About

This site presents materials created by sofakoy. The site design is my ode to Times New Roman and seeks to embody both the simplistic and feral nature of early websites. See the first website by Tim Berners-Lee. I'm not unique. A lot of people have written about early web nostalgia and created their own 90s inspired sites that are much cooler than mine. See, e.g., Parimal Satyal. For some intense Geocities nostalgia, you can check out all the websites at Neocities.

I created this site as a personal project because I am going through a midlife crisis. I am suddenly a sick Internet boomer croaking about all the things I hate online. I hate all the noise, all the ads and embedded videos. Yeah, I am aware adblockers exist, and yes, I am aware that these issues existed in early Internet as well. I hate the cookie cutter look of websites and I hate how so much is made to look "sleek." I find myself constantly searching for simple reader versions of everything online. And I hate the intense consumerism of everything on the Internet--everything feels dishonest and manipulative.

So I made a personal website that tries to cut out all the things I don't like and focuses on the things I do like. I'm documenting my learning process in the way that I want information to be conveyed. And I want to try and be forthcoming about the materials I present. So I try to disclose my own experiences and motivations for creating materials, as well as checking my materials for accuracy and citing sources except when written from personal experience, based on a real life source's experience, or common knowledge. These informational pages are purposely simplistic in design. Conversely, I am also going to make some really unhinged personal webpages based on 1990s and early 2000s web design.

One specific feature of the website layout I want to credit is the use of sidenotes, which is mainly inspired by Edward Tufte. To achieve this layout, I used HTML and CSS code snippets from people who know much more about HTML and CSS than I do. Big thank you to scripter.co and Kenneth Friedman.

All mistakes are my own.