8/3/2025, 7:15 AM

MOT ATTENDS HTML DAY 2025

(an excuse to socialize)

yesterday, August 2nd, 2025, was national HTML Day! sorry i'm a little late to the party, i got home kinda late last night and wasn't really up to writing about it until this morning... that being said, i had a great time! HTML Day is essentially an excuse for people to meet up and talk about, write, and enjoy the wonders of HTML and the web as a whole, which is a really cool idea in my opinion. they have meetup locations all over the world run by different people, so if you think you don't have the opportunity to go to one, check the list and see if a city nearby is there! for me, i attended the Atlanta meetup, and that was a bit of a drive. i am really glad i went though, because i had a great time! i'm a simple country girl, i live pretty far away from the city, so it was sorta nice getting to drive up to a more populated area. that being said, good GOD the Atlanta highways are a disaster. i got off one exit too early and it added like 12 minutes to my ETA, and it doesn't help that people drive like absolute maniacs there... still, i got there in one piece, and made my way to the meetup location. it was a sort of shady looking place, it had fogged up windows and was covered in metal bars... i wasn't sure if i was at the right place, and i was worried that when i tried to go in i'd be held at gunpoint, since it wasn't in the best part of town either. but luckily there were no guns, instead i was greeted by Nobel Yoo, the super nice and welcoming host of the event.

when i walked in there were only five of us, me, Nobel, Isaac, Aris, and i don't think i ever got the last guy's name. he had a really good HTML themed shirt though, i think it looked like this:

pretty good stuff, i love a good programming shirt. of the initial five of us though, i think i was the only one from Neocities, and i was far less experienced than basically everyone else there. i think everyone else morso had jobs in the field of web development, while i was just a hobbyist. i was pretty nervous at first, but we pretty quickly started to fall into a rhythm and i felt more comfortable after that. again, Nobel was a super nice host, i can't overstate this. we did a couple ice breakers, including sharing our first internet memory, and i always love telling the story of mine. so, i discovered the internet when i was SUPER young, as early as three or four years old, before i even knew how to spell. i was instantly captured by YouTube, since that was where i could watch people play videogames, and i liked those things! unfortunately, i didn't know how to spell YouTube at that point, so i had to get crafty with how i got to the site. luckily, i did know how to access this one flash game called Super Mario 63, which had a splash screen for its creator, Runouw. if you clicked on this splash screen it'd take you to their website, which had a YouTube video front and center on it. i'd then click on that video, and in the bottom right it had a "watch on YouTube" button. i'd click that, and THAT was how i got to the site.

a little while later, we got a 6th person to join our ranks named Ano, and she was another Neocities user like me! she was also moreso around my skill level and age, so i felt a little less out of my league. we exchanged sites, and we found out we both know Velvet Blue, who was one of the first people from Neocities i became friends with! her site is called oopsano and its super cute, go check it out!

speaking of sites, we all ended up exchanging sites at some point, or at least sharing ones that we thought were cool. Nobel shared a site he made called steam-ratings.nobr.me, which is a super cool site that lets you sort Steam games by their ratings in very intricate detail. he also enlightened me to the existence of Rotating Rotating Sandwiches, which i'm glad i know about now. i believe Isaac also told me about a site called hydra livecoding, a pretty cool visuals tool you can program, it reminds me a lot of Milkdrop in Foobar2000. i also got to introduce everyone to crouton.net, which i was surprised no one had heard of before. near the end of the event, Aris shared the site they'd been working on the whole time, and i totally didn't even process i was supposed to be making something. i was having so much fun talking that i couldn't focus on writing any code, oops... i liked the site they made though, it was pretty cute! here it is, if you wanna check it out. next year we might need a theme though, because i had zero ideas on what to make even after finding out we were supposed to be making something.

6 PM came soon enough, and we all had to go our own separate ways. i bid my new friends farewell and headed to my car, which i walked to with Ano. we talked about Persona 1 for a bit, which was really cool for me. we then parted ways and i started the long drive home with my roommate, who attended the event with me. she's not all that into HTML, but she still wanted to come with to get out of the house for a bit. on our way home we stopped at an old mall we used to visit when it still had a Round1 arcade, but ever since it shut down there's been nothing there of interest. i guess i just hoped that it would have magically reopened, but alas, it had not. rest in peace Stonecrest Mall Round1, you will never be forgotten. on our way in to the mall though we saw this super pimped-out Jeep which had a huge array of speakers in the back, and it was so loud that even with all my windows rolled up it STILL sounded like the music that was playing from it was coming from inside my car. my roommate described it as a sonic weapon, which is a pretty apt name for it. on our way out we also saw the remnants of what looked like a car accident, because there was a car sitting haphazardly in the opposite lane, facing the wrong direction. despite the debris on the ground, the guy's car looked mostly fine? so that was interesting. i think that was the last thing of interest on our ride home, though.

overall, a very fun outing for me! i only remembered the event at 2:30, and it started at 3, so i was heavily debating on whether i should go or not. i'm really glad i did though! i definitely wanna attend next year's meetup wherever it is, and next time i'll be sure to be more prepared... and on time.