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.

Dark confined spaces

03 Nov, 2025

General Ambient

Welcome to Fright Night. For real. Okay, so my paws are quite full, but nonetheless I will go over how it's been.

General ambience has been appropriately very spooey, and I was going to tell you all some Halloween-themed stories from our childhood, but with all the commotion of the games, the website, and the comic itself, which is continuing to receive some very sudden improvised pages that I hope will enhance the pacing and whatnot, I’ve had a lot going on. However, I should be able to refine them by this week. You could say it’s like post-Halloween reminiscing, kind of like a little hangover after the Halloween party. It reminds me of a dream I had a few months back all about that kind of thing.

Dancing with the Dead/ Projects

Project-wise, we've made some major breakthroughs. First of all, say hello to our two new games! They’re finally here to wander about, stare at and possibly die in!

Onto the next thing. My website, Pearlnight’s Lair.

Now, as you know, my website is not very big or flashy. That is by design. I prefer it to be compact and economic, something you can pick up and put anywhere else. I don't really like to take up space. I prefer to do my own little thing, something that has only intensified with time. But I have always had the issue, regardless of how squished my page has been, of what fucking colour is it going to be. Now I'm not colourblind, though I do have issues with interpreting colour. When we were much younger, we drew in neons typical for a kid that realised computers can shit out whatever retina-diseases you want them to. Then going into adulthood, we took up monochrome and we’ve never been the same since. I think more in terms of values than colours, and we've realised just how much of a monochrome artist we actually are. With colour, it’s either zero or a hundred. Naturally, this is very problematic for web design. By default, websites are supposed to be read, not endured. CSS is supposed to present your text with a little hat n’ cane, not create unholy demons from the pit. As a result this was a humungous pain in my ARSE and only now do I have a solution. Use someone else’s colour scheme like a total baby genius. I am now basing my website's colour scheme off the Dracula colour scheme. So not only do I code with it, it’s now my whole site. Plus I just found out that it has its very own light theme called Alucard. I will admit there has been some mild imposter syndrome on my end, but sometimes it's not really about what you do: it's more just about some random little thing. I’ve been here before. It's like when I’m drawing and I’ve hit a snag. I’m getting hung up on a pose, a composition, some kind of perspective, something silly like this. Then I’ll get all overstimulated because Autism and then I’ll just take a step back to breathe and remember I’ve been here before. Get up, eat some food, talk to Alex if they’re around, get stoner wisdom from them if the edible’s kicked in, and all the while, keep remembering that. Then I'll come back and it'll be fine again. Sure, I’ll be kicking myself for getting so worked up but I’ll come out fine. I’ve been here before.

Net Archeology

I’m revving myself up to go on another big search, but of a different variety. Alex and I have been talking about the endless pitfalls of trying to find things online, and the problem goes as follows. A lot of websites disincentivize people from finding the sources for all those images they like to share online and slam into their likes to forget about three days later. After I went through Alex’s using a free-to-use site viewer, I realised that there’s a lot of stuff that’s very nice, but we don’t really know how to source it very well. I’ll admit, it’s become rather trendy for people my age to seek out old material and try to identify where it came from.

I’ll take this over what’s happening right now, more when it’s blatant pinching from seldom-funded passion projects! It’s driving me well, batty and I want to do something about it.

Now, because I myself can forget, there’s still a lot of information that doesn’t get to make it online. Sadly, we’re not in the timeline where we can clone Mike Duncan en-masse and hear the sweet serenade of his presentation for whatever demented topics we desire. With some meagre scraps of coin, I recently purchased a copy of Black Dog Folklore by Mark Norman. To my delight, the information inside had never been seen by a Youtube video essayist. It was beautiful, it was just like all my other books but it was beautiful. Now yes. I could have tried for this stuff. Really, really tried. I’ve gone down holes before and by lord do I have a thing for dark, confined spaces, but well…Let’s be realistic here. For every winding rabbit hole there’s SEO-ridden wastelands and unarchived craters whose typosquatting ghouls crane their necks from the dust to tell you that your computer has virus. This is hyper-local english folklore, and to study to this calibre I’d need to have absolutely no life. I’d have to shower even less than my exes do. So I’ll admit that there are limitations to what I do, but that’s okay. I thrive under this kind of thing. It makes me more creative.

Featuring Speech-to-text!

26 Oct, 2025

General Ambient

General ambience continues to be nice as we slowly but surely depart the spooy season. While I’m sad about it, I also remember that for me, Halloween is all year round. So, this aside, I haven't really added too much to my usual roster. I've been taking things one day at a time and enjoying a quiet and leisurely autumn. A lot has happened this year, and this season has done wonders to help me decompress from it.

For Halloween itself, I'm going to smother myself in ambient. Like I’ve been feeling good all month but now I’m gonna go all in. I’ll be watching Ghostbusters and a handful of the direct-to-video video Scooby films. I will watch the latter half of the “Red Shirt Shaggy trilogy”. Then I will watch the very famous four of Scooby-Doo Zombie Island, Scooby-Doo and the Witch's Ghost, Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders, and finally Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase. Out of the Red Shirt trilogy, my favourite is Scooby-Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf. I know Ghoul School is the one that gets the most accolades, whether it be from genuine Scooby fans or internet perverts, but I find Reluctant Werewolf a lot more well-rounded. I find Ghoul School is a bit leisurely for me, especially when I can go watch two Quasimodos eat shit for an hour and a half. Then my favourite out of the famous four…Well, this is quite a hard one because they're all really good. If I had to nix one, I’d do Alien Invaders. It has these sick-ass visuals with the Shaggy love song, yet besides this it doesn’t really grab me. I'm just not very into aliens. Then we got Cyber Chase, Witch's Ghost and Zombie Island. Zombie Island is surprisingly biting for what it is, Witch's Ghost is a lot more straightforward and predictable…then comes Cyber Chase and it’s absolutely off the rails. If you, Count Dracula, had to dunk me, one of the hunch bunch, into boiling oil…Cyber Chase. It’s Cyber Chase.

If I had to wager a guess of why Cyber Chase, I'm gonna take a guess and say that it's because of the computer element. We loved computers from a very young age, so getting to see Scooby-Doo go inside one and fight a virus was thrilling. As if that wasn’t enough, he gets to meet his older counterparts And all the monsters they met! Naturally already being a Scooby fan, this was enough to send Little Me into an autistic aneurysm. It's got good-spirited meta-commentary, it's got a creepy…thingy, it's got the soundtrack, it's got the montage to the soundtrack…How did they go this hard on the soundtrack?!

Alongside our films, we’ll start with a mix of horror-themed surf rock, in particular Bradley Thomas Turner’s “Haunted House Party”. We got the Space Funeral soundtrack, which likes to alternate between dark ambient and some of the warmest, snuggliest emotions I’ve heard in a song. Then for good measure, and because we were the exact right age to be playing this game, we're going to play the Halloween party tracks from Club Penguin. In case this still means something, yes, we did meet Gary in the 2010 halloween party. Yes, we did start yelling and cheering at our laptop while it lagged from the hordes of other desperate schoolchildren. We did flex his commemorative background for months on end to the disgusting plebeian non-members. We…Oh wow. We had a whole thing with that game.

Other than this, I will be releasing my long-awaited projects, celebrating them thoroughly with Alex and finally, doing this all in the company of the loving, watchful eyes of half a dozen Halloween-themed Beanie Babies.

Dancing with the Dead

Now, on to the projects. Time to tell you. Our first project, as set for release, is called Foxtrot: Gone Away. It is the first of our two projects and goes as follows.. You arestuck in the clutches of a certain Belfort, awaiting your doom in the dungeon beneath his hunting lodge. You only have one in-game hour before he comes home, spices in tow to push aside and not use on you. The game is an adventureon, text-adventure, get-lamp-style game. There's no pictures, no graphics, no noise, just good old-fashioned text and the reflection of your face trying to figure out how to “FUCK” something. Naturally, as my very first text adventure, I will warn you in advance that there are inevitably going to be a few little bumps, a few things that I might have to iron out, and all that. But it is, from what we've known and messed with, a very lightweight game. I cannot estimate how long it will take to beat, but I can promise that I have been rigorously testing this thing to be as interesting as possible for a first-time text-adventure developer release. I'm very excited but very nervous to get into the world of these games. Should , I am confident to say that a sequel will follow for next Halloween.

Now, our second project is called Hiraeth. It was made in Bitsy and consists of you, a freshly dead Will-o'-the-Wisp, trying to find a home in this strange post-mortem world. Hiareth is a very quiet, contemplative game, in total polar opposite to the ultra-violent Foxtrot, and if you are looking for a game with brooding forest atmospheres, it might just scratch your itch. However, I can say, with just as much confidence with Foxtrot, that this game was a blast to work with, and I am likely to try more in the future.

Old Web Findings

Not necessarily an old web finding, but more of a somewhat strange, obscure one. I have found a splendid website about vintage Halloween ephemera. Alex and I are huge fans of this kind of thing as is, but it is especially good given how many people like to go around reposting this stuff without providing credits. I would also like to go on another big website binge of anything to do with vampires, although the usual roadblock I hit is either:

A, Vampire the Masquerade. You could say that I have no choice to be isolated, struggling left alone and apart, pushed aside and segregated-

Alright, I mustn’t be so churlish. VTM Bloodlines is an extremely funny game, but my interest wanes once the rest of White Wolf’s world-building comes into the room. To be somewhat of a shit here, if you’d like a quick way to put your friend Pearlnight to beddy-byes, please by all means, read her at-length wiki pages on Werewolf: The Apocalypse. It’ll work every time.

B, Buffy. I am yet to watch the series myself, so I cannot say much besides “Damn it can I please stop procrastinating and get to this one already?”.

C, anything to do with “real life vampirism”, which this genuinely take you aback, but I do not partake in. How I identify with vampirism is frankly, a giant tangle of twine. I’ll elaborate on that in another post. This and I’m hardly in that demographic. I’m the kind of person that considers OneShortEye videos to be tuxedo-worthy events. I’m a total square.

That’s all for now. Next time I’ll tell you some halloween stories from our childhood. They’re silly little things that I don’t see any harm in divulging.

Someone you know is a ghostbusters fan in 2025

19 Oct, 2025

General Ambient

I am neck-deep in the sauce. Ghost pyjamas on, glow-in-the-dark spider sheets on, cheaply-made Hammer Dracula mug I bought this time last year breaking right on cue…Oh yes, it’s all going as planned. Also, as an aggressive plush-collector, I finally got to snag one of my dreamies. It’s Build-A-Bear’s Pumpkin Kitty, and I’m so excited to unbox it! Pumpkin Kitty is a design that came out in 2010, which according to our calculations was 2 years ago. It was then discontinued for the rest of the decade and then re-released to what I can only describe as mass-hysteria. And so, the Pumpkin Kitties thus fell into the hands of the resale-scalping dick-cheeses that went on to re-enact the economic prosperity of Weimar Germany with them. But I got lucky this year! In the middle of October of all times! I’m still in disbelief typing this, I mean, really! So yes, he will be here to enspook my dungeon very soon! I’ve also been having the rest of my plushes out; usually I store them in the summer so the moths don’t get to them. Pumpkin Kitty will have to be the last plush I buy for a while, hopefully not for too long but a good while at least. I own a lot as is and I mainly try to buy things that I know I can put away in a box.

Dancing with the Dead

Episode 16 has been started, with only some minor pauses for composition improvement. The improvised father-son reunion is as flamboyant as you’d expect it to be. As for the halloween treats, they’ll be ready for release when I sweep away the last bugs. They’re right on schedule.

Old Web Findings

After being educated of the Javascript Link (a royal pain in the ass to decode and actually, well, pull links from), I took to more rewarding things. There’s a lot of seasonal specials I’ve never seen, and I decided to take a break from sleuthing by…sleuthing for them instead. After some Charlie Brown, Garfield and several careful evasions of Mad Monster Party Rewatches…I found my new favourite show. Next to Scooby-Doo, anyways.

The Real Ghostbusters

The Real Ghostbusters is a show about kissing the homies goodnight.

No, The Real Ghostbusters is the show that fan-fiction writers wish they could make but can’t, because everyone’s too busy getting pregnant.

No- Well, yes actually, but…

But also, The Real Ghostbusters is the show for me. I was a casual fan of Ghostbusters before but now I’m bustin’ 24/7, and Egon doesn’t even have to be on screen for it to happen. I’ve become utterly, autistically fixated on the whole thing, even the first film’s getting my love all over again. Learning that Dan Ackryod is autistic himself was like putting out fire with gasoline; I didn’t even know how badly I needed to hear stuff like this until now. It shows how much of my condition I’ve repressed, even with my pre-existing openness.

So yes, Ghostbusters! Egon’s my favourite, closely tailed by Ray, Winston and Janine. Peter would probably pick on me for being the hermit I am, so he can go last. I don’t hate him as a character, especially when I have to remember when Slimer exists.

