Hey there! Thanks for visiting my online showcase. I’m Mr. Roarke, your host. Welcome to Fantasy Island.

But seriously, folks…

I’ve had a personal website for about 20 years, as well as an ancient blog, neither of which ever got many reads. But I’ve had it in my head for a while to put together something a little nicer as a portfolio, something which could accommodate my longstanding habit of getting projects 98% finished, often almost presentable but for my perfectionist tendencies, before getting distracted by something else while the final work on them dragged out for years. As a consequence of this, my hard drive has become a repository for tons of mostly-finished art, music, and writing that nobody ever sees. Not that that mattered much—I actually don’t have much need for applause or care for other people’s opinions of my creative work, I mostly just do it for my own pleasure. But at the same time, I thought perhaps having a comprehensive, consolidated archive to look over might feel validating in my occasional darker moments, plus a showcase might provide some additional incentive to actually finish some things occasionally.

Plus, as I rounded the 660th month of my extended youth, I found myself a little less worried about what people think of what I say. Other than my professional FileMaker Pro consulting site, I’ve always been pretty scrupulous to keep any online dealings that might involve expressing opinions or telling unsavory tales of my misspent youth under a speudonym (that’s a fake name you use when you spew.) I originally worried that a prospective client might stumble upon my opinions on some other subject or edgy tales from my travels after college and take offense, but after a couple of decades of consulting I think people mostly just care about professional experience and skill. And conversely, there’s always the risk that someone online will take irrational offense at an opinion and connect it to my real life identity and lash out—which, at this point, has actually happened anyway, despite my best efforts. Plus, plenty of people online speak much more controversial and courageous things under their given names than I ever will. So I began to feel like maybe I was being overcautious, and I started to vaguely want to kind of re-integrate my various online guises, and maybe start to consolidate my scattered output under my own name, as was the long-term plan for some of my more ambitious creative endeavors anyway.

Summer 2023 provided an opportunity, as I’d been kind of fogged-in with long covid and simultaneously under a lot of debilitating life stress—the less said the better—that left me with a lot of time mentally exhausted but nonetheless bristling with energy and in need of something to do that doesn’t require a lot of thought. So, presto, a website was born. (Benefit of being a lifelong programmer, it’s actually a low-thought, relaxing activity for me. I may still be so utterly befuddled about how to make small talk at a party that it puts me into vapor lock, but I can code in my sleep.)

As of this update, a year later in August 2024, this website has filled out pretty nicely. I’m still muddling through a ton of PHP—which after a year of heavy website development I’m surprisingly finding much less hateful than I used to, I must be getting used to it—trying to get WordPress to do what I want (N.B. to coders: don’t build websites in WordPress, you’d think I’d learn but I never do.) Plus I have a ton of other stuff to post… if I can finish it. In particular, I don’t mind posting in-progress demos of music, but I have a lot of unfinished writing, which is, unfortunately, kind of pointless to post at all until it’s pretty finished. Hard to see what an unfinished essay is getting at, unlike, say, a demo recording. But as I’ve worked on this project I’ve dug through more and more old archives and found more and more stuff I want to add to what is essentially either a monument to myself, or, a simple compilation of evidence that I was here and did things. So this website should continue to grow for a while.

I’m also going to pad this out with some reposts from my old site and blog that I still like and think don’t need to be consigned to the scrapheap of history.

Which is my typically longwinded way of saying, thanks for, uh, logging in and checking it out, and check back periodically, there’s always more to come. This is meant as more of an archive/showcase than a blog, but there’s an RSS feed for posts if you want.

Mike Kupietz
updated Summer 2024