why this website exists :

while starting to re-learn the basics of writing html and css more seriously in late summer 2025, i re-unlocked a core memory from my childhood ( how could i bury this memory ?! ) :

it all started with my father coming home from work sometime in 2008, and under his arm there was a huge computer he had saved from the electronic trash at his workplace. he said that if he was able to fix it, it would become my first own computer. and so it did became my very first computer.

so, alone with my computer, i spent hours surfing the www while blasting mainly madonna and massive attack on my poor old logitech speakers. from rabbit holing in forums, chat rooms etc. ( i miss these times a lot ), i eventually found a website called geocities ( basically the mother of neocities ), and i created a very simple website there with small windows of my favorite music videos from youtube, listings of cheat codes for acww, a gallery of my photography, and corny gifs i had created on blingee.

i remember how fun it was to have my own little curated online garden and share it with my friends. even though they didn’t quite share my enthusiasm or the work behind it ( note that i was 10 y/o back then ), we always loved surfing together through the old, self-made www and of course we also stumbled upon some very dark, absurd, and questionable websites, but digging through an unfiltered world full of personal websites was ( and still is ) very fascinating to me.

and suddenly i stopped. perhaps because later i switched to a laptop, and it just wasn't the same flow anymore. ohh, and because puberty and life in general took up a huge amount of space. i wish i remembered the last time i updated my geocities page, or that i had archived it somewhere.

so, in disapproval of today's online world and feeling supposedly powerless to fight against it, i created this page as a response to the ugly, sterile, and ai-flooded www that we’re "forced" to interact with. and simply because it’s fun and quite punk, imo.

today, we have the urge more than ever to share about our lives and update our friends on events and projects on the www, ( social media to be precise), and i totally understand it. this trend ( or phenomenon ) resonated with me too, until i reached the point where "social" media was unbearable to look at and sucking the life out of me.

do you remember the times when youtube channels were actually customizable, with fonts, backgrounds, etc.? and myspace, netlog, tumblr, just to name a few. this is the kind of personal content i long for. it was there before, and it’s being taken away from us more and more. we can only speculate about the reasons behind it, but one thing is certain: we like sharing our lives with those around us ( and it is, after all, a valuable tool ) and instagram & co. became the main platforms, with their dubious regulations for this.

it is scary how drastically we are being limited in having our own handwriting. instead, we share our lives within non-customizable templates and call it our own, when in reality, it belongs to huge, greedy tech lords who feast on your personal data, devouring it with 1s and 0s in a bowl for breakfast.......and we thrive on their excrement.

and this is just one out of many branches of the tree called "geworfenheit"

quo vadis ???

the spark of personality.
the freedom of curating my feed myself.
without limitations in designing my space.

so this is my approach of carving out my own self-made and curated online garden again. a silent protest.

before i drift any further, that is all for now. thanks for reading and visiting!

love,
paloma


p.s:
of course, there are many many things not going well to rant about, but right now, i deliberately limit my rant to this topic only. once this website is developed enough, i might open a room for further rants and participate in discussions.