Ask Me Anything

DISCLAIMER: As of November 3rd, 2024, you are mandated to have a Google Account to use the form. Three reasons for this: the first is that I'm curious and I need to make sure y'all are actually real people and not one guy spamming. The second is that I need to be able to (privately) shame you if you ask a stupid question. The third is that if a question's answer ends up becoming more of a conversation starter, I can contact you directly to continue it if needs be. Your e-mail address will remain secret. I wish I could do all this without resorting to collecting Google Accounts, but.. c'est la vie..

List of Answers

• Why do you hate GitHub?
  Asked October 15th, 2024
  
  Two reasons. First of all, their 2FA transition disrupted my workflow too much. There was a page that I frequented on one of my repositories and it required sudo access for whatever reason. My password was automatically entered by one of my extensions and it just proceeded through. When it was announced that all accounts needed 2FA, when no other website had done this, they specifically wanted you to use your phone every time you wanted to access sudo mode. Naturally, this would disrupt my workflow too much and so I evaded this like hell, and even after they forced you too I found a way around it logged off for a couple months before I was convinced to get back on my account and thus use 2FA.
  
  That's not the main reason though, the second reason is that their code suggestion system is stupid. Although, after asking around, I've come to realize it's not just a GitHub problem, but a fundamental problem within Git. To make a edit on a Wikipedia page as an unconfirmed user, you just make the edit and then it's put on hold for an experienced editor to approve. To make an edit on a GitHub repository as a foreigner, you have to copy their repository entirely, make that one small change, and push that as a pull request. I've never understood why they did it that way, it just made everything more complicated and stupid.
  
  The system that should be in place is that it's like if you coded in place, except after making the edit it wouldn't make a whole new repository but instead push that as the pull request. If you wanted to put in multiple code changes on one pull request, you could save it as a code draft then push your selected code drafts as one pull request. Go revolutionarize coding in big projects and take that idea from me. Please credit me, though. That'd be nice.




• Why the name LegitSi, and why the preferred shorthand "legi"?
  Asked October 15th, 2024
  
  One day in late 2015 or early 2016, I came up with the name LegitSi. It materialized into my head as through it was divinely given, and it sounded cool at one point. That's not the interesting part. The interesting part came a couple months later when I got enough robux on my Roblox account. It was already taken by an account that joined a few months after me, but I hadn't come up with that name at the time. It is a namesniper to my best knowledge, although I met someone one day on Roblox that thought they knew me, and turns out, they simply met the namesniper. I don't remember that person's name. But back to when I was trying to change my name, I changed it to "EpicLegitSi". I don't remember where the "Epic" came from. I happened to pick this name right as I joined Discord in May 2016, and then in a community I was active in during 2017 this was frequently confused for someone else who was called Epic. I'll spare you the gory details, but it caused quite the headache and I entertained moving back to LegitSi, which eventually, I did, and don't regret it at all.
  
  Although, my Roblox account was still called EpicLegitSi, and I expressed my desire to rename it "LegitSiOfficial". A few days before I got the robux to rename it, one of these community members namesniped the name LegitSiOfficial, which was infuriating to me, but I realized "LegltSi" was still available, which I made the change to on November 25th, 2018. I was LegitSi on Discord for several months beforehand. If my goal was to stop ridicule, I failed at that, as another group of friends immediately ridiculed me calling me "leglt" and I couldn't get them to stop. But I associated EpicLegitSi with my cringy past and the name LegitSi stuck, primarily to get rid of that past. That's part of the reason why I'm not that eager to accept anyone misnaming me, because I'm tired of it. Speaking of which..
  
  My name is LegitSi, and I care what you think. So goes the words of Eminem.. maybe. But anyway, I do care about what others think about me and look up my name frequently on Discord. However, others called me "legit" and when looking it up, it was too frequently confused for the word "legit" and thus it became infuriating. Initially, I just wanted people to use "legitsi" until I became aware of another word to call me: "legi". It came about completely on accident in a discussion in late 2022 when someone called me that instead of "legit" or "legitsi". I liked it, and so decided to take it as my own. But of course, as I knew from my times with "leglt", people weren't going to stop using "legit" unless I explicitly told them not to, which I told them to stop using it. Also just like "leglt", that doesn't mean they'd stop.. it's a valiant effort though.




• What's the most precise location you are willing to share?
  Asked October 16th, 2024
  
  I absolutely despise that this is a valid question to ask. But anyway, in terms of what I am willing to share with the public, I currently reside in North Carolina. I will say nothing more than that outside of my close friend circle. This is one of the kind of things I can't really elaborate on, even though I'd like to, because I keep my real life and online life as separate as humanely possible. But then I don't do anything in real life and thus don't have a real personality.. whoops!




• Why did you think your old Wikipedia user page was cringe?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  Quite frankly, there was a lot of fluff in it that is entirely unnecessary, such as "ranking" Wikipedia based on its content assessment. What's even the point of that anyway, let alone broadcasting it out to the entire world through my user page? I still have a soft spot in my heart for Wikipedia's content assessment, but in more recent years I've taken a more rational view of it, using it as a tool to quickly gauge how good a Wikipedia article is, which is exactly how it should be. It's not the most accurate thing in the world, sure, but it's a damn good tool for quick checks. If I made such a "content assessment point scale" today, I would almost certainly keep it to myself and not share it with anyone because that sort of thing is unfathomably cringe in a way I can't really describe.
  
