About Me

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             P E A R L

• History: How I Got Here
• History: How the Rest of Me Followed
• The Thematics of Grotesques
• How the Lair Happened: 2019–2021
• How the Lair Happened: 2021–2023
• Footnotes
• FAQ

Foreword

“I love men too — not merely individuals, but every one. But I love them with the consciousness of egoism; I love them because love makes me happy, I love because loving is natural to me, because it pleases me. I know no “commandment of love.” I have a fellow-feeling with every feeling being, and their torment torments, their refreshment refreshes me too; I can kill them, not torture them.”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

You are about to see the words of a seasoned e-hermit who has made a rare surface from her trawlings. She's liable to go back under any second, so heed this and heed it well. I loathe repeating myself and insulting your intelligence at the same time.

How I got here

Is it the past I see,
when I look up to the heavens?
Believing in the magic,
that I know could never be

I want to go where they are going,
into the world they've been
Can I open up my mind enough to see?
- Don Mclean, for The Flight of Dragons, 1982

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 making nests out of lawn thatch¹, 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 and a handful of disappointments². 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.

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.

How the rest of me followed

With being online, comes a consistent persona. Here this section entails how that evolved, and led to the creation of this Lair. I also, as a treat, give you some extraneous details on gargoyles, grotesques and their history.

I first made Sanguine in 2020. That year I was troubled by just about everything, minus a certain disease. Out of all these troubles, the biggest was a single feeling. That being the feeling of lacking an identity. It wasn't a total lack of self; I knew what I loved, but I didn't know how to present that to the world. Every time I tried to cobble something together, it led to more questions than answers. I'd describe it as a form of selective mutism, where I'd lock up and retreat into myself at seemingly random moments. I knew better than to imitate others, but I struggled nonetheless. Sanguine was my latest attempt at closure and miraculously, they landed straight into my heart.

They were simultaneously unsettling, yet cute, cuddly without being furry. An anthrothomorphic animal, while remaining bestial. It did not read like a mascot costume draped over myself, an aggressive compensation for issues of gender and certainly not an act of creative desperation. Their traits were invigorating in their freshness, yet a callback to earlier designs, an echo of a 12 year old self's "Koi-Lynx"⁵, with glittering fins and the same chimeric, yet feline features. Sanguine made me feel gothic in a way that could also be whimsical, serene and comical. The wings harkened to my love of vampires and bats. The tail still draconic, reminding me of previous dragon characters I used to represent myself. The giant mitt-like paws that mirrored my own experiences as an autistic, constantly out of tempo with her body, constantly feeling like she took up too much space. Sanguine was everything I felt, and unlike my previous attempts, embraced the uncertainty inside myself and reclaimed it.

The thematics of grotesques

I identify with grotesques for my love of chimères and Gothic art. I adore vampires, but I don't see myself as one. I'd say I'm an onlooker, a prop to the vampire set. Their bombastic personalities and lurid backstories, while fun to watch, clash with my own. Instead, I'm more akin to a Castlevania enemy or a creature you'd see in a 70's toy line. It's modest, and some may say overly so, but it's right for me. Also note the absence of "fursona", "furry" or even "funny animal" as I speak. Sanguine and I are furry-adjacent at most. Back when I was a furry, I couldn't relate to other furries. I felt like something else.

The main appeal of the grotesque, like other chimères, is its sheer versatility. There are no real rules, and surprisingly, not all grotesques befit their name. One atop the Château de Pierrefonds depicts a mother cat holding her kitten, thus showing the grotesque as an exercise in cuteness. They can be quadruped or bipedal, sapient or feral, gendered or ambiguous. They can mean anything an author wants them to mean. How one must wonder what it feels to be one that hates its own shape, or yearns to feel living flesh?

In the 1997 book "Holy Terrors, Gargoyles on Medieval buildings", Janetta Rebold Benson theorises about the grotesques of medieval europe. Her first theory suggests they symbolise the creatures of hell.

