May 13, 2025
I grew up with movies that taught me to fear Artificial Intelligence. In the Terminator movies, SkyNet borrowed humanity's nuclear missiles, and then inserted itself into robots to hunt the ones it missed. In The Matrix, the computers decided we were better off as batteries. I always thought the rest of my fellow bipedal sentient beings understood those threats.
Instead, they spent the last couple years making those scenarios into a grim reality. Google's entire platform is now a trash pit of piled on, broken AI. Modern day Microsoft has committed its resources to turning Windows into a bloated AI menace (as opposed to just adware.) College students everywhere have thrown academic honesty to the curb and given it a good stomping. After all, what's the point of English 101 when ChatGPT already knows the structure and formality of a paper, not to mention the content itself? Going beyond that, AI threatens to replace paid human jobs with willfully unpaid labor.
The humans parrot the same mantra everywhere I go, like the robots have them on an ominous puppet string: “We have to embrace AI. It's here to stay, whether we like it or not. If you don't, you'll be left behind.” I've heard that so many times, I stopped keeping count. And while I understand driving a car instead of a horse carriage, I aimed to avoid using AI as much as possible. I was going to write, and revise, and edit, with my own brain, not a machine's.
I founded this website last year, moving existing content away from WordPress and its insistence on enshittification for its free users. I'll admit that I was hesitant, though. You see, I wanted the site to look presentable first. More specifically, I wanted it to have a two column design, with a navigation bar at the top, main content on the right, and a sidebar on the left for funny image captions. However, I knew the very basic fundamentals of HTML, and nothing about generating tables. I knew nothing at all about CSS.
But I made the site anyway, and I ported over those old reviews. Hitting preview, I wasn't surprised to see a page from 1994 staring back. Not even 1996. While a large focus here is on nostalgia, that wasn't quite the generation I pictured for the look and feel.
Thus, I left my account alone for awhile to study CSS. I already had two books on it. The one I would use for teaching myself was called, Learn CSS in One Day (And Learn It Well). I already knew the title was a misnomer. It would take many mornings, conducted in one hour sessions, to learn the CSS well.
But I went for it. I took it serious. I highlighted entire sections. I took extensive notes. I did the end-chapter exercises the author insisted on. While that was going on, I drafted two brand new reviews that I sat on for that entire duration.
And then, on April 16, I reached the end of Learn CSS In One Day (And Learn It Well). Now I could revise and edit those reviews. Now I could post them—on the all new, beautifully designed Old Man P's Place website.
With excitable vigor, I sat down to code the website of my dreams.
I discovered I didn't know shit.
Oh, sure, I could resize and reshape boxes. I could move them around the browser window. But as far as keeping images and text inside of those boxes, instead of content roaming all over the place? Well, Learn CSS In One Day (And Learn It Well) didn't have much else to say on that subject.
I struggled hard. I lost morale. The reviews remained in drafts. In fact, they were on my hard drive for so long, I forgot about how the game I'd written about even played anymore.
Meanwhile, I chatted back and forth with a Discord friend of mine about my dilemma. One morning, he flooded my window with sample CSS and HTML code. It allowed me to assemble two columns, a top header, and funny image captions.
“How did you come up with this?” I asked.
To which he replied, “I asked CoPilot.”
Well. Damn. All those months of book learning, the insistence on old-fashioned brain stretching, and a machine did my work for me after all.
But hey, at the very least, I still couldn't keep content inside the blocks. Eventually, my friend's wife passed along a URL, where I was able to steal much friendlier code.
Now this place looks mostly decent. The navbar still looks like garbage, as I can't get the CSS script to adhere to As for what I learned? Not much. And out of the two reviews I wrote, one is ready: Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. Go check that out. Also, go check out the all new Anime section!