How about you emulate me and start your own website?

I don't think terrorizing people about the professional and psychic decay you experience posting only to social media can do a lot more than it's already done, so I won't be going into that very much. You already know all your hard work and precious connection can be vanished in a flash if you upset some wet diapers king, and that anything that serves you ads under the pretense of being free is actually selling you to the people posting those ads. Like, you know that, right? I don't wanna go over that again, I wanna tell you what's nice and easy and cheap about actually doing the thing. Because I've been using my personal website for a while now, and let me tell you: No regrets.

Part One: Building a website is a thing a 12 year old can do.

I know this because I was 12 once, and I did build a website. I did this in 1998 when resources were fewer, code was more obtuse and necessary, and the combined forces of dial-up limitations (Slow! Interrupted!) and limited comprehensive learning material online meant that learning that code often involved a trip to a library. In another town. In a car. That I couldn't drive. And you know what? My website, a glorified shrine to my Doom achievements and Dragon Ball Z opinions, functioned perfectly well.

This isn't to imply that you're dumber than a child if your cursory forays into learning web development baffle and daze you. What I'm trying to say is that the skills you need to build a rudimentary, static website that serves your purposes are super easy to acquire, need not be acquired all at once before you start, and are easily supplemented with resources that are cheap or even free.

Part Two: My very own piss on the poor website

Sure, you might say, you insist building a website is easy, but is it... FREE?

I mean, it can be. I don't recommend it. See, as an example I use on account of its ubiquity in discussions of hobbyist web development and because it's an extreme example of the limits of free hosting, NeoCities is a project run by one dude. Not founded by a single founder and then grown, not overseen by a single executive, opened and run by one dude in every sense. Which is cool, and generous, and exciting, and... kind of limiting and precarious.

How is it limiting? Well, because Kyle runs and to some extent takes responsibility for the service personally, your content is (ostensibly) limited to content that Kyle's personally comfortable being held accountable for. As someone who spent his college days moderating message boards, I can say with confidence: This is a completely sane position for Kyle to hold. I actually think of NeoCities as being a lot less like Bluehost and a lot more like MySpace, a platform upon which one can build a customized instance that is still subservient to an overarching structure. One cannot, for instance, post certain kink content on NeoCities, and the bar for what counts is variable at best. The hard lines I've seen expressed are ABDL and associated ageplay kinks, which makes sense not because these kinks are harmful and evil (they aren't, at least not any more than backyard wrasslin' is) but because they are contentious. They're also, like the content guidelines on NeoCities, very much... open to interpretation. Tokyo Babylon is a manga and anime series with enduring appeal and influence among fans and creators into the modern day, and the main character is a sixteen year old boy in a relationship with a man in his twenties. Would a website dedicated to good faith literary critique of the series be in danger of getting wiped for debauchery? I argue based on my observations of platforms with entire moderation teams drawing paychecks to make these decisions that it would depend on how motivated an individual or small group of individuals are to give Kyle trouble about it. Every freebie service, to some extent, will be vulnerable to these whims.

So what, then, does it cost to own and build a website? For me, it costs $84 a year. Retaining ownership of my domain name is $24 for twelve months, and the static hosting package I buy from Porkbun costs $60 over the same period. That works out to $7 per month for everything I do here, which is about what you'd pay per month to watch (a portion of) Netflix's flagging catalog with ads choking the feed. YouTube sans ads is over twice that. And you can get all that junk Somewhere Else anyway.

Not that I would ever do such a thing. Just saying, if you're so hard up for money $7 is a stretch you shouldn't be paying for slop that's just going to be redistributed in portrait-cropped 2 minute chunks on TikTok tomorrow anyway.

I've also seen some gnashing of teeth and rending of garments about the immense, life-destroying cost of a personal computer upon which one might code a website. I program and update this thing from a Dell-branded toaster oven I bought for $60 at a thrift shop. It has no video card (but still plays Minecraft!), it gets its wi-fi from a dongle I found in my roommate's desk, and it's so hilariously tiny that upgrading it poses some unique puzzles.

If all you're looking to do is text and some basic photo and video editing, that's about all you need. Windows 10 is 8 fucking years old, which means computers still floating in circulation that can run it can be up to 10 years old. This means they're not exciting, they're effectively junk, they have no whizzbangflash, and people offload them to upgrade. Find them at a yard sale. Find them on Craigslist. Many thrift shops have entire bins of mice and keyboard. Some even give you a keyboard and mouse if you buy a desktop there. If you have a television with an HDMI or DVI or VGA input, and that's an output on your garbage can PC? You don't need a monitor. You have one. That's how video I/O works. And monitors don't have to be expensive either. I'm looking at one on Craigslist right now that's $20. It's 19 inches, it's a flat screen, it takes VGA input. It's $20.

"Okay, smartass, how much do I have to pay to build something like a blog?"

Fucking. Nothing. Nothing, you hypothetical bastard. I use Publii, which is free and can be used totally offline for drafting purposes. To upload and manage said updates, I use Cyberduck, which is also free. Both programs provide resources telling you how to use them. Publii has several free, attractive themes. I use Mercury. Cyberduck, you know, does the thing I need it to do which is upload files.

For the less dynamic parts of the site, I'm currently using CSS and materials from foollovers, and while I recommend them on the quality of their work I will be discontinuing this in the near future because I intend to do some posting that could frustrate the administrator's relationship with Japan's copyright system and I don't want to cause them undue trouble.

So yeah, please make a website. They're cool and they're fun, and you get to build your confidence in a skill that's kind of fallen by the wayside despite being really useful. I think $7 a month for a funky little hobby is a pretty good trade, and we should all do more funky little things.