  Another way of thinking about it is that I am not an active Wikipedia editor. I've only made something on the order of 50 edits, a good chunk of those being user page edits (which arguably shouldn't count), and just about all of the rest of them being minor grammatical corrections. It's the reason why, even after being on Wikipedia for years, I'm not extended confirmed and I likely never will be unless I decide to actually start being a more active Wikipedian, which I don't feel like doing mainly because I'm afraid of fucking it up and getting it wrong. Wikipedia is serious shit. It's a central Internet institution just like the Internet Archive. The main news behind the 2012 SOPA blackout was Wikipedia going dark for a day. Teachers have to actively tell their students not to senselessly grab stuff from Wikipedia (check the references Wikipedia cites, not Wikipedia itself). If I'm the reason that Wikipedia loses that sort of trust, that credibility, even for a minor mistake, I'd arguably never forgive myself.
  
  That's why I'm not becoming a Wikipedia editor anytime soon, and that's why I don't consider myself worthy to have any sort of voice in the "content assessment" part of the website, which is why I considered that whole part of my page to be "cringe". It was much more valid, then, to keep it nice and simple yet still representative of my beliefs and aspirations.




• What's the most interesting location you are willing to share?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  Hmm. Not many come to mind, probably because I don't go out much. I will say that North Carolina is a hell of a picturesque state. From the Appalachian mountains to the Piedmont and its many cities to the coastal regions where two brothers thought the sands around Kitty Hawk were nice enough to try flying heaver-than-air machinery, there's a little something for everyone here. There's a lot of places around North Carolina I could think of if I went around looking, but I don't want to do that. Two places I can think of in particular are Little Switzerland up in the Appalachian mountains and the Outer Banks along the coast. Both of these places I've been to and both of them I quite liked. As of the writing of this answer, however, Little Switzerland is listed as 'temporarily closed' due to Hurricane Helene, because as it turns out, mountain valleys and shit tons of water don't mix well at all. Once it reopens, however, definitely give these two areas a visit.




• Why do you think CSS is such a negative thing?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  At last, we arrive at a good question, once I have waited for for many a time. I will mention now that I despise Javascript primarily because of its projectile vomit bracketing that it calls proper formatting, although I will admit I know little more about it than that. Other programming languages like HTML (what this is written in), Python, and uLua are better formatted than whatever the hell Javascript came up with. CSS is in a similiar vein, leaving HTML as the only one of the three main website programming languages that I can tolerate programming in. At least tags look visually interesting. However, there is an additional reason as to why I despise CSS, and it's both an inexcusable and very funny one.
  
  To put it quite frankly, there's something about no-CSS websites that are inherently fascinating. The more content I put up here, the better it becomes. The fact that I have all this content here ready to be distributed and yet I put zero effort into dressing it up and making it look pretty makes it pretty funny, and like I just said it becomes even funnier the more content I put into this website. Especially on NeoCities, where you're meant to make your own personal site, most people think of that as CSS, but I tend to think of it more as content. However, some of my friends (Split and Whirling particularly) have lamented my lack of use for CSS, which is why I have an offer.
  
  To put it quite frankly, I want to keep not using CSS to not have to bother with it, but my friends want me to use it. So tell you what. Bring to me one singular webmaster of a respected website that tells me to use CSS and I'll happily start learning it for this website. Websites that count include NeoCities, BlueSky, NationStates, Sudomemo, and Wikipedia. Websites that don't count include Roblox, YouTube, and Twitter. A respected website is, in my eyes, one that is respected for its practices across the web. Roblox and YouTube are too slimy and corporate. NeoCities and NationStates are not in this regard and thus count. It will not count if you pester a webmaster to "please convince my friend to use CSS". It has to come about organically and naturally. I don't want to interrupt their fairly important work for something so meaningless.




• What would you consider to be the most overrated and most underrated thing?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  All that comes to mind right now are particular websites (since those happen to be what I'm most versed in), so in order from most underrated to most overrated, we'll cover several websites briefly. NeoCities is arguably one of the finer website hosting providers, allowing you to customize your own HTML, CSS, and Javascript for crying out loud. Much better than Carrd or whatever the hell GitHub allows you to do. I haven't particularly found a thing I dislike about NeoCities, yet more and more things to love about it. BlueSky is rapidly gaining traction as the replacement for Twitter, but it's still not quite there yet. If America survives the 2024 election, I imagine Twitter will fall before the next one and BlueSky will soon become not underrated.
  
  NationStates I cannot tell for the life of me whether it would be underrated or just neutral, so just check it out yourself. Sudomemo/Flipnote Hatena would be underrated, but there is a respect for its artstyle that is omnipresent across the Internet so I would neither rate it underrated nor overrated. It's just fine as is. Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are two profound Internet institutions have been recognized just as much as they need to be for the work they've done.
  
  Roblox is a lot like Runescape in the fact that initially, they were founded just to make kids have fun on this thing they created. However, as time went on, and they needed to grow, they increasingly became more slimy and corporate in order to continue growing. The ends justify the means after all, right? Surely, they would, right? We are living in the year 2024 and I am not sure that they have, but what I am certain is that they certainly cannot get out of that cycle now. Mr. Basooka doesn't seem like a terrible person, the smiley face on his signature suggests otherwise, but what I do see is that he's been corrupted by the power of money which is unfortunate. It's the power of money that tells them to outsource their moderation to outside countries to save extra bucks instead of doing something about it to prevent a catastrophy. YouTube is similiar but different in that competition does exist but is crushed, and said competition is sorely needed since thanks to the power of their parent company they're trying to get away with so many things, and we just have to accept them, because they're too big to fail in the 2008 sense.