Egon Spengler Quarantine Zone

Egon has TRASHED my ability to be normal about this show. I literally cannot talk about this thing without fucking gooning over him. It’s so fucking bad in here, like, send the Ghostbuster-busters. I’m dwowning!!! Now going in, I already knew I was going to start sliming all over this man. He’s visibly my type and his vocal performance has me gawping like he’s personally crawled into my bedsheets. But what I didn’t expect was his characterisation. Somehow, through some dark wizard sorcery, the writers have made the most autistic thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I won’t stand for anything else, this man is autistic! I saw him stimming in the ECTO-1!

I am nowhere near the first to pick up on the accidental autism-representation going on here. As a result, I’ll inevitably hit the same beats as I go over this, but I hope to bring some new things to the table. If I had to summarise in a single sentence why I feel this way, I’ll put it like this. Egon is very dry and aloof, which is typical of his archetype, but then he has this discerning quality. It’s the hyperawareness of one’s sensory world, and the hopeless overcorrections that come with trying to navigate it. It’s a studiousness only seen in autistics. To other characters, this makes him appear awkward and unapproachable. Ray openly states that Egon is “hard to talk to”. Egon takes things literally and at times can appear dour, especially to Peter and Winston. Egon can find things funny himself, but when he quips, he prefers double-entendres over conventional jokes. If anything, conventional jokes seem to feel wrong for him to even attempt. While he and the others slide down a snowy hill, all he can manage is a stifled “Uh-Cowabunga!”. There lies the asynchronicity, the sensation that he is uniquely not designed to do this. By default, a comfortable Egon speaks in effortless layers of tech-jargon. Like his movie counterpart, he continues to collect molds, spores and fungi. He speaks directly, regardless of how other characters react to it. He speaks with a heavy monotone, even for a character of his profession. He’s obsessed with being logical, and he strives for order no matter how otherworldly the situations get.

There’s a running theme here with Spengler, and it’s disconnection. While he feels a deep love and camaraderie for them, he feels an emotional disconnect from other Ghostbusters. Egon has to reiterate his jargon, his theories on a situation, and even his own feelings. Egon is the only Ghostbuster to see Slimer as a test subject, whereas Ray dotes on him and the other two despise him. Egon is at times irritable, and becomes guilty when this spills out onto the others. He knows his emotions, while they make sense for his species, are ultimately illogical. There’s a tragedy to Egon; he’s not just an awkward genius, but he’s actively covering for his sense of disconnection. He seems mostly content with his differences with others, but what really seems to drive him is his disconnection from logic itself. He treasures logic, and seems to use it as a means to self-soothe, much like the routine-seeking behaviours of autistics like myself. His fixation on The Boogeyman proves this; it scared him so badly it’s what got him into ghosts in the first place. By learning about ghosts, Egon created an outlet for his emotions. By being a Ghostbuster, Egon can (semi-safely) make sense of his experiences and demystify them, thus giving him closure. To the extent an 80s’ cartoon can explore, the Boogeyman represents the inverse of Egon. Spengler is a typical adult human specimen that adheres to earthly physics. The Boogeyman terrorises the young of another species from the safety of a psychedelic pocket-realm, with next-to-no explanation for any of this. Emotionally speaking, when Egon contains a ghost, he contains the Boogeyman by proxy. Then after containing the Boogeyman itself, Egon can continue this with even more ghosts.

I don’t care about the politics of cartoons kissing but it slaughters me when he and Janine share a room. I don’t even care if they weren’t supposed to be a real thing, I love these two together. He’s the stiff straight-man nerd, but he also gets cuddles from Janine, dances with his friends and gets to be himself with minimal questions. I find that deeply comforting, and an incredible subversion of the nerd archetype. All of this, and he’s completely and utterly my type.

Design, story and effect

I also really love the ghosts. They look like the creatures of a Boschian dreamscape if it mingled with the terrors of Japanese hell. No two ghosts look alike, and for a show of this era, there’s a genuine sense of artistry here. They’re strongly complicated by the music and set designs, really selling the emptiness of these post-human entities. The plots, like Scooby-Doo, follow the same formula. As a result, there’s lots of room for characterisation, fun between-the-action domestic bits and running gags. It’s just predictable enough but still capable of delivering surprises when it wants to. I can do a serialised show, but this is where I feel most at home. This is what I think most people need when the rest of life can be so uncertain.

Rules for the Tomb

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.

And the fog clears

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.

General Ambient

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.

Dancing with the Dead

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.

Web Spelunking

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!

In Closing

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.