Here I'll be jotting down the progress I've had making this website. Expect long breaks between the updates.
As most stories do, mine begins with Pokémon. I remember in first grade my friend introduced me the trading card game and I was hooked immediately. It was pretty clear to me that he was making up the rules as he went on (and to be fair, everyone did), but it's not like anyone cared about how you actually played the game. No no no, far from it. We just wanted to collect the cards we liked and play with our friends. We let our imaginations fill in the gaps. And from then on my intrigue for the series grew exponentially. I'd scroll through Bulbapedia for hours on end revising the lore of the anime and games, studying the game mechanics rigorously, if not religiously. By third or fourth grade I eventually encountered Serebii.net via it's Cardex. Discovering that site felt like I was opening my fourth eye as I amassed more knowledge about this fictional universe than I could've ever possibly imagined. Now this all begs the question -why I am relaying all of this information? Why does it matter that I was on these niche, independent fansites rather than TikTok or whatever the hell these kids nowadays are doing... Point is, the internet used to be fun. It used to be personal. All the efforts on streamlining the internet has unfortunately led it to be more commercialized and homogenous. The end of the Glitch City Laboratories wiki & forums and the birth of its succeeding Discord community was the beginning of the end for me, quite damningly so (even if there's nothing wrong with Glitch City Laboratories' Discord in particular other than the aforementioned issues inherent to a modern platform of the sort). What I had grown to love was being depreciated in place of a poor man's archive.org.
...if the only way you can find a game is through a Discord [then] that game is dead to the average person. Some of you guys will wave through the heaps of porn channels & racist sub-Discord to find [the sauce] but the average person will never do this. If [the sauce] is only available through a Discord just like the old JoJo [sauce] ...the game is dead to the average person. Until you realize that, sorry. ۰ Leffen (out of context)
But all is not lost! We still have grounds such as NeoCities to thank for allowing each and every one of us to contribute to the internet in our own little way. I believe the first time I heard of NeoCities was when I saw that a friend of mine made their own page on the platform & I got intrigued enough to make my own ...which was a year ago, if not two or three. It's 3 am now that I'm writing this now so i should probably just wrap things up here and finish this manifesto later