About the site

In many ways, the advent of the modern internet has diminished the ingenuity of creative individuals. With the acceleration of AI adoption among creatives, this trend is likely to accelerate. AI has unlocked creativity for the masses and the productive possibilities that reality carries; it also threatens organic, slower, and individual forms of creativity that once grew from sustained efforts under friction, and in many cases throughout history, genuine hardship. Although I'm not trying to lecture on what's best for everyday creatives, it has been well documented that artists and the hard lives they lived often created some of the world's most appreciated artistic displays.

Some creators have seen their skills atrophy as creative tooling advances. The highest form of artistic strength resided in the process itself, not merely the tools that became available to the mass-market during their time as an artist.

The issue of artistic creation today is the misapplication of automation and generative tools to create what was already possible with basic, yet unique efforts from the trained creative artist. This creative process applies to painting, drawing, web design, programming, and other segments that have been automated with generative AI. Automation when applied through a standard of restraint and usefulness is beneficial to the creative mind, but when used to replace all parts of the creative process that bring about unique results, it becomes an unfortunate commodity in a market with everything that begins looking and feeling the same.

A great amount of potential uniqueness has been handed over to systems that cannot replicate the nuances that make our creations human. The fine-tuned talents that made them unique in the first place given away without any formal protest.

I'm not anti AI tooling, but believe it should be used in accordance with human-first creative ideals: meaning that the human must first create the majority or entirety of at least the draft concept before an automation system is used to modify and improve what was first built by a human. What we have being pushed by technologists today that own these AI automation toolsets reduces the artistic effort to an afterthought. The result is systems that copy other systems and propagate commonalities with such perfection that there is very little nuance left to appreciate in the world of beauty and art.

I constructed this site by hand, meaning I typed the code myself, slowly refined the writing, wrote the CSS, designed the presentation logic, and upgraded various formats for displaying data here over the years. This doesn't mean everyone has to build their website this way, but I believe doing it this way today makes the format and presentation stand out in a world where most people get a computer to build them their entire portfolio with minimal involvement.

The idea of building a creation brick-by-brick online is fading fast in favor of generative AI websites. Yet, there has been no major large-scale improvement in the form factor of the internet as a result. Both artists and creators routinely use website builders and take what could be a highly unique medium for their creative works, and marginalize it into some generic website that looks professional but generic. I rejected this methodology for the site because I believe that a display format is a unique vector that must also be controlled and owned by any credible artist utilizing it.

The goal was to preserve the highest practical level of artistic and technical integrity while using the smallest amount of external tooling possible. The reason I had rejected using a builder outright was to make this site about the process of producing what everyone else has chosen NOT to do. I have made my own attempt at normalizing a work in progress: normalizing art in motion. Being okay with creating and displaying something that is never quite perfect, but never far from it either - something I view as mirroring the realities of our world.

The New Entity Standard™ is used here for navigation and that can be reviewed in the Controls section. This standard provides a common way for websites to be browsed by both human and agent-operators without a mouse. I designed it myself to help make websites more accessible to modern consumers of content utilizing tools that are only recently being deployed.

The underlying stack is deliberately minimal and transparent: Python, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Linux, Shell. I write and maintain the code live in a plain text editor, without an IDE or AI assistant. I code the site live because then there is nothing between my mind and the final result between a Ctrl+O save. The site has been improved this way from the start and will continue to be improved this way over the coming years and while most artists or blogs use WordPress or Squarespace, it makes me feel good to know that everything here was designed and implemented by me. Nothing you see here was "free" - everything required a mental cost or time investment to get right. This site has nearly unlimited customization and performance options available to it because of that and from the start, this was the artistic objective I set out to hold steady on my personal website.

Why, then, would anyone want to make endless customization an artistic objective? The content is meant to improve naturally over the years without any concept of "this can't be implemented" - that is the entire reason.

Constraints while building out aren't bad when your objective is endless customization. Eventually you build your own ways of achieving each objective that make sense to you and although it is idiosyncratic, it provides the endless canvas that makes doing so interesting in a creative pursuit. The display of content here may have been faster with a builder initially, but now any objective I have from here is possible with much less complexity.

I started this site as a Novice and over many years of iterations, I became an expert at each of the required components running here today. Additionally, I am now an expert at managing and upgrading the entirety of the subsystem running here, including the operating system, server and more. The project runs the right technologies for the job only and it won't change much from this point forward because everything is now stable.

Building this site pushed me at times early on, but it was the challenges that brought about the largest gains in related skill growth. Easy was never the objective, customization and independence were. Building this site has been practical, fun, and rewarding.

If you seek insight into my character, consider this: I prioritize doing what I intend, in the manner I deem right, over adopting the methods and dogma pushed into our faces by "experts". Ultimately, I favor the experience you gain by trial, error, refinement, and creativity. This site is a demonstration of that philosophy.

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