MySpace Pages and Clickbait Ads
Or, How I Spent A Weekend Obsessing Over A Landing Page
God, do I miss the age of MySpace. I miss when we could all congregate on one website and spend hours coding your page to be the exact right balance of blingees, emo girl chibis stolen from Photobucket, and Avril Lavigne.
So when I was looking to spice up my landing page (I call it a writing portfolio, even though it’s not exactly that), I leaned into its preexisting frutiger aero-ness and made the snap decision to mimic a MySpace page.
Yeah, I know HTML… How to meet ladies—
If I had to estimate how many hours I sunk into this, I’d say around 12, off and on. Unfortunately, my self-taught HTML coding knowledge wrought from customizing my defunct MySpace page and my still-active (no, I will not tell you my username) tumblr did not factor into the contorting I performed on Carrd’s somewhat limited layout.
But I am nothing if not tenacious as hell.
My ultimate goal was to end up with a landing page that—should any agent, editor, reader, etc. glance through it—elicited the reaction, “Oh my god, this bitch is crazy, but, like, in a really good way. Who does this?”
Me, dear reader: I do this.
I added some modern touches to my bio, including my pronouns, links to my social media, and a link to my Spotify playlists—the latter of which contains curated playlists for all of my novels.
And what would a MySpace page be without a Top 8?
A fun detail here is that I’ve made this section (using the gallery feature) interactable, so if you click on any of these authors, it’ll lead you to their Wikipedia pages for an overview of who they are.
SPEAKING OF INTERACTABLE—
If you’ve been scrolling through my portfolio, you may have noticed all of the ads, such as…
While reflecting upon the era, I recalled the absolute inundation of advertisements for MMOs like Evony, which feature sexy women beckoning me to “come play, my lord!” and confusing the hell out of me because the game itself had a distinctive lack of women breasting boobily along the trenches.
But the core memory of these ads along with free iPhone 2 scams and trojan horse viruses conjured the joke-thought, “What if I make clickbait ads for my stories?”
And because I can’t simply ignore a joke, I spent an additional however-many-idk hours on crafting shit like this:
I love the compression on the one above—it’s Period Accurate.
“Nectar of the neck” is code for “blood.”
I think we as a society should go back to using ‘z’ in place of ‘s’ to denote something trendy and “kewl.”
And of course I needed an esoteric one that doesn’t make sense no matter how long you stare at it.
I made all of these clickable, and if you try pressing the improperly placed ‘X’ (they were never quite in the right place, were they?), it’ll lead you to that ad’s correlating story page.
But what’s up with “Oops! All Demons! ‘Verse”?
Oh yeah, that. I’m not going to lie to you: that’s an outlier in the MySpace theming and a holdover from my old layout that I couldn’t bear to give up.
Oops! All Demons! ‘Verse is what I jokingly call my loosely-connected-but-not-really-connected book universe in which—as the name suggests—a demon tends to pop up at some point. What can I say, I could make my own canon at this point. It’s not my fault that un-Googleable names are very, very fun to invent.
I opted to keep it as it contains a chronology (that I swiftly broke with the Gyre rewrite) of my stories as well as a preview of what’s next on the slate.
The name is a play on the Captain Crunch Oops! All Berries cereal, which then led me to make this—
—which is a stylized like a vintage cereal ad. OH, THERE! THERE, I CONNECTED THE THEMES OF THIS POST!
Odds and Ends
Okay, here’s a lightening round of things I missed. Quickly:
The “About” and “Recent Work” sections are headed with glitter graphics that I used a generator to make.
The “Recent Work” section contains the statuses for everything I’ve written (i.e. if I’m writing, editing, or seeking representation).
I plucked the floating gifs from GIPHY—the pride flag, the writing chibi, and the zodiac sign. I used my thirteen year old brain to chose these three things to describe myself in a condensed way.
The music player contains a song I made in—well, bandcamp says 2018, so let’s go with that. Back in the day, I produced some fictional music for a fictional band that’s actually in one of my books! I threw it up on Spotify as well, just to kind of keep the name for myself. (Note: their music sounds nothing like this.)
The favicon is a small but knowing clown.
Final Thoughts
Sometimes, you’ve just gotta do things for yourself. Does everyone who looks at my myspace page appreciate the amount of work I’ve poured into it? No. It’s a consumable. It’s art. The creation of such things and the amount of time it takes to devour it are two disparate lengths. Such is the nature of these sorts of things.
But do I appreciate the effort I’ve put forth? Yes. Yes, because it’s fucking kewl.
All SO kewl! So much of it makes no sense to me (in part, because I’m not stopping to think and, in part, my age) but I truly enjoy reading your clever work and thoughts. WHEN do you find the time?!!