about the site

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.

Written March/April 2023.

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 was on Neocities for a little over a year (started my site in Feb 2023) before I moved to Vercel in June 2024.

Neocities was a great place to start – I made a lot of friends and discovered so many wonderful sites via the social feed. But the social feed also tired me out the way social media did, with its numbers and rules that I would instinctively try to play by. I also thought a bit more friction in accessing my site would filter out the teens and people who clearly did not read the warnings I slapped on my front page. I took a bunch of breaks from my site when I felt particularly exhausted by this.

I also was growing frustrated with the way I updated my site, and wanted to try experimenting with a static site generator. I tested out 11ty by making an entirely different site altogether and liked it! It de-tedified my process and expanded the number of things I was willing to build/maintain: image galleries, tweet archives, paginated items. Revamping my site to better fit the SSG process I wanted to use also gave me the excuse to revamp my least mobile-friendly pages, because those were annoying me too.

It made sense to me to use all these reasons as motivation to finally Commit and make my website a Real Website (not that my Neocities site was not real, but mine felt to me like Baby's Hobby Project That She'd Eventually Lose Interest In). I even bought a domain name to celebrate. Hooray for hellomei! She is a testament to my investment in this new hobby, which I think I'll have for quite some time.

It's a lot quieter now, but less stressful on my mind. I'm enjoying it!