I first purchased tristanisham.com nearly ten years ago. In 2016, I was in highschool. A member of the marching band and tech club, the domain was a vehicle for a SquareSpace site self-promoting my limited work making videos for our high school media class. I’ve always been a bit self-promotional. I’ve never sold anything I can’t do, but even I’ll admit I embellished my experience then.

I’ve loved the web for as long as I remember. The first program I wrote was a BAT game inspired by the copy of Zork included with the original Call of Duty: Black Ops on the Xbox 360. From there, I quickly hopped over to websites, creating my first blog nextgamewins.com where I wrote about gaming through the GoDaddy WYSIWYG editor. Before that, back in middle school I had a blog on Blogger called Life Changing Cheese. Unfortunately, I changed the domain to one of those free .co.vu TLDs and now I can no longer access the original site, but my point stands. Since I was a little kid, I’ve always loved creating on the internet.
What people born outside of the late 90’s fail to understand is that we were the only generation to grow up at the right time for the internet. We have a natural proclivity towards it, but had enough time to mature without it. We were the first generation to grow up with smartphones, while still being able to appreciate life without them. I remember where I was when the App Store launched. I saw the rise of smartphones and social media. I was there when tests were on paper and when they transitioned to laptops. I lived through the greatest transformation of society since the mass adoption of electricity with feet in both worlds. No other generation can appreciate that. They were either too early, growing up in the now defunct age of the desktop, or too late, never to know the peace and reward of having to think for yourself on every matter. In that way, I think I am uniquely situated to comment on what it means to own your own name. With this website, I hope to leave a permanent record for anyone to observe, interact with, and experience beyond the control of anyone else. I would like to own my digital identity without falling prey to the manipulative misincentivised platforms that run our lives.

I would like you to make your own website. You should purchase a cheap domain, and find a service that works for you. Hosting your own site is easy too. If you can learn HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you can find a service like Netlify that’ll host your site for free. Just create something. Draw something; write something; film something; do something. You won’t regret it.