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Who is Hamaonoverdrive?

>30 y.o. woman (she/her), online I go by Shock or Hamaon. Currently a STEM-field PhD student with a background that’s bounced around all letters of that acronym, as might be apparent through the content of this site.

I enjoy videogames, anime, music, books, PTCG, and western TV in my spare time. I frequently draw and occasionally write; Recently I have started branching out into gamedev as a way to combine both of these with my professional experience in programming.

Around Socmed

discord @hamaonoverdrive

email very.unoriginal.email (at) gmail.com

bsky vis+game dev, personal

tumblr hamaonoverdrive

itch.io hamaonoverdrive

git hamaonoverdrive

neocities hamaonoverdrive

What is Hamaonoverdrive?

Handle etymology:

Hamaon (ハマオン): Light aligned spell with low chance of instant killing one enemy. More effective on dark or chaos-aligned demons. From the Shin Megami Tensei series.

Hamon Overdrive (波紋疾走オーバードライブ Ōbāduraibu, lit. “Ripple Dash/Sprint”): Specialized martial-arts technique using energy identical to the sun’s rays. Can be used to heal wounds and is effective against undead creatures. From Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, parts 1 and 2.

More About Me…

As seen on Fragmentary’s blog.

I generally try to avoid the fandomization of identity that has become all-too-common on social media on this website, but it is unavoidable that some works have been very influential in shaping who I am as a person. Written on 2026‑09‑28, subject to change.

Books

Perhaps the Stars, Ada Palmer

Death’s End, Cixin Liu

The Stranger, Albert Camus

Solaris, Stanisław Lem

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin

Animanga

Baccano!

Hokuto no Ken

Dorohedoro

Ichi the Killer

Orb: On the Movements of the Earth

Tobaku Datenroku Kaiji: Kazuya-hen

Albums

Playing the Angel, Depeche Mode

Pretty Hate Machine, Nine Inch Nails

Hideous and Perfect, Angelspit

We Only Love You When You’re Dead, Encephalon

Anything That Moves, Chrome Corpse

Games

Deus Ex

Devil Survivor: OverClocked

Roller Coaster Tycoon

Pokémon Crystal

Disco Elysium

Live Action Movies & TV

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Videodrone

The Godfather

Breaking Bad

Columbo

Practical Assignments

Ride a bicycle downhill and break 35mph

Build something from visual instructions, ex Legos, Plamo kits, IKEA furniture, etc.

Pick up a combat sport and train at a club where everyone has years more experience than you do

Go to the gym, lift weights, and have a stranger give you a weird compliment

Play a trading card game and, at locals, donate staple cards to new players

Originally from mouseling.net, as seen on wriorango's neocities and ophanimkei.com. Written on 2026-09-24.

1. Please introduce yourself.

Ah well, if you're on this page then you already scrolled by my self-description. I don't like to describe myself, really.

2. How long have you been making websites?

On-and-off (mostly off) since... 2002? Woof.

3. And what got you into the hobby?

Like many in my age bracket, I got started back on neopets.com. You could customize your profile page and write up individual webpages for each 'pet' you had.

4. What kind of website are you most interested in?

Websites that capture the breadth and depth of the creator's interests; curated information and commentary.

5. What's your workflow? Do you plan your websites out thoroughly or do you come up with the design as you go along?

6. Please link to your biggest inspirations.

I'm going to be so real, I've been at this for so long that I don't remember any specific, direct influences. Hell, I wrote the core layout for this website back in 2021 after talking with Mads on artfight, although I don't think they directly influenced my design. Some bits and bobs that I've added since do have direct inspiration though, ex I set up the /now page after seeing the status widget that Rue made.

7. What's your favourite part about making websites?

Tinkering. When you have the big sketch settled and need to tweak things to get UI/UX just right.

8. And the thing you struggle with the most?

My design trends towards minimal because the notion of making graphics to use as page elements just doesn't click for me. I'm not terribly happy with my button for this site, either, but it plays on the one drawn asset I do have here... so it goes.

9. Do you keep the same layout on all of your pages? Or do you use different ones?

Same layout; Even the /games/ sub-pages (which do have a different layout), the core positioning is the same. I find that lack of continuity between pages can make it confusing to navigate, sometimes.

10. How confident are you with CSS?

Very, but only when it comes to my very old knowledge. I have to look things up when I want to make use of CSS3 animations or SCSS nesting.