"It is possible that members of the medieval Church recognized the potential of gargoyles to in-trigue, to entice, to attract attention and perhaps even attendance. The medieval preference for grotesque gargoyles is clear; they far outnumber the comparatively few realistic depictions of humans or animals. The frequently monstrous nature of gargoyles makes obvious that all medieval art was not intended to be beautiful. In fact, ugliness had a fascination all its own, and images of the macabre were very much a part of daily life in the Middle Ages.

Because it is extremely unlikely that there is one meaning for all gargoyles; various interpretations must be surveyed. Some are of limited plausibility, such as the suggestion that gargoyles were inspired by the excavations of skeletal remains of dinosaurs and prehistoric beasts, or that gargoyles were derived from the constellations. Rather, the key that unlocks all discussion about the meaning of gargoyles seems to be the great concerns about sin and salvation that prevailed during the Middle Ages. The preoccupation of many medieval Christians with the eternal fate of their souls, coupled with widespread illiteracy and the consequent emphasis on the instructional use of visual imagery, resulted in the creation of many monsters in medieval art. Evil was both an abstract idea and a concrete fact something very real that could be given visual form by artists."
- Benson, 1997, p.23-24

This reminds me of the Church Grim. A Church Grim, in contrast to the grotesque, is not a demon or sign of evil. Instead, a Church Grim is said to be the ghost of a dog, buried alive in the foundations of a church to guard it eternally. Unlike other black dogs, it's explicitly christian and actively protects its land against acts of sacrilege. Despite their differences, grotesques, Church Grims, and the mounted head of La Gargouille all serve as symbols of sacrifice. By dying or remaining in servitude, they become a monstrous echo of the original Crucifixion.

Alongside Christian analysis, other texts suggest more secular reasons for the grotesque. In a November 1912 edition of the Arts & Decoration Magazine, one of its writers G. Mortimer Mark, discusses this concept.

"For the grotesque is always an architectural surprise, besides being an architectural joke. It grins down at us from a safe and unexpected perch overhead, high up on a column, or leers out from the shadow of a balcony or overhang, with varied multiplicity of facial contortion. It is obvious that the grotesque in architecture must be sparingly and judiciously used- being essentially humorous, it must realize that brevity is the soul of wit, and that if too much in evidence, it could be as tiresome as the man who is never serious. "
- Mortimer, 1912, p.22-23

Given many gargoyles exist as naked men spewing torrents of rainwater from their buttocks, this is more than plausible. One atop the Salisbury cathedral in England spends its time nibbling the cheek of another, who screeches in silent torment. The aforementioned mother cat clutches a kitten, and is hardly a portent of any kind. If the hard work of a sculptor can't be adequately rewarded in financial compensation, they can still take amusement from their creations. Another proponent of this theory is ex-president Theodore Roosevelt, as seen in his review of the 1913 Armory Show.

"The makers of the gargoyles knew very well that the gargoyles did not represent what was most important in the Gothic cathedrals. They stood for just a little point of grotesque reaction against, and relief from, the tremendous elemental vastness and grandeur of the Houses of God. They were imps, sinister and comic, grim and yet futile, and they fitted admirably into the framework of the theology that found its expression in the towering and wonderful piles which they ornamented."
- Theodore Roosevelt, 1913

This theory of levity is unique, and to ignore its humanity would be a display of ignorance. The people of this time believed in hell, and bearing that weight daily would fill the mind with its own demons. A peering face might bring mirth to both its sculptor and the overworked onlookers below. Even the most devout, much like their counterparts today, could not have been overly certain of their afterlives. While their prayer commences, it happens amidst the company of grotesques. Choir stalls, corbels, doorways, misericords and rood screens seldom stand unadorned. Why should a potential sinner let their eyes rest away from God onto a dreary corner? Why not remember the perils of sloth, through a piteous, slavering creature peering back at them from the gloom? It's a reminder of evil, yet a reprieve from the oppressive dogma that so defined the time. These misshapen creatures, as absurd and unwelcome as they look, frighten things more frightful than external "ugliness". I designed Sanguine, beneath the sensory and aesthetic appeal, to protect myself from the riptides of dissociation and self-doubt. Evil spirits in their own way.

