About Me
General
My name is Alperen Demirkaya, a.k.a. TheCosmicCat. I am a composer based in Ankara/Turkey.. I was born in 2004 and I am pretty sure I have ADHD. I like to experiment on new concepts and create/understand both art and design. I have probably spent way too much time on learning new niche things and creating systems. But I am fine with having hobbies as long as it prevents doom scrolling and wasting time on unimportant stuff.
Education
I have a long, complex and bittersweet of a musical background. So, everything started when I got introduced to music at the age of 7. There are no musicians in my family, so my elementary school teacher is the one who thought I had a musical talent after seeing me play the songs we used to sing on a toy piano. With her suggestion, I started having private music classes, attended some school events, TRT choir etc. On my primary school, my parents (and I) decided that I should get a more professional musical education. So I started to study piano in Eskişehir State Conservatory throughout my middle and high school years. Throughout this painful and regrettable 8 years, I have come to realization both piano career and conservatory culture wasn’t going anywhere. So, while still studying high school, starting from the Covid-19 lockdown, I gave my everything to composition and self-educated myself. Countless hours on tutorials, feedbacks from discord groups, spending few thousands hours on the music software, I created my first 20~ pieces, which officially started my composition career. After graduating from the Conservatory, I entered to the Bilkent Composition Department in 2022, which I am a 3rd year. Currently I am working with Onur Yıldırım.
Why Cosmic Cat? And why not my real name?
Cosmic Cat is a very important concept for me. It is a legacy nickname, from an era of hope, future, and exploration. It is my first and only nickname, and it corresponds with the start of my composition career…
So, why am I still using it??? It is a question I ask myself everyday. I tried to change it with my IRL name, but I just could not rid of it. Nevertheless it has an interesting story.
Coding & Neocities
I have started coding thanks to my irreplaceable and precious teacher, Onur Yıldırım. He is not only a very good and successful teacher/composer, but also an inspiration for me to use the digital world at full potential. His enthusiasm alone is enough to make people create websites, learn coding, purchase expensive gadgets and services and follow tech news. I am so glad I have studied with him.
Hobbies
Last year, I had an breakdown. And I realized that I was stuck in a single and repetitive loop, which was harming me. So, I decided to add some extra hobbies alongside to music, just to see if everything gets little better...
- Painting/Drawing/Designing
- Learning Guitar
- Coding (HTML, CSS, JavaScript)
- Listening Global Radios and Discovering obsecure musics/genres
- Composing in obsecure genres (breakcore f.e.)
- Going to Picnics / Exploring the unknown locations / Driving somewhere I dont know
About This Website
Creation: 21/06/2025 | Hosted on: Neocities
About CosmicCats the website, and why I did not create a professional website
I believe that an artist’s professionalism does not come from corporate culture. An artist first must have the will and means to be original and innovative. Then they should be hard working and well managed. Along those lines, an artist must be sincere. After all those steps, finally the composer can be described as professional.
Secondly, I always wanted to have an personal website. From the childhood, having a customized place on the whole internet always sounded very cool to me.
If you do not know, Neocities (the web hosting site) is not a website designer. So everything you see on the screen (other than iframes; such as Soundcloud and guestbook) is designed, coded, and maintained by me.
Not yet but I will ultimately put a licenses pages.
Update History
- 21/06/2025: Opening the Neocities account & Learning HTML
- 05/07/2025: First actual design
- 06/07/2025: First Sidebar
- 07/07/2025: New Colors & Background
- 09/07/2025: First Togglable Sidebar / First Few easter eggs
- 10/07/2025: Improving existing content
- 11/07/2025: First Fonts, js sidebar (no more copy/pasting for each subsite!)
- Draggable cosmic cat button
- Click counter easter egg
- Proper sidebar animations
Today was intense. I tried to make a fun, interactable sidebar button, but somehow everything went wrong.
After hours of debugging JavaScript conflicts and CSS positioning issues, I finally got the sidebar system working properly with:
I also added this toggle line thingy to write detailed blogs. I will use it later.
It is working much better? I don't know...
Everything went wrong and I lost my site. Well, something arose from the ashes and ruins.
I started to understand this environment better.
Today, I did not do a lot. Cleaned some of the layout problems, filled up some of the content, added few new styles etc. Today's chillness was nice. I believe As I get better in html and understand more, It will get easier.
Also I added some mobile and small screen accessibility. Now blocks changes location if they can't see themself worthy of their old place!
I am still trying to fix the iframe reloading issues. This page does not like to be reloaded! I looked at tutorials, searched trough internet, even asked AI, but found no cure. I will fix it later, because I do not any better.
I also researched and understood flex and grids. I will create much better layouts, however, I do not have much content to work with. So, ever so slowly, I am improving things.
Thanks to my best friend LLMs, I put all my htmls into folders, and categorized them regarding their place on the website.
Also, I searched and found a free chatbox! That's nice, now I have something better.
It is frustrating at sometimes. By but hurts from sitting! But dammit, it is the most banger thing I have ever coded! It will get better.
