"My Art isn't Cool"

03/04/2025

When I'm browsing around sites on Neocities or seeing what my mutuals have updated, I often end up feeling so jealous of how cool other people's sites look. Sometimes it's sites that are all smooth and polished, or it can be those sites which are beautifully chaotic and messy. Either way, I end up thinking "Damn, I wish I could make something like that". Don't get me wrong, I'm very proud of my site and I like the way it looks but sometimes it all feels a bit juvenile. Like I haven't gotten any better at web tech since I started learning as a teenager. I often feel the same way about my pixel art, although I haven't been doing that for as long.

If you feel this way, I think it helps to realise that the artists you appriciate probably look at their own creations and critisize them in a similar way. Like where you see their amazing artwork, they can only notice the flaws. If you try to see your creation through the eyes of someone else, someone who's there to appriciate rather that critisize, hopefully you can better appriciate the beauty in it. Progress often feels unbearably slow, so if you've been at it for a while and feel like you aren't getting anywhere, really look back at where you started from and you'll see the difference.

If your art means something to you, it's cool. If you enjoyed making it, it's cool. Damn, you made that? That's cool.

Daggerfall

31/03/2025

First blog post! Just like every other blog I've seen on Neocities, I don't really know what I'm going to do with this, so I'll start with talking about a game I've been playing recently: Daggerfall!

Daggerfall is the second chapter of the Elder Scrolls series, published by Bethesda in 1996 for DOS. It's an open-world RPG where you do classic RPG things like taking on quests, exploring dungeons, fighting monsters, etc. It starts off with a very D&D feel where you choose your characters race and then class by either selecting from a list or taking a little questionnaire, before rolling for your initial stats. Then, with your new character, you're launched into the main questline where your emperor has enlisted you to investigate the spirit of a slain king which has been haunting the city of Daggerfall. You'll quickly find yourself too low-level to continue the main story, so you must explore around the city, picking up side quests in order to level-up and progress.

Also, this game is HUGE. The image above on the left shows the different regions of the game's map, and on the right you'll see a zoomed in version of one region where each of the little dots represents a town, city or dungeon. In fact, according to MrSaviorHD on Youtube, the game's map is roughly the same size as Great Britain.

Being almost 30 years old, the game definitely shows its age in terms of graphics but is still very much enjoyable and playable. Particularly when compared to other 3D or open-world games from around 1996, I think that Daggerfall was well ahead of its time. So far, I've only played for a few hours and barely scratched the main story, but I am very excited to play more :)