Giant Ghost is a writer, musician, & internet person haunting the wired from a collection of times & places.
This is their megastructure.
Giant Ghost is a writer, musician, & internet person haunting the wired from a collection of times & places.
This is their megastructure.
This is the personal website of Giant Ghost, which is mainly dedicated to hosting their tracker music.
To submit your own questions, you can use either the chatbox or email address found on the homepage.
There are plenty of reasons, from learning HTML to the way the web works in general to appreciating the aesthetics that Web 2.0 robbed us of, but I'll focus on why it matters to me specifically.
I'm interpreting this question as "why do you mainly host your stuff on a personal website as opposed to social media or some other platform?
As somebody who makes music in the 2020s, I just can't keep up with social media. It's not that I don't like social media--Neocities is its own form of that! We live in an incredible time of technological connection and I'm all about that. It's just that I don't have the energy or frankly the disposition to be constantly chasing an algorithm that I don't control or understand. A website is slow and disconnected and hard to find by contrast--but it's a space where I can distribute the things I make and communicate with the world in a way that I actually have some control over. Nothing on the web lasts forever, but here I can express myself without pressure, break out of the constraints the major platforms place on individual profiles (remember what happened to the YouTube profiles from back in like '06?), and easily archive all of my work in a way that remains more legible and accessible to those who find it.
In doing that, I'm trading the really significant advantages of social media--visibility, explosive algorithm-driven growth, and cross-compatibility (sharing/likes/etc across different platforms). Nobody teaches you this stuff, and it took me many frustrating years of total obscurity to figure out--I hope young artists starting out today are able to understand these differences and weigh the best options for them. But the way I see it, by doing it this way I always have the option of setting up social media profiles and cross-promoting...if you don't have a personal website, you miss out on having the stability of a "home base", a platform made by you and for you. Whether or not it works for you, that's a trade that works really well for me.
Also, this shit is just fun! Are the other sites fun anymore? You tell me.
It's pretty simple: it's how I learned back around 2010 or so. Crazy to think about, considering how most piano-roll DAWs are considered to be easier, but that's just how my brain works now. But I've stuck with it for a lot of reasons beyond that too.
My first interest in making music was in chiptunes and I bounced off doing that in FL Studio, and guess what program all the YouTube tutorials were promoting--Milkytracker! I still boot it up to this day, I know the FastTracker II remake (which is such an amazing piece of software, massive kudos to 8bitbubsy) is gaining more traction these days, but it's hard to overstate what MilkyTracker did for the chiptune and tracker scene around that time to really keep the sound and culture alive (it was actually kind of exploding around that time).
That culture in particular is what I want to keep going. I'm a huge proponent of free and open source software--typical linux snob etc. That's a political commitment too. But what I mean is that tracker music is free, portable, and open source. If you're willing to climb a pretty modest learning curve for the software, you come to realize that if you like a given tracker module, you are never more than a few clicks away from 1) playing it on your own PC, with a file you own and control 2) seeing exactly what sort of programming the original tracker used, meaning you can learn directly from the source, which is almost impossible in other forms of music and 3) rip the exact samples right out of the module. That's right! We're doing copyleft babyyy!!! Seriously though you should do this, we need to get over the fear of sample-stealing, just be mindful of making exact copycat tracks. The fact that you can do all of this is still insane to me, in files that are regularly sub >1MB. You can literally put this shit on floppies
Anyways this is also kind of a mercenary consideration in terms of competition and sticking out from the crowd. I am a regular person with regular skills and I am not going to be able to compete with 15 year olds who have been drawing beats in their DAW since they switched from Cocomelon to FL--but I feel pretty confident that I can write some interesting modules and contribute to the resurgence of the jungle/dnb scene in that way, where it seems like there's a casual interest in "oh yeah, this stuff has something to do with Amiga, doesn't it?" All that has been extremely cool to watch, and the communities built around Modarchive and other sites are still going strong to this day and feel really tight-knit compared to a lot of other parts of the web.
All this to say--check it out! It's ALL free, it's ALL easier to learn than it looks, and we could ALWAYS use another tracker musician. Check it out.
Right now, almost entirely this site and the music!! But I do also maintain a few other pages that, once ready (writing this in early 2024 so god knows when that'll be) I do want to promote them here.
I go back and forth all the time on whether it makes sense to really narrowly focus on just one aesthetic/genre here on the site (jungle tracker music with a '90s vibe) when I actually do make a lot of other things too--in the end I'm sure this'll be one big mess of a site but for now I want to sort of curate the experience so that it remains memorable/visible without diluting the actual UX here. Maybe I'm being overly sensitive about that but it has worked so well for the site. More on all this soon, hopefully. Pester me if you're impatient.
A combination of luck and vision.
What I can answer here is "why this combination of visuals and music?" And partly that's because the design is pretty well matched, I think, with the late-90s HTML1 style of "black-background skulls and subs" music person design.
The dithering behind the main div is something I had to come up with and draw myself (not by hand, christ). I really wanted the site to revolve around basically being a feed of tracks that I created and not all that much else! In time I wanted to add a bunch of other stuff since it just made sense to do that instead of creating separate pages, but I still basically see this as a pretty simple feed with some added content.
A lot of hay has been made about how post-2.0 sites have devolved into Feeds and phone aspect ratios have killed content-rich widescreen design, and I think that's basically true but that it's actually pretty much okay. With the web as large as it is now, the reality is that many of us do not "spend time on the computer" and just click around these big sprawling websites. Search engines basically embiggened the web to the extent that it just wasn't going to be a realistic use of your time anymore. There are some awesome examples of sites trying to revive this idea on Neocities but I'll leave that to them--I see the user experience on the site here as basically stopping by, interacting with the simplest arrangement of features on the front page, and diving into the sidebar if they feel super motivated to do so. I dunno, maybe I'm off my rocker about how people use this site and other sites, I am very happy to receive feedback to the contrary if that's true (I mean, hell, you're here reading this, right?).
/rant, I guess. A lot to say about why I made this the way I did! I'll leave it there but happy to talk more about the intent behind this. Also to receive hatemail explaining how I did it completely wrong and am being presumptuous lol
Nope, that one's for much later. Track it down.
