Welcome to the Apotharchive: An Origin Story:
A Rope of Sand or: How I Learned to Stop
Worrying and Love the Cyp Interactions
Part IV: The First Part; Unknown Lumps

Hey!

If you're reading this, you might be wondering why a pharmacist is spending their free time building a crunchy, Web 1.0 / Frutiger Aero(ish) style throwback site on Neocities. To answer that, we have to go back to Summer 2025.

Making this website was an exercise in escapism. At the time, I was staring down the barrel of graduating from my PharmD program and the terrifying reality of prepping for the NAPLEX and MPJE licensure exams. Building this site became a fun, creative distraction from that anxiety-fueled fugue state. While I should have been filling every orifice leading to my brain with UWorld questions and practice exams, I was tweaking CSS, downloading more gifs (pronounced with the hard "G" /gɪf/, like gift) than I could ever use from gifcities.org, and trying to perfectly balance sleek mid-2000s aesthetics with Web 1.0 crunchiness.

Somehow, against all odds, I survived.

After a lot of hard work, and no small amount of picking myself up and jumping back onto the metaphorical horse after failure, I am done being a student. I'm fully licensed, practicing independently (with plenty of support when I need it!), and finally free of the constant weight of exams.

With all of that behind me, life has really opened up. I can focus on building the life I've always envisioned, spend time with my girlfriend, friends, and family, and dedicating genuine, stress-free time (yes reader, it does exist !) to my weird kitschsy hobbies.

Speaking of hobbies, I have a lot of fun projects in the works for this little corner of the net! Here is a taste of what I've been up to recently, and what's to come:

• Refining the Website: Over the last year I have toyed with the homepage layout to make it nicer on mobile, coded the Clippy buddy/music player you see on my main pages pretty much from scratch, published a number of themed oldweb pages and more modern novelty/ultilities, and spent 50 kerbillion years making an "About Me" page designed to look like a mock Wikipedia entry. I'm really proud of how it turned out!


• Authenticity Research: I'm reading a few antique web design books to see if I can pick up any old-new tricks. Currently reading Web Pages That Suck (1998).


• Hardware Repair: What began as a simple desire to shell-swap my broken childhood Nintendo DS Lite inadvertently led to me purchasing two more NDSLs on eBay to shell swap, and enjoying THAT so much I bought a NDSi and a broken nN3DSLL to homebrew from a sketchy Japanese auction site! Repairing the latter was an absolute pain in my ass, that console was constructed by Satan but at least now I know how to solder.


• Future Updates: I have already been able to make many of the optimizations and additions I had in mind for this website when I began building it last year. I hope to come up with more large scale products that are worth blog posts of their very own, to update and optimize some more ambitious projects like Tournament of Champions and fun interactive GUIs like Time Travel Control Panel. I am also preparing for lots of changes in my personal life which I hope to share (in a way where I don't completely dox myself)!

I am so proud of what this site has become so far. I am overjoyed every time someone leaves a comment on the guestbook or my Neocities profile. The community here is incredibly cool, and I'm glad to finally have the mental bandwidth to be a real part of it. Thanks for stopping by, and enjoy your stay in the apotharchive!