Hello! I'm A-wan. A-wan is my Chinese nickname. Actually, no one in real life calls me this. My family only calls me by mantou (a name for steamed bun, and/or baozi depending on what region of China). But A-wan I have chosen.
(The Wikipedia photo for Mantou)
The ideas behind the Web Revival piqued my interested immediately. I've been thinking more these past years of my childhood of curious internet wanderings, so dramatically juxtaposed with my recent years of algorithmic brainrot. Phone addiction has done a number on our brains to an extent we haven't yet recognized. I surely recognize it in myself, though, and it's majorly concerning. What happened to the internet I grew up with, where I travelled and socialized in a million virtual worlds (when I could not do so irl stuck in an extremely sleepy American suburb), where I learned and played while not turning off my brain and surrendering myself to a machine? Even my early encounters with social media were unlike the purgatory I live in today: I found community! I sought out art and ideas and passions! Now I'm just one of the many casualties in the Tiktok addiction crisis.
SO I was thrilled by neocities, then crushed by the fact recreating the internet requires... coding. I am through and through a humanities person, studying a PhD in one of the classic liberal arts. Looking back, it's actually quite embarrassing that I was ready to admit defeat when faced with basic html.
What you see here is the extent of my abilities, but imagine the universe where I am the loser who quit before learning how to format a paragraph on a page. Aren't you glad you aren't there, so you get to read this clunky piece of writing?
Here's some of what you'll find here, in vast generalizations:
Reminiscing about this virtual world
