about the site
I can't exactly tell you what it is that drew me to "the old web", but it has been one of my biggest interests ever since I discovered what it was. There were many other sites that I remember visiting, but the most pivotal ones was this website made by this guy named Mike where he uploaded scans of candy wrappers. (link) He also had a somewhat secret section of his site that he made for his family and there's just a bunch of random pages there. (link) I think part of what drew me to this part of the internet is just the personalization of it. You can do literally anything as long as you know how to code the HTML, CSS & perhaps JavaScript.
PotassiumMCR (2017-2020)
Before I discovered Neocities, I had already experimented with a personal website through various mediums. The very first "website" I made was made with OneNote 2007 and obviously no one else saw it besides myself. Then I graduated to a Björk fansite hosted on an Italian hosting service that didn't last very long. Before the Björk site I had actually already made a Neocities site but I think I forgotten about it at that time so I ended up registering the domain potassiummcr2.neocities.org.
The first public version of my site was put up on September 17, 2017. It was pretty awfully done, I'm not even gonna sugarcoat it.
I got sick of it pretty quickly, so on we evolve. There were a few intermediate changes that were all very radically different from one another. The first one was not too different from the purple explosion except it was much less of a purple explosion and instead completely in greyscale. Second one was in typewriter font that caused the site to become illegible. Third one was basically a recreation of the Björk fansite. I was gonna make the theme change with the seasons but I never got around to doing that. We will get back to that idea in a second though.
Second major version started in June 2018 and evolved over the summer. Went back to the purple explosion (booo), but chose a better font (yay)... and coded the entire with frames (BOOOOOO). Original landing page was just text, but eventually I added the changing image one. Even if it looks a bit garish now, it's still probably one of my favorite website theme ideas. Eventually I changed the purple to a blue theme that took forever to load because the background image was a 3000px PNG, and then I retired it altogether.
Third version is the beginning of a vicious circle of burnout and then reinterest and then burnout, rinse repeat etc etc. I directly plagiarized the theme from another Björk fansite and just added my ~ trademark font ~ to it. This was early 2019, maybe February.
Fourth version was borrowed from Machetona, a former Neocities peer. This wasn't a straight ripoff this time and I did add some of my own elements to it. I believe this was November 2019?
COVID-19 pandemic happened and I had finally I had decided I was done with the "old web thing". (NB: i was not) Fifth & final version of the PotassiumMCR era was a retrospective of all the different versions my site went through. I definitely have a thing for constantly rehashing the history of my website. Rest in peas, you are not missed!
la guerre est finie (2020-2024)
I can't exactly remember when I adopted the LGEF username, but I can say that it originated from the title of a Pizzicato Five song from their 1999 self-titled album, which in turn was named after some old French movie. I was using it by the time I created my last.fm account in October 2020, so probably sometime shortly before then (if not right at that point).
The original version of the LGEF site was created on May 8, 2021, after I randomly got reinspired due to a psychotic episode but this isn't the page to traumadump. I experimented with making the site with AutoSite but I had a Mac at the time so I had to use a virtual machine and it just wasn't very practical. Changed the Neocities URL to laguerreestfinie.neocities.org although this was the only version to be hosted on Neocities. Not really a fan of this version and it was scrapped pretty quickly.
The original version lasted a whole 5 days before I decided to redo it for a much better one. I think this version is probably the one that has been the most consistently updated (although not by much). I registered the laguerreestfinie.com domain name on May 10 and LGEF 2.0 officially went live on May 13. The code was recycled from the Nov 2019 spirals edition of PotassiumMCR but obviously I did quite a bit of reworking. Still managed to "borrow" all of the header images from Flickr though!
Brief detour to talk about my LanaBoards era. Not gonna mention my username because #idrathernot but if you know you know, if you're that desperate it's probably not that hard to search. If you're not aware, LanaBoards is an internet forum dedicated to the singer Lana Del Rey, infamous for the leaks that get posted there every 5 minutes & the Charli XCX thread where leaks get posted every 5 nanoseconds. Even with the occassional website updates I did during this time, I was pretty much exclusively active on there from November 2021 to March 2023, with a brief break from June 2022 to October 2022.
The unofficial LanaBoards smileys page was created March 2022 (I think). A lot of the pop culture forums use small GIFs that are called "smileys", pretty much the precursor to how Discord emojis are used now. This was a page for custom ones for me and other users to use. Originally it was posted in a thread, but eventually I created the third version of my site in September 2022 and included a link to it there as well. Never really updated this one, mainly just put it up so the previous version wasn't rotting away on the internet. Recycled another PotassiumMCR theme for this one as well.
Dramatically exiled myself from LanaBoards in March 2023 and the fourth version of my site is born. This is still probably my favorite theme I've ever made. It was recycled from an unpublished & unfinished Rina Sawayama fansite I had made, but it is 100% original coding this time! Let's celebrate that!
Over the summer of 2023, I properly joined RYM and later rejoined Twitter (had an on & off relationship with it during 2018 & 2019) in search of another internet community. This was the first post-Twitter website update although due to life responsibilities this version never really got to live to its full potential. The laguerreestfinie.com domain name expired on May 10, 2024.
...on the 12th floor (2024-)
I had adopted the OT12F moniker in December 2023 around the same time as the last LGEF update but it was never really used until c. March 2024. It's derived from the 2000 Karen Mok album, 十二樓的莫文蔚 (Karen Mok On The Twelfth Floor). This isn't a Karen Mok fansite, hence the ellipsis. I registered the onthe12thfloor.com domain name on April 14, 2024, and the website was officially launched on May 18, 2024. I'm kinda going back to my roots with this theme. It was coded from scratch, but it was mostly inspired by the very first versions of my site and what I originally intended it to be like.
some technical notes
This website was coded on Windows 10 using Sublime Text. Hosted by Dreamhost, domain registered via Namecheap. All of the tiled backgrounds are from old versions of Windows ranging from Windows 95 to Windows 2000. The main Latin font is Times New Roman. The main CJKV font is WenQuanYi Zen Hei, with BabelStoneHan being a fallback. For some reason, the font didn't load when I tested it on Windows XP, so if your computer doesn't have fonts capable of loading CJKV Unicode characters, parts of this website will be broken.