10/27/24- happy halloween! and mid-autumn refresh 
so! idk who's keeping up with this website at any point but i thought it'd be cool to mention some of the stuff i've been doing here to refresh it a lil bit, give it a bit of a new coat of paint and also fix some of the broken stuff i coded in that no longer worked on html5.
idk why i suddenly got a new burst of energy to update this site and whip it up into slightly better shape but! i did!
and lbr, no website is ever truly done, right? we grow and evolve and learn and therefore everything we do is liable to be a work in progress forever. so!
i happened to (this weekend while i'm sitting at home bored and trying not to spend any money LOL) 1. refresh the home page a little bit by moving some graphics around and fixing the stopped marquee of my blinkies that i managed to collect. idk why the marquee tag no longer works on html5 but it was a sad day when i found that out :( i loved my lil merry go round of blinkies i had on top of the page and it bummed me out when i looked up why the tag no longer worked no matter what i tried to do. so alas, rip marquee, you will be sorely missed. i replaced it with a slideshow option instead that sorta kinda works? it's not a perfect replacement but it was the best i could do with my limited amount of coding knowledge LOL
so hopefully that looks okay to most ppl visiting, plus i shoved it down further on the page bc my goal for the home page was to stop fuckin using the position: absolute css code so damn much. it made things look way too wonky and i was embarrassed to see all the elements i stuck onto the page on a screen with a completely diff resolution size to my old laptop (which is what i originally built this site on).
now i did state in my lil welcome blurb that i was building a non-responsive site! so ppl were warned! but i was like "geez louise this site looks like such a mess and i'm still trying to zoom in and out to make it look okay". so i just... did away with all of the graphics i painted onto the site. those were such time-wasters, too, bc i would try to line them up perfectly to other divs i had on the page pixel by pixel. it was just so much work, and for what? it wasn't gonna look that great on anybody else's screen! so yeah, that was happily done away with.
and 2. which isn't that big of a deal to anyone else but i figured i'd add in for the fashionistas here: i did away with the "etsy" div on the shopping page of this site! why? for several reasons, ofc! etsy sucks. it just does. it steals so much money from vendors and puts in so many weird rules and fees and policies that it is SUPER shady lately, esp given the amount of scammers and dropshippers on that site anyways. what's the point of making every small shop bend to these stupid rules if you're gonna let scammers and ghost shops set up accounts to trick ppl out of their hard earned money regardless? so dumb. plus i've even heard of ai bots lowkey taking over as well and that is just so... like c'mon man, what is this, amateur hour?
not to mention the amount of israeli shops camped there too giventhe whole... well, you know. ethnic cleansing happening over there on the USA's dime? yeah. def not buying any product from anybody living in tel aviv, i can tell ya that.
not to mention the amount of shops closing up left and right everywhere. several shops that i bought from would no longer exist after a couple of months and tbh i don't blame them. between the exorbitant seller fees and the bonkers instagram-like banning of shops out of nowhere nowadays, i can imagine not many ppl want to use etsy as a platform to sell anymore. they mostly pack up and leave for shopify or redbubble or if they can, they make their own websites.
which is ofc very very valid. i always try to see if shops on etsy have their own websites or maybe their other merchant accounts somewhere. etsy is so unbelievably unstable that i was checking thru some of the links on my site and every other shop linked there was either completely wiped from the internet or was listed as "not selling anymore". i was like... well. might as well just raze the fucken list off my site entirely bc when half the links don't work anymore, what is the point?
so yes, the shop page is still being updated i swear! it's just that lately i'm trying to cut back on my shopping and looking for other creative outlets that don't completely drain my wallet lol but i do come back every now and then with some shops being added and others being deleted to keep that page as functional as possible.
i don't want ppl genuinely bookmarking that page just to come to it every once in a while and be frustrated at the dead links. i do check thru some of those links to see if the shops are still in business!
