives, in case the day ever comes in which I'm allowed to use one ^^
After spending several months working to reform my website into something I was proud of, I realized once I was finished with it that I... still wasn't happy with how it looked.
I can't tell exactly what's wrong with it, but it just doesn't look like a proper website, and it's starting to frustrate me to the point that I've been having difficulties sitting down to mess with the code at all. Maybe I'm just not very creative. I don't know why it feels so flat compared to everybody else's beautiful creations...
Does anybody have suggestions to make for how I could improve? What kind of thing should I add/take away in order to make it look more complete? I feel like I'm missing a core aspect of what makes a personal website good, but I just can't put my finger on the pulse of the issue. Help!
I think one of the primary contributors to the feeling of freedom and individuality in this part of the web is the fact that it's pretty small--and that's not to say that something like this couldn't exist large scale, but that these spaces encourage people to find others who are into really niche, nerdy, practically unmarketable things and connect to each other well. For example, I've had a similar positive experience to the indie web with tumblr after I got into a really small fandom with about 100-150 active members. My posts started getting way more interaction than when I'd contributed to large fandoms, despite receiving fewer reblogs and likes. Yes there were fewer people, but they were more passionate about the media, bouncing off of my ideas to create elaborate memes and collaborative art.
Social media really went wrong when it started convincing people to make themselves marketable!!! Be cringey and be free!!!
Most KH fans would kill me for recommending it but I think KH3D was a lot of fun. If you don't care too much about keeping up to date with the plot, it's a blast even totally blind and I know it cause I played that game before I knew KH had other games.
Recently, I stumbled upon this article (https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/dont-worry-these-gangley-armed-cartoons-are-here-to-protect-you-from-big-tech/) about the corporate art style "alegria", which is used for the vast majority of Big Tech advertisements and websites. I've been thinking about art and the internet recently, how the indie web/web revivalist movement is absolutely teeming with talented artists with an eye for fun color palettes and "ugly" gifs that give their sites a homey feel.
How is it that so many people can come up with beautiful designs for their own personal websites that they make as a hobby, yet companies with billions of dollars and infinite access to artistic resources can't make a single site look like it isn't just blatantly trying to steal your money? People on the small web literally put fake ads on their website and somehow make it look cool, but the alegria art style feels like it's trying to sell me something without there being a single "BUY NOW!" button blinking next to it. I wanted to ask for everyone's opinion on this--do you find the alegria art style to be soulless and creepy, or is it just me? And what do you think makes the difference between our "ugly" graphics and their "ugly" graphics? Why does one feel so much more genuine than the other, even when many of our assets are pulled directly from older operating systems?
I think what I always find the best about smaller online spaces such as this forum and general small web content is that the interactions are a lot longer and more personal. My only social media platform is Tumblr, so I don't know if this is even a universal issue, but it's generally frowned upon on Tumblr to contribute to posts that have already been deemed by the community to be "finished". Small users rarely get interactions with others on the platform unless they happen to be funny enough to inspire a tiny following--for instance, I have about 80 regular browsers of my Tumblr blog and they usually appreciate my posts. Yet we never talk! I only ever see them responding to my content in the tags, which is kind of like the Tumblr equivalent of looking over someone's shoulder at what they're texting their friends about. It's nice to know when something I've made is appreciated, but after the post has made a hundred or so circulations it disappears into the void (unless someone happens to find it years later).
What I appreciate about small web culture is that I'm able to directly respond to people on Melonland Forum and be reasonably confident that my short essays will be read by somebody who's interested in seeing longform text responses. I also like that the interactions here tend to be less trend-based, meaning that they tend to stay relevant long after they were posted because the content isn't as focused on a new song or movie being memed to death and dropped in ten minutes.
And for a brief footnote, I also like that everything on Melonland is clearly timestamped and in chronological order. Tumblr is in chrono order as well, though I hear that other socials are not for some reason??
There's a lot of talk amongst us all about social media being a negative experience, but probably not enough talk going around to thank Melooon for giving us all a space to get away from it. My experience on Melonland forum has been nothing but wonderful! Everyone is very helpful, informative, and kind, and best of all, I feel like our voices are really heard here when we want to make a change. I was inspired by Melooon adding the cat emotes to make a little thank-you post for our site's admin, for making it all possible! Thank you for creating a wonderful forum for us to goof off and talk about the net together! And thank you for the cats!
