About
History of this website, background, and purpose
Personal Website
My name is Samuel Wasley and this is my personal website.
Purpose
I use this website to share all electronic imagery, text, and videos that I create. Media that I am not the original creator of might be published because I find that work valuable or interesting to me. In that sense, this website is a collation of creative endeavours that I would like to share and record as an archive of my personality on the web.
Background
Social networks are built upon sharing content, and that is my agenda with this personal website. It is an authentic representation of me.
For several years, I used Facebook to share content, stories, opinions, and commentary that I had – just like the majority of people in Western countries. I have always been weary of Facebook’s monopolistic, corporate position in the social lives of young people. I have become even more disillusioned with Facebook’s emphasis on revenue and metadata stockpiling. Facebook treats its users as consumers of advertising for big business and news organisations. I do not want to live my life by cycling through a corporate news feed every single day. Facebook’s policies as to privacy and ownership, while naturally being of concern to some, are not the primary reason I made this website.
The reason was a lot more than that; the Facebook interface fosters toxic, vain, and in some rare cases destructive behaviours from a minority of people who use it religiously, as far as I am concerned and have seen. There is an allure to living a fake and sanitised life through your Facebook profile, and I felt this pull and influence. I want to try and divest myself from it. Though undoubtedly a valuable platform of communication, I feel that there is no reason in the modern world to hand over your life experiences to a corporate company unless you are a content creator who derives a living from advertising and entertainment. There will be millions of people whose sole repository of photographs, videos, and creations are saved and catalogued within the Facebook infrastructure instead of in a photo album, private tape recordings, or other intimate space. As a private citizen who derives no income from online interactivity, there is no reason for me to cultivate an online persona on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or the abundance of similar platforms. On Facebook, appropriation of content occurs at an arm’s length (ie. all content in your News Feed is brought to you courtesy of Facebook, posted and made by someone else), and here, I bear the full fruits of my labour. As individuals, we are expected to share through social media, while usually only companies, businesses, and entrepreneurial individuals build their own website. Yet, the Australian government regulates and authenticates a specialist second level domain within the ‘.au’ ecosystem for such purposes.
As Domain Name Registrar (Australia) Pty Ltd (2011) explains:
The id.au extension has a special place in the .au namespace – it’s purely for individuals. While the name of the person who originally proposed the .id.au name is not known; in October 1994 an Australian online pioneer by the name of Robert Elz again floated the idea of an extension for Australians for personal use – and by early 1995 the domain was created.
Unlike other second level domains which require an ABN or an ACN, ‘.id.au’ is readily available for license to Australians for personal use.
Facebook is restrictive in terms of expression; you can make a post, but it must be presented within the ‘container’ or shell of the Facebook infrastructure. You can post videos, audio, files, and memes, but there are many limitations on creative and intellectual freedom. I want to indelibly step away from the morose politics and debate of the social ‘moment’.
On this website, I am able to share, publish, and create in an almost unlimited fashion. All choices of colour, style, and background have been made by myself, including all the errors, and both style and usability faux pas. This is true freedom of speech and expression.
I appreciate that in most respects, making this website is an exercise in the very vanity I wish to leave behind with the obsessive Facebook users, and this is a correct observation. However, I would not have gone to the trouble I have gone to create this website if I wanted to create a voice to be heard; I would stay on Facebook and open a Twitter account if I wanted exposure. If I want to create an intimate voice and expression that is quintessentially my own, I have found my platform.
Building this website has been an exercise in discovery, learning, adaptability, and experimentation; I have spent countless hours researching how to go about every step of the process of building a website of this nature, and I have enjoyed every minute of learning about domains, servers, content management systems, FTP, CSS, HTML, and many more software concepts that I would not have had an insight into through over means. The journey and exercise of problem-solving skills has been its own invaluable reward. A wise man once said: ‘Live as if you were to die tomorrow, and learn as if you were to live forever’ (even if it wasn’t Gandhi).
History
In March 2017, I sought to launch my own league website for motorsport simulation games called ‘League Racing Australia’. This was spurred from nearly five years previous experience as a competitor with other league racing websites. At various points throughout this hobby and endeavour, I believed that management and community aspects could be improved monumentally by a focused and tailored user experience devoted to fairness and equality. I still believe in these ideals, and have many unfulfilled visions in this sector.
With that said, I did not achieve a launch for the website. What followed my initial enthusiasm was a grueling month of hard work, research, and experience in what it takes to start creative and business pursuits. Countless hours were spent building the website with pages, policies, user-friendly navigation, and prospective marketing. By the end of the month of April 2017, there was a complete website with universally consistent style and branding with interwoven links to a PHP/MySQL powered forum housed in a subdomain. Social media accounts were active, and the broad sum of regulations, rules, and policies were written. It was easily about a day’s work away from a prospective launch, however I never took the step to release it onto the internet for a variety of reasons:
Life got in the way – in May 2017, I was making initial strides into signing my first residential lease along with a friend to move out of the parents’ home. In addition to all the moving activities and preparations, I made a choice to not re-locate my steering wheel rig required for simulation racing to the apartment. This meant that I could not have the hands on access that I needed to organise a new league.
I lost interest in leagues as a format – later that year, I knew that the next Gran Turismo entry (my racing simulation of choice) would be releasing an esports orientated game, and the FIA sponsorship of the esports events meant that I wanted to focus my efforts on that aspect of the game as opposed to friendly community competitions.
- The market on console was shifting – during 2017/2018, video game developers really started to push esports aspects in competitive games. Due to the aforementioned FIA sanctioned events on Gran Turismo, I did not see the same value in a community organised series from a user-focused point of view. The market was becoming more adept at supplying the competitive aspects of gaming that community leagues historically delivered. Officially sanctioned events necessitate having an equal and fair competitive environment, to maintain integrity and interest from spectators, and integrity and interest were fundamental to my vision for the new league. I believed the market opportunity was about to close or become too small to be worth the investment.
Therefore, I never launched the website. It was supremely promising in my opinion, but the website sat unpublished for about a year. Below are some of the only images that I have archived from the website.
Below you can find the league documents for archival purposes. These documents (including pictures created using third-party software) are under copyright, and may not be published without permission. You can report a copyright infringement or seek permission to use the documents by contacting me here.
All images are full HD and were captured from my PlayStation 4. These were used to create backgrounds, action shots, or feature images on a case-by-case basis. You can find some being used in the screenshots of the website above.
Click an image below to view it.
In September 2018, I came back to thinking about developing another website. I had an insight into how they work from my experiences building League Racing Australia, and I wanted a slice of the internet to call my own. I grabbed a licence to use ‘doublethreshold.com’ and ‘samwasley.com’, and scrapped the hosting of League Racing Australia. At the time, I thought that Double Threshold sounded like a cool name, but I did not have a specific purpose in mind. I thought that Double Threshold could be a name for a blog site potentially or something similar as a brand. I ran ‘doublethreshold.com’ and ‘samwasley.com’ as aliases.
I played around with WordPress and developed my knowledge on how to create a fun and interactive landing page layout. I settled on a video featuring my world record Audi Quattro S1 Pikes Peak run from Dirt Rally. The earliest iteration of the landing page featured the same ‘Engine Start’ button as the image used today, but instead employed an audio track of Kevin Shepherd’s ‘115’ written for Call of Duty: Black Ops as a proof of concept.
Later on in the month, I purchased the licence for the current address and published the site with the landing page as it is today sometime in October 2018, and in so doing, abandoning the previous two addresses.
The site remained barebones with zero content for a few months until March 2019 when I began the concerted efforts to complete the site.