/now

Did a major update to the main website with some legacy content, FLUR: Blades of the Universe. I added some more music that I found for it, as well as announced its existence on social. Was a pretty ambitious project at the time.

https://keyjayonline.com/share/production/flur-blades-of-the-universe

In other news, I'm trying out some new tools to see how they work in my overall web flow and workflow. I've been on a mission to rethink how I spend my time on the web and on a greater scale, on social. Thankfully now, I have a plan in order to put that in action, but it's going to take some time to build the habit honestly.

Spending some time to get more value out of RSS. It's still a very useful tool, especially if you're trying to see a bunch of news and even social feeds all in one place. Thing is, certain social networks don't make it easy to find, and other sites don't have it at all.

So I've been using a tool called N8n for a while to basically generate RSS feeds, and ran into another tool recently called RSS-Bridge and installed that as well. I'll likely have to add some feeds I follow to the https://neo.keyjayonline.com page. Highly recommend if you're trying to de-social.

That aside, been working out more, more work on music for game project, and been working on next app which doing a bunch of testing.

Websites:

Been heavily modifying the Outpost site to spruce some of the interactions, as well as add some weblinks to be part of the community!

Games:

I took the wipe on Arc Raiders! So I missed the first one but thought I'd give the next one a shot. So far, not too many regrets. I do miss being able to take big Arc's no problem, but I'm coming in with existing knowledge now so the grind back up is not as bad. The rebalancing of Blueprint distribution helps too I think.

Music:

Working on an indie game project for a client. Some exciting stuff, but still cant talk about it just yet.

Other:

These two are crazy XD

Well it's been a long time coming!

After a couple of months of work and lots of research, I've finally created the site that I've wanted for so long; a destination hub for my creative muses and a portfolio of my works both new and old. Crazy, I've been able to dig up works that I haven't seen or heard in years! In many ways also, I ask myself...man, HOW DID I COME UP WITH THIS?! 

I wanted to take things a little further though. I still have plans for the site (with some features not enabled yet), but with all the conversation about social media platform this, ID verification that, and just how...exhausting common social platforms have become, I've been seeking alternative ways of how I want to spend my time on the web; where do I find true value?

So recently, I ran into this movement called the IndieWeb. Lots of the appeal seem to center around the nostalgic aesthetic on most executions, and that's fine, but the nice thing is that it doesn't have to be. What matters is that you are creating your own curated space filled with as much of...well anything you want. Want to make a page that resembles your MySpace page of years gone, sure go ahead, and include the loudest un-skippable MIDI music track you can find with as many flashing glitter gifs that you can pull up from Internet Archive (please dont though XD ).

So I made my own space, https://keyjay.neocities.org since that seems to be the popular destination for getting involved with the IndieWeb, and the nice thing about that site is, no restrictions to HTML, CSS, or JS! So I went to work and built a site design with heavy notes on my existing new main website. The site serves as an Outpost to the main site, mostly to be in line with aspect of the IndieWeb Zeitgeist while syndicating what I can/want from my own website. While I don't think it follows the exact "feel" of the other sites on the platform, it's mine, it's what I wanted, and that's enough for me. 

I am new though so I am experimenting with how webrings work, I may make a button, stamp or two just to have fun with it, and I've begun my exploration around other havens just to see what's out there. For example, https://misterdizzy.neocities.org/ has a really nice remix of Wellerman I ran into today! 

One thing I've noticed though is that the action and effort of doing this kind of browsing mirrors the experience of browsing the web in the 90s; intentional browsing instead of mindless scrolling, when search results actually meant something and you manually had to go through pages or result to find what you're looking for. In a way...I'll be honest, I dont like this style of browsing right now, but mainly because I know I've been conditioned for so long with how social and the web have worked for the last 20+ years; I've been sucked in to favor instant gratification and that  feels like a sickness. 

So I'm going to give it time in finding the aspects of this new venture that gives me true value. It may be this way in discovering new and cool NeoCities sites, or it may be through Open Source software like Fluxer that I want to spin up on my own server. Either way, I'm here for a change up. There's so much out there from web, music, art, etc. Why limit that exposure to what the algorithm tells you is relevant?