pc: Hi Jack! How are you?
j: I'm doing well! Glad to be here. :)
pc: As you may know, these interviews are really more a Q-and-A situation. I got some questions about you and your time on Neocities. Speaking of those... Here's the first one. You are somewhat known for having lots of urls. How many have you had? I know the original account was rocketmix.
j:Whew, I've started many sites in the past, both as a main site or for side projects. For how many sites I have, I'd have to guess 6 to 9 sites. My current account jackomix went under 3 renames I believe. It was first galaxycat, then rocketmix and then finally jackomix.
pc: Oh, woops, I guess I was wrong, haha! But what are some of those side-projects?
j: One of them was Neobadges, a project I started with Palutena (one of the guys from Project2). It was basically achievements for Neocities. The site is https://badges.neocities.org/, though the badge system doesn't work anymore. Though I made my own (worse but working) version at https://neobadges.glitch.me/. Another project was https://chatcat.neocities.org/. The point of this site was instead of posting on your Neocities profile, you would post on the chatcat profile. So if you wanted to see some people's posts uncluttered by updates and including people you hadn't followed, you could just hop on the chatcat profile. It was used for a bit, but it died pretty quick.
pc: This is the first time I've heard of chatcat. I might need to check that out later...
You're also known as a bit of a game-maker. Such hits as the cheesd game series and the crayon comic maker are pretty neat.
Where do you get your ideas from?
j: Sometimes ideas come to me randomly, and sometimes I try to do them. I'm one of those people with a million scrapped or unfinished projects. Recently I've been writing ideas down whenever they pop into my head. I started a daily game idea log near the beginning of this year (though Neocities doesn't make notifications for updating .txt files I believe) at https://jackomix.neocities.org/bin/txt/2.txt. I also have a notebook and black marker which I use to write other ideas down. There are some exceptions though. cheesd was a game I made to force myself to finish a game. I gave myself one hour to make the game. I didn't finish in one hour, but I made enough progress that I was motivated to actually finish it. crayon was a tool I made since I wanted to make comics without hassle. Though FireAlpaca's comic feature is easy to use, I was too lazy to use it, so I just made my own comic maker program. lol
pc: That's interesting. I can also relate to having places to write my ideas. I have a folder with loose-leaf paper inside that I scribble down ideas whenever they come to me.
Maybe that's a Neocities thing?
j: Maybe. lol
pc: Third question. How do you feel, moderating the biggest Neocities Discord server there is? And I say that while running my own Discord server. haha.
j:Heh. I've certainly gotten better at moderating over time. I think that the server has seen multiple generations, people come and go. Sometimes there's the one member that's active for a bit. There's been times multiple people left the server or moved to another server, maybe even threat to, though eventually most of them join back or they get replaced by new members. I'm not sure why my server always seems to still stand in the end, maybe I'm not as strict as other admins, or maybe it's cause I'm always active on the server. I started my old Neocities discord server in July 2016, I've grown a lot since then, I've lost contact with some people but also met new ones. I'm always happy to meet new people and say hi to old friends, so maybe my happiness bleeds into my server as well. :)
pc: Huh. Cool stuff Jacko. I think I only have one more question...
If your name really isn't Jack, what is it??
j: Only time will tell...👀
pc: dang it i needed your name for clickbait