-1-

Hello and welcome to my Neocities page. My intent for this page is for it to serve as my long-term, ever-evolving refuge from the continued enshitification of the internet. As I’m sure others who seek out oases such as Neocities or Nekoweb are aware, the internet of the ‘90s and early 2000s, Web 1.0, bears little resemblance to the products packaged today for us by Meta, Google, Reddit, X, or Bluesky.

Web 2.0 offers convenience and accessibility, but these qualities come at a cost. We’ve relinquished the responsibilities of creation, curation, and even the discovery of websites to tech bros trafficking in packaged hubs offering one-stop shops for friendships, news, and entertainment. Social media platforms that promised to connect us instead seek to entrap and commodify our attention. And oh boy, entrap and commodify are exactly what they've done.

planned updates:

• A shrine dedicated to protest music
• A page for posting pet pictures
• An expanded "About Me" page
• A splash page
• A media recommendation page
• An art gallery to post finished projects
• And more . . .

Spend enough time with Meta, Google, or Amazon, and the algorithm is sure to notice. In no time, your feeds will be inundated with more and more of your interests. There’s never been a stronger recommendation system, one tailored to your ego and designed to feed you content to keep you engaged, scrolling, and purchasing for as many hours a day as possible. If that weren’t bad enough, the algorithms shepherd us into camps, anger us with rage-bait, and turn us against one another, for little reason other than to increase the time we spend glued to and spending money on these platforms. While we lose our time, money, and empathy to this entrapment, the few companies who monopolize the web are fattened at our expense.

With the pervasiveness of the smart phone, these tech bros have unwittingly unleashed the real-life analog for Orwell’s telescreen—a device used to pacify, stupefy, and enrage the population. However, even Orwell hadn’t considered that the real thing would do all of this while simultaneously draining the people’s purse in the process and contributing to levels of consumption driving Earth’s sixth mass extinction. Worse yet, all of this promises to deteriorate further, even exponentially, as those same tech bros decide it's time to force yet another technological “advancement” down our throats with the proliferation of artificial intelligence driven by large language models.

With knowledge of Web 2.0’s very real harms, I’d predictably like to excise it from my life. However, as someone for whom the phrase “terminally online” would apply, I’m not ready to say goodbye to the entirety of my virtual existence just yet. As hard as it may be to admit, the internet has long been and continues to be an integral part of how I experience human culture.

anime & manga:

As such, I’ve come to Neocities searching for the ghosts of websites past. Not yet touched by the rot of late-stage capitalism, the internet I remember was a place of experiment and exploration. It was a place inundated with personality. Websites served as both information reservoirs and digital art installations. They gave users a glimpse into the creator’s inner space in a manner unlike any other medium before. Features and attractions could be completely superfluous. Utility was optional. Web pages were the manifestation of the ego molded by their creators and filtered through seizure-inducing gifs, tinny chiptunes, and low-res waifus.

In seeking this past, I wish to return to a period where my internet usage focuses on creation, not mindless consumption. I want the internet to again be in service of my interests, instead of me in service of its. While I’m sure this website will also become a distraction, it will, I hope, become a catalyst for the craft of art and written pieces that might otherwise have remained in my head—a place with a definite expiration date within the next 70 or so years (likely fewer if global trends continue). But even beyond leaving my mark, I just want to be engaged in the act of creation. I am, after all, my happiest when I am doing so. What more can we want from life but happiness?

Click here for a short history of my time online.

-2-

Now in my thirties, my formative years were the 2000s, when the internet offered a world of possibility, one completely alien to my Boomer parents and Silent Generation grandparents. Growing up in Appalachia as a weeb and only child could be an isolating experience. While I had many great friendships, I often looked to the internet to connect with them due to distances covered by our county. Terminally online from adolescence on, I experienced this new world in stages.

First, came websites like CartoonNetwork.com, where I would spend hours a day after school playing several of the many cartoon-inspired games hosted on their servers, titles like the great, at least, in memory, Codename Kids Next Door: Operation G.R.A.D.U.A.T.E.S., a Raiden-style shmup. When I would tire of the games, I’d spend even more time carefully organizing my favorite cToons on my Cartoon Orbit page. Cartoon Orbit was my first experience with the internet’s addictive hit. I poured hours of my young self into collecting digital trading cards, with special attention given to any anime-themed cToons, especially any Dragon Ball stickers. After Cartoon Orbit came RuneScape, a game I played for much of middle school under the alias, “Bardock217,” a first of many anime-themed usernames I would come to adopt.

From RuneScape came the forums and the beginnings of social media. First were the IGN and GameSpot forums where I kept track of games for Sony’s PS2, Nintendo’s GBA, and discussed Toonami and Adult Swim’s lineup of anime: Dragon Ball Z, Yu Yu Hakusho, Mobile Fighter G Gundam, Rurouni Kenshin, Cowboy Bebop, Big O, Inuyasha, FLCL, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Fullmetal Alchemist and Paranoia Agent. When it comes to media, young Jamie had a lot to discuss and to research, and forums provided an excellent avenue for both. As for social media, this was the time of MySpace, Gaia, and Bebo—hubs for user-created websites whose explicit purpose was the projection of the human ego. I used all three, and in shaping my self, I was able to learn rudimentary HTML and CSS, skills that I’m now utilizing in my thirties to build this website.

Following this period came my stint with DS-Play, a forum and chat site dedicated to matchmaking for games, mostly DS at the time, later including Wii, running on the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection. Prior to Mario Kart DS, RuneScape was my only real experience with online gaming at the time. In adding online to the DS’s roster, Nintendo greatly increased my internet usage. I made friendships that would last at least a couple years just hanging out in chatrooms with other kids playing DS games. And we had excellent titles to choose from with Mario Kart DS, Animal Crossing: Wild World, Metroid Prime Hunters, Jump Ultimate Stars, Tetris DS, and Star Fox Command. Having come from a rural town in Appalachia, I have no doubt that my online friendships helped to shape my antiracist and leftist views by exposing me to many more people and viewpoints than I ever would have encountered in my very white hometown. This obsession with Nintendo would also eventually lead to a short stint as a game journalist for the website, Nintendo World Report. A position that would make a childhood dream of going to E3 and meeting Shigeru Miyamoto a reality in 2012.

Morover, this period also saw me at my most creative. At the time, my primary aspiration was to become a graphic artist. I spent hours teaching myself the photomanipulation software, GIMP, to create forum signatures for myself and members of the various forums I frequented. It was a time where I could create simply out of the desire to be helpful and flex my ability, regardless of how ultimately poor many of the products were.

-3-

After this, I took a predictable yet inferior path to YouTube, then memes—Millennial brainrot such as I Can Haz Cheeseburger and rage comics—on to Facebook, Reddit, 4chan (specifically /m/, /a/, /tv/, /lit/, and sometimes /g/ 😊), Twitter, Instagram, and so on. These last few represent the ever enshitifying hubs for which I hope to find refuge from with this website’s creation.

— Two-Reeler, 29 July 2025

P.S. expect much of the content here to be at least somewhat masturbatory in scope. While creation is the goal, what I am creating is an imprint of myself—a kind of primary source that gives place to the voice of one insignificant ape in over 8-billion. Having perused other creations from apes of the past, I know that websites like these found on Neocities will, in some small way, serve as a mirror to the past, hopefully even after my brief existence is extinguished.