Lastly, I have still concerns about the personal and professional sides about it. Finding and implementing the moderate is always the good they said. Don't go towards the extremes they said! Even Chatbox is kinda dangerous for an professional website. I have to believe what I am doing. If I do a good enough job, I will be awarded by the uniqueness.
So, I started to understand the fundementals of css and html, but there are soo much things to do! And learn! And DO! Sometimes I wonder, If anybody will ever read, even see this website. But I am not doing this for them, I am doing this for me. I want to create something unique, something that is mine. I want to create a place where I can express myself freely.
I was working on grid/flex systems. They are quite tricky.
Also, I started to dislike AI. When I didn't know any coding, It was cool and too powerful. But when you have a website with tons of broken code, scrambled functionalty, heck bloat, you start to regret everything. But I cannot say it was not useful. I would not start designing this website if there weren't LLMs at the first place. It was the sweet bliss of an warming, gentle shower. But it ended, now I just have the scars ands the pain of the boiling water.
My life has started to oscilate between working on Erasmus things and learning HTML. I do not want to waste my time with stupid youtube videos, instagram reels, and so many other distractions. Instead, whenever I can, I watch some html tutorials, and change one small thing about this website.
Yesterday and today. I was still working on the broken iframe, looping link and navigation system. I do not understand javascript so well, so I use AI to help me, but it is far worse! This is valid if you just request a robust thing and do not investigate, of course.
Yesterday and today, I sit down on my computer, bug fixed for 10 hours. I asked everything, cleared every unnecessary bloat feature, and converted my 500 line of navigation code into 100 line code. And somehow, I managed to fix it! Now I can refresh and redirect without issues! (some exceptions included.)
Also, I redesigned some of the main UI elements, AGAIN! But this time, I did it with a goal. In the previous days, I thought about the overall story. What can I do to make this website different than a corporate one? How can I add a story?
So, I came up with the cosmic theme (no, hear me out). So, this site symbolises the spacestation that is on the orbit of the catmic saturn, my logo's planet. And Main Sites will be the general modules of this station. This is why I designed the navigational tablet. Now, I need to add those Astroneer like background plantes!
It is not over, FarSites (troll websites, websites with individualised characteristics, like liminal corner) will be the moons of this planet. So, I want to create some rocket/launch animations to my website.
In the future, I plan to build a cosmic sitemap as a playful minigame. Imagine a top-down view of Saturn’s orbit, where you can pilot a tiny spaceship around the system. Each webpage will appear as a small moon, and the main station will be at the center. You’ll be able to explore the site by flying to different moons, and even leave the orbit to visit external sites like YouTube or Instagram—representing journeys beyond the CosmicCats universe.
My Layout is a mess, And I am trying to fix it. It is hard.
Alright. Today was full of old functionality fixes and bloat cleaning. I seperated my 1.7k Javascript code into 5 ~100 line code. Also, I added toggle buttons in the sidebar, just for the people who want to look at into features. Content after content might be very demanding on one's computer! Also, check out Mark
I am very busy with my personal life. However, I am still adding new functionalities and nice features to the website. Few broken features are back again!
My site's structure is slowly making sense. After creating so many pages, merging and dividing again and again, I am starting to see a clearer picture of the overall layout. There are some pages which is very obviously AI generated, but there are pages molded bhy my pure ambiguity to create something right.
Eh, I am a musician after all. I need to develop my musical abilities, technique, knowledge etc. This website was just an extra, but it is becoming a big thing which takes lots of personal time. Lets see where this is going.
This week, I was busy with some other things, like learning German and trying to proceed my visa. I am also still busy on the game osts. However, this does not mean I completely forget here!
Added bunch of new features and improvements. And made friends along the way!
On 22 July, I added a new toggleable customization panel right away! This lead me to organize my overbloated css and create some variables for the panels. I probably will figure a better and more compact solution, eventually.
I added my album farsites. For now, there are 3 semi completed, and 1 empty page. I want to create something special for each page! I highly recommend you to look those up. I give my best to those!
ALso, I added marqueeLand. You can reach there by clicking the main marquee bunch of times. When you do that right, you end up on marquee land. It is THE place I put my shitpost site's links. Go check it out!
Also, I added the space-craft. It is not perfect, heck, it does not even lift up because of the lack of fuel, but when it finishes, we can be able to go different planets!
I added a short weekly music blog and a way to change the blogs with a button.
Then, did some small layout fixes. Flexbox is a hell.
Finally, I could not update the aboutme page yet, and it was the first thing I tried to update. Perhaps it will be complete next time. I want to share my website's link inside my instagram, so need to clear some things and atleast reach the 1.0 version of the site. I dont know how to reach 1.0, I did not put any criteria, but I believe I will know when it is ready.
I have updated the AboutMe page.
Fixed the AboutMe Toggles.
Also hid an AI created gambling page around my site.
OnurYıldırımShrine.
Liminal Spaces have subpages now! You can find piece informations there!
Breakcore has a better writing and fixed css.
For some reason, comments and guestbooks not working. I might need to change the provider.
Few new Easter eggs
I was little lazy, so I could not added more content. But I am preparing and fixing some old but crucial content.
Optimisation...