SO. I DID NOT INTEND TO POST AGAIN SO SOON AND THEN THE CRAZIEST NEWS EVER DROPPED: A NEW CASTLEVANIA GAME!!!! So, for those who aren’t in the know: Castlevania hasn’t had a new mainline title in YEARS. Not counting the short-lived Lords of Shadow reboot, the last game that was released was in 2008. Konami rather infamously got more interested in making slot machines than being a video game company, and Castlevania game sales were dwindling at the time anyway, so that was the end. Until recently, there was mostly dead air and everyone who had been involved with Castlevania left to go on to do other things (go play Bloodstained guys it’s truly great).

I kind of saw something like this coming- there have been a ton of Castlevania crossovers with Vampire Survivors, Dead Cells, etc., and four different collections of the legacy games (Anniversary, Requiem, Advance and Dominus) and I begrudgingly admit that the Netflix series probably did lead to a lot of renewed interest in the series and made it seem worth reviving... as much as I dislike the show. And hell, we even got a Castlevania Takarazuka musical. If there was any time to bring out a new title in the series it was now. We’d even seen Konami testing the waters by shopping out their other IPs to indie devs, including Silent Hill and Getsu Fuuma Den, plus letting M2 make a whole remake of Haunted Castle for Dominus Collection. I was just kind of waiting for the ball to drop. And now it has! There’s an exciting new trailer out!

The new game is called Belmont’s Curse and appears to be a collaboration between Konami and the developers of Dead Cells. They’re calling it “action-exploration” so I assume that’s the copyright friendly version of saying Metroidvania. The agile whip combat looks great, it’s like an evolved version of Super Castlevania IV. AND HOLY SHIT IS THAT SONIA BELMONT? (retconned into being Trevor’s successor instead of his mom, I guess?) I used to dream of days like these... As a true Castlevania Legends defender I feel so vindicated. I just don’t get why so much recent Castlevania media has been so France-heavy, it’s giving brand synergy-related mandate? Like, my first thought when I hear “Castlevania” isn’t medieval Paris, it’s foggy woods and cliffsides in the Carpathians, and yet now we’ve had Nocturne, the musical and this new game all like YEAH COME TO FRANCE. CASTLEVANIA IS IN FRANCE NOW. Very odd. I have hopes they can do something fresh with it considering it’s filled with old churches and catacombs and stuff. The setting felt kind of underutilized in Nocturne and the Musical and the attempts to tie in figures from the French Revolution felt kind of silly at best. I kind of wish they reached out to IGA and co. but they are kind of busy with The Scarlet Engagement right now...

FRANCE ASIDE... The art style looks gorgeous, and is exactly the kind of style I was hoping for, like a living painting. Sonia looks great and it looks like she can wield swords as well as the whip, so I’m hoping she plays kinda like Jonathan, who is one of the best protagonists in the series in terms of gameplay-feel, imo. As for the titular curse itself... I think it’s lycanthropy. Maybe they do some kind of Beast of Gevaudan thing? (Wrong era but that has never stopped Castlevania before) But the promotional website describes Sonia’s moves as “pouncing on your prey like a wolf” which seems like a hint of some kind...

AND IT’S COMING OUT THIS YEAR! And Konami has made some statements outright stating that this is the first of multiple Castlevania titles and releases and that it functions as the series’ revival for its 40th anniversary. Hell yeah!! Looks like the future is very bright. (Though I’m still slightly more hyped for Scarlet Engagement, it looks SO GOOD)

Today's song is: The Sound - Skeletons

Today's tarot is: Six of Wands, The Hierophant, Two of Pentacles, Temperance (reversed), The Hermit

At the time of writing, the latest scary tech news is that Discord (the widely used chatroom client) is rolling out a new age restriction system. Everyone is now “teen by default” and cannot access restricted content, and the only way to verify your account as an adult is to scan your real-life ID or a picture of your face. Discord has also made some statements about detecting age by analyzing your usage for regular work hours (great news for the unemployed, part timers, remote workers, anyone who uses Discord to text people on the clock regularly, et cetera, I’m sure). For obvious reasons there is a ton of backlash against this decision. Discord recently got in hot water for leaking thousands of users’ identities, and the increasing overreach of major web platforms collecting data, IDs and other personal information has become extremely worrisome. I mean, my Youtube account was locked out of age-restricted videos despite the fact that I had the Gmail account attached to it for like 15 years at this point!