and tbh? that's also sadly the nature of a lot of small businesses in general. all i can do is try to promote them as much as i can, try to emphasize slow fashion and sustainability as often as i can, but the nature of capitalism is that every business venture comes with risks and sometimes the best thing to do for some of those businesses is to just close down shop. hell, even big companies are struggling rn in america. shit ain't easy nowadays you guys LOL
yay shitty collapsing economy!! hooray! /s
anyways, ye. sooooo that's that on the updates. as per usual, i will keep trying to refresh this site overall as much as i can. i know i said a lil while ago that i'm overall p happy with the layout of this site and that there really aren't many things i can think to add to the site that will really make it stand out (with my limited knowledge of coding ofc! sorry y'all) but i do still intend to keep returning back to this lil side hobby of mine every once in a while, yanno?
i do love this site! and i love the nice comments ppl leave me every now and then on my homepage! i enjoy adding a slice of pink to neocities and seeing how many visitors i get every month :3 <3
especially after 2 years of semi-consistent updates made to this website, i think it's safe to say i ain't going anywhere anytime soon!
and actually! i know ppl can't comment on these or anything but i was also wondering for this spooky szn whether or not i should start a sort of horror movies shrine for this website... really curious to know if anyone would be interested at all on this internet to read my horror movie reviews and thoughts n stuff like that LMAO
i mean, who cares, right? this is my site, so i can do whatever i want with it but it would be kinda cool to finally properly build and establish a shrine just like veryone else on neocities seems to have! i never knew what i wanted to do with that bc i never thought abt anything that i loved consistently enough to build a whole page for. even my sewing page didn't really last very long, sadly.
but i'm getting excited thinkin abt building a horror movie shrine!!! i love horror so unbelievably much you guys, and all i've been doing since september is just inhaling horror movies like my life depends on it. god, i fucking love horror.
and hell, let's turn this blog entry into one that's on theme: i have been watching so many horror movies lately! like a butt-ton fr
i think it would be kinda weird to stick a horror/edgy themed page into a site that i've built to be as sugary sweet as humanly possible, but yanno what? fuck it. that's me, anyways! sugary sweet lookin on the outside, but if you dig around a lil deeper you'd find a lil bit of darkness in there (*ᴗ͈ˬᴗ͈)ꕤ*.ﾟ
i'd most likely design it to be pretty cutesy lookin anyways, just like a lot of pastel halloween and horror graphics everywhere tbh LMAO
so yeah! new page in the works there, i'm probs gonna start building it soon and launch it hopefully before the end of this year, depending on how busy i get in life. oddly enough, i'm p proud of myself for getting out a lot more this month in general and taking care of my social life. idk what possessed me to go out and visit diff shops that i've always wanted to visit, but i have!
this month, i've visited an artist's market filled with a lot of local artist work and bought a couple of things. next month i'm going to another local artist market to see if i can pick anything up for my family this year to give as gifts since the holidays are coming soon! i also went to a cat cafe in a city near me that opened recently, and i got to see cute kitties while eating pumpkin cheesecake! i finally bought some locally grown groceries at a farmer's stall i always drive by going to and from work and their stuff was surprisingly amazingly cheap. might hit them up again before winter sets in tbh!
i've gone to see two horror movies lately by myself, just getting up off of my ass to support the horror industry since they released banger after banger this year. like is it me, or is horror just like... killing the game lately? every horror reviewer on youtube that i follow is getting fed with content for daaayyyss, some even posting that there are so many movies coming out this year that they have like no time to sit down and make other videos besides reviews. it's crazy. plus, everyone and their grandma is talking abt terrifier 3 and i haven't even sat down to watch the 2nd one yet :o
i should probs get on that soon actually... don't want any spoilers ruining it now do i? /s <-- i mostly meant that sarcastically bc i mean who tf is watching terrifier movies for the plot? LMFAO
but anyways, yeah, the hour is getting late and i should probs finish tweaking this site up before having to make dinner and prep for work tmrrw. ugh, work. ugh capitalism. ugh ugh ugh
but i mean what else is new? them bills don't pay themselves, after all.
as usual, thanks 4 reading and byyyyeeeeeeeee :3