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             .----..--      (_-(__  )--\      /              .---..---.         _);;(_
 .-----.    /.--.     .-      (__-(_   _\    /              /.--.  .--.\       (_/..\_)
 | .--. \     _ o  o    \        (__(_/  )  (                 (  O  O _           ||
 |_|_  \/    (:Y::)   )  )--.           /    \            .--._\__   d ) .--.    _||__
(   __)       (^-^ .-(__/  .-'''''''-. /.:::. \ .-'''''''-.       UuuuU   -._)  [____ ]
(    _)  '-..- '--'      .'            '.    .'            '.   -.-[_]-.-) \_\   [___ ]
(___ )                  '                '--'                '  -.-[_]-.-)  \_\ [_____]   
                       '          ,-----,_ _,-----,          '
 |_|     ______________'_________/__.--.    .---.__\_________'________________              
         \                            __)  (__                               /
         /   R.E.M.E.M.B.E.R         /  ___   \           T.O. D.I.E         \
        /___________________________/  /   \   \______________________________\    
          \       \      \_/   \__     \   /     ___/   \_/         /       /
          /  /\   /              \  /   \-/   \  /                  \   /\  \
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                                   \/ \_|_|_/ \/
        

Introduction

The name Pearlnight derives from me, its webmistress, but you can call me Pearl. I'm an autistic queer lady and webcomic author since the winter of 2021. My primary work is the webcomic Dancing with the Dead, it's a 1970's period piece and my love-letter to the vampire genre. Besides this, I lurk in quiet holes in this web, play old computer games and prod at other niches with equally shy creatures. My art is derived from my love of darkness, my experiences with mental illness and my own repressed feelings. I invite you to interpret me through my pieces and make of me as you will.

Pearlnight: Basics

Pearlnight: Favourites

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.

To be alive has no answer, and it's solely up to the person living to define it with the mental framing devices they derive the most comfort from. For example, I see myself as deeply connected to the earth's atmosphere, particularly the primitive lifeforms that paradoxically resume in the form of my every breath. To live and die means to be in a state of constant intimacy with those primordial creatures, and the sensory inputs that remind me that I am not alone, when they lived and felt the way I do now, however basic. To die means the bond increases, my organic energies dissipating and joining them. That is an afterlife to me. It's taoist, but that is what to be "alive" is to me. This differs in my view of websites, though. They and their webmasters, here or not, have their own ideas of life. For some, it is a family by however they define it, others it is to display lofty achievements, but many of the websites I saw felt alive simply because they loved to live. This is not to sanitise the mental health issues likely suffered, but rather to celebrate that, even for the most suffering webmasters, they let me see their cats. Their bookshelves. Their bedrooms. Their huge monstrous towers that had to be activated by toe. They trusted me, their beloved peeping friend, to see into their world. It was curated even back then, but the seams still showed. The presentations felt organic, imperfect even amidst sparkling borders and strategic camera angles. Not unpolluted, so to say, for I am not that cynical, rather they felt unrestrained, gleeful about this magic machine that lets them exist so uniquely. They did it for the reasons they did, all of them fuelled by the love of being able to do it at all.

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.

I consider introspection a virtue, and moments like this are why. A year later, I worked through our gender, and Sanguine evolved with me. In their completed form, Sanguine is a mirror of myself, only exaggerated to comedic effect. My friends know me as affectionate and conscientious to a fault, while Sanguine is a nervous wreck. Thus, they serve less as a power fantasy and more as a performance of self-awareness.

This even shows in their very design. Blue was chosen for my pre-dawn motif and its typical link to human sadness. Their horns are not a proud crown of bone and keratin; instead, they point forlornly downward. Their eye markings furrow their brow into a constant look of gloom. Combined with their horn shape, they carry the air of a depressed court jester. Their ears, once sharper in earlier designs, are now lopped and soft to the touch. Their face is catlike, closer to a small cat than a lion; so the poor thing can't even roar. They don't have claws, but large, plushlike paws. Seldom is there a sharp edge on this beast, softened by its blobby contours and heart-shaped tail. In short, they're designed to look absolutely pitiful. Their name came from a line in our favourite childhood video game; the Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion. Amongst the game's more law-abiding guilds, the player can initiate into an assassins' guild. When they complete the guild's initiation quest, they're led to a dilapitated house in one of the game's major cities. Once inside the house, the player needs to go downstairs and speak to a magical door, which riddles "What is the colour of night?". To this, the player must respond "Sanguine, my brother". Sanguine in that context is likely a reference to blood, but in the context of naming this Sanguine, it comes with a double meaning. Sanguine's skin is a mix of the colours Pearl Night blue and Pearl Gentian. So alongside the prior allusion to blood, this Sanguine is also the colour of night. Although, the word Sanguine can also describe an absurd sort of optimism, which matches about as well as me and broad daylight.

Writing a century prior, Abbé Auber and Ludwig Gerlach suggested another idea. Where Benson describes visual shorthands for evil, Auber describes man's triumph over it. These demons, once wild and free to terrorise men, are domesticated servants of the church. For the French folklorist, this will conjure images of La Gargouille: the scourge of Rouen and its eventual war-trophy. The dragon's neck, once the passage of many hapless maidens, was too hardy to burn. Thus, it found itself mounted on the church walls as a warning to other creatures. Yet the inverse could be true. Instead of being bound to the church, the grotesques are being driven from it in a mass exorcism. However, this idea is ambiguous; it does not clarify whether they serve as a reminder of the Church's power or of its initial consecration. Gerlach and Auber also disagreed on the importance of this exorcism, as explained by the latter:

"Although I concur with the idea that gargoyles visualize the cleansing power of the church through exorcism, the cleansing force of the Church's sacraments and the force of prayer should also be added. The petrification, to my mind, is not significant, but was a mere side-effect of visualizing how a strong ecclesia, community of the faithful, could expel all evil."
- Auber, 1871

Benson nears this theory, but alludes to a long-standing folkloric motif. That grotesques, despite their monstrous appearance, are man-made sentinels. Like dried cats, immured shoes and witch-bottles, their presence is not a display of dominion. They're secretive, but in their numbers they paralyse lurking threats with hundreds of eyes.

"Perhaps grotesque gargoyles were intended as guardians of the church, magic signs to ward off the devil. Amalgamations of animals have long been used by artists and authors to create frightening images. This interpretation would justify making a gargoyle as ugly as possible, as a sort of sacred scarecrow to frighten the devil away, preserving those inside in safety, Or perhaps gargoyles were themselves symbols of the evil forces such as temptations and sins— lurking outside the sanctuary of the church; upon passing the gargoyles, the visitor's safety was assured within the church."
- Benson, 1997, p.24

2019 - 2021

Ignoring honest business pursuits, I found most websites to be mires of thought-terminating clichés. Though I lurked on-and-off on Tumblr for years, I did not integrate into it or understand the user culture. Microblogging never came naturally to me. Instead I attempted various art galleries. After I left deviantART, I hopped on-and-off between furry sites, then in the earlier nights of the lair, I had a brief stint on Buzzly that ended in a site-wide riot and one on SheezyArt that I vacated on less poor terms though it got hit hard by age-verification laws. I spent one year on Bluesky, which I left due to a growing disdain for the atmosphere and a feeling that I couldn't really get much conversation out of people there. People there seemed more interested in talking about politics than socialising. Years of lurking in every conceivable corner of the internet built up a kind of immunity to social media and its inbuilt conditioning techniques. I didn't get addicted, I got the opposite: bored and frustrated.

Social media, even when I existed as conservatively as possible, discouraged me from setting limits. When something political and/or upsetting happened, it spread across the platform and I found myself pressured, with much intensity, to have an opinion on it. I did not grant these, though the posts of users, angry at the refusal of others, made this process uncomfortable. Even when I tried to get away from this material, the people around me tended to repost it or if not that, my homepage would do so itself. I could not relax in that environment, and my other attempts to disengage carried similar amounts of rhetorical weight. Tools of placing space between myself and others became interpreted as a new means of aggression. A blocklist could keep the experience focused on what a user wanted to see, but they could also be used to target people for heckling, especially if the creator felt impassioned to be as thorough as possible. A sizeable portion of blocklists I saw used insulting, condescending language, instead of stating who they were for. Being pelted with parting shots from disagreeable people was not pleasant. It did not incline me towards their views, nor did it make me feel worse about my own. It simply achieved nothing productive.

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. 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.

During this time, I was developing my first ever text-adventure game. During its production, I wanted to add more sensory details to my writing, but was not sure where to start. I never considered myself much of a prose writer, and I have a tendency to type the way I talk, as compounding sentences that wind in eight different directions at once. This does not translate well into interactive fiction, where shorter sentences with more precise wording tend to garner better reviews. Overwrought, or "purple" prose, is the Back thing one wants to see while playing a video game of any kind. The atmosphere, by the nature of this oxymoron, thickens from the mental image you have with these curated words. By not holding a player's hand, you are letting them decide how to feel, while still absorbing the emotion you desire. So, out of curiosity, I went to ask a robot.

I do not care to justify my explorations with robots, for I saw them in a dream.

The LLM, or Large Language Model, is a divisive tool, but to me it is just that. It is a tool that can be used for good or ill, just like any other corporate invention. While I am currently turning my attention to open-source LLMs, I got my start with ChatGPT. I went in curious of its capabilities but derisive and embarrassed that I was even doing this at all. My wandering mind, however, had to be sated. Growing up with Cleverbot was one of my less satisfying internet memories, seemingly an act of wizardry until you put a few queries in and witnessed your first virtual lobotomy. Asking a contemporary LLM, as much as I risked the metaphorical red cross being slathered on the index page of my site, was a way of checking in on the robots. I asked it my first question: what would it expect to see in a séance room^*. The robot responded with a basic sensory description, and I found myself wondering about the materials of this room. Perhaps it was because I lived in a sensory world of my own, or I was a pedant, but I probed it about the exact materials. I did not specify much, only that the setting was a haunted hunting lodge. I knew a lot of my vision, but there were gaps in my knowledge that I was not shy to admit. Of course, this was where I was further surprised, not only by the pattern-recognition doing its work, but by another thing. These robots told you upfront that they were not only liable to be wrong, but screamingly wrong. This was past the point of Google's pet robot suggesting you eat at least one small rock a day, but as I came to see, it was a subversion of the narrative I had seen online. This was not to say I respected the corporations behind AIs, but rather I saw the AI as a currently useful method of sifting through the SEO schlop graveyards we called the surface net. The search engines I tried were too broken to satisfy my needs, and while I did have plenty of books on hand, there were things so specific even books could not quite graze them. Either that, or I did not know where to look each time. A librarian was a curator, not a search engine. A search engine was a broken pile of junk that was tolerable twenty years ago, not artificial intelligence. An AI, when it hit right, could give you exactly what you needed.

In the immediate weeks of utter relief, Alex and I planned a redesign for their website. They were amused by the quirks of my AI, but once they saw how quickly it performed tasks, they allowed me to use it for their website. I needed somewhere to warm up and try new techniques before trying my own site again. The heatwaves were oppressive; I was staring down the past half of the decade, and most of all, I was preparing to fly overseas to meet Alex in Chicago, something I had never done before. I was experiencing an emotional upheaval, not a series of crushing blows but a profound reorientation of my sense of self. So much of my identity, while no longer as tenuous, was tied deeply to the dynamic and the ensuing pain it caused. I was not ready to address the lair; I needed to feel more at home inside myself, to let myself breathe, and when I felt a surge of it, expend the energy elsewhere while I waited for the answers from inside myself. With the AI, I examined its outputs, asked it questions, and learned a lot of CSS that summer. I even learned how to make a flex gallery without having to use a dozen separate thumbnail images, a technique I am still proud of. Three months later, on the verge of releasing Foxtrot for Halloween night, 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 try more ideas and fail them faster, which in doing so freed up space for ideas closer to me. One of the biggest things that stopped the writer's block, besides processing the relationship I so quickly left, was trying other projects besides my comic. I held myself to standards of creation, and did not consider myself a curator. I knew it was a legitimate form of creation, but I did not know what to curate. It was then in December, once the style had been relatively finalised, that I asked myself questions about what I wished existed. I had a dozen copyright-infringing books saved on the Internet Archive, but none of them were sorted. So then I looked about for vampire-themed bibliographies, saw sparse and thinly populated results, and decided I would make my own. After all, I finally felt good enough.

