This site won't render right on a phone. Get on your computer.

I'm dot_lvl. You already know this if you're here, but in case you somehow found this page at random (maybe neocities has some sort of discoverability engine, beats me), I'm a retro game streamer on Twitch.

After Twitter blew up and bluesky ended up inheriting most of its worst problems I came to the conclusion that I truly hate what the internet has become. Social media sites are get-rich-quick schemes and popularity contests designed to trick us into acting like marketing execs and treating ourselves as the product we're selling. Fuck it. I don't even want to be internet famous, but the social media panopticon means any time I want to say anything at all, I second-guess myself because I'm so sure someone's going to saunter in from the Discovery feed with the most annoying possible reply.

I'm tired of sanding off the rough edges of my personality for social media. But I don't think we need to take this lying down. The internet used to be fun to explore. There's nothing stopping us from being the change we want to see in the world on this one. I had a hell of a headstart on this because I had some residual HTML knowledge still stuck in my brain from the 1990s, but I really think anyone can do it. I'm sure ten people in the entire world, at most, are going to bother reading this site, but I truly don't care. There's intrinsic value in writing and in putting yourself out there that has nothing to do with the potential for internet virality; in fact, I'd go so far as to say the more worthwhile your writing is, the less likely it is to blow up on Web 2.0. That's not a bad thing. If I drive off the vast majority of my visitors but genuinely enrich the lives of the few who stick around, even if it's just by making them smirk a time or two, that's perfect.

Here's a list of homepages I like (friends, sites I read, people I admire, etc). It's a little sparse, but if more of us start telling social media to go to hell and making our own websites, that will change.