I mean, it looks black and blue, but that is because it was taken with a bad camera against the light. It is white and gold, but looks different due to bad lighting.

Excuse me, may you elaborate on "guerrilla school of art"? Sounds interesting but I don't quite get it yet

I just feel like there are two schools of thought when it comes to the role of art in society.

Traditionally, people view art as the property of the artist, that which the artist feeds themselves with and therefore akin to a physical product. Just as a regular physical commodity as produced by a craftsman (think a table by a carpenter), where the output is their very own tangible commodity with a use and a resale value, a painter might paint and sell a painting. What is done to the artistic output, for example a remix or a copy, requires permission by the artist as its rightful owner. This has propagated to digital art, too: even though they can be copied and moved without losing the original (as opposed to a painting which only exists once), they are essentially the property of the artist and should not be considered a common good in their eyes.
In this framework, reusing art in your own works without payment, or just straight up lifting it to reuse for yourself as we would a cool GIF we found on our website, is pretty much theft: hence the negative reaction to not crediting artists, "stealing" art, and neural networks building on art.

Others meanwhile, whose viewpoint I spontaneously titled "guerilla school of art", view art as a product of society as a whole, where the artist is but the executive arm of a much larger corpus of society's past artistic output, building upon it like a single ant extends an anthill. Art grows as a phenomenon upon itself; generations of artists before have built a foundation of knowledge, experience and canon where no artist can truly claim any work as their own alone. Art therefore is a product of all of society, not a single person, and should be freely accessible and reusable in the same way that we currently treat language: as a social good that belongs to everyone and no-one. In this framework, art can be freely used, reused, remixed, "stolen", displayed, built upon and redistributed, as it is a common good. Of course, this view of art often conflicts with the more material needs of artists in a capitalist society: they require to be paid to survive and be able to create more art to pay themselves, which requires marketing and a recognizable name, a certain exclusivity and the ability to sell and control your own work. It is a tragedy; for the economic system we live under requires art to be ripped from society's collective ownership into the limited commodity form.

My personal opinion about all this is that the social spaces that we are building here in the web revival are precious and powerful to many people, and would not be possible if we all rigidly credited and licensed the assets that we use. On a small scale like this, "stealing art" is okay in my book: especially the GIFs and buttons and backgrounds and layouts and scripts that we all share and occasionally lift. The existence of the web revival does not threaten the livelihood of artists but instead perhaps even promotes it; for if I really like a person and their art, I might commission something off of them, and I would not have been able to get to know them in the first place if positive spaces such as these that allow people to express themselves did not exist. Naive creativity like web crafting with simple (X)HTML and CSS like back in the day is a joy, and using art without crediting is almost an inherent part of it. Of course, claiming something as your own is not okay; but using others' assets to build a very new thing is what all art is about in the end, is it not?
 
Just as I could not have built my website without assets from some 1998 asset CD, GIFs and assets taken from other people's works, not to mention endless tutorials and guides, Picasso would not have been able to define a whole new school of art without all those who came before him and figuratively painted his way forward; those who manufactured the paint and the canvases, those who gave him a home and an education. No piece of art is the product of one mind only, and if you think about it, neither is any product at all.

Common ownership of all that society produces, without copyright and property, is impossible in the economic conditions of our time, but perhaps we can live out our own little corner of this utopia in this web revival we are building. That is what I mean with guerilla art.

Hey, welcome to the forums! I am also a twenty-something in academia (linguistics and computational linguistics, so pretty close to your combination!)

I came here basically the same way: missed some aspects of the web I grew up with and found a world of wonder.

I don't really majorly mind anything that has been posted so far. I actually enjoy the fact that we have kind of gotten back to the guerilla school of art and asset reusing.

However what I don't like is the conflation of "old" for "good". The browser wars and lack of intercompatibility were the exact opposite of what we like here. MSN and ICQ were the beginning of the end. A lack of mobile optimization can be endearing but don't we want to build something better with the aesthetics of old?

When I use real life photos on my website, I usually cut their contents out crudely and then use dithering and some other methods to make them look crunchy and "digital". I love it.

I keep hearing about using that kind of stuff to "find yourself" but I'm not so sure how true that is, or if it's the same for everyone. They always say you have to be in the right headspace.

Definitely correct; I know plenty of people for whom one single LSD trip solved things like a gender identity crisis, some parts of their depression or completely changed their outlook on how to conduct their life. But you definitely need to be in the right headspace, you need someone you trust and love and knows what's going on to tripsit you, and you need some guidance to guide your trip in the right direction.

