about 0xf: part 0

i guess a page called 'about 0xf' can either be about this website, or about me as a person, or both. it's not my first pseudonym or my first website and it probably won't be my last. if you're a friend of mine i may have shown you the site myself at some point, but in particular i'm hoping a stranger will come across it by chance.

i have a couple of goals for 0xf which could always change later. i also probably have a drinking problem (could always change later). having gone through a lot of major life changes in 2023 i found myself at the end of the year with a big void in place of my goals that i had accomplished. so just out of boredom while i was drunk i decided to buy the handshake domain 0.xf. the idea is cool in theory but there's like a 99% chance you've reached this site through the other domain instead which i added after realizing that resolving a handshake domain is a messy pain in the ass (for now).

i feel very cynical about the modern internet in general, which is funny because i'm not even that old. but i've noticed that i can no longer find information online like i used to a decade ago. now i have to specifically go to wikipedia/reddit/stackoverflow, or a private discord/telegram chat, or a variety of niche but increasingly diluted social bookmarking sites, or the internet archive, or steal a pdf of a book or research paper, or ask a more knowledgable/connected friend to steal it for me. and people ask me for information a lot. search results now are just full of sites that are all filler no killer. i think the personal breaking point for me was that elon musk buying out twitter shattered a big part of my aforementioned network of places where i could find real information, and in the process spawned 4 new microblog services everyone scattered to, and created a cottage industry of websites dedicated to fixing just broken embed links (fxtwitter, vxtwitter, fixvx, many others i have to now type every time i want to share something).

i've looked into the indie web thing, and again, in theory it's great but in practice i have no idea how to use it and not have it be a huge waste of time. same with static site generators, they're more trouble than they're worth. and i'm cheap, i don't want to pay for hosted shit. so back to 0xf, i have this domain now, and i've decided i'm just going to make a website that's only text and default html so you can automatically read it on anything, and that my priority will be to have information on it. like information that you can take and use. crazy i know. real 'access to tools' shit. and this information is coming subjectively from me, 0xf. so i'll curate it, i'll add my anecdotes and opinions too, et cetera. i guess it's kind of like a blog but with no profit motive or advertising or pretense about me being an expert or even having original ideas, and i don't really care much if i'm the only one who sees it. i'm not doing any analytics on visitors or whatever. it's just text and links. and some ascii art maybe.