(c) thi doan, 2024
venomositea@gmail.com
hosted on neocities and handmade with love
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Happy Lunar New Year!
My mom has always told me that the way you spend LNY is the way you spend the rest of the year, so we would always make sure to do things that we enjoy. This LNY I ended up working on and learning stuff to add to my website for 8 hours ^^'
I've been wanting to transition to Neocities for a while. I only really enjoyed posting my art to social media around 2018 when my art was just a hobby. I would post to Tumblr whenever I wanted (usually 2am) and tag my art simply "low poly" and write in the tags a little bit of how I felt about it or what was going on in my day that was impacting how I approached my artmaking. My favorite thing was when someone would reblog and I'd get to see the tags they added in response to it. When I started art school in 2019, I tried to get a little more serious about social media and transitioned to Twitter to find more game devs. Posting on Twitter was not as fun because of the character limit, and I had a visceral repulsion to adapting to the algorithm so I couldn't work with it even though I wanted to. When I took breaks from art to handle some big life events (deaths, frequent moves, re-adjusting to new limits induced by disability, etc), I had a growing, gnawing feeling that I was "falling behind."
At a time I was feeling pretty burnt out and start questioning if I should stick with it or not, my friend who majored in art history took me to a museum and told me about how many artists took years to finish a piece, social media just makes us feel like we have to work so fast now. They told me how much they love my art, and to take my time.
I stayed on Twitter for a bit because a lot of people I like are on there, and crossposted to Instagram and Tumblr when I remembered (frankly, not very often), but when Twitter/X introduced a new privacy policy in September 2023 that said it would train AI on users' tweets and messages, I deleted my art off the site and decided to find somewhere else to go. I was not really interested in trying again on other sites and realized I'd developed a strong distaste for social media, so I thought maybe I'd just focus on finally building out a personal website I could be proud of and which could be a home for all my art. I'd tried a couple times on website builders, but couldn't really get them the way I wanted. One of my favorite artists, Kaylee Rowena, deleted her Twitter account and moved to Neocities, and after watching their site transform under her handmade code, I decided I'd follow them. It took me a little bit to make the time to learn, but here I am! And I think I'll make a home here.
I want this site to be a portfolio, but I think more than that, I want it to be an art project in itself. I want to give myself permission to work slowly and to be able to write out long accompanying entries about them so I can share what they mean to me. There's usually a lot of authenticity I compromise when I post on social media, but I think this year I will not let myself sacrifice it to adapt to the site. I'll construct a site that can adapt to me!
Next step(s): find more of my art that's saved across my phone, laptop and PC so I can add them all here; learn about implementing javascript and making a portfolio gallery with filtering; browse more sites for inspiration and link to them on my site!