I'm not sure I'm quite happy with the page layout yet (if anyone has suggestions for how to make it a bit prettier—or uglier—I'll take them into consideration; I'd also appreciate tips for how to break into the world of PHP and/or introduce a comment section that doesn't involve D*squs), but it's serviceable enough for me to officially kickstart this blog. I'd be lying if I said I've "always considered" creating something like this, since I really only began giving serious thought to it once I started exploring old Geocities pages (those who know me can tell you that I keep my age and other personal details close to my chest, but I'll at least admit that I came after that era), but some of my earliest output online was via Blogger (under a different name), so in some ways this is a return to form for me. Of course, it's also nice to be able to point to this webpage and say that it's "mine" in a sense very unlike that of a Tumblr blog or Twitter feed. I'm quite proud of the development of both the page and my HTML skills in a short span of time.
Those of you who know me from social media (likely all of you) may wonder why this page breaks with my pattern of nearly every online profile of mine using the same handle (or a variant thereof). There are a few reasons for this. First of all, I've become less fond of it over the years. It was originally conceived as a...Pesterchum...handle...when I was enthusiastic about reading Homestuck. I don't think many people would immediately read it as such, but it does carry that baggage for me (I am currently neutral on Homestuck). It's also not particularly meaningful to me apart from containing an obtuse reference to my syndrome. Lastly, I think eventually I'd like to direct people I know from the lifeworld (a useful term I've stolen from a translated German article) to this page, and I want the URL to be something I'll be comfortable saying out loud to normal people. So, when I started thinking about creating a Neocity, I turned to a phrase that I had previously obtained from a "Kojima Name Generator" for inspiration—"Divine Inconsequentiality." That's a mouthful. What's a phrase that conveys the same idea, which also sounds more like an online handle? I eventually settled on "nulldivinity."
Here, a very interesting (to me) series of coincidences happened. I wanted to create a simple logo for this new handle. I realized that 'null' could be represented by '0' or '–', and 'divinity' could be represented by a cross—or '+'. Therefore, "nulldivinity" could be "–+", which also reinforces the 'null' concept. Wait a second, what about the 'plus or minus' sign, '±'? Furthermore, wouldn't it make sense for there to be a corresponding 'minus or plus' sign? As it turns out, there is. Now, that '–' on top resembles a halo—what if we flank it by 2 tildes, representing both wings and approximation (trending toward neutrality)? I was astonished (in a mundane way, I suppose) by the degree of symbolic meaning I had stumbled onto in three simple Unicode characters. ~∓~