This is my place to escape. If you were to ask about These Simple Complications offline, I'd probably deny its existence. See, this blog is where I can ramble about awesome things I find, revel in the coolness of the internet, debate with amazing people, and share everything and anything that I find - and I don't want my "real life" (which I love, too, don't get me wrong) getting in the way of that.

How did I get started with this whole internet thing, anyways? Well, my first encounters with websites and design started, like many people, with the Warriors book series and neopets. I was launched into the world of graphics by my friend on neo, Brook, who had a warriors graphics website called Frosted Ambition. I was really interested in what she was doing, and I decided I wanted to try doing it, too. With her help, I set up my own website. After starting out on a neopets petpage, I eventually moved to freewebs, and officially launched Shattered Flames, with the help of one of my other awesome friends, Shadey, who worked on SF with me. My designs absolutely sucked, but I had a lot of fun doing them. For about a year I kept up with SF, but then life got crazy and I ended up shutting it down.

After my life had calmed down a little bit, I started to really miss designing things and the community, so I took a chance and plunged headlong into the graphics world again by applying to work as a staffer at my friend Snowy's site. Even though we had lost touch during the long time that I wasn't part of the community, she still was gracious enough to give me a spot working on her website, Sparkling Snow. On April 18th, 2010, I officially started working there. Once I had settled in there, I felt much happier; my desire to be creating graphics had been fulfilled. I started to figure out better ways to make designs, and I began to use textures and playing around with effects more.

However, being the needy creep that I am, I started to want something else, too. For one thing, I missed having and controlling my own website. And for another, I really wanted to be able to share my thoughts and opinions and random blurts of musings with other people - not just design signatures and avatars. (This was partly spawned by my reading of numerous awesome blogs, such as Black Cat Friday, and feeling both bad for spamming up their comments with my blabbering, as well as feeling admiration of their posts and ideas, and wanting to be able to share my own words with other people. Unfortunately, the former has not gone away, since I still spam up numerous people's blogs, but at least the latter has been taken care of.) Although I still loved working at Sparkling Snow, I wanted a little something more, too.

I should probably mention that having a blog was not a new idea for me, as I had entertained the notion before. Back in the time of Shattered Flames, I had created a freewebs site that I intended to use as a blogsite. I never got it off the ground, though, and it faded away into obscurity for a while, until I rediscovered it in January of 2010. Before I started working at Sparkling Snow, I tried to start up my blogsite again, but it just never worked out. You can see it here, and as you can tell, it didn't really catch on. There's only three blog posts, full of broken promises and ideas, and ultimately I gave up on it. At this point, you're probably wondering why I gave up on one website only to start another.

Well, that's a good question. For one thing, I'm a lazy person. I wanted a website without the hassle of making one, and without the task of learning to code PHP. Not only that, but I had also forgotten most of the basic coding that I learned while running Shattered Flames, and I only knew the bare minimum to start with. I could, and probably should, have spent the time relearning the old coding and instructing myself in the new coding, namely PHP, but that also would have required figuring out free hosting and domain names and all that, because I really didn't want to go back to freewebs. It would have taken a lot of work to get a site up and running - and that's what sites involve, a lot of dedication and work.

Did I mention that I'm lazy? Instead of investing a ton of time and energy in something, which probably would have had the effect of me getting bored and leaving the project half finished, I went the easy route, and looked into free blogs. I started out on wordpress, and on June 5th 2010 I created this website. However, in the short space of 12 days, I started to get annoyed with Wordpress, and I fell in love with a premade layout for blogger.com. So I decided to switch from wordpress to blogger, and thus on June 5th 2010 (although, technically, I didn't switch over to blogger.com until June 17th 2010) thesesimplecomplications was born.

And then, on July 6th 2010, it died! Not literally, but technically. My muse ran out, and it started to become a drag to have to sit down and post something. I changed my mind about the way I wanted TSC to run, which I confusingly explain here, and I decided that I wanted to become an "awesome" site, and post interesting content instead of blogging. I also wanted this site to become a little more lax, which is why I don't always post consistently, although I swear, I'll never shut down this site or just leave without saying goodbye, and you can always still email me or leave a comment even if I haven't posted in a few months. It should be noted, though, that you'll be more likely to get ahold of me if you email or comment - the cbox isn't your best bet. The old layout I was using (which I still love!) randomly spazzed on me, and stopped working correctly, which just sort of cemented my decision to change the site. I found a new layout that I love possibly even more, and since then I've been much happier with the new way TSC is going.

Although I might one day open up a "real" site, for right now blogger.com is perfect for me, and I doubt I'll change any time soon. I decided to keep the original name of my webs.com site, because I liked the idea of it. To me, sometimes it seems like life is a paradox, a simple complication, and I thought it was an appropriate name for this blog. The rest of the story, my friends, is history.

--

You might be thinking, okay, fine, but what's the point of this site? If you didn't get it out of the verbose, drawn-out and overlong history above, the point, mis amigos, is that this site is a place for me, Lydia, to escape, like I mentioned before. It's a place where I come to relax, to express my thoughts and spark debates, to write overlong sentences sprawling with comma abuse, to share awesome random things that I find on the internet with other people, and overall, just to generally enjoy talking to people and interacting in the community. Unconventional or not, that's what this site's here for. (: