Desperate Fun Productions
I make music, zines, blog posts, and stream games.
How this site got this way
It was the last Thursday in February, 2025, and I was bored at work; I read a post on Boing Boing about Sophie Koonin's love letter to homemade websites, This page is under construction.
I remember those days! My first website was hosted on Xoom, and then there was all the work I did coding a dynamic site in Perl on Tripod. My Quake side got hosted on PlanetQuake, introducing me to the delights of ASP and CSS, and then...
Back then I was just trying to put something up there and show off. Rabbiting about my then favourite movies or anything else I was obsessive about. While I did focus on a constant, coherent visual style — yes, I was looking forward to becoming a professional web developer — I wasn't trying to sell anything.
Flash forward to now. Freedom of expression is stifled, you have to jam your parts into prefab slots on someone else's website, and that site really isn't yours. The owners can kick you out, delete your postings, censor them, or just block you from others' sight. We used to own digital sections; now we rent from virtual landlords. (Yes, I know, even back then you could be evicted if you got dobbed in for that super secret page of porn that wasn't actually linked to, but you told friends, and one of them was found out, which is pretty much the same.)
If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website. A little home on the independent web.
A reflection of your personality in HTML and CSS (and a little bit of JS, as a treat). This could be a professional portfolio, listing your accomplishments. It might be a blog where you write about things that matter to you. It could even be something very weird and pointless (even better) – I love a good single-joke website. Ultimately, it's your space and you can do whatever you want with it.
More than that, everything you do in your virtual apartments is being monitored and monetised. Whinging about gambling machines being an effective metaphor for job searching? "Huh? What? I stopped listening at 'gambling'," the ad algorithm says, "so here's ads for gambling apps! Lots of them! You're obsessed with these, right?" Your browsing habits are tracked and sold to ad companies who don't give a damn that you only looked at that thing about the Saw franchise out of curiosity, for example.
The big social media companies? They're authoritarian surveillance states. If you care about your content, put it on your own site.
This site is what I would describe as "semi-professional". It's not tied to a specific character or franchise such as The Church of the SubGenius or my DJ/streaming avatar, Cranky Rabbit. But it does point to them, hence the linktree first and foremost.
The main layout and CSS comes from a linktree-specific template by Vitor Antoni, lightly folded, spindled, and mutilated by myself.
The colours of cyan and magenta are chosen not because of cyberpunk style, but because in 2024, I purchased a colour cartridge for my printer that stopped printing the yellow. Cyan and magenta highlights became the norm. It's also a strongly popping combination, that would be better if I could layer multiple drop shadows on a single div.
The linktree's the thing; This site is a sort of hub where you find out where to go in order to watch, listen, or purchase. And maybe a social medium or two. I am growing cold on those.
The blog list and pages are operated by PHP scripts. The listing is done thanks to a chap on StackOverflow; the actual blog entries are written in Markdown using the Parsedown script. I used this on my Cranky Rabbit site to populate the dynamic parts, such as recent mixes, recent music, and so forth.
And that's it. I still have to log into my host and upload images and new blog posts, but since these are few and far between, updates about "Hey, I stuck a new mix up" or anything like that are more likely to surface on BlueSky or Tumblr. That's because I am lazy and don't like logging into and clicking through all the stations of the cross in order to upload a text file and maybe imagery.
And no contact details. I know full well nobody wants my skills, my talent, my productions. If you've got questions, the socials and shops are in the fargnaxing linktree.
Also, after some thought, I started asking if I really needed a domain, or dynamic pages, or a dedicated email. This is a site for a permanent amateur and pauper, a forlorn wail from a guy running the digital equivalent of selling tat off a blanket on the street. So goodbye paid hosting, hello Neocities subdomain. As a result, the PHP generates the page, and I copy that into the guts of a new HTML page with the needed s/.php/.html/ calls. (If you know what that means, you know.)
So here it is. My character-agnostic site. I started on static, free hosting, and I will no doubt die here.
Not that you care.
Nobody does.