2021 - 2023

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.

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.⁷

2023 - 2025

By 2023, two years later, I had 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 show the quaint oddities of my life. However, I wasn't thinking laterally, the way all interesting things 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, yet not fall 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. I would read hundreds of websites, staring into their pages and wondering what I was doing wrong. I felt unintelligent; I didn't provoke respect or intrigue. I felt I was stooping to a creative low; how could I even call the Lair a personal website if so much of my person was invisible to me? It was a uniquely unpleasant feeling to simultaneously know what I was, yet not be able to look inside myself and bring those aspects of my soul out with me.

It is also hard to look inside yourself when one of the only people in your life begins to echo the same mistreatment you have seen in so many others. It is one thing to have somebody insult you, but having someone sitting on your shoulder, whispering sweet nothings one day and booming proclamations of my helplessness the next is absolutely disorientating. I was "the light of her day" just as much as I was "infantile", "dramatic" and had "no empathy". My trauma made me endearing but also a burden, my struggles with intrusive thoughts ignored in favour of complaining to nearby people about how annoyed she was by me. When I disagreed with her, everybody else had to know. When I was happier, she'd do mocking impressions of me, apparently how me expressing my pleasures sounded to her.

"You don't get anything done because you hate yourself", all the while refusing to seek employment. I was angry, but too conditioned to downplay my feelings and achievements to call it out the way I wanted to. I would not be listened to, because I was the sick one who needed her to fix me. My life was defined by being and remaining sick. She claimed to have "caretaker burnout", for care that I did not demand of her. All I wanted was a companion while she positioned herself as my saviour. I was a problem that could not be fixed, the stereotypical mad artist with glimmers of potential, if only I were not so mad. At times I was treated like I was on the verge of death, and while I do love to play morgue with a good air conditioner, it was almost laughable in its audacity.

The rest of this relationship veers away from relevance, but I hit my threshold. Comparing a close friend of mine to a person who hurt them very badly was that threshold. From the moment I evicted this apparent oracle of my future, things improved dramatically⁸. I had an internet to explore without her.

My process went like this. I would ask a question, the robot would give me a statement, and I would check it. I would ask the robot to answer more of my questions, it would give me another statement, and I would check it again. I would check a few times, and watch my project grow. I described it at the time to my best friend as rubber-duck debugging, only this duck could talk and produce a stream of emoticons as you worked through problems. There were times I would ask one to assist with a task, only for it to go "Hooh, no! I'm not going in there!" or "Graham! Watch out!" right after I had fallen into another problem entirely. Now that I think about it, working with LLMs was more like working with Cedric from King's Quest 5. It would probably even tell me to look out for poisonous snakes.

Nonetheless, I used it to help me define the materials of various rooms, improve my cadence so my sentences read better, and most importantly, debug. But also, actually debug. I also, as this website would come to enjoy in spades, used it to automate long, repetitive tasks. While I kept creative control of the game, its prose and its vision, the robot took care of the code. I playtested with it rigorously, for hours at a time. Foxtrot was an ambitious game with features I had wanted to see in other Adventuron titles. The groundwork was laid in the documentation, but its example was an owl following you through several forest screens. Its documentation was a recreation of 1986's Excalibur, where a bloodthirsty worm would kill you should you linger a turn too many. Neither example had an enemy that could chase you, get trapped, escape from an improperly set trap to wander back to its home and resume the prowl should you alert it again. This enemy, a towering skeletal elk possessed by dozens of unintelligent ghosts, wears a key to the way out, but you can only get that key after defeating it. If you want to trap this osseous beast, it has to be chasing you first. If you run into a designated safe room too many times, it will finally get the memo and kill you. When it catches you, the game alternates between a few death messages, just to keep things fresh. This was quite a bit for a first-time project, so this was where the robot debugging shined. I wanted more human debuggers to balance out all the robot work, but I only had Alex on hand. Thankfully, when I got a working copy readied, I spent a morning walking them through, and we had a lot of fun.

