About me
Hello, this is your webmaster speaking to you from Belgium. Call me Coby Cat, or Fox Simile. Any resemblance to a certain popular rodent is purely intentional! My interests are pretty broad, but in the context of this site they often circle around pop and consumer culture. Specifically, I often try to look at how Europe (Belgium in particular) engages with American culture.
Coming Full Circle
I started creating websites during my childhood, using Freewebs for hosting. Sadly, those early sites are long gone (and the internet culture that they belonged to), but here on the webhost Neocities, I’ve come full circle. Though you might be wondering why I even bother, haha.
Nostalgia & Reinvention
I’ve always been a nostalgic person, but I adhere to the credo of vintage aesthetics, not vintage
values
. In my teens, I drifted away from the things that made me happy because I was searching for
something deeper.
That search ended up burning me out, and I realized I’d left a lot of what mattered behind.
I don't know about y'all, but the media I grew up with in my late 90s and early 2000s childhood was often pretty ‘woke’ avant la lettre. I suppose these are now the values I conservatively hark back to.
Still, I’m not interested in simply preserving the past. Either I want to pick back up where it left off, or pick and choose the good bits and fashion something new.
Handcrafted website
My website is largely made by hand, barring a little Python script that aids me with constructing my blog feeds. The visual design tries to emulate something you'd see around the year 2007, taking cues from The Skins Factory's designs for Disney for example. But unlike the way it was done back then, I try to do it primarily with modern day CSS, as a challenge.
The 3D Coby in my sidebar and the wordmark underneath were made with Blender, while vector-based illustrations are made with Inkscape. The typeface using in headings and sidebar links is Mouse Memoirs by Astigmatic.
