I don't want tasteful, I want fun
i don’t want tasteful, i want fun
there are little notes in the margins of this post so you might want to view on desktop!
i was 20, all the way back in 2012, when i took a deep breath and hit ‘post’ on my very first blog.
(it was, predictably, a goth blog lol, in the fine tradition of my favourite goth bloggers of the early 2010s. i loved reading blogs by other girls and young women into alt fashion and culture, and felt inspired to start one of my own).
the boring white and grey aesthetic had already begun creeping into websites by then, but visual interest in more alternative corners of the web hadn’t completely evaporated yet. while everyone was posting with Blogspot or Tumblr and there were a lot of similar layouts, the backgrounds and headers were all at least different enough that it felt like you were exploring someone’s cool house on the internet every time you entered one!
i always loved the internet - the internet outside of social media - and since due to my upbringing i’d never had the millenial MySpace experience, the idea of having my own cool house online was pretty exciting.
so i thought i’d finally give it a go for myself!
but when it came to it, i actually found that i struggled to blog.
and it’s not because i didn’t have anything to say. (i talk a lot, that wasn’t the problem lol!)
it was because i didn’t have anywhere to put my digital graffiti.
i could have that term completely wrong, by the way, but to me it kind of encapsulates what i didn’t know i was after at the time:
a digital space to scrapbook. to doodle in the margins. to put art i liked wherever i liked it, like a Geocities page. to just be cringe and have fun with it!
i found only through experimenting with blogging that i didn’t just want walls of text interspersed with an occasional relevant image. i wanted real visuals, a vibe. a way to blend shapes, images and text non-linearly and make my blog into something like online collage art.
what i wanted was already out of date.
…and that was probably why 2012-me didn’t last long as a blogger lol, despite (to my surprise, honestly) having followers who did enjoy my outfit posts and style deep-dives lol!
» i’m fairly sure this goth pixel doll came from an alt-girl site from before 2005. i honestly wouldn’t be surprised if it had been animated in Microsoft Paint (i can’t remember if you could make animations in Paint back then, but you could certainly make the frames by saving a bunch of Paint JPGs.)
maybe this one should feature in my gothic internet shrine - the solitary-girl-weeping-black-tears thing would definitely fit!
but of course i didn’t actually know any of this at the time, let alone how to verbalise it. i gave blogging a crack a few more times. on Tumblr, even my own WordPress.
and of course i did the short-form-content thing on instagram…lots and lots of times…and just found that it felt like a continual anxiety-provoking popularity contest instead of a place to be expressive.
i really wanted to do something creative on the internet, and i just couldn’t figure out why i didn’t find posting on any of the available platforms satisfying.
and i think it’s that, as artist Kening Zhu says, apps (and i’ll add most website templates) allow you to create content, or to ‘post’. but they don’t allow you to create experiences.
experiences on the earlier internet were about this complex weaving together of text, imagery, backgrounds, and a doodling-in-the-margins, always-under-construction approach to expressing ourselves online. it was about carving out little homes or entire worlds online.
content, on the other hand, is not about world-building - it’s about producing for someone else’s marketplace. your content must fit into the established aspect ratio, and be polished and complete before you hit post. you can’t edit much once you’ve posted. you can’t customise outside the margins. and content is necessarily restricted to either an image/video with a caption, or if you have a blog, a long-form post with a few images inserted in a linear manner between paragraphs.
experiences on the web stay with you, just like a good book or movie do. they are about building and exploring individual worlds - which is why they all look different.
content is about producing and consuming products that need to fit onto a shelf - which is why they all look the same.
« i absolutely love that there’s a skull just popping out of this rose. why is it there? why is it rising from a flower inside a locket? lol who knows!
the kitschy-ness of the old web meant that stuff like this was common: themes of darkness and angst, blended with ornate beauty, and topped off with something mildly silly just because whoever made it was proud of being able to animate something. (and they should be!)
» this cauldron gif is another one of those old internet relics that likely hearkens back to the 90s. i remember seeing it on goth sites in the early 2000s, as well as pagan/witchy places.
the amount of detail in it, considering that digital art was still very pixellated and in its infancy at the time, is pretty impressive.
it probably makes me a huge nerd to get so excited to find something so old still floating around but oh well.
and it might go a long way to explaining why i longed for a corner of the internet to fully make my own, when i never got to have a MySpace experience like everyone else; and it might explain why i was frustrated that the blogging and social media platforms available by the time i finally did have more internet access were all trending towards ‘clean’ and ‘minimalist’ and - let’s face it - boring as shit.
what i wanted all this time wasn’t a traditional blog. or a social media account.
i wanted a website.
and not just any run-of-the-mill Wix template site, either.
i wanted a website because the sort of decorative, old-web stuff i like to do doesn’t fit into the platforms.
there is just no way i could add the kinds of backgrounds, gifs, or annotations in the margins on WordPress or Substack or Instagram the way i can here.
i like my online expression to be very visually extra and evoke the nostalgia of the early internet - the silliness and earnestness that we probably cringe at now but that i actually really like.
i don’t want tasteful. i want fun.
i think there are folks out there who feel the same way - places like Nekoweb and Neocities are full of expressive websites where people have made their own cool houses on the internet!
websites just have this potential to be truly unique forms of digital art and expression, and social media and most website templates just don’t allow you to turn your space on the platform into a real work of art like that.
‘tasteful’ in the context of web design really translates to boring, corporate, homogenous. literally every website looks the same in 2026. because most websites these days are trying to sell you some shit or another, and so they all follow the the marketing funnel formula: the same layout, the same phrases, the same colours and fonts, even.
it’s so interesting to me that part of the corporatisation of the internet is the doing away with human expression and fun online. as if there’s no point to self expression unless you’re going to make money off it.
and it’s not like there’s anything wrong with selling things online. even i’ve got a little shop tucked away on this site for folks to buy emo/scene themed art i’ve made myself if they’d like to.
but my site isn’t actually primarily here to sell stuff. it’s my home on the internet - something to customise and decorate and share.
the fact that most websites these days are entirely about selling and specifically designed as stiff marketing funnels is just sad - especially when websites started out as blank canvases where people could geek out about their favourite stuff and express themselves however they wanted.
whenever i browse Neocities i’m always blown away by how creative people can be! even the newbies (like me) who are CSS novices can still make things that feel special and interesting no matter how wonky the coding is.
there’s this attitude of imagination about personal website building that i love. it doesn’t have to ‘convert’. it doesn’t have to please the algorithm. there’s no AI slop. it’s about being colourful and individual and exactly the opposite of the urgency, hustle and same-ness of social media and the corporate web.
browsing the indie web, and making my own website here, feel like relief.
in summary, i really don’t mind being tacky and silly and cringe online if it means the relief and liberation and actual happiness i feel at getting to carve out a space where i can be myself.
and i hope that inspires you to make your own online spaces that feel like you, too: beyond algorithms and followers and whatever else we’ve been taught to care about. creativity and fun first, always.
thank you for being here! <3
