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Welcome to Nexl

So, this is Nexl. I’m Nexl.

I’ve been thinking about making a personal website for a while, and eventually I ended up here, on Neocities. There is something strangely comforting about the idea of having a little corner of the internet that is just… mine.

I miss the old internet. Or at least the idea of it.

More than the way it looked, I miss the way people used it. You went online because you wanted to find something. You wanted to learn something, read someone’s thoughts, talk to people, find a weird little website about something you were interested in, or maybe just share something you’d made yourself.

The internet was somewhere you went to.

Now it often feels like somewhere you sit and wait for things to be served to you. Endless feeds, recommendations, algorithms deciding what might keep you around for another few minutes. You don’t necessarily go looking for anything anymore. You just scroll, and the internet keeps putting things in front of you. Maybe we didn’t even notice when it happened. One day it just became the way the internet works, and suddenly, here we are.

I don’t think the old internet was necessarily better in every way. It was messy, inconvenient, and sometimes downright ugly.

But I miss that feeling of being an active participant rather than a consumer waiting for the next thing to appear.

Maybe that’s part of why I ended up making this website.

I don’t really have a grand plan for this place. I have a few things I know I want to write about, but knowing myself, my mind will probably wander somewhere completely different five minutes after I start writing.

Which brings me to watches.

Casio F-105W

A few months ago, I stopped wearing a smartwatch and switched to one of the cheapest digital watches you can buy: the Casio F-105W.

And I’m still weirdly fascinated by it.

It’s almost comically simple. It tells the time. It has a stopwatch, an alarm, it tells date, and that’s basically it.

No notifications, no apps, no health metrics, no tiny glowing rectangle trying to convince me that I need to know something every thirty seconds.

Just the time.

But the thing I like most about it isn’t even the simplicity.

It’s the scratches.

After a few months of wearing it, the watch is starting to look used. There are little scratches and marks on the resin. The surface isn’t quite as perfect as it was when I took it out of the box.

And somehow, I like it more because of that.

A smartwatch always feels like a piece of technology that is supposed to remain new. You replace it, update it, charge it, eventually the battery gets worse, and sooner or later there is another model waiting to take its place.

The Casio feels different.

Every scratch is something that happened while I was wearing it.

I don’t even remember most of them. Maybe I scratched it while skateboarding, or at some sweaty punk or hardcore show. It doesn’t really matter. Each one is just a tiny reminder that I was somewhere, doing something.

The watch is slowly becoming a record of being used.

The patina isn’t something that needs to be fixed.

It’s the point.

I think there is something nice about owning objects that are allowed to become a little ugly. Things that don’t need to stay pristine forever. Things that can accumulate evidence that you’ve actually lived with them.

Maybe that’s part of what I want this website to be, too.

Just something that accumulates over time.

Anyway, that’s enough about a $20 watch for now.

Welcome to Nexl.