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, six years after its creation in 2013.

The post found its way to me during one of my lurking sprees on Tumblr. Between posts about otherkin and lovingly curated clutter, I saw the name Neocities. While I am yet to find the original post, which I would much like to show you, it struck me with one terrible, obsession-forming idea. I wasn’t too late to make my own website and experience the joys of self expression. I was in fact, just in time. That despite the state of things, I wasn’t going to miss out. I could relive these lovely experiences, and create more. I just had to make an account, and learn how to code.

Putting together an entire static website as a self-loathing, much-abused nineteen year old only months shy from passing with flying colours on an NHS autism test was a tall order to say the least. I am of a particular neuroticism, even to this night, that if I don’t pick up things as fast as I like, I hate myself until the sun implodes. While the self-esteem’s since improved, at the time even looking at the editor was enough to send me into a fit of overstimulated muteness. I was paralysed, too confused to proceed but too embarrassed to drop the idea entirely. So I put down the idea of coding for time being, while a less agitated ex of mine hacked at crude dashed-border boxes and in-line styles like it was 1999. To dampen the shame and get a start somewhere, I turned to Wix.

2021 - 2023

Wix, for those unfamiliar or wilfully shirking its existence for its mutilation of DeviantART, is a drag-n-drop website generator. Now to attempt some modicum of respect to the megacorporation, this format lends well to prototyping. Dragging things about the page without a single div let me get used to web design, however unskilled it was. My first layout, which unfortunately evaded the crawls of the Wayback Machine, was as stereotypically vampire-themed as one could get.

I’d liken it to a medium-sized scroll-box in the centre of the page, with a sidebar on its left side studded with appropriately gothic blinkies. Two gargoyle gifs bobbed their heads atop the box, flanking its corners. A fun fact as I was writing this section, but I tracked the source of the gif and it points to an e-vendor called GargoyleStatuary.com. He’s been going since 1993, since the internet literally got started! The gargoyles I picked are listed on there as the Roaring Sentinel model, nice to have a name after years of wondering. They look straight out of a Castlevania game.

But let’s get back to things. It was very much a sort of play, excessive, frivolous and unconcerned with accessibility. It was not a serious project but it was a passionate one. I sincerely wanted to join the others, and felt increasingly insecure as my site grew in size but yet not with code that I made (or stole from someone elses’ site as is customary) myself.

It was a pleasant summer, and I'd learned a lot about myself, so I was brimming with ideas. 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.

I had ideas, but I didn’t have a backlog. I had some sense of a self, however scattered, but it was not fully lived in. I did not have what I needed to make this a truly interesting experience. It didn’t have any of what you see now, I’d have to make projects. I’d have to learn, and in a way, I’d have to put the site down. I just didn’t admit that yet.

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 deleted my Wix account, and the aforementioned company (kindly for them!) modified my Sadgrl layout to match that of my old Wix site.

The transition was smooth visually but continued to be a chimera of failed ideas. I wanted, badly, to curate my life. I wanted to show the things I loved, but was perhaps a trifle simple. I wasn’t thinking laterally, the way all things interesting do. I had the zeal in my comic, just not myself as an individual. The few ideas that stuck were rare and special, but despite my best attempts I failed to trace a pattern between them. I wanted to know myself deeper, without falling apart into something I didn’t recognise. I didn’t want to make things happen for the sake of it, but I didn’t know where to look.

It’s also hard to look inside yourself when one of the only people in your life begins to echo the same mistreatment you've seen in so many others. It's one thing to have somebody insult you, but having someone sitting on your shoulder whispering sweet nothings one day and booming proclamations of your helplessness the next is absolutely disorientating. Thankfully I now know that this is a typical occurrence of being alive and that it happens to most of us. From when I evicted this apparent oracle of my future, things improved dramatically.

In the immediate weeks of utter relief, I took to another friend's website, redesigning it with their enthusiastic permission. I needed somewhere to warm up and try out new techniques before trying my site again. I learned a lot of CSS that summer, no more were the deprecated inline stylings, now replaced with wide-reaching variables. I even learned how to make a flex gallery without having to use a dozen seperate thumbnail images, a technique I'm still impressed by. Then in October, I felt ready to try my own site again.

It took another few sessions, a few more failed ideas and an improvised graveyard to make the most of them. I learned to repurpose things, and in doing so, free up space for ideas closer to me. 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.

Now this site is no longer a glob of clay. It is a lot of metaphorical things, but now I’d describe it as a vase of well-tended roses. Unlike their wild specimens, they have no threats and need no defences. Like my manners, I prune to keep the flower, not the thorn.

Here's all the technical information for this lair. It also functions as a credits page with a few extra silly things that got a bit distracting for the main browsing experience.

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