about the site

This website is more or less a personal hallucinogenic dreamworld where I archive my art, writings, ramblings, and whatever else I feel like.

Why "ROBGARAGE"?
Short answer: I'm Rob, and this is my garage.
Long answer: Much of my childhood was spent making stuff in my dad's garage, so I've gone on to associate garages in general with relaxation and creativity. Something about the bottomless boxes of trinkets, art supplies, and miscellaneous doohickeys instilled a sense of wonder in my tiny mind, and digging through them was the first time it occurred to me that the world is a mysterious place filled with unknown treasures waiting to be found. I molded an idea of garages as liminal spaces where time caramelizes and the pressure of daily life is lifted, temporarily, for as long as you exist inside one. I don't have a physical garage anymore so my website is a digital manifestation of those rosy memories and a reminder to stay curious about the world around me :-) I also just think garages are punk as fuck and cool.

ROBGARAGE is hand-coded with HTML and CSS by (mostly) yours truly. I'm just an amateur with a keyboard and too much free time, so if you notice any particularly egregious instances of jank, please report it to me here.

history

ROBGARAGE began when I took up HTML as a hobby in 2021. 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 a new hobby. Though I squandered much of that time writing awkward Lemon Demon fanfiction, I managed to squeeze enough into learning the ropes of webcraft!

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 small/personal/indie web before, but I couldn't have discovered it at a better time in my life. Too young to have experienced Geocities or Angelfire in their respective heydays, but juuuust old enough to witness mainstream internet mutate into the corporate hellscape we know today, it was a strange time to be a teen online. I was sick of shallow numbers 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 while they yielded some satisfaction, none of them fully scratched that itch. It didn't help that most of them lock basic functionalities behind a paywall (especially if you had any desire to use it for anything beyond a glorified linkdump). It was all very disillusioning. I was beginning to accept the internet must be a bland place with little room for creativity, until I discovered Neocities from an artist I followed, and through it, the indie web!

Coding was intimidating at first, to say the least. It started as a pet project, but snowballed into something more 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 ironed out a kink or learned a quicker way of doing something made every moment of frustration worth it and more 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 early 2026, during which a lot of big events in my life happened in dizzying succession. I fell in love with my boyfriend, started HRT, became a legal adult, graduated, volunteered, moved apartments, struggled with self harm and mental illness, entered college, got my license, recovered from surgery... you get the idea. All of it burnt me out on updating and I was pretty much out of the game for a while.

As you'd know if you've ever suffered art block, the only way out is through. I spent that 4-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 that gave me a fresh perspective on webcraft when I returned.

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 some 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 the web are transient, 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!)

fun trivia

• In its early days, it was coded entirely on an iPad in the Neocities editor. (I later became sane and switched to VS Codium on my laptop.)

• It is old.

• A moderately famous hip-hop musician has witnessed me work on it.

• It's alive and can feel pain. Try it out!

contact

The best way to reach me is by sending me an email at contact[at]robgarage[dot]online, but you can also leave a comment on my guestbook or message me on Toyhouse. Please allow up to a couple weeks for a response as I'm a relatively busy and forgetful guy. I probably won't respond to small talk, but I appreciate every "hello" and nice comment I get :o}