So, as you might know, I draw traditionally on paper. Even my digital drawings are just traced or colored in versions of my paper drawings. Meaning they need to be photographed or scanned in before I can digitize them.

So far, I've just been using my phone's camera for this process. But recently, I broke my phone's touch screen like a Dumb Ass and now I can't use it for taking pictures until I get it fixed. The great thing is, there is a building in my city that is basically a free-to-use internet café. I love this place. It's just a room with three computers and a printer/scanner that is accessible to anyone. They don't advertise this room much at all of course, since it's not for profit. Either way, it's rare that I get to use the scanner because someone is pretty much always busy with it.

So one day, when no-one was in there except myself, I decided I should spoil myself by scanning one of my drawings in the highest available quality that this scanner would allow. It was a number somewhere in the thousands followed by "dpi". I have no idea how much a dpi is, so I just clicked "start" without a care.

And then it started scanning. Very. slowly. for like 10-15 minutes it was busy scanning this one single page. I was honestly scared I broke the device or something. But it eventually finished, the biggest image file I have ever seen in my life, not in 4K resolution - oh no - this image was 14K. FOURTEEN THOUSAND LOL. I have never looked at a picture this crystal clear. It's like I can see my pen strokes on a molecular level.

Check this out dude.



What you're looking at is around 1 centimeter of the full 30 cm page. These strokes from a ballpoint pen you're seeing must have a diameter of like 2 millimeters at most. Look how much detail this freakin printer captured. It's ABSURD, you can make out the exact kind of texture of the table I was drawing on. My own eyes can't even see that well. It really is like looking through a microscope.

If I could archive all my art in this resolution, you bet I would. But this single image is nearly 100 MB. The free version of neocities would allow me to upload a whole nine of these before I had no more space left LOL. Maybe one day I'll buy a seperate hard drive just to fill it up with 14K resolution scans of my drawings. Sounds kinda awesome.

Thank you for reading about my happy little tech accident! Much love, Lola

Being on the indie web is so REFRESHING!!

No - seriously.
In the back of my mind, I always remembered a time where the social internet was more inspiring, personal, creative and more WEIRD.
But being born in 2005, I grew up right around the time social media shifted, atrophied into a hyper-profitable, algorithm-based ... something where genuine creatives are pitted against each other in a constant, sisyphean battle for relevancy.

And as someone who just wants to upload art for fun and to socialize, I feel...unwelcome there. I was practically raised on the internet, except on niche fandom forums (not "fandom.com"...) and DeviantArt, and as these spaces have slowly died out or folded to appease the demands of modern social media (never forgive Tumblr's hidden genAI-training toggle), it's slowly started to feel like I just...wasn't meant to be here anymore!?

So when I discovered the indie web, HTML blogs, Neocities, Nekoweb something awoke within me. These maximalist, stamp- and button-hoarding, hyperpop-neo-Y2K-frutiger-aero-weirdcore-puppycore personal websites just fill me with so much unadultered joy. I love the internet. Not the one sold to us by technofascists; this one!

And I know my website falls very firmly on the minimalist side - not just by indie web standards but the wider internet in general.
But, with this website I wanted to achieve two things. One: Evoke the aesthetic of a standard, black and white manga scan. And two: allow my art to exist in a space without distraction. Kinda like a modern, béton brut museum. (Although I Fucking Love brutalist architecture and I'm often more fascinated by the museum building itself than the art featured inside it lol.)

The main reason I migrated here was to archive my art, free of modern social media bullshit. OK - done. Now, however, I've kinda fallen in love with HTML and, I think, in the coming months I wanna set up a shrine for one of my special interests! So uhh.. stay tuned!?!?!

Thank you for reading! Much love, Lola >⩊<