background

i started playing computer games around age 6-7 (Webkinz, mostly, and later Toontown, some Club Penguin, and Minecraft in its early age around age 12). i loved reading and computers. morning was computer time.
when i was 9 years old i started reading the Warriorcats series by Erin Hunter, popular among a few kids in my class. i ate them up and spent family trips noting down names of herbs and animals for use in my own fanfiction.
around age 11 i noticed something on the back cover of the book: I could join an official online forum, the Warriorcats forum! (this was known as the "wcf" or "catbeardog forums" among forumers - referencing the author's equivalent Survivors and Seekers series that revolved around dogs and bears). I created an account, which involved mailing a parental permission slip to the HarperCollins office. in March 2012, my first account was created!

at first, I was mainly in the Warriorcats-related Roleplaying and Off-Topic Roleplaying subforums of the site, where i would create original characters and flesh out a story in turns with other forumers. as the years passed, my interest in the series faded but i found a home among the chat rooms and discussion threads in the "Off-Topic Discussions" sub, or "OTD". i decided to reinvent myself with a cool new non-Warriors screen name, "Sand Dollar", (stylized with messletters of course). while i was a very reserved tween/teen in real life, there i became close friends and built a community of overwhelmingly queer tweens/teens. we called ourselves "forum kids" or "wcf kids". however, HarperCollins employed a team of Moderators to patrol the website and ensure it was truly child-friendly. while they did keep us minors safe and were quick to remove any content that violated their codes of conduct, their rules were homophobic and they would ban users for having non-straight roleplay characters, mentioning sexuality/gender identity, etc regardless of if any sexual content was discussed. as a result, the queer community grew increasingly outspoken and we'd create chat threads where we'd modify our language and use code words to avoid being directly banned or censored. it was pretty upsetting, especially since many users likely were lacking social and familial support in real life. through the queer community, however, i grew to learn more about my identity and to be fearless in experimenting with labels and identities, if only within a digital realm. i'll forever be grateful to the wcf for finding myself and for the lifelong friends it gave me -- one of which i've met up with three times with IRL. the good news is that the WCF was shut down in 2016 after HarperCollins decided to let it go. one OG forumer who was into web dev copied the site code and recreated the forums so the spirit of it could live on. by that time, many of us old forumers were growing up and i was grateful for this shift, as i had somewhat of an unhealthy obsession with using the site (to paint the picture: i attained the "Super Message Board User" ranking, with over 100,000 total posts). this "addiction" was often a joke among forumers, who saw constant threads of users announcing their return after a brief hiatus. "taking a hiatus" was a common aspiration.
the migration provided me with an opportunity to "touch grass" as they say. i'm glad i never went through with getting the WCF tab icon tattooed on my skin in remembrance of it, though i think fondly of that era now and appreciate the ways the community allowed me to question myself and the systems in place.

Some WCF-Related links:

• history of major wcf events/features
• fanlore wiki: the official erin hunter message boards
• The Wayback Machine: forums.warriorcats.com

since high school i learned how to hold conversations with people, lived abroad in Belgium, reconnected with nature, held a few jobs, created more art, and recently lived/worked in France. i have been emphasizing real-life connection while trying to minimize my use of Instagram and i feel more in touch with myself each year.
my goal is to create a personal site for my art and thoughts, to encourage me to create more than i consume and interact more with media.
i've always loved going on internet rabbit holes, information seeking, strolling through libraries at my lowest point and finding words and thoughts to bring me comfort.
when i stumbled upon the web revival movement and decided to relearn the HTML i used daily in my forum kid days. i miss the old internet and having a digital home uncluttered with algorithms and ads.

This observation from The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş rings true:

This was the other thing: it seemed that our interests could be legitimized only if we made something of them - a book, an exhibit. We often said what a shame this was; we romanticized artists of past decades, doing work with great joy and creativity without turning it into a product. Still, we belonged to our own times.

Neocities seems like a healthy way to hold space for my art and create a sense of community without being sucked into a forum or social media platform.
i look forward to being a part of the community here and i hope you enjoy your time on my website!

why egret?

i started paying attention to birds at university. it's like birding opened up my ears - while on a walk in the arboretum i was suddenly aware of all the noise around me, usually i'd block it out with music. i was so in awe!
i love waterfowl and wading birds because they're a lot easier to identify as a beginner and i'd see tons of egrets in the wetlands between my home and uni. they're so elegant yet awkward-looking and i love them!