Welcome
Welcome to my site! This place exists so I have somewhere to share things that will exist and be accessible for as long as I plausibly will. I have never been one to trust social platforms for a variety of reasons - though chiefly because many of the things I have an interest in (furry art, 3d printing, firearms, etc.) seem to be verboten on major platforms, and actively pursued for complete erasure by the people in charge.
The primary resident of this site is my art gallery. In case any of the platforms I use to reach people end up getting wiped out, or enshittifying themselves to the point they finally go under, I'll be here for as long as I'm making art, and am able to host a site like this.
I'll put a brief description of all the different parts of the site here:
| About | This page! Scroll below for a description of myself and what all I do. |
| Art | My gallery. Almost all of my art, good and bad, will be posted here. |
| 3D Art | 3d models of the non-functional variety. If I ever make more than basic attempts at character models with blender, I'll share those here. |
| GunCAD | The other half of 3D art, functional 3d models! This is where I'll showcase anything I've made or had a hand in that is designed with computer tools but meant to exist in the real world. Most of these will be guns and gun-related objects. |
| Digital | Programming! Hardware! Games, websites, scripts, general computer things, etc. I haven't made much of note in this avenue yet, but I will fill it out once I think it deserves its own page. |
| Audio | I have made music on occasion. None of it is particularly good, but some of it I think is worth sharing. |
| Photography | Art without a pencil. I enjoy going on walks at weird times of day in weird places, and have done a wee bit of urban exploration. |
| Writing | I write at length about many things most people don't care about. Maybe one of the categories 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 may not fit with the rest. Things made for me instead of by me, maybe. |
How'd you make the site?
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 in my house, served by a small HP 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 much more organized to use a database instead of whatever nonsense I'm doing here too. 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. From, and residing in a little po-dunk town in the US. I've been drawing and painting seriously since December 2017, and have scarcely skipped a day since. I've dabbled in music, though I have yet to learn much there. Most of my time that isn't spent on art or work, is on technology and mechanics. Making the world around us do things by shaping bits of wood, metal and plastic is something everyone should try at least once. Steel outlasts many things.
If I am to have one stated goal in life, that is to make other people happy. I see no greater good in life than making those around me feel better about things. 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.
I hope you enjoy the things I am able to share here, and that they inspire you to create things of your own.
"Politics"
It's difficult to address the above goal (and my presence in the US) without also addressing the political issue. Our system of discourse, as far as the mainstream is concerned, has devolved mostly into a collection of heuristics for identifying the "opposing side" as quickly as possible, so you can disregard their opinion and move on to talking to someone else. The implicit "two-sides" thing pervades basically everything in our society, and serves only to make everyone fight each other by turning bike-shed issues or actual fabrications into gigantic central problems, rather than actually talking about solutions to actual issues that would be useful to anyone if they were solved.
To avoid getting too deep in the weeds (I'll save that for a blog post), acknowledging this internally is the first step for most in realizing that the system we are in and all the components of it were designed to lead you away from anything that is actually beneficial to you or those around you, rather than the commanding few who have most of the resources and make all of the rules. We are specifically and intentionally led to hate and distrust each other over completely manufactured issues. We are taught to be prejudiced and selfish, and told it's "honorable" and "patriotic," while the alternative is "unfaithful" and "communist," as if those words themselves haven't been contorted by the system they're used in to mean completely different things. Don't fall for it. You will encounter all but impossible challenges in taking control of your own life if you do not first understand the reality you are in, and what the words in your head actually mean to you, if that makes any sense.
Once you understand this, you'll probably see where I stand on whatever graph or chart people have devised based on US politics. My goal is to help good people do good things for themselves and others, not to blow smoke at psychic vampires.
Also check out these other cool people with cool websites who do cool things
est. 2023