11. Do you know how to correctly use <dl>?

I had to look it up for this. Seems simple enough, although I don't know when I'd use that in lieu of good 'ol <ul> or <ol> and some bolded terms, though. Like, I think letting the browser handle the numbering while you add text formatting would be easier to maintain than doing the numbering yourself and letting the browser handle formatting, no?

12. What is your favourite HTML element?

I'm simple, I love a good <div>.

13. If you're making a new web page from scratch, what is the first thing you do?

Get the big layout chunks/columns laid out, followed by site and/or page navigation.

14. Do you know JavaScript?

More or less.

15. How about PHP?

Lol, no. I learned a liiiitle of it back in the day, but I would have been better served by a static site generator with how I was using it (modularizing page layouts so you don't need to copy/paste it on every page).

16. Does your website have a theme that you stick to?

Kinda sorta themed to evoke a commandline. I date blog posts the same way I date my files.

17. Are you more focused on content or design?

Content. The design is just a simple container to enable navigating the contents of the page itself.

18. Do you own a domain name? If not, would you ever want to?

(points at url bar) I may change the backend host for my site in the future, and I like the idea of users having no idea that this is happening.

19. What do you think of nostalgia-focused or "retro" websites?

Well, my general distaste for nostalgia aside... I think it's fine. Usually people who do this know what they want to do and execute on it, but only rarely do such sites have actual content that I want to sit down and explore.

20. Is your HTML valid? Do you even check?

Hahahahahahaha. I used to check this all the time back in the day, but the standards have changed and I no longer care to ensure I'm up to date. What do you mean we don't need to close <br /> tags?

21. What are your opinion on buttons and banners?

I like how there's a standard size for them, so it'll always look a little cohesive if you have a lot of em.

22. What do you think of button walls in particular?

It's fun! Although it can be noisy and information can get lost.

23. If you started over again, would you make something similar or completely different?

Oh I'd definitely structure the backend of this site differently, now that I know a lot more about jekyll. I'd also set my CSS up better, I didn't know you could nest different attributes at the time I wrote it all...

24. Are you envious of other people's websites?

Not really? If I see something neat, I steal it.

25. What text editor do you use?

Vim. Usually splitscreen with a browser window tuned in to a livereload local web server.

26. Why do you use that one?

I like using one swiss army knife for everything. I use this professionally (sometimes over SSH) and when doing both videogame dev and general writing. I have a pretty strong muscle memory for all my shortcuts and hotkeys at this point, and I take my .vimrc file everywhere with chezmoi.

27. Do you host your image files on your web server, or on another host?

Images are hosted on the same server as the rest of the site, although I use protondrive to host zips of my visual novels.

28. This might not be relevant to you, but what's your opinion on the Neocities vs. Nekoweb debate?

The answer here used to be very simply in favor of Neocities because Nekoweb has some pro-censorship policies, but as of late Neocities has been throwing some NSFW creators out in the cold with no warning, despite ostensibly being allowed by the TOS. So 'iunno.

29. How much server space would you estimate your main website takes up?

Currently around 620MB. Most of that is images.

30. Do you keep local backups of your files?

Yup, the whole thing is on git and I keep local copies of it on at least two computers.

31. Do you prefer simple or highly visual websites?

Simple.

32. Do you stick to certain colours? Do you do that on purpose, or is it your subconscious?

It's very much a deliberate choice. I usually sit down and come up with a color palette pretty early in the creative process, just look at my games.

33. Have you ever thought about quitting? Why?

Nah. Most I'd do is slow down updates.

34. Do you have many webmaster friends, or is it a solitary hobby?

Well, I did my best to set up a community to help people with their websites, which hasn't really taken off like the original discord server did. I talk shop with some of the regulars from that often enough.

35. Do people in your real life know about your website?

Only the irls who know about my discord profile, which in turn links them to all my creative works.

36. Do you update your website very often? How often is "very often"?

Kinda-sorta. I generally try to get a blog post out in some capacity once a month, but sometimes that goes dry for a bit if I'm locked in on a particularly long post or am in the middle of a game jam.

37. And the overall design, do you change that much? Why or why not?

I changed the center column of this site to be centered instead of offset to the left a month or so ago, and that was a big deal. If it's not broke, don't fix it.

38. Is your website more you-focused, hobby-focused, or outside world-focused?

Hobby focused, I suppose? My initial intent with my website was to have a solid archive for all my creative work (because socmed is hell for this), but I'm gradually adding more stuff that's just about me and my thoughts.

