Skip to content

To Come Into Being

The Mind of Bryan Veloso at Age 28

The Web Design Era
GitHub
Los Angeles, CA
DISCLAIMER
This is a legacy post written before 2013 . While the content has survived numerous site migrations and content management systems, some formatting and links may be broken. I've done my best to fix things under my control.

Definitely an odd feeling, working on this place again.

Version 26, Redemption, was up for a pretty long time—a little over 840 days to be exact. When I see it like that, all of a sudden I notice the dust that piled up around here. But not only that, it’s been over 840 days since I’ve worked on Avalonstar.

Poor guy, I missed a couple of birthdays too.

When it comes to personal sites, especially my personal sites, the ideas love to pop up suddenly. Very ninja like. The first neuron fired during the Japanese-leg of our honeymoon with one word, “rise.” Once I felt it—as much as one person can feel a neuron firing, which is impossible and subsequently besides the point—I closed my eyes.

In my heyday, per se, I would’ve been able to think of my design, close my eyes and slowly see that design start to come together in a sort of 3D plane. Talk about rusty. I closed my eyes and all I saw was white with the word “RISE” at the top, my immediate thought being along the lines of “this shit’s broken.” The idea stayed with me for a few days, but I chose to wait to see if it was a fleeting thought or something my mind really wanted me to go with.

Sure enough, when I opened up Photoshop, I typed in the word “ARISE.”

rise, arise, revive, phoenix… I’m obsessed.

Avalonstar is the 25-year-old personal website of Bryan Veloso: streamer, professional user interface designer, hobbyist developer, lifelong gamer, and compass of purpose.

Colophon

The text of this website is set in Geologica, Andada Pro, and Optician Sans. Built by hand with Astro and GitHub. Hosted on my Mac Mini using Bun.

© 2000-2026 Avalonstar. “Avalonstar” is a registered trademark of Avalonstar, Inc. All rights reserved.