My Mission, Passion, Reason, and World Domination

On this page, I aim to explore as many reasons as possible as to my motive and interest when it comes to LiteralHat related works.

Why A Website? Why not Twitter, or Instagram, or ___________?

I’ve developed quite the resentment towards social media platforms despite having accounts on them. There is a lot of grey area involved when it comes to copyright and intellectual property that we could discuss about for hours. But I’m not a lawyer, and that’s not exactly the reason why I decided on a website, either.

The contemporary world of the internet is so filled with algorithms that it’s become fast paced and almost terrifying to keep up with. It’s almost as if no one stops to simply just read and absorb nowadays, because the next hit of dopamine is just one swipe away.

At some point, it was decided that LiteralHat.com would be a ‘new’ social media – the one better than all of them, without any algorithms, without any follower system whatsoever. I wanted separate user profiles, photo posting capabilities, and so on and so forth. But come on, if you really think about it, such an idea isn’t valuable and wouldn’t stay afloat with the hosting costs. We already have forums anyways, and moderation would be expensive, time and mental health wise. There would still be people comparing themselves to each other, and in today’s age, social media quite literally requires addiction tactics to stay afloat and continue generating revenue, whether you like it or not.

It is a conscious intention to make you change your mind about what you consider worthwhile content. This website is quite literally a protest against a system that no one fucking asked for, a place to browse without being pressured about keeping up with the newest this or that. And I hope you feel that way too. You should try to make a website of your own. We could kill the system together if we all tried hard enough.

In the future advertisements may be run on this website simply to help pay for hosting and space costs. You can run an adblocker if you’d like, I will not be offended. I also have a Patreon if you’d like to help out. But honestly? I’m passionate about this enough to pay with it out of my own pocket. Just take care of yourself and keep visiting at your own pace alright.

The Goal Of This Website

As a kid I always wanted a website to myself. Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly weren’t a thing but there were alternatives around – lo and behold, cheesymouse.com.au became my first website at the ripe age of 10. With such frantic excitement, this was the first thing I added to the front page:

I know, I know. It’s amazing. MSPaint and Windows Movie Maker were free, and by putting each ‘slide’ on 0.5s, my fetus brain pieced together that it could be used to create animations.

The domain has since long expired. It’s probably on the market if you’re spoiled enough to buy it, but I left this experience with the ever fleeting feeling of sharing something with the world.

Since then I’ve made many more websites – keyword ‘made’; they were always on whatever fuck-off free maker that exists nowadays that only gave you 1 gigabyte of storage and a stinky (sub)domain name. I poured my art onto them relentlessly. No one knew who LiteralHat was, and there was virtually no traffic every day – Just knowing that it was online, for anyone to stumble across, was already enough.

After a period without a website, I jumped the gun and bought LiteralHat.com.

My motive from years ago remains the same. I still aim to upload as much as humanely possible to this site, in order to have the opportunity to share with the world, even if hosting costs are a bitch. I love it, and always will. Even if no one ever reads this.

In the unlikely event that I die, this website is going to disappear in under a year unless someone else hosts it. But it’s more preferable to do this than becoming a ‘memorial account’ on some garbage platform that will still generate revenue while I’m 6 feet under. Save all my work. Hoard it. Share it. Enjoy it.