• Why do you think society as a whole puts things that are 'cringeworthy' down, and how do people consider something as 'cringeworthy'?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  Ask me what the definition of cringe is and I could not give you a good answer, because truth be told I have no real idea. It's just a sense within me that says that something is cringe or not. The urban dictionary definition is a good enough answer I believe. It's a bad thing, people don't want to associate with it, so that's why society puts cringeworthy things as a whole down, because that's what society tends to do with things it perceives as bad. As for the second half of the question, I don't really know. I can't speak for all members of society, but I can speak for myself, and like I said, it's just a gut feeling deep within me that tells me whether something's cringe or not. It could be from someone else's actions or alternatively from my own, actually a lot of the time from my past self's actions or intrusive thoughts. Not all bad things are cringeworthy, there are other descriptors that exist, but all cringeworthy things are inherently bad.




• What music are you into?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  I've been asked this question many times, often in real life, and I give whoever asked it the same question each time: "I have no fucking idea", because I really do have no fucking idea. Old music as well as "white girl 2000s pop music" are two things that come to mind, but in general, whatever sounds good to me is music that I'm into, which is a lot of things actually. It's hard to describe, actually, what I would consider better over another. I think I mostly just don't care. Give me something that isn't complete ass and I'll happily listen to it for some time. I will tend to not listen to songs that I've listened to over and over again primarily because my brain loves to focus on small sound bites within the songs and it just gives me a tinge of cringe that makes me not want to listen to the song to make sure I don't get those tinges.




• Favourite era of history and why?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  Ooooh. Fuuuuck. That's a damn good question. I kinda like all of them, primarily because I've spent a bit too much time researching them and figuring out how one went into the other. Some top contenders in my view would be, in chronological order; Dawn of Civilization, for that's the time when specialization of labour led into city states and eventually those city states starting conquering each other, and when you're talking about a map game, it's a damn good place to begin for long stories; Pax Romana, simply because the Roman Empire was one of the greatest countries we've ever seen (to my knowledge they were lacking electricity to lead into industrialization, although they still had slaves so that would've been an issue); the Medieval Age and specifically feudalism, there's something about it that I can't quite describe but it's fascinating to me, not the specific details but the devolution involved with it; and finally, the 1990s and the years between it, for the rise of the early Internet as well as culture shift that arose from that sort of thing. Those are my four best eras of history in my view.




• You mention Wikipedia and the Internet Archive as 'Internet institutions' deserving of serious respect. In your view, what responsibility do individual users have in maintaining the integrity of such institutions, especially when personal contribution feels risky? Is selective non-participation sometimes more ethical than potentially imperfect participation?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  Sidenote here here: Starting about now is when I got a huge wave of questions from various sources. Some of these questions were stupid, but others were insightful. So, that's why all of these are on or shortly after Halloween.
  
  I should probably specify that I feel as though my specific contribution would be risky, since I have this fear of fucking things up for others, especially when a lot relies on it. However, for these two Internet institutions, they are slightly different in their approach but rely on user-generated content either way. For Wikipedia, everyone can edit Wikipedia pages and thus all pages are edited by individuals. Some individuals edit far more than others, but in general, many people contribute to this website. Those that do contribute way more than expected are typically the ones that attain more responsibility with Wikipedia and can also manage said responsibility well, since they arguably know what they're doing by that point. Editing Wikipedia actively is not for everyone, but that's okay, because you don't really have to. All you have to do is correct things when you know they're wrong, because Wikipedia allows you to do that.
  
  The Internet Archive is slightly different in this regard in that all users can really do (aside from if they're employed with the Internet Archive) is submit content. Wikipedia sort of counts in this regard but Internet Archive primarily, but the true power in an archive is its ability to always be there when you need it. It's a large gathering of information, sure, but the ability to access it anytime is an archive's true strength. It is this reason why Masahiro Sakurai needn't worry about the lack of traction on his Creating Games series, for in his own words they were created as an archive, so that future game developers can view this material at any time. It is this reason why the Internet Archive's brief downtime this month was so alarming: because for the first time in a long time, that aspect was severed. It is also why many are concerned over the Internet Archive's future.
  
  So to answer your two questions. The answer to the first is that for Wikipedia, it is a considerable amount, but for the Internet Archive, it's not that much (aside from donations, which both of them rely on). The answer to the second is that if you don't know what you're doing, it's generally a good sign that you're better off not bothering until you figure out what you're doing. However, in either case, no one user can fuck things up on their own irreversibly unless they accidentally set off a chain reaction of fuck-ups years in the making. Your mistake will likely just be undone without much incident.




• You draw a distinction between 'respected' and 'corporate' websites based on their practices. Given that NeoCities and similar platforms might need to scale up as they grow, how do you think they can avoid the 'cycle' that corrupted Roblox and others? Is there a sustainable way to grow while maintaining integrity?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  The first half of the answer is that they can't. Capitalism is inevitably going to draw them towards a corrupt business model because you can always make more money by fucking other people over. It is unfortunate to say, but by default right now you just have to assume all online services will undergo enshittification through one means or another. Roblox was once a good platform back when I first joined around the early 2010s, and now it's one of the prime embodiments of capitalism today. Hell, they're one of the few platforms actively trying to make the 'Metaverse'. I'll also cite Discord as a good example, getting closer and closer to being corrupted by capitalism, even though it hasn't gotten nearly as far as Roblox as of present.
  