Contrary to my initial opinions on using a robot for assistance, I did not seem to lose my creativity or my ability to fact-check, nor did I attempt to mate with it. How this relates to the Lair is simple: I turned my attention to using it for more general coding tasks. My favourite at the time was generating batches of boilerplate code, which gave me more room to work on my site's CSS, rather than getting stuck in unrewarding copy-paste cycles.

Footnotes

1. Thatch is a layer of organic detritus found in grass, and in larger quantities, can assume a "fluffy" appearance. From spring to summer, my primary school field would become littered with it and we would all descend on it for various acts of depravity, such as tossing it about, packing it into shapes or shaping into nests, which was more popular with the girls. If I had to compare it to any material, I would say it behaved like kinetic sand. It looks fragile, (and to an extent, is) but once you pack of it enough of it together it can actually develop a structure. I only found out exactly what this strange "plant" was very recently, and it's just a nice thing to know after all this time.
2. One, I never made an account on the Wolf/Big-Cat themed roleplaying MMORPG, Feral Heart. Two, I never met Rockhopper in Club Penguin, Gary was a start but now my soul cannot rest for eternity. Three, I never realised the nintendo Wii was backwards compatible with the Gamecube despite spending hours on the Super Mario Wiki.
3. I say almost because the internet then is no more innocent than this current one.
   
   On one hand, this notion is not unreasonable when we consider how social media exists. As said, its structure rewards conflict and punishes the very precision that's normally capable of preventing it. People are indeed cynical in this environment, things are seldom enough when you're constantly doused in reminders of what you seem to lack, or the ever-rotating list of monthly trends. It really does not feel like enough, and to compensate these people perform texture. They co-opt the concept of physicality and tactile interaction. They desire to be part of the earth and its gifts, but sit knowing that their lifestyles do not allow them to exercise that. It is a frustrated middle ground they're in, aware of the problem but unable to fully act due to the tampering of their internal dopamine processes. They want, sincerely, to be natural creatures with natural knowledge. They want to be maximalist, they want to be identifiable in a sea of equally-insecure performers, they show you grids of photos bearing fictional characters, that apparently by looking at them, are "coded" as them. You are supposed to gather the entirety of a man's soul from a moodboard, instead of their own words. They want the completion of the self far too prematurely, instead of forgiving themselves for not living up to standards that can never truly be fulfilled. So yes, in some ways the internet back then was more innocent, but of course this is not entirely it either.
   
   Sites back then did warn you of their contents, and while many of these are deeply comical to me in their seriousness, were often simple preludes to all manner of debauchery. Porn sites were often a click away from the sexual abuse of animals (it was considered more of a strange kink, from my personal observations). The lines between healthy sex and destructive paraphilia was far thinner than it is now. To be more direct, it was alarmingly easy to find material that encouraged and glorified the abuse of nonconsenting parties. Thankfully, Archive.org should let you report these websites if you go on your own expeditions. On the topic of glorification, self harm, anorexia and pro-suicide sites emerged and did their own deeds. Usenet in particular was a hotbed of this content, the most infamous being alt.suicide.holiday for the acutely at-risk. The flames were no less hot, and being told to die from AIDs was a line I saw more than once. Pseudoscience was rampant, and in some ways, even more dangerous than now, where counter-arguments can at least balance matters out. People ranted openly, and with that they hated openly. Political vitriol, racism, sexism and all manner of discrimination was of course, all over. Yahoo even had a designated racist section, like a whole sub-directory of sites for white nationalists. So, if you need some esoteric essay idea, perhaps observe that side of the web and see how that dark side of our human lives has evolved over time. If you do so, show your findings to me. I am much too occupied to read faqs on "The KKK for Kids", which is a real thing I have seen with my own eyes. But back to things, it is in error to claim this primal web was a place of mindless where people laughed and jumped in joy complete.
   
   In short, after all of this: "The more things change, the more they stay the same".