Hello, Neocities!

So my online name is Kevin, my digital name is RuthlessxNexus in some places, in other places its kpr2k. I’ll put it in short for you guys while you’re reading it here: I’m from Buffalo, New York, I’m 25, my birthday just passed last month. I’ve been on the internet since I was around 5, right around the time when YouTube was conceived, but I was on a lot of Flash game websites from way back in the day when Flash wasn’t deleted and condemned a couple of years ago for being a privacy hazard for modern websites. I used to go on websites like Newgrounds, y3, and y8, these websites are still around, but the prominence that they had back in the day, is not the same prominence that they have now in days, as kids are not really playing flash games anymore, what they’re instead playing is games on consoles and PC. I did not grow up in New York however.

I’ve very much lived a nomadic life, to where, I would grow up in Dallas, GA, To all over New Jersey, from Newark, to Belleville, to Nutley, and right around the times my blood parents had divorced, I would stick around this area, up until 2018, to where I would move in with my dad in the Dominican Republic, and since then, I’ve moved from the Dominican Republic, to Winter Park, Florida, to now, I’ve been living around in the Daytona Beach, Florida area since 2021. I was not able to find work around the time I was in high school, as my blood mother and brother had said “I don’t have the mentality to work” in ages 14-17, but I started working in food and retail before I turned 21. I had worked in this sort of scene for about 3 years give or take. The problem with what we’ve had to experience and endure here was hard to say the least. I have gone through multiple jobs in these scenes I had just mentioned, and I was not able to keep a consistent job because: I would be treated lesser than, and I would not have my issues be heard, and instead ignored by just about every single company that I had worked with; to which around spring of 2024 when I had just gotten through the mail of my paycheck from Mcdonalds, no I am not joking when I say this, I said “There’s gotta be another way for me to do what it is I want to do.”, well, I had been unemployed for so long that, I had tried to do direct freelance through platforms, and social media for a while, most of which I was not taken seriously, as I’ve had two people before con me on trying to sign my contract that I have set up, and now I’m just very strict on that stuff.

This is just out of work experience, I’ve given up on trying to run the rat race, and I’m just trying to figure something else out, that’ll work in the long run. Anyways, outside of more recent events, I had been through two colleges, both of which had shut down: Independence University & > Miami International University of Art and Design, to which I was meant to graduate in August of 2021, the month of which IU had shut down, and then graduate earlier within the next year, of which I did from MIU in early 2022, only to have MIU shut down in 2023, which I didn’t know and had to grab all the transcripts from both colleges from, to ensure my degrees validity… Fun… I had also graduated with a Bachelor’s in Graphic Design, and before anyone says I haven’t tried before: I’ve had multiple chances before in the state of Florida, two were right by me, and in the times where I had tried to get an interview, I got nothing back from them, one even called me and said “they picked someone better”, there was some kick from my professors when I was in MIU to go to Miami, and I had been to Miami, and I said no… repeatedly, then the latest was when I was getting into contact with my uncle in Miami-Orlando, saying that, one guy he knows wants to hire me in Orlando, but he was ‘reluctant’ in doing so, which that one word was for me to just be like “I’m not following up with that”, just that word is enough for me to realize that I’m misplaced here in when it comes to my career. As of late, the only things I’ve been doing for the past couple of years, since I have no job, was promised a career path from college, dating all the way back to when I was a kid, when I was brainwashed by the US school institutions if I had just “went to college and graduated”, and now the only thing I plan on doing for the time being is just to work on projects that can land me… something… What I want to do for the time being is: Create projects I enjoy doing, that help to ensure that I don’t go insane, and instead allow me to give into my creative passion, along with other things I want to do in the meantime.

This is where ctrlgrid.neocities.org falls into place. I had a portfolio change for so many times in my life, from back when I was in high school, when I was heavy into Adobe, up till college, because I was promised to have the whole Adobe Suite for free, until IU shut down, to which I had realized that: nobody uses Adobe for portfolios like that, no one uses behance like that, and when I tried to move it somewhere, and I didn’t want to have to pay money to host a portfolio website on Wix, or on Squarespace, I tried to move it to Wordpress, and get everything set up there. Yes, you can make a Wordpress website for free, via .org, .com makes you pay for your entire WP website. I then tried to add in a plug-in that would ensure that the website would go live on the WWW, and nothing worked; this was last year. I gave up, I said “This is not going to work, let me gather the time and energy to move this somewhere else.” Then I saw HTML FOR DUMMIES | NEOCITIES TUTORIAL by magoonka, and then I was convinced to move here!

I had known about Neocities all the way back when I was in school, I wanna say the earliest I remember hearing about it was in middle school or high school, and I had thought, with some sort of form of backwards superiority that “Adobe would trump that of anything graphic design related” and well… Now people are leaving Adobe in general in droves, so I know now I was essentially just coping. I decided to move here because, I genuinely want to be apart of something, showing that I’m sort of like the potential future of what the family will potentially have, because for a majority of my life I was treated as like the “Kid that would excel over all the rest” and overtime I realized that… wasn’t the case. Overtime, I had decided to fully change course in terms of the stuff that I use, and what I currently use is pretty different than what I planned on using in terms of how things go along with technology. Now here’s the thing you maybe wondering: Why is it that in ctrlgrid.neocities.org/about/ that I have my info listed as “• Las Vegas, NV”? Well, it is because we’re making plans to move to Vegas, to find work, and the reason being that: We’ve been living here in Florida, and we’ve even gone as far north to Georgia when we first got back here from the Dominican Republic back in 2019-2020, and when we tried to find jobs here in Florida, again, it was repeat, and it wasn’t just me mind you: We would find a job, we couldn’t keep it because we were disrespected, we would quit the job, or get fired, and find another one.

This has gotten so consistent that: after about 4 years, I still want to find a job, but as the job market changes, your likelihood of finding a job on indeed is dwindling, along with finding one on Linkedin, Glassdoor, Monster, etc., and after so long of me trying to find a job, I just flat out gave up. If I’m looking for a job realistically, I want to find consistency, and a job to where I can stay in, and regardless of if I get someone disrespecting me for whatever reason, I can just ignore them, and feel safe knowing that, at least I’m doing a job that I prefer to do, that I love doing, even when I am stressed out. I never had a passion in food or retail, I just needed to work in those jobs because, I needed to make money, but with no passion, or force set behind it, I just decided to give up on this prospect, because after a while I had said “This is something I should have pushed against my blood mother when I was 15 on. For me to do this in my early 20s is dumb, this is a high school job.”, and so in 2024, I gave up, willingly, because: I didn’t want to be disrespected, whether it’s for my gender, my race, my ethnicity, etc., all to keep a job that’s bellow the federal minimum wage, which the max I got under the federal minimum wage in Florida was somewhere around $14 - 15 an hour, and one of them was on a pay-freeze, of which I was not made aware of, and the other one was lowered overtime, due to discrimination based on my race, which was fueled by a thin veil of religion being used against me. I don’t talk much about this anymore now, because I’m 100% aware that bringing this stuff up to employers is not something you want to bring up to them, and not only that, but even mentioning this in the blog is something that is going to put ire on here, but I just flat out don’t care anymore. When I see something, and that something isn’t working, I have to seek an alternative to make something happen, and originally the idea was to do what I’m doing right now, and to do everything as when my dad was making money, only to have AI come over and replace that as well, which case: I don’t buy anything Rideshare, or food delivery related in terms of anything Uber Eats, Grubhub, DoorDash, etc., because of that, and also because I planned for a while to work for these companies, and then when the AI came over, I just said “If they’re after my degree, and now after my job, I’m not going to support it.” And that was it.