  I cite Discord here because the second half of this answer is that you totally can, because you can still make large amounts of money while respecting the people. Discord accomplished this through 'Discord Nitro', where all the core features remained free but cosmetic improvements were behind a subscription service. Cosmetics are an ideal way to make money because practically, they're completely useless and don't give you an advantage over others. However, they do look neat as all hell, and many value themselves off of looking good to others, so cosmetics are often one of the most profitable models online. NeoCities has done something similiar with its Supporter plan and even BlueSky as I write this is experimenting with this model as well. However, while power/money may reveal and not corrupt, it often reveals people's true sense of morality, which to many outside observers is perceived as flawed. Even if someone's moral compass is true, it doesn't mean others are as well. Public companies such as Roblox often undergo rapid enshittification shortly after going public. Again, I don't see Mr. Basooka as an inherently bad person, but his company is public now, and in America, shareholders are king.




• Your answers suggest a tension between preserving authenticity (like your no-CSS stance) and adapting to reasonable suggestions from friends. How do you determine when standing firm on a principle becomes mere stubbornness versus maintaining genuine authenticity?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  Good question! I don't. This is one of the things I'm actively learning as I continue along with life and I personally suspect many others as well. I kind of just have to figure out through trial and error whether a principle of mine I keep through genuine authenticity or through stubbornness. The current political (and not!) polarization of society, the fact that every lie is built on some kind of truth, and the grey morality of human beings further complicates this field. I won't get it right all the time. Nobody will, because nobody's perfect. Even you reading this. Yeah, you. You're flawed in some way, but so are your friends, your family, and everyone you know, even me. I am flawed in some way. It's just a matter of being a human being. And this imperfection is contagious: we created advanced machine-learning algorithms like ChatGPT based on human values and thus it inherited that imperfection. To answer the question however, whenever I have too many second thoughts about my own principles based on other people's input do I stop to consider what it means for real. I analyze what it means and what it relates to all its factors, then I make up my mind from there.




• Your description of 'cringe' as an internal sense rather than a definable concept is interesting. Could society's aversion to 'cringe' actually be stifling genuine expression and innovation? When you feel something is 'cringe,' how often do you question that instinct?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  It is less so that society's aversion to cringe is the direct cause of many innovative concepts being snubbed, but rather "cringe" is a form of expression that can be abstracted in this case to also mean "this is too novel for me to handle". Humans desire familiarity and novelty in moderation. In this aspect, I don't believe so. While innovation can absolutely be snuffed for being too novel, many wouldn't choose the word 'cringe' for it, rather some other word. Expression is another thing entirely I feel, and yeah in that aspect it can definitely snuff expression and even be harmful. Quite frankly, people grow up from different backgrounds and see different things as normal compared to others. This form of expression then can be looked down upon as "cringe" by those that either never saw it before or saw it in a different context entirely. As for questioning my own feeling of cringe, I often don't question that instinct at all, primarily because the vast majority of what I view as cringe is my own past work.




• You mention keeping your online and real life separate 'as humanely possible' but then note you 'don't do anything in real life and thus don't have a real personality.' In an increasingly digital world, is this separation still meaningful, or could it be limiting authentic self-expression in both spheres?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  This separation is still very much meaningful so far, and although it isn't really limiting my self-expression online (it is somewhat, but not to a noticable degree), it is somewhat noticably limiting my self-expression in real life. For many people however, I can see how it would become unreliable and at some point you would have to break the gap. But the truth is, we're increasingly living in a post-privacy world, where privacy is becoming a more scarce resource that you have to protect. It is quite a valuable thing to have privacy nowadays, and that is why I actively spend the effort to keep the separation intact. I will note, however, that I spend the vast majority of my time on the computer, so it would arguably make sense why I don't really have a real life personality. Now that I think about it, my life seems more like a science experiment than a normal person's life.




• What's worse: having to use GitHub's 2FA every day for the rest of your life, or having to add one tiny bit of CSS to every website you make forever?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  Considering that I don't really use GitHub, the former currently doesn't affect me much, however of the few features I care about on GitHub, one of them is behind the "sudo mode" lock and thus requires me to use 2FA. Conversely, one of my friends has already provided me said "tiny bit of CSS" to every website I make so that wouldn't be the problem. So I would probably add that tiny bit of CSS over having to actually use GitHub and thus deal with sudo mode for the rest of my life. At least it's a one-and-done thing in that case as opposed to a constant struggle.




• If you had to design a website about either Little Switzerland or Kitty Hawk, which would you pick, and would you still refuse to use CSS for it?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  From the sidenote until now, I had a feeling that these questions were written by AI (although I cannot personally confirm this, so if a human was actually behind these questions, apologies!), but ignored it because they were still good. This is not a good question. This is an example of having to quality check your AI results before you release them out into the world. But as for the question itself, mostly because I don't like to work with CSS, I am not a website designer. So as much as I don't like to question dodge, I am going to have to dodge this question and say neither. I have one website, this one, and that's good enough for me.




• If Wikipedia had a content assessment rating for 'personality authenticity', how would you rate yourself, and would you publish that rating?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  Why would Wikipedia have that content assessment rating? Again, quality check your AI results before you release them. But I'll answer the question anyway: I wouldn't rate myself and I wouldn't publish it because how the fuck do you determine something as subjective as "personality authenticity"? If anything, I would actually grow the courage to stand against this rating due to simply how baffling it is, before realizing that every other Wikipedia editor is already doing the same and stand down.