This all comes in the middle of an ongoing discussion of how one goes about restricting children's internet access. One side says that this increasing trend of age restriction is a good thing (or even that all adult content should be censored), the other side says that the onus is on the parents, and that they should use surveillance applications to watch their children. BOTH OF THESE SIDES ARE WRONG and I find these stances also worrying.

First of all: demanding a photograph of your ID is an invasion of privacy, full stop. Compare this to something like a bar or club, where the bouncer takes a second or two to look at the date on your license. That data isn’t stored anywhere, it’s just a person checking to see if you’re old enough. Discord wants a picture, and while the PR stuff they’re trotting out insists the photo is “deleted after verification” I still feel suspicious of that after the previous data leak, as they also claimed that the data wasn’t stored then. It’s just a little too convenient for a tech company (who make a lot more money by selling user data than they do from selling things to the user!) to demand access to crucial identifying documents, and this becoming normalized on the web is nightmarish to me. I remember back when all you needed to use an account on a website was to come up with a unique username and password; there was no innate connection to other sites or to your real-life self. That anonymity was one of the best things about the internet! Then after the advent of Facebook and smartphones, sites began asking for email addresses or phone numbers, and things have only gotten worse from there. And while the current wave of dataleeching is in the name of “protecting children”, don’t think for a second that that is the actual goal. Children aren’t profitable customers as they can’t spend money on your online service without parent permission; this is part of why Virtual World sites (which tried to financially target children) are broadly a thing of the past. It is more profitable to instead harvest lots and lots and lots of data, and “protecting kids from unsafe content” is just a convenient way to dress that up in a way that seems agreeable.

Another thing is that what exactly “unsafe content” is is extremely subjective. Is a kiss scene inappropriate for children? When does an illustration of nudity become pornographic? How much blood is fine for someone under-18 to see? Is LGBT content ‘inappropriate’? You’re going to get different answers from everyone; the growing conservative views towards sex and gender are also part of what galvanized current efforts to take down and restrict adult content, and it is absolutely being used to take down LGBT content online. Also, to censor online content requires moderation teams, and, honestly, knowing about how exactly online moderation is conducted on a mass scale (inflicting PTSD on workers in the global south who are subjected to horrors every day), I’m not sure if there is an ethical way to enforce such restrictions. Basically, social media is structurally exploitative and we should burn it all down.

However, I agree that the internet is often very unsafe for children! I’ve been subjected to that, as someone who’s been online since I was like four years old! I think it is a good thing to want children to be safer online and I really don’t blame anyone who goes for the bait. I’ve seen people on the other side of the argument, though, say that the only solution is for parents to have more reach and surveillance over their child’s online life, or to keep them offline entirely (which I think is unfeasible in today’s environment, you often need computers for school purposes and to submit assignments). But I feel very strongly that if we adults are entitled to privacy so too should children be. I’ve been subjected to the online surveillance parental control bullshit applications, too, and they’re just as harmful, even abusive. They humiliate the child, erode trust, they make it impossible for a child to feel safe coming to their parent about things, and it leaves you paranoid constantly about having your activity watched. It’s why I still instinctively close my browser when someone comes into the same room as me, even if it’s someone I DO trust. And that’s to say nothing of how this can be used by bigoted parents- surveillance apps have been used to out closeted teens, which I think should be evidence enough that surveilling a child’s online activity is an evil, evil practice.

So, what is to be done? If the internet is so dangerous to explore unsupervised, but the onus of supervision should not and cannot be on either the platforms or the child’s guardians, what is the way to reduce as much harm as possible? I think it really is just education.