Easily my favorite unpopular game has to be kingdom hearts: dream drop distance, which for some reason is almost universally hated in the broader kh fandom. Everyone says that the controls were weird, the mechanic of switching randomly between two characters was annoying, and the disney worlds had no real character or appeal to them. It was very weird to find out that this opinion--to hate on kh3d--was actually the popular one, because I had a total blast playing the game! I have very fond memories of playing it while waiting for my turn at high school wrestling tournaments. 3ds games in general hold a very special place in my heart, but kh3d really knocked it out of the park with its neon visuals, beautiful music, fun boss battles, and intriguing plot twists. There's so much about the game that I wish I could experience again for the first time, so it's always a little disheartening to encounter long-time kh fans shitting on the things that I think made the game great.
In a similar vein, a lot of original paper mario fans have made fun of me for enjoying the recent title, origami king. I think they might just be stuck in nostalgia sometimes! Sure, the older games had darker plots, but I thought that origami king was a very beautiful game. Especially the soundtracks and environments... have they SEEN autumn mountain? And the shogun studios theme slaps so hard!!
I've mentioned this before but I was born in 2003. Everybody born in the 90s and earlier thinks I should be a fetus right now lol. I'm 18 years old (turning 19 in december)! Pretty young, sure, but still technically an adult in the United States.
I was one of those kids who got lucky enough (or unlucky depending on how you look at it) to have access to the internet really young. My formative memories of the web were mostly on dress-up game sites and kids roleplay sites like animal jam, petpet park, and at some point pixie hollow. I was also suuuper active on the pokemon website back when it had games and little bits of fun content for the chil'ren. Personal sites only exist in the very back of my memory--stuff that I'd almost forgotten about entirely until I started looking up some names on the wayback machine. It's a sort of surreal experience to see those websites locked up in a perfectly-preserved museum state when I remember, even if a little fuzzily, what it was like to just stumble across them on total accident and spend hours reading through as much content as I could understand.
I really want to give that magical feeling back to the generation after me. The internet they've been forced into is worse in just about every single goddamn way except for loading times.
Thank you, Melooon! The webring is now right where I wanted to put it without issue. Your explanation was very helpful!!!
I'll have to go over my code for a while and see what I was doing with all those overflows. I guess that's what happens when I work on the same document for several months--I improve drastically the more I write, but when I get better, I see that my old stuff is full of mistakes!
Anyhow, I tried to change the value to "relative", but I don't think it knows what it's supposed to be relative to because the whole main content of my site moved left. Here's what it looks like before and after...
Today, I was accepted into the sweetdreams webring!! I'm very happy about it, but I'm having some difficulties putting the webring button where I want. For reference, here's what I have so far:
This is where I want to put it, and I managed to place it there by observing how #radio is placed on melonland and copying that code to see if I could move it to my desired position. However, it seems that even though I was able to successfully position the widget, the "absolute" value makes it stay in place when the window is minimized, meaning that ppl with different screen sizes might experience display problems. Is there a way I can position it without causing this issue? Am I missing something obvious?
I'm kinda dumb lol so any help would be massively appreciated.
/home/user/, I don't want to come across as rude, but I feel like you might be missing the point here with all this talk of structure and theory. I don't disagree with the principles of marxism that you bring up--they are, in fact, solid ways of analyzing the current state of affairs. However, I feel like this obsession with theory might be restricting you from seeing that, at its core, the discussion that we're participating in here isn't supposed to be about marxism. It's about the place of useless websites on the internet.
What (I think) Melooon is saying is that, because nothing inherently has importance unless it is given importance, the idea of having utility at all is kind of ludicrous. This is a mostly theoretical way of looking at things, but it does propose an interesting line of thought: why does usefulness matter? If nothing matters, then why not have fun?
When I created this topic, I was feeling very upset that someone might consider the hard work I put into my website to be pointless and harmful. I discovered by reading through everyone's responses here that it didn't matter that some random guy would think my site shouldn't exist. It neither should or shouldn't, it just does. And because it makes me happy, I can decide that it matters.
Basically, if you want to discuss the political theory behind web revival, then we can talk about it, but I think you're taking this discussion in a direction that didn't really have much to do with the subject matter. Why don't we make a new topic for it?
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and I know it cause I played that game before I knew KH had other games. 
I guess that's what happens when I work on the same document for several months--I improve drastically the more I write, but when I get better, I see that my old stuff is full of mistakes!
I'm very happy about it, but I'm having some difficulties putting the webring button where I want. For reference, here's what I have so far:
