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Hi everyone!

Have been slowly tickering with this website again. If you know who I am, welcome! If you don't, also welcome! I write games criticism and journalism as well as fiction... you can read the about page if you want to know more...

I already have a blog on my "professional" website and would like to get back to writing there occasionally, but I think that will be more mannered, more "edited," and certainly more drafted than this. Want to get back to writing very unpretentiously and having at least a little space to show that to people (though mostly my friends and perhaps neocities freaks who come across my page, rather than any thing approaching my limited internet audience on bluesky or elsewhere). Not setting up any goals or anything because that will kill my joy sooner or later. I make no promises about output. I do want to check in here though and I have a couple ideas for pages I would like to add and blogs I would like to write. I may also write reviews of movies and whatnot and crosspost them to letterboxd or whatever. There was a time in my life where I really enjoyed jotting down my little thoughts about a movie and I would like to get back to that. Letterboxd becoming a like... place where "film criticism" happens and a space that people use essentially instead of having a website kinda soured me on it. I don't want to be serious or accountable... I just want to be my little self... and I DON'T want to think about what star rating I'm going to give a movie when I'm just watching it you know.

Sticking with zonelets for now because I do want this to be a blog really and therefore kinda want people to be able to read on their phone, though other parts of the website may get weirder if I get more coding confident. Already have gotten so so so so much enjoyment making my little banners and adding background art and fonts and buttons. Crazy that any of us ever gave this up for twitter dot com or whatever. This is way more fun.

Something that has really struck me about exploring other neocities is the profound self-interest, which I don't really mean as selfishness, but like an interest in the self. I feel like social media is very self-centered but also very performative. There's a room, but it's not your room, it's someone else's room and a lot of other people are talking in there and saying things and there's a sense that it is very very important to also say things about the things that other people are saying, but then it all moves on and that same sense of urgency becomes about something totally different. I like the sort of privacy of a website. It's a place where you live, which I think gives you some desire to make it liveable. And it tends to me more anonymous, which I think is really good. (The social [and legal] shift from essentially total anonymity online to having to upload yr id to log on is nasty) Twitter or bluesky or instagram, you have *your feed* (which you have so little control over in practice) and *your page* but the totally temporariness of those spaces makes it very easy to just be thoughtless. I am, admittedly, an overthinker. It's rare that I share something off the cuff without me immediately qualifying it or starting to consider counterarguments. So the shotgun blast nature of social media is perhaps uniquely contrary to my temperment. But I do kinda feel like it is bad for us. Or at least it is pretty bad for me. And I do have to start taking that seriously, even and maybe especially if I keep using it.

With that little ramble out of the way... I'm really looking forward to writing and joking around. Thinking about writing about my journaling/letter-writing and stationary stuff next time... will be nice I think.

I hope you like my little thoughts and feel free to reach out if you wanna yap or something...