F l o w R S t a t e (pronounced "flower state") is my free-flowing cozy corner of the Internet and the home of my art of the past, present, and future.
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 [1].
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 web programming and ran out of ideas for what to do with it,
so the site basically turned into a place for storing images and fan fiction that I wanted to share with my friends.
Years later, I turned down the chance to go to a four-year college for a STEM major. My career path was becoming less appealing to me, both from a philosophical and personal viewpoint, and I turned increasingly more to my art. I had been drawing for years up to the point. Even through my struggles to get better, I still truly enjoyed it.
For me, having a job means finding a passion that I can dedicate my whole life to, and sticking to it. And I just couldn't let art go. I wanted to be an artist and make it full-time (I still do).
If I was to be a freelancer though, I knew I needed a website. Plus I wanted to try again to express myself visually beyond what social media allowed me to do. Deep down, I saw making a website as a productive challenge, something to keep my mind sharp and push me forward. This time I was going to better understand coding and make something that truly represented me, beyond the creative confines of Instagram and Twitter.
While looking for inspiration, I stumbled upon Neocities for the first time. I'm not sure how I found it or where, yet I was going on a whole journey from site-to-site before I knew it. And the whole existence of Neocities blew me away. In a smaller part of cyberspace, there was a whole community of people making and coding sites by hand. It took me back to that time in my childhood when I went to indie sites about different video games, played fan games and looked at fan art with Kirby and Sonic and such, while saving tons of wallpapers along the way (collecting wallpapers was a big hobby of mine). What was even cooler is that many of them were doing things with web tools that I didn't even know were possible, and maybe weren't even possible, when I tried picking up HTML and CSS as a teenager back in, like, 2012 (I'm not that old, just old enough to be limited edition)
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.
[1] A term referring to web pages from the '90s-2000s Internet, namely the aesthetic and its connotations with grassroots creativity separate from continuous commercialism and social media algorithms. There has since been a resurgence in this movement fueled by nostalgia for a bygone era and a desire to break away from the metrics of the modern web.
Background generated with the help of the CSS Polka Dot Generator by Brian Louis Ramirez.