The Confession Chamber

My page for these shameful things called "thoughts" and "feelings". It updates roughly every sunday or so, around the time I add new posts to my BearBlog.

12 Oct, 2025

I only post on a Sunday.

I will always post from evening to night, no later than sunrise.

I don’t post in summer.

This is when I get blasted by sixteen hours of raw daylight with no reprieve and spend the remaining eight literally being unconscious. The posting break will be from June 1st to October 1st, but I’ll be working on other projects in the meantime.

I don’t write essays.

I’m not an essayist despite my attempts, so this is mainly for personal updates and random things I get up to online. However, I may go into essay-like discussion during my updates, much like my first post. I liked that bit so much I now want to represent it in other ways.

I don’t attempt to review things.

See, here’s the issue. Every time I try to review something, no matter how gentle I am, I end up feeling like an insecure braggart. The company I’ve kept over the years has been adamant that this isn’t true, yet the feeling persists. It could be that I’m used to the deluge of armchair critics so frequent online that I’d rather not remind myself of them, no matter how I word my arguments.

I prefer leaning into my strengths.

Measuring the qualities of a piece is my style, discussing atmosphere is my style, playing critic is not. Every time I try, my brain conjures the image of a four-year old me deftly inhaling the fluids of a plastic bubble pipe.

05 Oct, 2025

It’s been three years since I’ve last blogged, so pardon any formalities, please. My best friend’s concerned that I’ve become a recluse (even for niche internet hobbyist standards) and I’m here to dust out this Casket o’ Random Thoughts to counteract that. It’ll take a moment for me to get acclimated, but there’s worse times to start.

Okay, first of all... it’s Spooy Month, so we’re swamped in that nice, nostalgic ambience. I’m posting from my Scooby-Doo bedsheets with a bellyful of all-anglo roast dinner. I’ve also been chipping at servings of Count Chocula, Goldfish Crackers and these little roast jerky thingies that look like really long cigars. I’ve been thanking Lutz profusely for the privilege of getting to disrespect my arteries in such a unique way. Speaking of Lutz, I’m settling back down after a trip we took to Chicago together. It was our first time meeting and it was a total scream, but now we’re calming back down and planning a year’s worth of packages before I can book my next round-trip.

As for projects I have my webcomic Dancing with the Dead, which I host on Neocities via the Rarebit client. It also has its own world-building pages, which are set to come out this Halloween night. As teased on the back cover of my latest release, I have another thing planned. I’m doing one last round of polishing and assuming there’s no curses that come with amateur game development, it should happen with all the other treats.

When I’m not doing my day-job or any projects, I wind down by going through old websites on Archive.org. I’ll grab a link off a directory, punch it in the Wayback Machine and sift through dozens of sites at a time until I find some keepers. To me, this is incredibly therapeutic. These sites feel so enthusiastic in their writings, like, there’s a such zest for life it becomes downright infectious. Every little thing on these sites carries so much weight to it. Yes because the connection speeds were nonexistent, and yes because people had to warn for the horrors of a 250KB image file, but it’s a love from a different time. The slow dance, the letters and postcards kind of love, the embrace of a transatlantic friend. How it felt to hold you, Lutz, Alex, how it shined strong and true. It’s a kind of tactile love; sitting in front of a belaboured machine as it strains to wake itself and meet you eye-to-eye. In touch, in raw reality around you, compared to the mass fever-dream of Instant Net. Using a computer back then was an event, it was an altar of progress, a portal to cyberheavens and cyberhells. Am I simply rapt by madness, or was a young girl taken by the sheer beauty of a once-in-a-millennium event? Were we the first land-fish to see the stars? Whatever we saw, my God, I know that sensation can be claimed again.

So I gather my links, and I give a lot of them to Lutz. We sift through lots of dead ones before we get a winner, but we’ve seen enough to know they’re still out there. Given the season, I know exactly what kind of sites I want to look for right now. Right now I have the “Caverns of Blood” pulled up and I’m gonna go through a whole load of Halloween links! Hopefully we’ll find a keeper!

Other than this, that’s all for now. This first entry has been quite nerve-wracking to write and I can only get so much out at a time. I’m really, really not used to doing this and after hammering away at my projects for so long, I’ve sort of convinced myself that I don’t need to write like this. For some reason, everyone else can, but not me. It’s all very strange because I take up space by existing as is, and I fail to see how (to my own brain) I can shrink myself any further. Maybe I’ll be right and retreat to my lonesomeness, like with all the other places I’ve appeared in. Or perhaps I can make this work, if I can be patient with myself. After all, we’ve been here before.