(written 7/23/23)
i have been chronically online since i was a little kid. honestly, i can't even fault my parents for it; my mom, dad, and grandpa worked full-time jobs up until i was in the fourth grade, and my grandma (who was retired and stayed at home all the time) didn't know what the internet really was. as a result, i was basically raised by youtube and warrior cat fangame forums. i knew things as a kid that no normal child should know, and boy did my peers hate me for it. it was a feedback loop; i was always online, so i was weird, and then because i was weird i had no friends, and then because i had no friends in real life i was always online with my online friends... you know how it goes! the never-ending cycle that it seems every undiagnosed autistic kid goes through.
i got myself into insane internet spaces as a child. i was identifying with lgbtq+ identities at the ripe age of 11; not because i knew any gay people, but because i was on tumblr despite not being 13 and heard about asexuality and thought it fit me! and, i mean. i had already started puberty and was definitely in the phase where people develop crushes, and yet i didn't. i was also deeply sex repulsed because of unpackaged trauma that i developed from Being Chronically Online and Being Made To Watch Porn By My Friends. my god, the amount of porn and weird fetish shit i saw as a child is absolutely insane to me. early youtube was a lawless hellscape, eh? to be honest, i'd still prefer that hellscape over whatever the fuck we have today.

my preteen and teenage years were spent on... one of the worst sites imaginable: deviantART. poor little 10 year old me, still growing into myself, suddenly forced to be aware of my AGAB and that all of my friends are having crushes... god, i was a disaster. i fell further into those weird interests that got me bullied in school, but i loved them. most of what i remember from 2012-2013 was loving warrior cats, homestuck, hetalia, pokemon, and doctor who. i would make crossovers of all of these, i'd spend all day drawing and showing off to my friends, i'd post everything to deviantART and i'd get no faves but i'd still love being able to put it out there! i deleted my first dA out of shame and hatred of my past self, but those memories don't leave very easily. my friends and i used dA and skype to talk most of the time, but eventually we hopped off to discord. i was 11 when it was first released back in 2015, can you believe it? i think i was 12 when i made my first account, cuz i loved lying about my age...
i made friends on the internet, sure, but i wanted to die 5 days out of 7 - the other two days were reserved for toontown warrior cats roleplay! i loved to roleplay as a kid; deviantART, chatzy, toontown, skype, discord, forums, anywhere i could get my grubby underaged hands on, you could bet i'd find somewhere to roleplay my OCs. especially my warrior cats OCs! surely no married women who are ABA therapists for their day job will take advantage of a young teenager who loved warrior cats, right? well, that's unfortunately part of my history on the internet, too. turns out, private servers for roleplay can get pretty... sexual. yes, even if the characters involved are feral cats. yes, even if the server owner is an adult and most of the members are children. and yes, NSFW roleplay was encouraged in the server - these literal feral cat characters were subjected to absolutely batshit plots, some of them involving lovely things like underage rape and pregnancy! wonderful things to be roleplaying as a 14 year old.
the drama doesn't even end there. discord is one of the worst "social media" apps, in my opinion. there's predators and horrible people everywhere, but good lord. several series of events in 2019 led to me e-dating someone who developed a crush on me because i was nice to them, who was so open about their crush despite me identifying as aromantic that i felt pressured into reciprocating it... they were also a manipulator, chronic guilt-tripper, and unable to control their emotional responses to anything and everything... it was a pretty weird time to be alive and on the internet!

so, the TL;DR of all of that: i was raised by the internet and abused by it, too. i may or may not have a toxic relationship with the older internet, but i would prefer that lawless and unregulated shitstorm than the clusterfuck of capitalism, datamining, and shitty business decisions we have today. i miss proboards and gameFAQs and other forum hosts, i miss alternatives to sites like youtube that aren't bought out by the megacorporations, and i miss anonymity! i know that's ironic considering i just listed a huge amount of my online trauma, but... i didn't feel obligated to. i don't feel obligated to post my name, age, full list of triggers, race and ethnicity, every single detail about my life... this isn't like social media. i know neocities has a social media aspect, but the main appeal for me is being able to just... do this. i can sit here and write my story, and i know i don't have to, but i just want to. i'll say it, i like talking about myself! i want to be able to talk about my life and maybe find someone who understands, someone who feels understood! what i DON'T want is for corporations to be scraping all of that and selling it off to other corporations. corporate will never understand you, or feel you, or feel anything other than greed and hatred.
in the modern internet, there isn't that same feeling of freedom. everything is the same. tiktok is actively preying on people's attention span, twitter is now owned by a right-wing idiot, tumblr is forcing itself to be twitter, deviantart shot itself in the foot with eclipse, reddit is slowly killing itself... there's none of that old freedom and craziness. it's all been painted over in monochrome. it's all corporate blue and orange on a black or white backdrop. there's... nothing, and i miss it more than i thought. i really don't care if people use social media; i use twitter and tumblr as i watch both of them die, and my boyfriend uses tiktok and still shows me things even though i uninstalled it. insert that comic of the guy saying "we should improve society somewhat."
i know that by myself, i really can't do anything. i can complain and i can reminisce on old weird internet shit; i listened to keyboard cat for the first time in years and teared up a little! i watch old pop lyric videos and AMVs and remember how happy they made me! and i can remember that little kid on deviantart who loved, loved custom profile codes, but couldn't read anything that made it. i can remember being that preteen at his computer, copypasting that code into his profile and just following the tutorial on how to use it. decorating my account, making cute layouts, hoarding stamps and pixels i thought were cute... and now i can look at this page. i never learned html as a kid, because i thought i was too dumb for it. academically i've always been "gifted," but never thought i had any talent for anything other than art. what i didn't realize is that coding is art, and making your own profile code is art, and making a personal website is art. i can remember being that kid on deviantart, my old usernames being silly shit like "umbyisthedoctor" (umby was my old fursona, and i loved doctor who!) and "captain-umby" (again, my old fursona, and i had just finished the misadventures of flapjack), and i remember just having fun. i loved profile codes, and now i love neocities.
so, what really is this site? originally i just made it for fun, for sillies. my friend had one and i thought it was amazing that she did all of that, and so i decided on a whim to sign up and make this site. i didn't know html. i was celebrating every little thing i did right, like making my headers different colors with css, and adding a background image. and, well... look where i am now! i have a site that's up and mostly functional! i started adding pictures, and making pages for random things about me, and for my art, and i realized i was happy. i was happy because i was that weird kid who loved decorating his profile on deviantart, and now i was some weird NEET teaching himself html.
now, this has become my little space on the web. it's mine and no one can take it from me! it's not like twitter or other megapopular social medias. i don't have to read pointless news and discourses, i don't have to see The World's Worst Media Takes constantly, and i don't feel like i have to censor myself to avoid getting wiped off the face of the site. followers don't matter here, views don't matter, it's nothing like actual social media. there isn't a place for love and passion in modern, capitalist social media spaces, just for profit and attention. i would kill to go back to the 2007-2012 era of the internet, but i know it won't happen, and that's just fine. in the grand scheme of things, this site is nothing, isn't it? but you don't have to please everyone, you can just make yourself happy, and make others happy in the process. i hope that even after i stop updating this, that someone finds it and sees something on it that makes them happy - whether they like my OCs, or they read my recovery essay and feel understood, or they just like the look of it. there are ways to make your world better, and to make yourself happy, even in this dark era of the internet, this dark era of reality. even if it's just making a site to talk about nothing, it makes you feel better.
i'll always remember that weird little preteen kid who wasn't supposed to be on deviantart at his age, and i'll remember how much he loved custom profile codes.