39. Do you do web design professionally?

Hahahahahah no.

40. If not, would you like to? And if you're comfortable answering, what do you do for work?

If you can afford to, never monetize your hobbies.

41. Do you communicate with people by email very much?

Pretty much just for professional things, and the odd webring application.

42. Some people reject social media and use websites as a replacement. Do you keep social media outside of your website?

I have a few accounts, although the only ones I'm really active on right now are my two bsky accounts. That's just where the critical mass of my friends and peers are.

43. How about instant messengers? Do you use a mainstream one like Discord or Telegram? Or something like Matrix? Do you avoid them?

Discord, siiigh. This once again comes down to the "critical mass of friends" problem; If it were up to me I'd be down to host something on a VPS, but if my tech-illiterate friends gotta get on it...

44. Do you listen to music while you work on websites? If so, what kinds of artists?

Usually VODs from streamers I like, or from PTCG events.

45. Do you keep everything you make on one website, or do you have more than one?

Right now, this is the only one.

46. On a similar note, do you keep to one topic on your site, or many?

One, if you consider the topic to be "my creative output and influences".

47. Do you present your real self, or at least try? Or do you construct a persona on purpose?

One of the things I hate doing the most is acting. I'm just me.

48. Have you ever made a good friend thanks to your website?

Hmmm... not really? I've helped out existing friends and met some acquaintances, though.

49. Are you happy with the way HTML and CSS currently work?

Happy enough to not go through and rip everything out to replace it with semantic code.

50. What are practices that you think people should avoid?

Assuming that everyone is going to be looking at your site in a fullscreen window.

51. What about under-utilised practices, or things you think people should do more?

Build everything with maintainability in mind! If your site is a pain to update, you're not gonna do it.

52. Do you use a lot of semantic HTML? Or are you guilty of generic structure?

The latter (whoops).

53. Do you consider different browsers?

lololol this question was so much more relevant two decades ago. There's only like 1.5 browsers these days, and they barely render things differently. I don't rigorously test everything, but yeah I make sure to throw -moz transform options in there, sure.

54. Speaking of, what's your preferred browser? Convince your readers why they should use it.

Brave, and I'm ngl it's a little bit of sunk cost now. Built-in adblock is nice (albeit redundant on my setup), and it's the smallest browser that offers sync across different systems (which I use, heavily). But when I made the swap they hadn't been super aggro with crypto yet, and I didn't know that the CEO is the same homophobic guy who used to manage Firefox, which made me switch away from that, like, 12 years ago.

55. And what OS are you on?

Currently? Ubuntu. I also make use of Linux Mint and Win10 on a regular basis, for different needs.

56. Do you have a strong opinion on that, or do you just happen to use it?

FOSS FTW! I'm just too attached to Clip Studio Paint to let my win tablet go.

57. Are your websites mobile-friendly?

Yup!

58. What are your thoughts on autoplay?

Hate it.

59. What are your thoughts on webrings? Are you in any?

Love 'em, and yup.

60. Do you have any web shrines? What do you like to see in that sort of page?

Aaah, just the one. When I first drafted up plans for this site I had the intent to make quite a few, but it turns out actually building those out doesn't excite me.

61. Are your websites "cliche", in your opinion?

Yeah this is probably some kind of cliche tech-y brutalism. Whatever.

62. What is your ideal website? Are you striving for that, or for something else?

Has interesting information laid out in an intuitive way. I'd generally say I'm striving for that, although I feel like maybe the meat of some of my interesting writing is buried too deeply in the pages of the blog backlog...

63. Are you an artist? Do you draw or design your own assets?

Yes, but there's only one visual asset for this site. Remember how I said I got my start on Neopets, way back in the day? I didn't have an imgbucket account (and there was no place on neopets itself to upload assets), so I got used to making designs with pure HTML/CSS. Original graphics for website navigation does not come naturally to me.

64. What are your favourite resource sites?

I have a good list...

65. Is there a habit you just can't get away from no matter how hard you try?

In terms of webdev...? Not really.

66. What's your biggest advice for a new webmaster?

I already said it once in this survey, but think about how you're going to update your website!! Be honest with yourself, you are not going through every page of the site and changing the navbar text whenever you want to add a new page.

67. Do you keep all your styling in CSS? Or do you hard-code some?

Don't really hard-code any, but I do include some CSS outside the head tags, whoops. Usually this is because it's a lot cleaner on the backend, for whatever reason.

