None of that actually happened, but there were a lot of ideas. Originally, fancy55 was supposed to be something much different, much grander. It related to many of my other projects, with the aim being to better/improve the experience of video chatting with my friends.
I never got as far as setting up the video chat. I had websocket text chat set up via multiple rooms, using ActionCable on Rails. It was an actual full-stack app, deployed, and functional. I worked on it while I was in Vancouver, housesitting with a friend, and I worked on it while I was homeless in Victoria, spending my days at the library working on this project, meanwhile sleeping in a shelter.
I didn’t expect this story to be so hard to tell, and yet it is. The product of that story is not the same as the here on this page. While in Victoria my laptop died… I mean, it had been dying, anyway, but the hard drive was no longer connected. I eventually fixed it, but in the process of that fix I lost all my data, all my progress, and all of my application, save for a git repo that I deleted in shame.
What this project is, that’s what came after. I’d moved back to Edmonton, found a place to be, and started again on my quest. This site was based on a Nixie Tube clock I found, made by someone else, on the internet. First I worked to better that clock, rendering it proportional to the page, and having it respond perfectly to changes in screen width. Then, I remade it, using their styles, but creating a nixie tube for every letter of the alphabet, plus some number. And there you have it: Fancy55.
I put all of my stock into this once, in dark, delusional days. I thought about using the domain name for a Portfolio, as though it was all that I had… And I was right. I was playing at being better than I was, and that’s what the Shortcut was all about… But that’s a story for another time.