Fuck Web 3.0, bring back personal pages, all that good stuff.

I'm writing a manifesto because everyone else is doing it. Because it seemed like a cool thing to do. I want my website to be a place for cool things, where I can squirrel away any mildly interesting random stuff I found or made or remembered from my childhood whenever I feel like it. Little secrets. Puzzles. Bits of my personal truth stashed in corners and corners of corners and so on until it's not just a personal page anymore, it's a sprawling maze of me.

See? Corners of corners.

ZampanioSim has been a big inspiration of mine for a while now. If you dig into it a little, you can probably figure out how that influenced my website.

I could talk in-depth about the effect Zampanio has had on me, but then I'd be here all day. It speaks for itself. If you're reading this, you'll fit right in.

All the other web manifestos I've read feature paragraphs about how much the mainstream modern Internet sucks compared to what it used to be; a living, chaotic network of personal spaces sanitized and compressed down into a depressing handful of corporate-owned pages. They talk about the invasive and predatory nature of targeted advertisement and all the companies that want to sell your personal information to each other. They talk about the addictive design of endlessly scrolling social media and algorithms that show you the horrors of the world because it maximizes engagement.

Some of them go on to acknowledge how the old personal Web and the culture it was a part of had its own set of problems that were just as bad as the ones we face today. Dial-up, toolbars with viruses in them, just as many shitty people as there are now. I'm not interested in writing paragraphs about the new Internet and I can't speak from experience on the old; mildly questionable websites from 1999 bring me nostalgia, but it's because I spent a good part of my childhood searching through their ruins after the fact.

tl;dr I'm here for escapism. Escape from the real world and escape from the modern Internet. I'm not here to be exploited or advertised at or spoon-fed the latest crimes against humanity, and I'm not here to focus on how much I hate the Internet that does those things, either. I'm here to create and have fun and I'm doing that by turning my website into a maze.