![[generously hosted by neocities -- thank you! ^^]](/neocities.png)
hi, welcome. i am me. also known as rapidcow. or ethan i guess. i don't care what you call me, and you shouldn't worry about what to call me either: the nuances are too much to be contained in a name, anyways.
you might know me from a variety of places on the net, but i consider www.rapidcow.org to be my home now. though i am thinking of a second home… and that is here, neocities.
being a geocities reincarnation, neocities proved to me that the 90s web can exist even in the age of social media and AI. here instead of profiles with square avatars and limited characters, people communicate with HTML; instead of copying trends and letting those define us, people create their own versions of selves (well, at least in general, people pursue what they like, rather than have an incentive to be trendy/end up in FYP, whatever that means). there are still limitations of course, but they exist for practical reasons (and boundaries are always important, for when people overuse/abuse free stuff.)
a note: this may not be the case for anyone, but i am guilty for always straw-man'ing social media = everyone is on it = bad. the truth is (surprise surprise) not everyone invests their life on social media, if they are active on social media at all; people who live a life outside of the internet exist and are by no means vanishing. that said, for people who do live on the Internet to a certain extent — the Web, namely — the landscape is becoming increasingly homogenized, monolithic, and commercialized. This claim normally would need more citations, but i am fairly positive about the general feeling: we are moving towards a single closed-off everything Web ruled by powerful corporations that have zero interests in our individuality.
and whether that is bad is… eghhh. i'm not sure. but i insist on one thing for sure though: corporations suck. (i'm staring at you, microsoft. your one* products deserve to be burn in hell for what they did to the precious data of mostly owners of free accounts who instilled too much trust in a megacorp.) so how bad can letting the corporations rule the Internet? well… let's just say i wouldn't be here if i enjoyed that possibility.
(this is all pretty one sided: the debate of the personal vs. business web is a long one and certainly not one i can think out fully. i accept that there are cases where professionalism is helpful and even "expected" of a trustworthy web site. though i think sometimes being too "professional" can turn things around, like, say, justify the poor excuses for not confronting a problem that might put you in an awkward or inferior position. there are times when people manage to put a nice balance between the two, but that is by no means up to me to evaluate — i'm just a kid, not a social commentary giver :)
click here to for an outbound portal :0
(i know i can ramble a lot so… i want to at least try to not
make this an echo chamber)
i'm a boy, before you look at the "cow" in my name and start thinking about weird stuff… or well, at least that's what i like to think of myself as. i'm technically too old to be a literal boy, but i dislike being a man — that means being a grown-up, and grown-ups are boring.
i grew up with 'puters — not that i know them, but they've always been cool to me. why? i can't put it in one word. but i guess it's convenient that you can make piano sounds with it without having to being patient to practice enough to make those sounds… (and if it surprises you that i like music, you clearly don't know me enough (:
probably the one thing i was in love in school with was the stories you can tell through these means: music and drawings. together they vivified people with emotions and filled them with personalities. they were one of my dangling hopes when my school life was crumbling, as i didn't do what they want me to do and, somewhat aptly, failed their measure of the good-ness of a student. i didn't always persist, because i was (and still am) scared to confront emotions, to the point i'd often forget them. but in my heart there was always a special place for these stories… and i truly, truly hope www.rapidcow.org can be a place for that: the stories of what have been, and stories of what should have been.
there is not much to what i believe in other than that we are imperfect beings. professionalism, perfectionism, all hide that facade of us often deemed flawed and undesirable. of course i don't say this for EVERYONE who has EVER made mistakes; i am really only saying this for my past self who saw himself as a fake and buried himself away from everyone. i wish i had accepted that the flaws and differences are what make me me and that people can be a bit BS at times.
Bob Ross calls them happy little accidents which brings me to my next point: oh boy. is the Internet (ahem) sorry the Web today BORING. we got bootstrap, tailwind, that Google-esque feel in EVERYTHING. who even makes all the <marquee>s? the flashy GIFs? now that everything is PERFECT… is there an artist in the Web itself anymore?
of course the old sites were full of blemishes: those nasty <table>s tricks people today should never try to replicate when the far better flex boxes exist; the poor colors with hardly legible text that make you squint your eyes — hard; hard-coded screen size using pixels that makes things often too small or too big; and far too often a landing page where you have no immediate clue where to click. modern sites are free of these problems: you know exactly what to do when you enter such a site, even if you've never been to one before, because they all look and feel the same, and everything is exactly where you expect them to be. it's just smoother UX experience (oops, did i repeat myself? ^^;) and better accessibility in general.
all of these are improvements, by all means — if it were not for the fact that they came about to replace the old ways. the old sites are unprofessional, sure, but they were by no means undesirable: they are really part of a spectrum of what a web site can be. they are also what i think a web site (or anything really) SHOULD be: a true reflection of us, the people who made it. we have flaws that may not even be, quote, "flaws" in the serious sense but are deemed so because they depart from the corporate norm, just like how getting a bad grade is stigmatized as a deviation that can only reveal what a bad student, or bad person, someone really is. sure, they are not good, but their existence shouldn't mean less because they are short of perfection.
and this is IMO the biggest problem with the modern web and the education system: the idea that something is only worthy of existence if it is perfect, and anything imperfect is simply disallowed to exist. i reject this idea; a perfect world is a world pointless to live in, because to live is to accept and embrace the flaws that make us do the unique things only we do. without flaws there'd be no us, and without us we might as well be someone else. but that's boring — and i don't want to live a boring life. :)
you are here :) oh yeah, there's this other .org thingy too…
i have electronic mail for ya ;) just send it to webmaster [at] (my name) [dot] org! i will carefully read things too… and, oh, one other good thing about joining neocities is so that you ALSO get to comment without having to send an email! (i heard that i get an email that way too, so… :)
if you want me to do a guestbook, tell me that too! (although you have to help me figure out where do i put the guestbook first, or let me know if you want a form… please note that i refuse to make a guestbook that accepts any messages automatically. it's my site and i get to decide if i'm cool with having your message on my site :) this may feel different than, say, twitter, where you get delightful followers that have a gorgeous profile picture and one-way gate straight to an adult website! but i hope it still makes sense why i'm not the biggest fan of that happening! ^^