What does someone put on a webpage? This question which, initially, felt simple to me, turned out to be much more difficult to answer than it should've been. For the life of me I couldn't figure out what to put on my webpage, for ages, it felt like I had nothing I cared enough about to make viewable, for myself or others.

I learned a number of things about myself because of this:
* I am anxious to a fault about what others might think of me
* I place too much importance on things meant to be fun
* I do not know who I am, what I enjoy, or what makes me -me-

Identity crisis!!!

Where this all started was when I was exposed to platforms like geocities and nekoweb, places where people do webdev as a hobby and for fun. They make pages that are full of personality, meant to be their spaces of comfort and where they can share themselves with the world. They share their artwork, their 88x31 buttons, shrines to their favourite characters, all designed to specifically fit -them-.
I decided I wanted in on this, in hindsight probably to understand myself better, but at the moment I felt that platforms like twitter or facebook don't offer enough in the way of personalization. I wanted to make something that felt distinctly 'Lexie'.

The amount of self-reflection this caused was unexpected and kind of confronting, online we are expected (and to some extent required) to anonymize ourselves. Apply a protective layer to your sense of self, do not be too sincere, do not be cringe, maybe even SEO yourself; I hate it.
In order to make a webpage I had to relearn how to be sincere, both online and in real life, remember the things I love and enjoy, and feel the freedom to talk and post about those things.

So what are those things I love? My passions, hobbies, predilections, and how many of those are -really- mine?

I don't know! The question in and of itself paralyzes me, I can't seem to find anything interesting about myself or anything I love. It fills me with an immense amount of doubt and drains me of ideas. I'm still unsure exactly -why- this even happens, still in the process of unpacking This mess for myself.

An example of this recently would be when I started a new job, a manager asked the question "What is something interesting you have at home?" and I could not produce an answer. Too afraid of being judged, afraid of being deemed not interesting or too weird. I can't remember what I answered, probably nothing, maybe something safe like my banjo or my gundams.

So how do I fix this? How do I become genuine, become myself, more and outwardly, boldly even? A webpage sounded like a good step, so I started working on LexieLand, and I hope to expand on it step by step, and become Lexie through and through.

An unexpected addition to this: genAI. Fuck that shit am I right? Why am I bringing it up? While finalizing this post and pushing it I got prompted by gitkraken to 'generate a commit message using AI'. Fuck me, such brilliant timing.

Dread and Rage

GenAI stands opposed to this concerted effort of sincerity, especially artistically. GenAI screams 'derive', 'recreate', it is a technology that, fundamentally, lives on these principles. No longer the dreams of computers, or something that can be referred to as generative art. It actively poisons the term for a way of design where artist and computer work directly together to create.
My foray into drawing fractals opened the world of generative art up to me, an art movement that respects and bridges the human and the machine elements of contemporary art creation. Importantly, it doesn't pretend to be anything other than itself, nor does it have to.

I'm going to figure out who I am, what I love, my passions, hobbies, predilections; I'll be Lexie.

The Sincere Web - Or, Learning To Be Myself