den's world.

dev log: feb 25, 2026 - PART 1

so yesterday i finally decided, after a long while of just thinking about it, to actually start working on my own website. with how fucked up and weird the internet has been the past few years, it seems like this is the best way to still engage with the internet without wanting to blow my head off at all of the insane shit i see on twitter and reddit. it's also rather freeing to know that i can make this site look and feel however i want, something that has been woefully lacking on the mainstream internet for a long time now. remember all of the awesome ways you could customize the look of your youtube channel? i mean seriously, look at what they took from us. i clearly still have a lot to learn about this whole HTML and CSS business though, because for the absolute life of me i cannot get that fucking screenshot to be centered. (update: after about half an hour of fucking around, i WAS able to get it to center, but with a janky method that will absolutely be a pain in the ass in the long term lmao. such is life)

i find HTML to be a little messy and hard to follow but i'm sure it will improve with time and practice. writing a blog post with what is basically neocities' version of notepad++ is very strange to me.

anyways, to go over what i've done with this website so far: much of the backbone comes from my portfolio website made by my incredibly talented friend bobby. the melee themed buttons, background, and header are all either straight ripped from that site or slightly modified by me to fit the look i want for this one. speaking of getting things to be centered, just getting the main 3 buttons at the top to be centered was a pain in the ass on its own. it was at least easy enough to get the pages to link to each other, and the home page for the blog has a very simple list with all the posts that i've made to it so far (which is literally just this one lmao). the bones of it are there, and it is TECHNICALLY a working website, but obviously it needs a lot of work.

to start with, i plan to make the site look and function very similarly to melee's menus. for example, i'd like for the buttons at the top to look more like this:

hovering over the button would cause it to glow yellow like the bottom image. i'm thinking of even implementing the sound effects from the game's menus but that may be going a little overboard. i'd also like to have pages like the photo gallery and the blog home page to be ripped straight from the game. i think it'd be INSANELY cool to have the photography page look exactly like melee's photo gallery:

....okay so. i stopped writing this post to fix some stuff and broke the absolute fuck out of the site. i think i'm just gonna start mostly from scratch.... haha., ahahah.,a