The site
| About | YOU ARE HERE |
| Art | My gallery. Almost all of my art worth sharing since my early days, circa 2017. |
| 3D Art | 3D models of the non-functional variety. Perhaps VRChat models, once those are done. |
| GunCAD | 3D and 2D designs, technical data, etc, usually related to firearms. |
| Digital | Programming! Hardware! Games, websites, scripts, general computer things, etc. I will fill this out once I think my projects deserve their own page. |
| Audio | I have made music on occasion. Some of it I think is worth sharing. |
| Photography | Art without a pencil. I enjoy walks at odd times of day in strange places. |
| Writing | I write at length about many things. Maybe one of them appeals to you! |
| Archival | Anything I think deserves to be preserved, but may be bad form for, or won't really fit in with, the Internet Archive. I'll try to mirror anything I host here on there, too, and vise versa, just for redundancy. |
| Contact & Elsewhere | Links to other places I can be reached, or my creations can be accessed. |
| Everything else | Anything that doesn't fit with the rest. |
The site's pages were written in PHP, HTML, and CSS using Notepad++. I tried to avoid JavaScript wherever possible. Where it was required to do what I want, it is minimized as much as possible.
Visual assets, if not made using CSS, were created using a combination of Clip Studio Paint (no longer recommended, use Krita instead), Adobe Photoshop CS6, and MS paint (32 bit, W8.1).
The site is hosted locally, served by a small PC running Windows 10, using WAMP as my web server software stack. This site was specifically designed to run without requiring a database - everything is written solely with PHP and relies on various JSON / text files stored in different places for any metadata storage.
I'm using Dynu for DNS, as I'm still on a dynamic IP due to being in a residential IP range, and I purchased the domain through Namecheap. I'm not paying for SSL or HTTPS, that's handled through Let's Encrypt.
I wouldn't recommend you do it this way yourself. It's better to run NGINX direclty on Linux if you know how to use Linux, instead of routing it through WAMP with a reverse proxy. You also won't have to deal with the mess of problems that using Windows comes with. It's also much more organized to use a proper database instead of whatever nonsense I'm doing here. On top of that, hosting things yourself has undoubtedly gotten more difficult over the years due to all of the new standards you have to account for when starting a website. It'll ultimately be best for most people to just pay a company to host the site for them, so you can do the fun part, which is designing and using the thing. I'm just doing this for my own weird idea of fun.
Myself
I'm Cal / Caliber, née 8762e13. I'm an engineer, a computer user, an artist, etc. I see many others put their personal attributes first in these sorts of places. Things they feel, but don't necessarily do. There's nothing wrong with this, but I want people to see my actions before my... self?
Throughout my life, I've struggled with my personal image. I used to do this sort of personal separation interally as well - I was always the meat sack separate from whatever went on in my head. My body was a vehicle for the marks I made on the world. I think I still struggle with this sort of thing when it comes to labels, because I still fear for the assumptions people will make when I tell them I'm this or that thing. Queer, furry, whatever. I fear people will see these and instantly shut off - refuse to talk to me, or worse. I've seen this happen all too many times, though I am starting more and more to believe it is simply not worth my time to associate with those that hate people purely based on characteristics like these. Living in America makes this difficult to hand-wave, though, especially given how many people behave online.
Until recently, I'd co-opted the "I'm me" approach, at least as far as my brain understood it at the time. It's inoffensive, it's safe, and it's true. But it's vague. I am, in fact, me but what does that mean? "You'll figure it out as you go?" I feel disingenuous for having ever done this. This ultimately was all in service of trying to interact peaceably with people I otherwise expect to hate me, and who probably would still hate me if I dumped all of this on them. It necessitates me putting up another mask between myself and who I show to the world. At some point, I think I lost who "I" am, and "me" became "whatever the situation requires." I lost what it means to be, and I suppose, through this, found solace in my ability to "be" something in my own spaces - music, art, etc. Whatever I didn't need to show or explain or give to anyone. I retreated into anonymity and pseudonymity.
I don't want that. I am glad to be rid of that. I want to say my acceptance of this morally was just was a symptom of my heavy use of 4chan and the like in my early years. The communities on those sites, in that time, have proved over the years to be one of the most destructive things for a developing person, as far as I'm concerned. They've only become worse in modern times as far as I can tell.
Throughout the early 2020s, I have realized the hard way that it is ultimately pointless to convince many of these people they are in the wrong for believing you are evil for doing what you like, in private, to the detriment of nobody - or for simply existing as you are, with your skin or your nationality or whatever nonsense has been invented out of thin air to discriminate against. Once someone is convinced of some of these ideas, it becomes impossibly difficult to convince them otherwise. You must lie to them, ultimately, to gain their trust and friendship. To attempt to change their mind, you must infiltrate their spaces and friend circles. It is incredibly time consuming and mentally strenuous.
But, at the end of it all, here I am. I'm finally me. I am able to admit to myself, and to others, that I am me. I'm an engineer, a gunsmith, an artist, a furry, queer, trans, and probably more. I am still recovering from my time in digital hell, but I am here, and I will continue to be.
My story is still being written. I'm skilled in many things, but no master by any means. My interests vary wildly, but I'll find where I fit eventually.
If I am to have one stated goal in life, that is to make other people happy. This has been true for as long as I can remember being conscious - regardless of any earlier missteps in my life. I see no greater good than making those around me more equipped to handle the world around them. To handle their emotions, their problems, etc. Finding a new outlook, finding agency, taking control of their circumstances, discovering new hobbies, new interests, rediscovering old ones, whatever. Something to allow them to pursue their goals, or create new ones, and feel good doing it. To this end, I aim to help those who would return the favor. It would only be a detriment if I was to give any useful information to people who hate who I really am, or the groups I share.
I hope you enjoy the things I am able to share here, and that they inspire you to create things of your own.
Also check out these other cool people with cool websites who do cool things
est. 2023