68. What do you think of frameset layouts?

Oldschool, but fine.

69. How about table-based layouts?

This is one, lol.

70. Do you subscribe to the ideas of "one-column", "two-column" and "three-column" layouts? Do you use any of these?

It's a pretty natural way to lay things out, I think. Depending on whether you could the music player column, this site is either two or three.

71. Do you spend longer on the HTML or the CSS?

CSS, pretty easily. I feel like HTML comes naturally with the layout of the information you want to convey, but getting it to all behave well and look pretty can be tricky.

72. Have you ever made a page with no CSS? It's useful for your thoughts.

No because if I'm doing that I'm just gonna write it in markdown, lol.

73. Do you ever find yourself making layouts with nothing to put on them? Or do you only make layouts when the need arises?

The idea of making layouts without anything to put in it didn't even occur to me until now.

74. Would you consider yourself a beginner? Or advanced? Somewhere in the middle?

Ehhhh *non-commital hand gesture somewhere in the middle, probably?

75. Do you have a habit of looking at the source code of websites you visit?

All the time.

76. How did YOU learn how to make websites?

With this.

77. Do you ever force elements to do things they're not supposed to?

Is it "forcing" if divs can do anything?

78. Thoughts on floating elements?

Neat, but oh my god do they misbehave sometimes.

79. When you're sizing stuff, what do you use first? Do you use px, em, %, or something else?

em and ch; I generally like sizing stuff to text.

80. Do you have a favourite font?

I've always had a soft spot for Verdana.

81. Would you run a website with another person? How would that work?

Ough, maybe? We would have to agree on the overall backend structure, I think. But other than that, I'd do the same thing I do with my visual novel teams: you're gonna learn git.

82. Do you surf the Web to find new personal websites very often?

Usually when I'm putting off doing actual work, lol.

83. Do you bookmark other people's websites? How would you feel knowing someone else bookmarked yours?

I don't really bookmark many personal sites, but I'll set up some kind of way to find them again. Follow their neocities profile, add them to my links page, etc. It'd be neat to be a resource that people come back to, althought I think I'd be more flattered by an RSS sub than a bookmark, ahahaa.

84. What do you want people to be most impressed with when they see your website?

My creative work, tbf.

85. Are you interested in technology outside of websites? Do you collect?

Why is collection what this associates with technology lol? But yeah, *gesticulates at creative body of work centered around the impacts of technology on society and individuals therein* you could say I'm a fan.

86. How often and for how long are you online?

All the time, too much.

87. When it comes to your website, who is your target audience?

Curious people.

88. Have you ever been interested in XHTML?

Other than looking up what it was when I saw it in a document declaration, no, not really.

89. Do you program in general? Have you ever written a program for use with or on your website, not counting simple JavaScript?

Yuup. If you took a peek at the backend for my image gallery, you would see that I use a quick python script to parse files and generate the yml file for jekyll to look at. The backend for the shrine page works in a similar manner.

90. Speaking of programs that help you make websites, what do you think of static site generators (SSGs)? Have you ever used one?

This is written in Jekyll, baybeeey.

91. Do you keep a hitcounter? Why or why not?

Nope. Metrics are brain poison.

92. Do you frequent forums? Which ones?

93. Do you write your page content directly into the editor, or do you prepare it elsewhere, like a text document or a Word document?

Typing right into vim at this very moment.

94. Do you think you appear cool to others? A more accurate answer now: do other people ever say you're cool?

I think I do, but mostly because I've been told this. I don't try to be "cool".

95. Are you embarrassed of your old work? Have you ever deleted everything out of shame?

Nah. It's out there, if you know the right string of handles and websites to scour.

96. Would you close down your website if you couldn't update it, or would you leave an archive?

Leave it up! Let it stand as a time capsule to this time in my life.

97. Do you reveal a lot about yourself on your website? Or are you more secretive?

Yesn't. If you read my blog I'll add some personal anecdotes, but I'm very selective in what I let be public information

98. Are you willing to reveal who your best online friend is, and/or if they have a website?

Dawg don't make me pick favorites like this.

99. And do you optimise the images on your website?

Mmmm nope. I could probably rig something up to do it automatically, but right now all I do is generate thumbnails for the gallery pages.

100. We're out of time! How do you feel after answering 100 questions? ....other than exhausted.

Yaaaay thanks for reading this far! Ngl I'm not that tired because I spread this out across a few slow work days, ahah.