I got my first personal computer when I was… maybe nine? Which is a wild age to have a personal computer and no adult supervision at. But it’s fine. (It was a maybe safer time for a kid to be on the internet than it is now, at least.)

I was into lots of the same things my classmates were into like Club Penguin and the MyScene games, but also loved just… exploring. Some of the sites I spent ages on were sites like dressupgames.com, that seem to have been built for no specific reason besides community and connection and fun. I loved how creative everything was - one of my favorite sites was the site for a webseries I loved called Making Fiends. The website still looks the same today. (It inspired my front page design!)

My first real internet community was the fanime community on YouTube. Lots of young artists like me were trying to make their own anime web series or just cute animation memes. I don't think anyone was actually successful in doing so, but the community attempt was there and it was just fun to support each other. There was even a social media site for it that I was on way back in 2010. Eventually we all totally moved to deviantArt, and continued where we left off there.

If I'm being honest, that time (pre-high school) was probably the last time I was ever that social online before the pandemic? lol. I made a lot of online friends then that I was talking to nearly every day! The internet at that time was a good place for a shy kid like me to get a social outlet, and I'm grateful.

At some point a lot of people moved to Tumblr. At my most active, I was part of the Once-ler fandom (please clap). I was starting to get busy with school so I couldn't contribute as much, but this was the last fandom I was socially active in pre-pandemic. It has a bit of a cursed rep now, but I unironically look back at that time with fondness lmfao.

In high school I also started using Twitter a bit more (mostly to talk to IRLs). My friends and I had private accounts, which we’ve sustained for 10+ years now as a makeshift groupchat. Twitter has never been perfect, but it’s served the purpose I wanted it to serve in terms of keeping in touch with my friends over the years, and I love that I can look through it to see how I’ve grown too.

(I usually talk about the same things though.)

note the timestamps.

Eventually Twitter became the new Tumblr after the mass exodus (although I stayed on Tumblr actually lmao). Moving to Twitter wasn’t hard, but it was the combination of online friends and IRL people that was confusing as hell to navigate… to this day, I’ve still not gotten the hang of figuring out what online presences I want to share with who. At the time it was fine though, since I was busy adjusting to college life and was still not participating a bunch, so I didn't have to worry.

In general it was hard to "participate" (contribute to fan activity vs just consuming it) in online communities during high school and college, but I’d throw in a drawing every now and then about whatever fandom I was into at the time. I was always online anyway, enjoying the access I had to whatever was going on and making a few friends.

Much like everyone else, I threw myself into Animal Crossing during the pandemic, and eventually decided to repurpose an old dead Twitter account as an ACNH account, hoping to find people to trade with. Eventually I found myself part of a huge community, making lots of mutuals and some friends. Maybe a year in, I even made the jump to Fire Emblem: Three Houses with ease, making even more friends and joining fan projects like zines.

It was fun for a long time, and made me recall the sort of enjoyment I got back when I was in the fanime community - I had friends who liked similar things, we enjoyed each other's art/writing/ideas, and it was nice sharing them with the larger fandom.

But there were other things too: I didn't know how to draw boundaries, and didn't like that I felt obligated to befriend just anyone who liked the same stuff. I couldn’t take a break for fear of losing relevance. It was also becoming an increasingly hostile environment for stuff that had always been totally normal in fandom, which was not fun.

These were all things I realized could be solved by better curating my experience or doing something as simple as choosing not to care what people think, but that's easier said than done on social media. As an artist I also had to make a decision about what I wanted to do with my work and who I wanted it to reach. Did I care more about growing my career as an artist or having personal freedom? Whichever I chose, what was I willing to give up?

Eventually I felt it wasn't worth the mental stress and quietly decreased my activity. While I've never been good at keeping up a public account, it was a relief to retreat with intention, and not because I just didn't think I could handle it. I kept an account for only mutuals I really considered friends, didn't force myself to make anything polished or publish-worthy, and talked a whole lot more than I drew, without fear.

And it was fun again.

I heard about Neocities some time ago and was intrigued, but thought it was too daunting a task. And I never checked out any of the sites because I knew if I did I'd want to do it too LMAO.

But in my first month at my new job, I had to do a presentation on something tech-related that mattered to me. I thought about how soulless and corporate a lot of the web had become, and thought about how my friends and I - online and IRL - were finding ways to protect ourselves from too much psychic damage.

(I also thought it would be a nice change of pace from "how to better your SEO" or "how Musk is changing the tech world," or at least be super funny to present a sort of fuck-you to the corporate web... to an audience of people who worked on widening the reach of corporate web.)

So I talked about it! One of the things I knew I had to mention was Neocities, which meant I had to research about it. I of course got started on sadgrl.online and the Yesterweb, and it pulled me into an online sphere that I didn't know still existed but was delighted to see again after having been steeped in social media for the duration of my teen years.

I also finally pushed myself to look through the sites in the name of research, and was predictably so enthralled by the creativity in self-expression that I, as a "I need to make this me-catered or else I'll die" kind of girl, ended up being like "well shit now I have to make my own site." And here we are.

I've seen a lot of Neocities sites (and other homepages) continue to be updated for years and years, and that's something I find really exciting. I'm a person who is always doing 1000 things at once, and sometimes has to drop 900 of them to keep from burning out, but the idea of having a website I can always go back to and tinker with is really comforting.

I also wanted to create my own website to get a feel for what it was like tinkering around and being a netizen on Web 1.0, since I only caught the tail end of it. The internet was a huge part of my upbringing, so I think it will be really meaningful to try and connect to its history beyond the social media landscape of my teen years!

I don't have a lot of coding experience - prior to this, all I knew was how to add links to my Tumblr bio back in 2013. But I remember thinking that looking through the code for stuff I wanted to modify was quite fun, and that in the future, it would be cool to learn how to totally customize something just for me. This site is me fulfilling that old dream!

My goal for this website is to code it from scratch - or at least know what I'm doing when I do copy and paste something. As a result, my layouts are pretty bare-bones and incredibly inflexible, since I'm still learning the ropes. At some point I'd like to do more to make it better, but I have the tendency to crank things up to 100 and lose the joy in them if I'm not careful, so I'm making a conscious effort to take it easy.

My rules for myself in designing this site:

• general rules like "don't steal code" "ask permission to use graphics by others" etc. goes without saying
• don't put in code you wouldn't know how to write yourself with a guide. (except javascript, as long as it's a free-to-use code.)
• make most of the graphics yourself! it will be fun!
• don't be too insane from the get go. you're pursuing a hobby, not trying to sell a product. it doesn't have to be perfect.
• on that note: enjoy the process! don't get bogged down by it being a wip. release pages that are still under construction. literally whatever