• Marlboro or Paracetamol?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  This is a troll question, and normally I'd reject it, but why the hell not, I have a decent answer for this one. So cigarettes or painkillers.. well cigarettes just kill you faster than oxygen and painkillers are a godsend, but I wouldn't pick paracetamol. I'm not familiar with that specific one. The ones I'm used to are ibuprofen and oxycodone. Oxycodone is the one I recommend more because it just kills all pain more effectively and faster than ibuprofen, but of course the downside is that it's an opioid drug. You know, the one that's causing one of the many silent crises ongoing in America. As such, its use is heavily regulated and I didn't want to be careful to get addicted to it. Nevertheless, it absolutely helped during one of my surgery recoveries so, if you get access to it, I highly recommend it. Just make sure you use it responsibly.




• If your Roblox avatar is your online identity now, what would happen if Roblox shut down tomorrow?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  Immediately get in contact with the ArchiveTeam, purge all my applications except for the ArchiveTeam Warrior, and do whatever I could to preserve Roblox's history. I'd also probably preserve as much of my profile as possible, including my avatar and its items, so that I could commission a reference so that my avatar could live past Roblox's shutdown. While the basis of my online identity originates from Roblox, I have effectively put it everywhere else at this point so all that would need to be done is to create a reference sheet so that it would persist forevermore. The more interesting aspect of this question is the shutdown of Roblox itself, which is a large contributor to online culture and the shutdown of a large public corporation effectively overnight, however it happened, would send shockwaves across the online sphere as well as the markets. We'd probably experience a small cultural downturn as well as a small economic downturn as investors panic, fearing that their investments might also go under overnight. But eventually, like with all things, we'll recover. Doubtless, however, having the archive all of Roblox in 24 hours will mean we miss a lot of things, and thus a small-scale Metaphor of Alexandria would occur. It doesn't help that a lot of Roblox's file formats are proprietary, and the work to archive Roblox as of right now is simply not there. But my identity and I would be fine.




• What's the weirdest message you've gotten that wasn't from a scammer?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  I don't know of much, especially since nobody really contacts me aside from scammers, but I can identify three notable instances. The first was when someone (Albion) whose profile I had been eyeing for some time (I tend to do this to people whose profiles are aethestically pleasing or those whom I particularly like) randomly contacted me out of the blue and started talking for hours in a voice chat. He is now one of my good friends. Funny how that sort of thing happens. The second was when I was talking with Digi who was in a bonk.io lobby and one of the other players mentioned a bit of lost media. I talked about how I knew the media in particular, and when this message was relayed back to the lobby, the player thought that I had a lead, when I really didn't, I just said that I knew the lost media in particular. He tried to get my Discord account, to which I accepted but quickly told him I had no leads. He acknowledged and we went along our separate ways. The third was, well, this question form. I didn't expect so many of you to ask so many questions. NeoCities said 35 people visited my website on October 31st and 71 people visited on November 1st. After accounting for my friends and web crawlers, that's roughly a couple dozen of you that I've never met before that asked various kinds of questions. Thanks for that. I definitely wasn't scared at all by this sudden influx and tricked myself into thinking it was some really dedicated guy. Not at all. Nope.




• What's your opinion on how NeoCities users are bringing back old internet vibes but with new tech?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  Ultimately, NeoCities is about bringing some liveliness back to the web by allowing everyone to make their own personal websites, something that's, well, personal to them. In this aspect, it is expected and even encouraged that many would try and recreate the old internet vibes through their website considering that NeoCities is the phoenix that rose from the ashes of Geocities. I don't really have a problem with these kinds of people, or with this philosophy for that matter, hell I encourage it. In the true spirit of what NeoCities represents, let the people recreate whatever kind of vibes they want through their website. If that's what they want, then that's what they're going to get. Just like how I don't bother with CSS and thus resulting in a bare-bones looking site, people that want to see the old Internet return will take matters into their own hands and make their own website as though it were from 2000.




• Which old website would you save forever if you could only pick one?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  Although I assume you're referring to keeping a website up for all eternity, I understand that that isn't really reasonable. Instead, a far more reasonable option is to assume this question means that "What website that isn't fully archived and is gone now would you restore its archives full and complete with the snap of your finger"?, and in this regard I choose Google Video. Geocities was just about completely archived thanks to the dedicated work of the ArchiveTeam, and all major websites since then that fall to the wayside (not really, really major. None of those have fallen yet, but we're getting there, looking at you, Twitter/X) are archived rather quickly. But ask me what our greatest loss was, our Metaphor of Alexandria for the web, and that's Google Video. To my knowledge, there isn't a complete archive of Google Video that exists and it's a shame since it was basically YouTube before YouTube was a thing, and the question of "what would happen if YouTube went down tomorrow" is answered somewhat on a smaller scale here. The result is that a lot of videos are lost to the annals of time. Granted, ArchiveTeam and even some video creators did their best, but still, many have been lost never to be seen again, and that can be particularly hurting for Roblox content, since Roblox themselves specifically called out Google Video as the place to put Roblox content, and then Google told everyone to move to YouTube.




