about the site

This place is a lot of things to me, but I mainly treat it as my own virtual world for me to explore myself through. It's my respite from arbitrary numbers and general shittiness of money-hungry mainstream web; life moves at the speed of light on social media, but here I can slow down and appreciate what made the internet novel and fun in the first place.

Why "ROBGARAGE"? The concept of garages as a third place is comforting to me. Grittier than bedrooms but cozier than sheds, they capture the feeling of messing about in a place entirely yours, letting paint splatter and paper spill without worry for perfection. Thus, this site is my own digital garage :^}

history

ROBGARAGE began when I took up HTML as a hobby in my sophomore year. The pandemic still had the world gripped tight in its iron clutches, so I had lots of time on my hands to dedicate to learning something new. And so began my webmastering journey!

Here's a glimpse of how the site looked at first. Each page followed the same top-down layout, since I hadn't figured out how to do anything else yet and the majority of CSS positioning remained a mystery to me.
Earliest archive, 2/01/2022

I'd never heard of the independent web before, but I couldn't have discovered it at a better time in my life. Too young to have ever experienced Geocities or Angelfire in their respective heydays, but juuuust old enough to have watched mainstream internet assimilate into the corporate hellscape we know today, it was a strange time to be a teen online. I was sick of follower counts and shallow interactions and cookie-cutter profile templates that allowed only the bare minimum for personalization. There had to be more to the internet than that, right?

I'd whipped up sites on carrd and other drag-and-drop site makers before, but the restrictions left me longing for more independence still. Then I discovered Neocities from an artist I followed, and through it, the web revival movement!

It started as a pet project, but snowballed into something more special as i realized i was actually having a lot of fun. Every obstacle felt like a challenge to overcome, and the wave of euphoria that hit when i finally fixed a bug or learned a more efficient way of doing something made every moment of frustration and desperation so worth it in the end. I tend to pick up and drop hobbies sporadically, but this was a rare case where one ended up sticking.

It entered a period of inactivity lasting from 2022 to late 2025, during which a lot of big events in my life happened in dizzying succession. I fell in love with my beautiful boyfriend, started HRT, became a legal adult, graduated, volunteered, moved apartments, struggled with self harm and mental illness, got my license... you get the idea. All of it burnt me out on updating for a while, and so began its dormant period.

As you'd know if you've ever suffered art block, the only way out of it is through. I spent that 3-year liminal in a reflective state, venting my frustration through other creative outlets and slowly rebuilding my energy. It took a while until i could come back here with the passion i once had, but it was a necessary sabbatical and gave me a fresh perspective on webmastering when i came back.

All this is to say that what's on your computer screen right now is a long labor of love. I hope your time here can inspire or help you in any way.

future??????

ROBGARAGE will forever be a work in progress, as it's a direct extension of myself, so keep in mind what you're looking at is more like a sculpture of sand than one of marble. I don't expect to "finish" it any time soon and I most likely never will.

Most things on internet, like the human experience, are inherently ephemeral, but I still hope one day in the distant future ROBGARAGE can be discovered on a beat-up hard drive and studied by archaeologists or something. (To the possible future archaeologist reading this: hi!)