What is this place?

amour-fou.net is my personal site, mostly a blog. In other words, this is my place to write, post, complain, and gush about anything I want. Oh, and perhaps more importantly, it’s a place to experiment with web design, one of my fave activities.

l’Amour fou is a book by Andre Breton, the founder of Surrealism. The English translation is Mad Love (kind of obviously). I chose to name my domain after l’Amour fou because I have gone through stages where I, ahem, kinda worshiped Breton and his movement, and it really is a lovely book that I’ve read a couple of times. And I love hyphenated domains, besides.

Design

I design my own websites, but I also design websites for others, on occasion. Most recently, my mom’s business site. I like unique, artsy-looking designs (not that I always attain that goal…), and if you want a blog or website in that kinda style, talk to me and I’ll see what I can do.

Hosting

Want to be hosted at amour-fou.net? (That means you’d be [YOU].amour-fou.net) If we’re friends (offline or long-time online), just say the word and I’ll get you a subdomain, ftp username, and e-mail if you want so that you can mess around with web design or blog or do whatever (within the range of appropriateness). Shoot me an e-mail here (remove bracketed stuff) and we’ll get the conversation started.

HTMLing since 2000, ish.

I started messing around with HTML and CSS when I was in seventh grade, I believe. Could have been eighth. Like many others, I had a variety of rando free sites with lots of flashing, scrolling marquees and ridiculous text effects. My free hosts of choice were Tripod and CJB. My first web site (embarrasingly enough) was a shrine to Kuja, villain from Final Fantasy IX. Yikes.

Soon enough I decided I had to have a domain, so in eighth grade, I purchased the long, long defunct branbal.net, which I had for a little under a year. I don’t even remember where I hosted it, but I do remember that some of my layouts featured: Celes from Final Fantasy VI, the Powerpuff Girls, and the Ziggurat from Metropolis (the anime version). Then I switched schools, broke with my nerdy past (briefly), and took a several-year-long hiatus from web stuff.

Then I met Jen, who was the first other girl I’ve ever met who was into web design, and this made me want to get back into it. So for a few weeks, she hosted me at amourfou.dirrty.org, and then on February 15, 2007, I bought this domain, amour-fou.net. What began as a small web site collective turned into a blog, but since I was using cutenews, I had like the worst spam issues ever. I had to switch to WordPress, but I was hella incompetent about it. Then I got my first full-time job at the Spec, my hard drive crashed and I lost Photoshop, and I dropped my hosting for a year.

And now I’m back. I have learned WordPress, I have Photoshop again, and I have even learned to validate my shit. I probably won’t be going anywhere for awhile.

Past layouts

Layouts of the old a-f.net

Unfortunately, I don’t have images of any sort of 99% of the design-related work I did on amour-fou.net for the year after I purchased the domain. But I do have my memory. Past layouts have included art by Man Ray and Yoshitomo Nara, as well as screenshots from Final Fantasy IX and various scans of advertisements. They’ve also included quotations from songs, like “You touched my heart like a knife that’s very sharp,” from “Take My Breath Away” by The Knife and “I wish you could exist to live on my planet,” from “How Does It Make You Feel?” by Air.