• Is avoiding CSS actually making your site more unique or is it just making it harder to read?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  How the hell is it hard to read my website? Don't screen readers actively get rid of some of the CSS so that you can read the, y'know, content? The default is white background, black text, and that's like the most readable possible. You're forgiven if you can't read the small text, because it's, well, small, but overall the lack of CSS actually makes the website much more readable in my opinion. As for it being unique, the funny thing about that is that CSS is meant to make your websites look unique, and yet since I haven't seen any website on this scale not use CSS in my entire (as of writing) 12 years on the Internet aside from KeymapsGB, the lack of CSS only serves to make my website more unique. That is pretty much antithetical to the whole point of CSS, yes, but when everyone's trying to pose as someone else, you gain a lot of character by just being yourself. So, to sum up, I think it's making my website both unique and easy to read for different reasons.




• You say you're not nostalgic but half your site is about old internet stuff. What's up with that?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  It's partially my fault for the confusion for both making this bit in small text but also making it a little confusing to read, but what I meant to say there was NeoCities is not specifically meant for nostalgia. Even though it was built as a sort of "Geocities rising from the ashes as a phoenix" sort of thing like mentioned earlier, the webmaster has made it quite clear that NeoCities is very much for the future and they've built in more than a few safeguards into making sure of that. When I said "it's not nostalgic", I was referring to NeoCities. The parentheses immediately afterward, "although part of my being is nostalgia", refers to myself. It's sort of a running joke amongst my friends that I am the past, and that's because I like to dwell on it a lot. Why do you think I make such a fuss on archival? The lack of CSS wasn't actually for nostalgia, that was laziness, but the past comes for me whether I like it or not, so good analogy regardless. Hell, my fucking identity is built off of nostalgia, since I had my Roblox avatar sit unmodified for years before I decided to make it more of a mainstay with myself. It was the one thing that I could disconnect from real life and that was persistent from year to year. I bonded with it very well, and so it was meant to be.




• What's your take on how Discord changed everything about how we talk online?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  For the most part, pretty damn good. I'm partially biased on this because not only was I an early adopter of Discord (May 2016) but I also have an active four-year (as of time of writing) subscription with no signs of cancelling anytime soon. In order to truly appreciate it, however, you had to have been around before Discord. You had essentially two options: TeamSpeak, which had godly voice chat capabilities, sure, but limited chat options and was paid. Skype was the more popular option for the plebeians, and it was essentially if Discord didn't have servers nor a dark mode. Or more rather, just a bunch of group chats. There wasn't a limit on the member count for these group chats, but there was only one channel per group chat. Wanted a new place to speak? Make a new group chat. Of course, Skype fell into disuse because these group chats weren't the point to Skype, it was the VoIP capabilities. One thing I miss from Skype is the ability to call people, through telephone, through the comfort and convenience of your personal laptop. Many videos exist of people calling up various institutions through Skype and recording the interaction through Bandicam/OBS or something like that. That is the only present-day use for Skype, there is nothing else valuable there. Discord not only innovating with servers but also being actively maintained was a big reason why it grew in the early days. As it kept getting more and more features, closing the gap between it and Skype, the waves kept growing larger. The pandemic essentially made sure that Discord became one of the major Internet institutions alongside YouTube and Twitter.




• You wrote "[at]" and "[dot]" in your email even though literally everyone knows that's what bots look for now anyway.. what's the point of this?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  "Literally everyone" knows.. except for me. I was trying to avoid the bots, and genuinely just had no idea they did that anyway now. You weren't even the first one to tell me, May was. I keep it up like that now because I'm too lazy to adjust it to anything else. I don't know if I should sacrifice readability and make it in brainfuck or something stupid like that or just yolo it and feature it in full without any substitutions. To be fair, I'm not that relevant enough to get any spam mail from bots (yet), so why would I even try and bother? I just saw everyone else doing and thought "why not, that sounds like something I need to do".




• Noticed you capitalize "Web" sometimes but not others.. is that like a specific thing or do you just feel like some uses of "web" deserve more respect?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  I didn't actually notice this at first so I had to check, and there are only two times where I used the capitalized "Web", both referring to the "CSS negative" question mentioned earlier. That was one of my anticipated questions from the audience, and so when I finally got it, I prepared it as though it was going to be enshrined in the annals of time forever, aka, I couldn't fuck it up. So yes, there are some instances where I feel it deserves more respect, but that's more of a random feeling to be honest. There isn't any set qualification to get the capitalization, it's just whatever I feel like and almost entirely incidental. Almost all the time I'll go with the lowercase web.




• You said "don't question me about which pages I fix typos on". Where can I see these pages?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  Right here: Special:Contributions. It didn't occur to me for some time that that page wasn't easily accessible to the public, so there you go. I do mean it when I say don't question me on what pages I fix typos on, so unless you have a damn good question/reason for asking, it will be treated as a stupid question and thus ignored. I won't judge if you do, however, as there's not really any way of knowing (only assuming/guessing) from my way of speech what I'll be interested in you asking and what isn't. That's why I don't tend to flag many stupid questions unless it's an obvious troll (and even sometimes I'll accept troll questions if I can get a good answer out of it).




• Do you actually wonder why people read your stuff? For example: "Why are you even here?" listed on your Blog.
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  In the true NeoCities fashion, this website is an expression of my personal self. I just say shit like that partially to pad it out to make my website look like it has more here than it does, and to make it seem like my AMA doesn't take up 90% of the text on my website (likely to grow!), but also because it's just what comes to mind. Is it good? Absolutely not! But is it undeniably me? Probably, I mean, someone else could probably say something that stupid. But would it be out of character for them? Most likely. Hell, what's to say that I'm not doing that same thing right now? I am! I am absolutely padding out this answer. I don't know the answer to it, but I want to give all of these valid questions a good answer, so this is the answer you get. I know it's not a good one, but it's mine. Oh wait, I didn't even try to answer the question. Yes, I do actually, because I'm not relevant. Where did you people come from? BlueSky?.. likely that, yeah, but it surely can't be where all of you came from. Whatever. I need to shut my mouth before this answer gets more nonsensical.




