being able to do a lot of things is very fun. it's like having too much party tricks, and there are always things you can do to show off. i love finding a random rubiks cube at the cafe or at a friend's house, solving it after it being scrambled once and then left in the dust. the person owning that rubiks cube will yell 'i have had it for six years and have never solved it once!', followed by 'and you finished it in a minute?' makes me feel smart.
or at sleepovers, when we have spent two hours playing every single card game we know, and getting tired of it, but not knowing anything else to do. maybe i'll try some sleight of hand, amaze the two people sitting beside me who just happened to watch what i was doing, and then showing off a simple but elaborate trick that can blow their mind. not really fancy stuff, just the really simple stuff you can figure out if you have even slightly tried to learn card tricks.
riffle shuffling decks, pen spinning tricks, simple lifehacks, a very weird fun fact. i love collecting simple, useless, weird skills a lot of people would have never even think about trying.
some of the skills i've always wanted to try but have never tried are playing the saxophone, the ollie or kickflip on a skateboard, hip-hop dancing, and coding. some of this i have never tried because of resources (a saxophone is quite expensive where i'm from), and some of them i have tried a little, a few times, but was always too hard for me to grasp that i just give up completely. coding was apparently one of them.
i have always liked the look of hackers on movies. typing cryptic stuff into a computer, with black and green screens, navigating the computer without having to have buttons you can click or toggles you can switch. seeing my friends code stuff for school was also really cool, and i have always wanted to try, but i was always so bad at technology that i haven't really, actually, worked hard to try to learn it. i don't really understand computers, but i have always liked the visual aspect of coding. The few times i had to put commands on a computer command prompt makes me feel so ecstatic i felt like rami malek's mr. robot (or whatever other hackers that are on pop media out there). i really wanted to try coding, so bad, and have tried various free coding courses (made for kids!) but can really never understand them. i have tried, and gave up, numerous times that the moment i found neocities i saw it as an opportunity to try one more time.
for a few years now i have started reading books. i was never a reader, but in college i started reading classic novels, then branching out to contemporary fiction, and then essays and non-fiction histories. this new habit has really made me want to try to write, but i have never tried. i was always terrified of my writings being read by people. i thought neocities is the perfect platform for me to try it out, since i can be anonymous, and it won't show up on social media timelines of people i know.
i also have always loved arts. i was the art kid growing up, hanging out in the art room at school, and being friends with other artsy kids. i was the kid that was always doodling in class. graduating high school, i got into architecture school and there were mostly artsy kids, and so i got influenced by them and started posting them on social media. my art was never that good, i was never good at graphic design (another skill i want to master), and never really liked finishing projects. graduating school and getting into the workforce kind of stopped me from making art, because i am constantly designing stuff at work, but i've always missed it. neocities seemed like a good platform for me to start making art, posting them without anyone knowing, and actually, maybe, force me to finish stuff.
so, after watching a lot of neocities 101 and html + css tutorial videos, i started to build this website.
the first day was the toughest. i could not grasp the concept of having to specify every single thing, like how many pixels would a box be and in what color would the border be, how many pixels the thickness of the border is, and just everything. having to specify things as headers, paragraphs, having different names for bullet points, images, links, everything, just freaked me out and was really hard to understand. as a person used to dabbling with design software, i didn't understand how people could create such cool and intricate websites without having the ability to drag, stretch, and stack stuff. it was so hard for me that i quit. again.
but the idea of having that space that I made, and is FOR me, is really appealing. i have been more and more bored with the concept of algorithm suggestions, and have been able to see through it and not finding things i would actually consume, that the concept of just having a place where people can literally do anything they want and not be stuck to a template sucks me back into trying to make my own website, four weeks later.
i am a lover of shortcuts. as an architect, i use various softwares to do my job. using shortcuts are very helpful when it comes to speed, as architects have really long, slow projects that takes months to develop, and every software has different shortcuts. i love having to memorize the different shortcuts that various softwares have, and being told by people, usually that are not in the industry, that the hand i use for the keyboard works very fast and that they can never tell what i am typing.
as i progressed further on developing this website, i started to look at the code tags as shortcuts, and more and more, it started to get fun.
now. the coding itself isn't really that fun. i find myself repeating the same 10 seconds on a one-hour css tutorial video over and over and over again and just getting something half-decent. the concept of something's position being absolute, or relative, or like, float, whatever it is, is something i still can't comprehend even now. when i insert an image and it ruins the whole layout i just want to cry.
the fun part is feeling, in real time, the learning curve.
everything is a learning curve. i am getting into my fourth year of being an architect and everything still feels like i'm learning. i have been sketching my whole life but have just started trying to learn to draw anatomy. but at the starting days, like right now, it really feels awesome to surf through my own website (that looks like shit) and say, i did that.
it feels like when i started to play the guitar. i remember wanting to learn it so bad, and then getting a guitar as a gift from my grandpa, and quitting after barely two weeks. it took me three years to pick it back up, and finally learning how to play it after my grandpa passed. but now it's like my favorite pasttime. singing along while reading chords from the internet, or learning to do intricate riffs and fingerpicking songs, or figuring out a song by ear. it has been ten plus years and i still love it.
after finally winging the layout, and make it look slightly like i want it to be, i stretched my back and looked at it from afar. finally. i made my own website. using code.
i find myself staring at the code (and not the actual website itself). like, i wrote all of that. i am finally learning to code.
a lot of the skills i have are usually skills you can master in a week or two. pen tricks usually start with your friend getting hit by the pen countless times before you can ensure them that it will stay in your hand, but after a week, you will do it every single time you hold a pen, for the rest of your life. but this one is different. i can feel it taking me tens of years to master, just like drawing, or the guitar, and it automatically being another hobby because there are just too much things to learn that i won't get bored of it. it gives me joy to know that i have another hobby up my sleeve, no matter how bad i will be at it. also, this will probably force me to learn more about graphic design! two birds!
p.s. other things i want to learn: comedy writing! god please make me funny i am so boring