About

What Is This Place?

FlowerState is my free-flowing cozy corner of the Internet, where I showcase my creative works, give my thoughts and experiment with web code on the side. It is the home to my art of the past, present, and future. The site was first published on Neocities on March 2, 2024. It is coded by hand and by heart, and tested in Firefox. Since I left Instagram and Facebook following their policies on AI, this has become my main place for posting art. I will strive to keep the site updated on a weekly basis.

From Humble Beginnings

This place came to exist as many sites of its kind do: from a drive to create and a well-timed rediscovery of the Old Web.

I once had a short-lived domain in high school called Plain Gamer, made from what little knowledge I had of HTML/CSS and some occasional help from a programmer (aka my dad). I struggled to wrap my head around the nuances of web programming and ran out of ideas for what to do with it, so the site turned into a place for storing images and writings that I wanted to share with my friends.

Years later, I turned down the opportunity to go to a four-year university for a STEM-related major. My career path was becoming less appealing to me, from a philosophical and personal standpoint.

Art became my solace. Even through my struggles to improve and find my "style", I still truly enjoyed it. And after going to school for another career for just two years, I could not let it go. My dream was to become a full-time artist, and that is something that has not changed.

If I was to be a freelancer, I knew I needed a website. Plus I wanted to try again to express myself visually beyond what social media allowed me to do. This time I was going to better understand coding and make something that truly represented me while challenging me creatively.

The Wacky Worlds of Neocities

While looking for design inspiration, I stumbled upon Neocities for the first time. I'm not sure how I found it or where. But before I knew it, I was journeying from site-to-site, blown away by this retro-inspired world of indie coding. To think, tucked away in this smaller part of cyberspace, there was a whole community of people making and coding sites by hand—a pastime I once thought had been forgotten.

The idea of Neocities transported me back to a time in my childhood when I went to hand-coded sites about different video games, seeing fan drawings of Kirby and Sonic and such, and collecting tons of wallpapers along the way (a huge hobby of mine). Many of these new indie sites were doing things I didn't even know were possible with web tools, and maybe weren't even possible, when I tried picking up HTML and CSS as a teenager back around 2012.

I started designing it around 2021-2023, working up several layouts that never saw the light of day. Eventually, I abandoned the idea of releasing a perfect website from the get-go and published it anyway. I've had so many projects over the years, whether art or music, that I worked really hard on before, only to get stuck in my head or my own perfectionism and then never finish them. I'm glad I haven't let that happen with this.

Though my website may not be the coolest-looking site in the world, I'm okay with it. It takes planting seeds to grow a garden. I'll keep cultivating this one so that it may best represent my art, myself, and my dreams of a more easygoing, carefree mindset.

Credits