• As someone who's become somewhat of an internet historian figure, what's your take on the preservation of early social media culture?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  I give the same answer I'd give if you generalized it to just "Internet culture": insightful and important. Go to a random website where user-generated content (be it through text or video) displays prominently, and then go to a random old snapshot through the Wayback Machine. Say, YouTube in 2016. You can get a sense of what it was like to not only be around at that time, but more primarily live in that time. It's useful for writers of that time period to know so that they can get a better sense of what it was like to be alive at that period if they weren't themselves or didn't really experience it for themselves, so they can write better, more compelling characters. It's useful for historians who can paint a clearer picture of what the people of this time period were like. Their needs, their wants, their aspirations and motivations, as well as what they did in their freetime. Early social media is particularly interesting in that it provides one of the few rare times in the Internet where a large group of people had the avenue to truly be themselves. There are pockets of this sort of thing across the Internet, yes, but either it's been tainted by reality (see Twitter) or not really catching on with the masses (see any niche, small website). I compare it sort of to NeoCities, where yes a large amount of people had access to a medium to be themselves, and they absolutely used it to the best of their ability, but it still was small enough to not really be ruined by society. Here, in these archives, you can find people learning how social media works for the first time, and once they do so, learning to express themselves through the medium of the World Wide Web. I just realized, the same thing applies to NeoCities. Ah well.




• Remember when everyone thought your Roblox avatar was gonna be an NFT collection and you went OFF?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  This looks like a troll question. It's not, and for it to make sense, I have to tell the story behind it. I forget where or even if exactly I "went off" on this, so that won't be covered. January 8th, 2024, I was checking my Roblox account when I got a new message. They don't come around very often, so either it's a scam or someone genuine. Most of the time, it's a scam, and this time it was a scam. This one was a little different. Rather than trying to convince you to divulge your account details through the means of a false promise of robux, this one advertised an NFT service. I won't link it here, but I did check it out. Although it was a thing, it seemed rather dead. The message itself promised 3,000 robux if I allowed my avatar to be used as an NFT. Of course, knowing that NFTs are just online traded receipts, I just ghosted whoever this was and went on with my day. I had two previous people try to con robux out of me using my avatar as the vessel using a different method, and I consider it a pretty damn high compliment if people have to try to use my avatar to get me to fall for a scam. For the record, not happening. I've been online too long to not know what is and isn't a scam.




• Why do you have such strong opinions about mountain valleys after Hurricane Helene?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  As mentioned earlier, I live in North Carolina. I'd consider the western third of our state to be the mountainous third, with the Appalachian mountains and such. Hurricane Helene went smack through this mountainous area, and you might think it wouldn't have done that much damage, especially since land (and particularly mountains) are known to weaken hurricanes. However, the particular terrain here posed major problems. Mountain valleys in particular, I believe, trapped a lot of rain (and thus water) with hardly any way out, causing major damages. It's also a matter of, well, hurricanes hadn't actually gotten there in a really long time, so hardly anybody was prepared. I don't really have strong views on mountain valleys in particular, but rather Hurricane Helene and its effects. For starters, have you fucking seen the damage to cities like Asheville after the hurricane? It was damn near apocalyptic. I thankfully don't live near the disaster zones but I've visited them once or twice in my life and it quite frankly seems horrific to see what I vacationed in now be reduced to rubble (which it likely will be for years). Doubtless Hurricane Helene was worsened by climate change, and speaking of modern events, our current political polarization made the effects worse since FEMA had to withdraw some of its forces following active threats to their operations there..
  
  And yet, as badly as western NC was destroyed, life finds a way. I am reminded of the 2020 Sparta earthquake, whereby a stupidly rare earthquake decided to occur in western North Carolina on a previously undiscovered small tectonic plate. Our Governor, Roy Cooper, said that "We've dealt with a hurricane, a violent tornado, and now an earthquake all in the middle of a pandemic: North Carolinians are resilient." All of these things were true, and yet, our state stood strong. I can only hope the same applies for those currently suffering in western NC as well as the overall stability of America as of when I'm writing this.




• The way you talk about music is sending me. "white girl 2000s pop" being in your top genres was NOT on my 2024 bingo card.
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  This is not a question and I'd skip it under that pretense, but then I realized there's a conversation to be had within this "question". What does it exactly mean to have a 2024 bingo card? As far as I'm aware, the "{current year} bingo card" metaphor is only used for unpredictable events, as in "that was not on my 2024 bingo card". But now I'm thinking, what is on people's yearly bingo cards? There's an untapped potential for this sort of thing. Yearly large bingo cards can be made based on people's predictions for the year, and if an event happens that is truly unprecedented, one that wasn't accounted for on the bingo card, then people can appropriately freak out that it, in fact, was not on their 2024 bingo card.