Now this site is no longer a glob of clay. It is a lot of metaphorical things, but now I 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.

• Why do you consider your site a library?
• Why is the site so text-heavy?

Introduction

Here's all the questions I haven't actually been asked, but feel like answering regardless. You get answers, I get an excuse to kick loose and relax a bit, and we both learn something out of this whole thing.

If you're intending to contact me, I highly recommend you read this in its entirety. That way you'll get an idea of what to expect when we talk.

Do you have a DNI?

Sure, sending e-mails to strange people online can be intimidating and I want to save us both the trouble.

1. Are you a minor?
2. Are you an adult that interacts with minors?
3. Do you view animals, children or the dead as viable sexual partners?
4. Do you create, defend or platform content involving the above?
5. Do you call yourself "kink-friendly" without saying what those kinks actually are? (This is a common dogwhistle used by the latter two groups for the above catergories).
6. Do you otherwise create, defend or platform sexual content of a nonconsensual nature?
7. Do you call yourself any type of "Pro-Ship"? I have no horse in the fandom race but plenty of bad experiences with this crowd and they tend to overlap with the groups above.
8. Do you post disparaging things about other peoples' DNIs or create lists of "stupid DNI criteria"? If so, then I fail to see why judging peoples' boundaries, no matter how "unusual", makes you think I'd want to talk to you.
9. Do you engage with current events on a regular basis? Are you going to call me a fascist or a normie if I don't?
10. Do you engage with AI news on a regular basis? Are you going to call me a sloperator or a luddite if I engage with it differently from you?
11. Do you engage with any kind of flamewarring on a regular basis? Can I envision you on your death bed wishing you'd argued with more strangers online?

Also, if you happen to be any of these, don't hide it. My internet home is my internet castle, and I've got the boiling oil right here.

I do not hold my drafts in high regard, for in the words of Hemmingway, "The first draft of anything is shit." I also find using a robot is more efficient than stopping Lutz after a hard day's work and making them answer heaps of writing questions when they'd rather be getting stoned, drawing comix, and drowning people in Rollercoaster Tycoon while we caterwaul on a phone call together. They help me in many wonderful ways, but to me, writing is a process that is often best left to a single person, even if a robot acts as their teleprompter. As long as something gets to exist and I am in control, I am okay.

Where I do draw a hard line with AI, besides not lifting any text from it verbatim, is with my visual art. There is also no place for AI to fit into my process, and, in contrast to my issues writing, I am far more confident when I draw. For reference posing I use human sources, and when I get stuck on any compositions, I ask Lutz to help, as unlike writing, drawing is much easier to multitask with, and we both tend to be drawing at the same time when we have our calls. Without feeling a particular urgency to explain my personal philosophies on AI art, I do not feel threatened by it or worry about the concept of it replacing me. I am confident in the character of my work, and its ability to weather the deluge that roars past it.

How did you get into ASCII?

So, how I got into ASCII was because back in 2024 -- in particular, 2023/2024 -- I was having very, very bad thought spirals about somehow losing my ability to draw. It wasn't from a sense of me becoming worse. It was more like I was having thoughts about somehow being rendered physically unable to. And they were absolutely debilitating. I used to have all manner of psychosomatic pains in my upper arms. It was bad. It was very classic stress phenomena and very unpleasant. And I decided, in an attempt to sort of soothe myself when these thoughts were at their peak, I decided to try ASCII art as another means of expressing myself. I wasn't sure if I was going to be into it, but I think it's like a part of my philosophy that I like things that are tiny and primitive and seemingly unassuming, but can communicate a lot about oneself. So it's definitely one of those things that's very unexpected, but I think it's become quite emblematic of me. I also want to keep my website visually distinctive, and I dislike drawing assets for my site. It just never went with my aesthetic, and given that my site is so tech-heavy, I only find it appropriate and somewhat poetic that I am doing this text-heavy website with, well, text art.