For me, it wasn't LSD though that made the horror trip; it was simply weed, but too much of it. The resulting time warp and constant "refreshing" of reality is very hard to describe but it felt like if I let go, reality would just fall apart completely; and even then, sometimes I failed. I was crying and screaming for help, speedwalking through my apartment to get some semblance of coherency back because if I laid down, "moments would just stack" and overwhelm me, it's hard to describe. Strong nausea, panic attacks, the feeling of being completely vulnerable to some chemical which can just make your mind feel all kind of existential horrors. Anyone who says that THC is harmless or weed cannot seriously harm you (if you use it irresponsibly) is lying; it definitely can, mentally.

Scotch

Love the redesign! I just wanted to say that I think the Vinyl Ventures project you're doing is really neat, and I'm excited to see more reviews as you put them up. It kind of recreates that feeling I have when I go digging through thrift shops and antique stores--sort of like treasure hunting!

Funnily enough that's the same feeling I get writing them.

These records have been gifted to me by my dad almost all at once, and I have never had the chance to actually sit down and make memories with any of them, so this is what should change that. I basically have a thrift store grab bag at home, but they're all mine and I don't have to pay for them!

Just posting here again to give an update on Libre Town!

Since I created this thread, many things have changed and new content has been added! Therefore, I want to give an overview or a little tourist guide here:

• The landing page holds a small introduction to what the site is, the changelog, friends' badges, and also a fun little marquee scrolling regularly changing in-universe news headlines!
• In About Me, you can read about the web gardener - me - who I am, why I am doing this and where to contact me.
• In Thoughts, you can find a bunch of blog posts mostly about the site, my personal life and emotions, my identity, my journey on the web, and various thoughts I have about the world and my life.
• If you're feeling particularly spicy, the Hot Takes section has a bunch of specialty blog posts that are not personal thoughts but much rather opinions; I thought it was neater to put them there instead.
• Shrines are like personal fan pages of your own interests and hobbies - right now, there's two of them, one for the constructed language Toki Pona, and the other one about my relation to music!
• The Music Room shrine lists an obscure band of the month with an example song liked, but also holds Vinyl Ventures: a blog post format where I take a piece of music from my physical collection and react to it with song-by-song first impressions and opinions! Check out this review of Talking Heads - Speaking in Tongues, for example!
• The Creative page holds links to special sub pages I have for different kinds of ways I get creative (see below), but also a cool 88x31 badges collection that I made myself and are free to use.
• One of the creative sub pages, cooking / recipes, holds, as you can imagine, vegetarian recipes that I like to cook. This is quite empty so far but I will post more recipes as time goes on!
• Another, the Writing page, holds links to all kinds of fiction that I write - mostly fan fiction, but also some original fiction, including a short description, a word count and so on.
• Finally, under Development, you can find programs and scripts I program; like TCal, the calorie counter written in Tcl/Tk!
• The Links page is a neatly categorized rainbow link list where you can find all kinds of cool websites, resources and in the future perhaps webrings too. Maybe yours is listed too (if not, ask me)!
• It's also mobile optimized these days and has a better font!

I have plenty of more plans for the site; I want to add content to the different categories of course and the existing pages, but I also want to implement a guest book, a little weather system, personality quizzes and more! I want Libre Town to grow into a real little town over time and I'd be stoked if you'd be along for the ride.

Please give Libre Town a visit and if you want, add the button to your page! :) It'd mean a lot to me; my homepage is my only way of socializing online and I'd be super happy if my homepage is fun or inspiring to some people! Feedback is always welcome.

I have various different "genres" of blog post so I organized them in a few categories:

• Thoughts - these are general things I want to communicate with the world, especially about the state of the site, my emotions, new projects, insights about life and the web.
• Hot Takes - these are blog posts that are opinions of some kind; things that are less "thoughts" about the world but rather rare outlooks or opinions on things. I take care that none of them are actually upsetting, so it's just a silly nomer. I still want to keep them apart from the normal posts.
• Vinyl Ventures - this is a specialty format that's part of my shrine about everything music; in this series, I take a vinyl (or tape, or CD) at random from my physical collection and react to it for the first time; with opinions, some background and first impressions all inclusive. I actually have never listened to 99% of them because I got them all at once from my dad so this is my way to work through them and make new experiences with music!

I think more specialty formats might follow in the future but I want to actually fill the existing formats to a respectable degree.

cat

I love the weird trend in early 2000's games of making ports that were essentially different games.

I just wish they'd differentiate them more. I am sure people bought Sims 2 on DS expecting the full game and got a weird RPG adventure instead.

I write them from scratch more or less semantically. I make a little sketch or notes what I want and need on the site (e.g. navigation, sidebars, content) and then just write them the way I need them.