I am so bored of making websites that have to be or become something. I want to play around with the website as an art form. As a lightweight art form, one that takes up no physical space and maybe as little digital space as possible. Which is something that is important to me, I've been realising over the past few months, and everyone keeps considering it something that's holding me back, something I need to overcome, my tendancy toward minimalism, but I don't think it is that - it's a philosophical conviction that I'm not sure quite how I arrived at, but one that's important to me nonetheless. I want to create without it feeling destructive or unsustainable. I want to create without having to carry around everything I make. I want to create without feeling bound to what already exists. I want to throw rocks in the ocean. I want to make an internet scrapbook. Maybe a portfolio.

This project was initially a directory for me and then it became something else. I realised that I didn't want it to be a public directory, just a directory for my person use, but that I found so many interesting websites in making it that I wanted this to become a project in making my own experimental websites. This is an experimental website. This website is just text. I am not really thinking about what I am writing. I am just writing. If this is a free writing exercise, I'm doing a great job. If it's a website outlining my ethos, maybe less so. But that's also just the name of the website - all the website is is a wall of text. That's all it needs to be. It's a collection of thoughts and ideas, specifically the thoughts I am having that are underpinning this project. I instictively what to edit this (I kind of am, I'm going back through it now,) and make it more professional and formal and proper, but that's not the point. It doesn't need to be proper. It just needs to be something I am creating. Some kind of experiment.

Maybe that is the ethos. To create for the sake of creating. I don't think I can really have hobbies that are big longterm projects, I would rather dip in and out according to my own whims. And it has worked for me - over the years I've become semi proficient in a number of random things, and if there's one thing I've learned to be good at it's adaptability, experimentation, evolution. Creating connections, applying knowledge in different ways. Interdisciplinerary studies, increaingly. I think I undervalue how I use my time. I am never going to use my free time to make something big and amazing. I am always going to use it on lots of little things. I want to give myself permission to do that. Maybe that's what this is. Giving myself permission.

Do you know how many Neocities websites I have? I don't. I think maybe 4? I keep making new email addresses to make new websites. And that's fine, but I want to let myself just make lots of tiny separate things in one big thing and collect them and not have to pretend like they're all complete things in an of themselves rather than conceptual websites, experiments. Consider this my collection. I'd considered making another new email address - I have a whole art website I could be using for this, what am I gonna do with that? - but that's opposed to what I am trying to achieve. That would be making this into it's own Big Thing. I might continue updating my personal directory because I find it so genuinely helpful for navigating and I'd love to keep adding my finds to it, but it is also its own experiment, something that exists that I may discard, something that I made just to make it, something that exists just to exist. I don't need a new email address. This is that space, already.

I think to some extent this idea of having one website that holds lots of little experimental websites is something I'm finding particularly important because it's the digital version of using what you already have, reduce/reuse/recycle. Maybe that doesn't matter so much online, where there isn't such a thing as digital waste (as far as I'm aware...?), but lately I've found it important to question whether I really need to buy something new, or if I can just repurpose something old. Or even, in this case, find something pre-existing and expand what I'm doing with it. Like having a notebook with lots of different kinds of writing in it, with essays and notes and prayers and letters and sketches and lists and thoughts, rather than a seperate one for each. Or having both my pop and my classical music on the same MP3 player. That's what I'm trying to do here - make use of what I've already got, expand how I'm using it, instead of just constantly reaching for something new.