I prefer to go with sequential art because I think it best demonstrates not just how I see my setting and how I wanted to communicate it, but it's a lot more engaging for me. I find it very satisfying when a page is put together. Also, I will admit, being inspired by underground comics was massively helpful for getting me into webcomics. It really helped to communicate that you don't need to draw them in a certain way, you just need to be able to make the compromises you need to. There was also a YouTube video by an artist named Lars Martinson, in his video "4 Time-Saving Tips (from a guy who spent 13 YEARS drawing a comic)". He talks about his experiences with webcomics and how he struggles to get his graphic novel out, and he goes over quite a lot of these things himself as well. So I definitely recommend his video if you are new to comics or if you just want some pointers.

What are your political beliefs?

I'm a left-leaning libertarian. I hate big money, being told how to feel and spoogy ghosts. My best friend is a similarly inclined transmasculine Guy Fieri androgyne who will talk your ear off about illegal substances and tornado sirens. So in short, my beliefs are probably not going to get in the way if you want to contact me!

•  Sanguine is too nervous to speak but can compromise by scrawling on chalk boards. The reason for this muteness is still not really very well known. When I think of Sanguine, I just cannot imagine them with a voice whatsoever. Which, you know, I find ironic given how much of my writing actually originates from dictation. But in general, there's just not really a voice that I could see suiting them. Everyone I've met has said they actually feel the same way, they cannot imagine this character even remotely trying to speak. At most, it's like you touch their nose and it makes a clown honk or something.
• Sanguine has very cat-like mannerisms. They'll curl up into a ball, perch, tuck their arms underneath their body and look like a loaf. Personally, I call it an igloo. Cats look more like igloos to me when they do that.

What version of Petz do you play?

I have Petz 4, though I have also played and grown up with Petz 5 as well. My favourite cat breed is the Honey Bear, and my favourite dog breed is the Labrador. While I have no idea how to hex, I do love downloading modded clothes and toys for my babies.

Who is Max Stirner?

Johann Kaspar Schmidt, known by his pen name Max Stirner, was a German philosopher. He specialised in Hegelian philosophy, and would go on to form critical foundations for Individualist anarchism, most notably Egoist anarchism. As its name implies, Egoism is about the self. You do things because you want to, not because you are commanded by notions of morality, patriotism, or religiosity. It was actually very atheist in that way, in that you were not commanded by religion; that you could acknowledge it, but not find yourself doing things solely because of it. And you can love, but not because you feel pressed to, but on your own terms.

Why do you not engage in fandoms?

Fandoms were more of a thing when I was a kid or a teenager, but over time, as my identity solidified, I didn't really feel the need to latch onto one anymore. But also, as a result of that, I find that fandoms tend to be full of people who are very much struggling with themselves. While I do sympathise with that (as fiction can provide comfort from a traumatic, unpredictable reality) I recognise the hazards of latching your entire self onto some kind of media. I see an old self in it, and it makes me sad.

Another thing I'd add is that fandoms don't have a very easy time with boundaries, or maintaining them. For example, people often get forced into close proximity, where from there they're pressured to "pick sides" on particular "fandom discourse" topics. A more serious issue is when minors are involved, as many fandoms have large populations of minors and adults sharing its spaces. Naturally this creates a huge child safety problem that, with the continuous growth of the internet, becomes increasingly dangerous and irresponsible for these spaces to ignore. This culture of feigned ignorance shelters abusers, and enables them to resume with their behaviour in the name of not rocking the boat. Accepting everyone sounds good until you accept literally everyone: paraphiles (casual and "activists" alike), other sexual abusers, and the incompetent moderators who let them pass by.

Furry has a massive problem with this in particular, and it was actually the reason I quit. The response to the 2018 Zoosadist leaks and the retroactive sanitising of furries as hyper-aware crusaders of animal welfare, even when the truth was more to do with Zoophile infighting than furry valour, is especially galling. Animals were tortured to death and all these fucking people have to say is that their image is being sullied. That is all I have to say on that.