hi! my name is melissa and i'm just another weirdo on the internet. i've been terminally online since before i was 10, stumbling upon sketchy chat rooms and discovering what smut was through warriors cat fanfiction. i suppose it wasn't enough to scare me off since i'm still here more than 15 years later. even though i've been on the internet for a long time, sometimes i feel like i can't be myself in other places... modern social media feels almost suffocating to me. when i discovered neocities, lurking on random strangers' sites i realized i don't really enjoy being that social online but i DO really enjoy learning about others, reading their thoughts, and peering into their mind for a moment in time even if i don't agree with them or we don't have that much in common. it inspired me to be more honest in the way i blog online, and i figured a site built by myself, for myself would be the best way to share all my thoughts and talk about my favorite things more freely, presented in more fun and creative ways that what's possible on mainstream sites and without thought to who will see it, how they'll react, or how much engagement it gets.

my history on the internet (cringe cw)

i don't really remember how or why i started using the internet recreationally – my memories of childhood are pretty patchy already and i started really young. i remember loving dress-up and escape room games as a kid; i would spend hours after school on the shared computer in the family room on those sites, only getting off right before my dad would get home from work and inevitably tell me to log off. a friend of mine with similar interests was obsessed with webkinz and tried to introduce me to it, but my parents didn't understand why i had to buy a special plushie just to use a site when i already had perfectly good ones.

i went searching for free alternatives, and while i tried more popular sites like neopets and poptropica, the one i really got into was a site called howrse. it's an online horse breeding simulation game, and notable for being my introduction to html. everyone had a profile page where you could introduce yourself and your 'stable', and it allowed images and some html. using 'layouts', basically html tables with background or header images, was really popular among the player base. you can see examples of what i'm talking about here and here. i think i spent more time tinkering with my page than actually playing the game, lol.

while the game was free to play, a lot of stuff was locked behind either micro-transactions or huge time sinks, which makes sense as apparently howrse is owned by ubisoft. anyways, since the playing with layouts was free and only limited by your creativity and not your wallet, i got really into making them. there was a subculture of people who didn't just take photos off google and put them in html tables, but photoshopped their own images to put textboxes above them. this was how i got into photoshop (i used GIMP at the time) and deviantart, where the most dedicated editors posted their work.

eventually making layouts turned into focusing on the photomanipulations themselves. before i joined dA i had no idea that photoshopping images could be its own form of art, but there really is a lot of skill and creativity that goes into picking the right stock images, cutting things cleanly, adjusting composition and lighting, and painting the details. i remember in seventh grade i asked for a wacom tablet for my birthday to help with that last bit, which i still have (it still works!)

while my interest in howrse and photomanipulation waned as i got closer to high school, i did find another site that kept my interest in coding and photoshop alive – tumblr. i remember that i joined when i was 12 1/2 because i used my half birthday instead of my real one to be able to join. i quickly got interested in learning how to code my own themes. i thought my html knowledge from my howrse days would be enough, but i had no idea what css even was! still, it was exciting having way more freedom to try out different designs. i also became interested in making my own 'graphics' as they were called at the time for fandoms i was in. i already knew my way around photoshop, but the style wasn't at all like what i made before, so it was fun challenging myself to trying new techniques and styles. it was because of this that i learned to make gifs, although they sucked by today's standards since we were limited to like 1mb/gif.

i used tumblr pretty religiously throughout high school, although what i blogged about definitely changed as i got older. when i started i quickly got sucked into superwholock and marvel (cringe ik. like my whole life online hasn't been cringe) on top of blogging about the emo bands i like, but by the time i was 15 or so i mainly moved onto blogging about anime and manga. i had been a casual anime fan since i was a child but some of my best friends irl at the time were really into it, so i got more into it too. i remember loving free! and kuroko no basuke, the first of which was my gay-but-grew-up-christian-and-sheltered friend's introduction to yaoi so i have many fond memories of having sleepovers and watching it together with him.

when i started college my internet surfing time decreased a lot, although i still checked in from time to time and usually kept up with the most popular anime of the season. my freshman year of college i was OBSESSED with mystic messenger, so of course i blogged incessantly about that too. i also joined other social media sites like twitter, at first for personal use and following my irl friends and eventually getting into fandom on those sites as well. but i had a hard time getting into them, usually because there was something about the interface i didn't like or the culture seemed horrible. not that tumblr culture isn't also awful, but i've found it a lot easier to block stuff i don't want to see using extensions like tumblr savior. actually i'm pretty sure twitter in particular is purposely designed to show you the most toxic and ragebait posts no matter what words you try to mute. (i've written more about what it is that bothers me about modern social media and internet culture here if you're curious.)

beyond finding these communities increasingly annoying, i also found the shift to mobile-first design and decreased customizability to be disappointing. gone were the days of everyone customizing their page and proudly showing it off to their followers; now most sites only give you a choice of profile picture and header image. even on sites like tumblr that still allowed custom themes, most of the hobbyist theme makers had stopped and only people who were studying web development were still making new themes, even though relatively few people still used them. discovering neocities and seeing everyone's unique and hand coded sites made me nostalgic for the time in my life where i spent dozens of hours customizing my page, getting it to look exactly how i want it just to scrap it all and start over a week later when i had a new design idea. it made me want to cultivate my own digital garden, to store and share things that don't fit elsewhere in my online presence and have fun playing with html again. in summary,

and i hope peer behind the curtain of my fellow internet freaks' minds ^_^