• As a fellow software developer of 20+ years, I'm curious about your thoughts on the evolution of web standards. Your stance reminds me of the early 2000s purists.
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  I didn't pay much attention to web standards (I'm presuming you mean something like HTTP) for a while, and only recently did while looking through the NeoCities blog. The NeoCities webmaster brings up a very good point in one of their blog posts, linked on my main page as of time of writing, where HTTP has served its purpose and needs to be replaced with a more decentralized/distributed model to prevent things like cenorship from various institutions (including but not limited to other nations) and link rot. NeoCities specifically cites IPFS, and indeed, according to my admittedly limited research, it does seem like our best shot in this so far. The main problem with IPFS at present is that, as an inherent part of how it works, it's unfortunately intertwined itself with Web 3.0 and thus all the shitfuckery that entails with it (NFTs, cryptocurrency, blockchain, mAchine learnIng). Some of this stuff is good, and a good chunk of it isn't. Also, if it's been around for 10 years or more and barely adopted by anyone, what hope do we have of such a thing being adopted in the next ten years, let alone a new standard that doesn't have the same Web 3.0 problems as IPFS? I would love to live in an ideal world that IPFS advertises, I just don't think I'm going to get it within my lifetime.




• You really named yourself through divine intervention and stuck with it?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  Yes. My previous username was not only dogshit but way too personal and so I was looking for a better username. It sounded cool, I liked it, and the name stuck. I have gotten some new ideas for usernames, but I like "LegitSi" too much to get rid of it. Doesn't mean I'm not keeping those usernames for a rainy day.. incidentally, LegitSi is pretty damn unique while also being short simultaneously, as a name that came from divine intervention rather than whatever a random username generator online will give you. My only complaint is that people shorten it to "Legit" way too often, which results in it being hard to look up, so I just tell people to either refer to me as "legi" or "legitsi", but you knew that already. I mentioned it earlier in a previous answer.




• Why does your contact page seem like a spy novel/tier list and have more lore than a dark souls game/family tree?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  Believe it or not, all of these things are real things that people said about my contact page. I think it's primarily due to the fact that I really want people to contact me if they can. If they have a problem with what I'm saying, tell me about it directly rather than muting/blocking me over it. If you wanna talk to me about a certain topic to get my thoughts or pick my brain, by all means, I'l all ears. Part of this is giving people as many options as possible to allow people of all kinds to be able to message me. Don't have Discord? Use BlueSky. Don't have BlueSky? Use Discord. Don't have either? Use my e-mail? Don't have any? Try whatever you can to reach me. Like my contact page says, I am available and I will get to you, no matter what, you just need to make the first step! I believe in you.




• Do you ever just wake up and choose violence against GitHub or is it more of a gradual build-up?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  Neither: I just don't use GitHub as much as I can. Anything I work on remains outside the confines of GitHub and all my current repositories are dead. There will inevitably come a day when I'm forced to use Git for a project of mine, but until that day comes, I will boycott my use of GitHub as much as possible. But to answer your question in an alternative way, it was more of a gradual hate with the more annoyances that came about, and then when 2FA hit, it was violence. A conversation I had with May, who told me that this problem was a problem with Git and not GitHub, was something further that led me to violence. I can't really answer this question to a satisfying level of detail but I hope that works.




• Can I get your thoughts on the discussion between small websites versus corporate minimalism?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  A couple comments before I answer. First of all, I had to retype this question because whatever characters you put into "vs" messed up the HTML editing terminal. I'm serious. Second of all, I am not the main character in this debate as you stated in your question nor of anything. More on how I know that in another later question. To answer this question, I assume you're referring to the various styles, with almost all of the big corporation websites going for a more minimalist look (see Corporate Memphis). This artstyle is rather lazy at best and sinister at worst, with this artstyle often being associated with the negative actions of a company. Whereas small websites from NeoCities tend to value personal design and thus one website can look completely different compared to another. To me, there isn't really any sort of contest on this issue, because both sides are doing different things like we're talking about apples and oranges. I do prefer the styles of smaller websites though.




• Pardon my intrusion, but I've been analyzing your writing style across platforms. The juxtaposition between your formal Wikipedia edits and your rather passionate GitHub complaints is fascinating. Care to elaborate?
  Asked October 31st, 2024
  
  Finally, we come to the rarest kind of question: ones I have not anticipated yet I love all the same. It's true that I act different ways online from one use case to the next, and I've noticed too and I'm unsure of how to deal with it. I have actually wondered at some point if I had DID, and while I do share some of the symptoms, it all seems circumstantial and can be explained by other things. I tend to act more serious when I'm in a serious setting (obviously) like Wikipedia or, hell, when writing up answers for these questions, but I'll tend to act more laxed when I'm around online communities (see Discord). The mood upon which I feel like writing a post will heavily influence how I write it, as I imagine many others will feel the same way, but knowing how I've typed over the course of several years, it is pretty obviously noticable. I act very differently from one Discord server to another, and from one BlueSky post to another. BlueSky is arguably a great example. On one post, I talk about how some of my peers are starting to get into extremist rhetoric in a rather serious manner, and then a couple posts later I talk about how it'd be funny if someone made a bot to block everyone on BlueSky. I will admit that even though they were on the same day, they were almost 24 hours apart.
  
  BlueSky has really felt like the platform where I can speak my mind on a lot of things (as well as this website, funnily enough!) so you can find good examples there. On Discord, many servers have their own communities, personalities, and hidden rules. I can act very differently from one server to the next, and I attribute that to the doorway effect, which may possibly be what's going on here. Of course, online, everything you say and do is tracked for the world to see if they so desired, and I do often watch what I say just to make sure it doesn't get into the wrong hands later, but otherwise, I just say what I want to say and if anyone has a problem with that, that's on them to let me know and tell me about it. I'm sorry if I talked way too much and you weren't able to understand me, I just like to ramble a lot, especially when in the presence of intelligent company.

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