Why is it that every website I see has some kind of slopware aesthetic characterized by large swaths of empty space, the (now) bastardized purple-blue gradient infused corpo memphis logos juxtaposed with a plain white background, paragraphs of insubstantial text across several pages that could be summarized in two sentences, and a slew of other hideous design choices that obviously lead to performance and UX issues? If even just a modicum of thought was put into addressing these problems I don't think ads would even be a problem, but obviously these websites were designed in a day using some junk tool to primarily to turn a quick profit. To preserve my sanity I wrote a little Chrome extension to replace the content in popup boxes with one of my favourite Paper Mario characters saying a random line of dialogue. Much better than finding a non-invasive Chrome extension that simply hides them!

I've further divided these types of sites into two categories: hardcore slopware, the purest form of bloat (intrusive popups, wasted space, gigantic fonts, generic shutterstock pictures, horrid performance, etc.), and softcore slopware, which is a restrained version of the same design plus still lacking in personality. Humorously even NN/group, a research firm that we constantly referenced for UX guidelines in our graduate-level human-computer interaction course, has a site which looks like hardcore slopware. And with LLMs these websites are now indistinguishable from those created by AI tools, since any AI agent will now be able to harvest and replicate the exact same templates. Imagine creating a tool that ranks websites with a "slopware" score. Then if I was Vicar of the Digital Realm I would kill every site that failed to meet a certain threshold to spare unwitting netizens from constant bombardment of what amounts to the digital equivalent of white torture.

Some users recognize the soul of the Early Internet™, and have created minimalist designs that try to imitate the "90s style" browsing ("web surfing") experience, though many look like hollow homages and lack substantially in useful or engaging content. I've also seen a good number of simplistic or unique sites on the 1mb.club and /g/'s good sites, and it's always cool to check out ones that let you leave comments so you can revisit them to see if what you wrote still exists years later. Many listed on 1mb.club are unsurprisingly written by software engineers, often filled with various blog posts discussing topics related to technology, but since they have no comment system and often talk about "the same things" (all-things-Linux being a common theme) even these websites start to feel a little mundane and one-sided, especially since you can't leave your own $0.02. Though it's never a bad idea to have your own website that reflects your personality, I've still found that the most interesting material comes from joyscrolling the posts and occasionally replies of a few guys I follow on the website formerly known as Twitter. But for some reason I'm too much of a wuss to share my thoughts and shitposts there, so to each their own...

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I've been speedrunning since 2005. But only since the mid 2010s has it gained mainstream traction. The past few years I've had an increasing number of people in real-life talk to me about my GoldenEye and Perfect Dark accomplishments, often mentioning how they came across my name in a YouTube video. Then these friends would tell their friends, so I was often surprised when I'd meet the friend's friend for the first time and they'd casually bring it up. Surely this meant my friend thought the hobby was interesting enough to share. At first I'd brush it off, thinking "ah well, what would they even get out of hearing my autistic Pelagic II Special Agent 1:33 analysis?" but I've come to appreciate that it's actually pretty cool to talk about my skills and achivements in something I enjoy doing. It gives you new perspective. It's also good practice to distill specialized knowledge into a format digestible to laypeople, since it teaches you the art of effective communication, a skill most people severely lack. I've played GoldenEye & Perfect Dark at a few parties and while the lack of a CRT in these settings blows because it means dealing with horrendous lag, it's still a fantastic fun casual experience worth doing every now and then to take a break from the standard 9 hour locked-in sessions in an age where I've hyperoptimized all of my records over the past couple of decades anyway. So then one motivation to create this site was to consolidate all of my GoldenEye and Perfect Dark achievements, videos, history, and fun facts, and then direct such people to this page, similar to how Wouter Jansen created his GoldenEye site back in 2001. I had no real concrete vision of what exactly I wanted to create and share, other than the pages that list my speedrunning videos and the classic three-column front-page feed layout. While my site will mostly be oriented towards GoldenEye & Perfect Dark, I'll probably throw in articles about various other interesting topics or experiences I feel are worth sharing every now and then. 

acecorner is a good example of a "2020s equivalent" of an early 00s website. I'm not sure what other examples of this style exist but I doubt I'm the first. There are still issues I need to resolve, for example, the initial load time for the main page being too slow for my standards, presumably from all of the image assets and the camera feed widget. There are also a few framework dependencies I'd like to get rid of (I use jQuery only for the sliding animations in my About section, a sin normally deserving of castration). I have no idea how the site looks like on phone, nor do I care to make it responsive on any non-desktop devices, since the phonification of the Internet (and more broadly, the world) has killed the joy in using technology.