Hell-ooooo world!

As I sit here in the living room of my parents’ house, where I grew up, I think of things that are different and things that remain the same.

My sister is married (!), and isn’t sleeping in the next room. My dad owns a boat and is on a fishing trip in Canada. My mom sleeps with the door closed nowadays. There is a grey cat roaming the halls and batting with insects who looks very similar to my childhood cat (Katie <3), but she doesn’t really know me and actually hisses at me most times I try to pet her. There’s a 1080p HDTV staring at me that finally replaced a “big screen” 4:3 box, and strangely, that is probably the most recent alteration.

I started Hell-Toupee probably about ten years ago. The idea of celebrating its anniversary is not why I’m finally changing the design of the site; I’m always messing around in the backend of this site, completely re-writing its system of working and layout, but rarely pull the trigger on actually making it live. To be honest, I know there are not a lot of visitors to this site; I’ve stopped checking the Google Analytics on a regular basis. And why would they come? The changes are not highlighted — nor are they all that frequent.

So I thought, why not make some changes? Why not actually incorporate a blog? Why not actually write? Maybe if I do make some changes, there will actually be some visitors.

Hell-Toupee has always been about highlighting stuff I’ve made or helped make, and that’s pretty much why it’s always existed. It’s always been a landing pad, a basic directory of sorts, piping you to different destinations, different expressions in different mediums. Mostly that’s videos and music that you won’t find anywhere else on the net lest I point you to it, and most likely you’re visiting this site because I told you it exists.

There’s also some writing that I’ve pointed to around the web, so again, I thought: why bother with the blog thing? And who knows. If my track record of starting blogs and abandoning them in a weeks’ time continues, so be it. You’ll find those already-written articles linked to as always. I’ve been writing a teensy bit in Medium, and I’ll probably continue that because the exposure can be interesting, but I’ll likely cross-post a bit. I’m expecting this side of things to be a bit unfiltered, a bit crazier.

I’m doing it to push myself to make (and finish) more things.

I’m doing it because I like discovering websites, still. Not Facebook pages and Tumblr blogs. Well, those are okay, but they’re not the same. Centralized feeds are addictive and engaging, but I still like websites. I like the open nature of the web. I like Firefox. I like organizing my bookmarks. I like RSS feeds. I like building things, mainly.

Maybe there will be a forum! Maybe I’ll post about other cool things I find on the ‘net! Maybe I’ll even share some of the things I get to do for my job! In other words, if I’m going to make some changes, I’m going to need to imbue my personality in this site more. So hi, my name is Justin and I live in central Pennsylvania.

So I’ll leave it there, and I’ll get to work hashing out this site. For my next post, check out some pictures I took on my phone while walking around my parents’ house in a Labor Day-stupor!