August 7, 2024 - HTML Makes My Brain Hurt

Back in high school, around 2008-ish, I was a young wannabe emo kid trying to find somewhere to fit in. Living in blue jeans and black t-shirts as often as my parents would allow, I was filled with the kind of teenage angst that only fellow Midwesterners can appreaciate and desperate for an outlet. I had my friends at school of course, but that wasn't the same. Not all of them had an interest in the spooky and the macabre, and the few who did elicited in me a feeling of inadequacy, something that I couldn't really understand or unpack until adulthood. But that's a tangent for another day.

I don't remember how I was introduced to it, but Vampire Freaks (RIP in peace) showed up on my radar and quickly drew me in. In one fell swoop, it broadened my world. As I explored the forums and joined various "cults" I started to pick up how people were customizing their posts: html. These little bits of code were magic to me. It could change text, it could embed images, it could do it all! At some point I even kept a notebook of html bits that I used frequently; it was my own little grimoir. Make no mistake though, I didn't actually understand what html was at the time. I just knew it could make things look cool in my little forum posts.

Fast forward to 2020: I'm locked in the house with my family in the middle of a pandemic, coping poorly with too much time in my own head, and enrolling in an LIS graduate program because the world is ending and I might as well make some life changes while I still have mine. My first semester includes a course on information technology. Our final assignment was to create a professional webpage for ourselves entirely from scratch. My days on VampireFreaks didn't prepare me for building an entire site from scratch. I could feel my brain melting like a block of wax on a hot stove trying to understand how all the pieces fit together. What the fuck was CSS? How was I supposed to parse any of this devil speak and turn it into a decent website? After I finished that class I swore that I would never touch HTML or CSS ever again.

Anyway, the moral of this post is that time makes liars of us all. Now that I'm not living in fight or flight mode, the mechanics of how HTML and CSS work are starting to come together. Granted, I used a site generator to make this (thanks again to sadgrl for that), but having something complete to poke around in is making it much easier to figure out and pick apart. CSS doesn't seem as scary as it did before. I keep learning new things every day.