About me!
Hello! As you've seen on the front page, I'm Harley! I'm 21 years old and I started using the internet around 2016ish though it might have been christmas of 2015? I'd need to check my 3ds for a better rough estimate. Anyway my point is that the "old web" as you might know it is older than me! My early internet memories are more filled with apps than they are with websites and man, some of those apps were real bad. There was heart in some of them, but ultimately they have made me endeared to lower quality stock unity asset games. Revisiting a few of them now, they're like ghost towns! It's very surreal for the strange, argubly low quality, places where my formluative memories developed to become so barren, I never imagined them like this. I imagine this is what others feel when coming to dead websites, but one day I may not get to revisit these places like others get to look at a site via the wayback machine.
My life on the web
My earliest experiences with the web were with fantasy and dinosaur app games, and the pokemon games. In hindsight it's much easier to see that I'm probably a furry, with how much I enjoyed the animal sims. I played a very large swath of games, I can't remember them all. I do, however, remember some of the more important ones, such as Raptor RPG and Dragons Online from the Stephen Allen Games collection. It actually wasn't very long until I ended up on a social media site, Tumblr! Where I still am to this day! I met some of my closest friends because of a stream happening on a somewhat obcure livestreaming site called Picarto. Then we moved into discord and the rest is history, except for what was streamed on that livestream that fateful day. If you've happened to have seen Real-Time Fandub Games then you know what we met over, as we met over its original parent series, simply called Real-Time Fandub, which dubbed over shows and movies.
Players grouped on Dragons Online
Three Players grouped in the oasis on Raptor RPGThoughts on the web
The web is a very special place to me, even though being online definitely did some damage to me psychologically. I definitely wouldn't be here without it! I personally think the ways people think to "fix" it are fundamentally flawed at their cores and would never have saved me from the ways I was taken advantage of. Not even to mention all the harmful things they suggest, kids need their own spaces, yes, but having them monitored using spyware will lead to abuse at minimum and information hacked and sold online in the worst of cases. I do not personally know my own parent's views, I know they vote blue but that is not enough, if I had spyware used on me and my parents were strongly anti-lgbt I could've beem murdered. Though I first ID'ed as ace online in a time where it wasn't as well known as it was today.
Speaking of being LGBT, the internet helped me realize I like girls! It also helped me realize gender is bullshit and I can do whatever I want. So this He/they lesbian is now pretty happy with my identity, and not struggling and toiling anymore. Now I struggle and toil because capitalism as a system makes me feel worthless for not wanting to work right now.
Our best bet seems to be fediverse in terms of a "better" internet, but I would only find it to be better if it sheds the homogeny of modern websites, especially modern social medias. We have a "indie" social media, but what good is it if its just twitter: 2 just with less data-selling and nothing else other than cross instance support. I would like to see page customization so people can express themselves in cool ways, like on myspace or now, spacehey!
Website Goals & Info
My website is mostly going to be a space to express my own interests and original work. As you've probably noticed browsing around, I don't keep my "copyright" info updated, this is because I'm using it more to date my site's creation than as actual copyright. Its not something that would actually protect me anyway, I can't hire lawyers!
One VERY Important thing to note with this website is that it will very often seem like a vanish for long periods of time and then I update the fuck out of the site. This is because at any given time my focus is one several things at ones and whichever thing i'm currently into is the one that won that month. So things might be barren in a part of my site and then suddenly start teaming with life, who knows, I don't!
To be honest my only real "goal" is to have fun, and i'm certaining doing that!