About Me

How I got here

My time online is shrouded in long periods of lurking, but I've persisted here since the Dot-Com crash. It first started with a typical consumer copy of Windows XP, and a handful of CD-ROM games. Petz 4 and 5, two Scooby Doo games and my sister's Barbie games (too frilly for a tomboy to enjoy out loud). Then, I turned my attention to the Internet Explorer, and experienced nothing short of wanderlust. When I wasn't playing outside with bubble swords and grass-nests, I took to the homes of child-friendly games online. If I'd pored through all the papers of Club Penguin that day, it was time to read the educational sites and fill the gaps left by my encyclopedias. I'll admit I was lucky with something as wonderful and terrible as a rapidly-expanding internet. I was frankly, spared from its dangers, though not without a few scares. But as you can see, we like scares now, don't we?

One of the defining experiences of this period were the leftover patches of digital estate, cheapened since the crash, sold in the dozens, and what would become life-long adorations. I’m talking of course about the personal website.

People could make their own places online and plunge into an endless deluge of passion projects. Personal encyclopaedias, makeshift bestiaries for fictional monsters, fan-pages for characters they obsessed over (so lovingly named shrines), art galleries of hand-scanned pieces or crude digital experiments, all interspersed with original commentary. Original, there’s the word. Even when sites were akin to hermit-crab shells, piles of refuse turned into a means of shelter, they were original. People really did want to tell me about their day, about someone elses’ day, their pet’s day, and all the other days they want to spend. They shared information from the depths of regional cultures, further enriching their ideas, like minerals deposited into a body of water. At times, these ideas were almost innocent in their simplicity. Their ideas felt invigorated, grounded in decades of pre-internet life that in turn fostered rich fantasy worlds. At times, these sites moved in such unison they seemed almost a single entity. I got to see new forms of human culture happen in real time, the products of people across the world gathering to create life through their screens. The goal, above all, was to create and make things exist, for the love of the ability to exist. Their zest for life emanated from the screen. For an unknowing, undiagnosed autistic girl, the feeling was hypnotic. Having my own childish obsessions, there was a piece of the self in these early webmasters. But perhaps I saw the future, perhaps now? That the website could alleviate one’s loneliness, creative frustrations, and Hiareth in a world so lurid and incomprehensible.

The internet of my childhood is both notorious for its lack of rails, and celebrated for its proliferation of hobbyists. Yet I feel an immense love radiating from it and its surviving remnants that I rarely see addressed. The slow dance kind of love, letters and postcards, the embrace of a transatlantic friend. It’s a tactile love; perching before a belaboured machine as it strains to wake itself. Glancing at the speakers that flank it, then the wooden shelf that looms over you, followed by the armchair and the tower that you’re careful not to knock with an errant limb. These things, alongside the machine itself, carry an extra weight. Literal weight, of course, but then it’s a psychological weight. The presence this altar of progress held in the room carried this grandeur and its internet felt grand too. It was weighty, corporeal and alive. It, no matter how strange it could be, felt truly grounded, unlike the ensuing mass fever-dream of Instant Net.

Am I simply overwrought, or did a young girl realise she was in a once-in-a-millennium event? Were we the first land-fish to see the stars? Whatever this was, I know this can be felt again.

As for the Vampires

I’ve loved vampires ever since I was small. I was first charmed by the various vampire disguises on Scooby-Doo, the Real Draculas that appeared after and then a relative decided this was an excellent time to show us his pirated copy of The Fearless Vampire Killers and then things coffin-bobsledded from there.

I find the vampire to be an enduring tool of conversation, storytelling and self-expression. The criteria is simple; it’s an often parasitic hemophage that likes to play sommelier with the living. The ubiquitousness of an evil hungry spirit means almost any person can speak of Vampires, thus turning a seemingly-simple topic into a cultural wellspring.

A vampire can be the yearning husk of someone from times past, skin condensing in the heat of your fire. A vengeful echo of aristocracies past, desperate to keep itself glutted at all costs. In its opposite it can be a victim of circumstance, socially and spatially consumed by its elders. A human mind buckling under the implications of eternal life, only stopped by violent death or slow starvation. A slave to hunger, akin to the notion of a zombie that so many are depicted as. It can be a kitschy, neon-skinned caricature of the former groups with a thing for puns and interior design. Or it is a small, flittering thing that is eccentric at worst, and wants to be left alone to peacefully wiggle its ears and eat worms.

Admittedly I identify the most with the very, very, very last of this list. Though cartoon animal vampires like Nyanpire don’t tend to have thumbs, and I need those.

I first found Neocities in late 2019, from a post I'd seen during one of my lurking sprees. I was ecstatic at my discovery, and after sorting some other affairs, I made Pearlnight's Lair in July of 2021.

Early nights

It was a pleasant summer, and I'd learned a lot about myself, so I was brimming with ideas. I used a drag-n-drop site-builder at the time, too unconfident with HTML and doubly so with CSS. I wasn't sure how much I was going to commit, nor did I know what I wanted to host. Nonetheless, it was ridiculously fun at first. Watching everything happen so instantaneously made me feel productive. I belted out dozens of pages before sagging somewhat at my engine's 100-page limit.

Then with a pile of the things on my lap, I realised I had no idea how to lay them out. Even when I did, it felt woefully unsatisfying. I resorted to quick fixes like adjusting the same navbar a dozen times, or reeling because it had a separate mobile mode and now I had to fix that. This grew so unwieldy that I neglected a page for two years. In general I'd compare this format to a glob of clay: I can bend it any way I see fit, but I am not a sculptor.

2023 - 2025

Two years later in 2023, I tired of this tedium, and further incentivised by the explosively-popular Sadgrl layout, took to Neocities for a proper bout of coding.

I've flayed it half a dozen times since, but it's mine! Ignoring honest business pursuits, I find other places to be mires of thought-terminating cliches.