While my generation did frequently get the online safety talk, I think this broadly kind of failed to leave an impression, because the rules the adults impressed upon us felt kind of laughable at the time. I think this is probably part of a broader issue with stranger danger-type childhood safety rhetoric: it is often extremely hyperbolic and never actually explains what the real threat is to the child, so it often sounds like empty, out of touch old people stuff. “Don’t talk to strangers, they’re all evil” is not very helpful advice to a kid whose only experience with online strangers is excitedly talking about their favorite Pokemon or Fortnight characters (do the kids still play Fortnight?), whereas something in the vein of “Some people online might want to get embarrassing pictures of you or try to act in a way that will make you uncomfortable. If anyone acts weird and pushy around you, you should tell someone you trust, and they’ll show you how to block and report the account. I promise it isn’t mean or rude to block someone if you don’t want to talk to them,” is however actionable, specific, and respects the child’s feelings and privacy. I think more computer-specific education would broadly do a lot of good as well as increase tech literacy. Computer education has fallen by the wayside due to today’s children being considered “digital natives”, but this is as silly as considering every child born after 1817 “bicycle natives”. You still have to learn how to ride a bike. (I never did, I preferred my little Razor scooter)

Also, phones. Kids should probably not have one. Maybe this is a controversial take? But, idk, we’ve seen iPad babies, we’ve seen how literacy is generally dropping, childhood is a key period for acquiring key skills. Not to sound like your grandma but I think it really is that damn smartphone. I got my first phone at 15 and while I was already a struggling academic, my grades dropped dramatically once I got my hands on it and I’ve been trying to kick the addiction ever since. If that’s what happens to a 15 year old I think if we ever get some studies done on the kids raised with smartphones and tablets from infancy the data will be shocking. I think kids SHOULD have computers though! Computers are good! Especially desktops, as they sort of enforce a boundary between the online and offline world. I think the internet can do a lot of good for children- having an avenue for a private life without parental overreach is actually a great thing for testing out independence and social skills, imo, and for me it was for sure an avenue for discovering my passion for art, and I think a “family computer” setup is a healthy way to engage with that.

And I strongly believe kids should have their own online spaces. The loss of browser games and other online child-spaces is a TRAGEDY and I think what has led to children using Tiktok and Instagram and other social platforms, thus putting themselves in more danger. However, when I was a kid and everyone was getting on Facebook for the first time I had absolutely no interest. I had Scratch and Pixie Hollow and Horseland and Bella Sara and Jumpstart Online. What do today’s children have?

That’s the real tragedy, actually. The internet is being made hostile for both children and adults and (apart from obvious capitalism-advertiser-credit card company-whatever reasons) the centralization of the same handful of platforms is the culprit. This wouldn’t be such an issue if adult content was allowed niches for it to flourish in private like a weird little eyeless cave animal, and if children had more online playplaces that are for them and aren’t for adults. Leaving a website wouldn’t be as much of a massive upheaval of your online social life as it currently is. That is to say, squeezing every animal into the same pen leads to conflict, biting, sickness, et cetera. There’s a reason zoos keep their lions and tigers separated.

As for what we can do now? Be good netizens. Be a safe person to talk to, put warnings on your adult content, be kind and courteous online, and fight against the current erosion of privacy. And of course, decentralize your web experience, surfing across its vast sea, and find the niches you like to inhabit.

Alright I think that’s all I have to say on the matter... I’ve been seeing a lot of chatter about the Discord news and this kind of thing has been on my mind ever since, since I feel like the discourse around it can get kind of reactionary, and because I am passionate about computers and the internet in a way that is colored by my experience of being a kid online. I’ve seen the internet shift and change shape in real time so as you can imagine I’ve got takes.

I’m FINALLY off after my 7 day streak of closing shifts, I need the relaxation time. Hey, at least I have a really good payday tomorrow, I’m doing better financially than I have been in a little while... Tomorrow I’m gonna go out and get some sushi for dinner! And hopefully get some more progress done on my lesbian vampire essay, we’ll see. (I might just chill out while I can, I have another busy week coming up)

Today's song is: Stiff Kittens - Eternal Blue

Today's tarot is: Nine Of Pentacles, The Chariot, Three of Cups, King Of Pentacles, The Empress

One of my favorite things to do when I’m bored is trawl through the existing archives of Geocities and Angelfire websites (particularly on Wayback and via the Geocities search engine Oocities). When I find a page super memorable I save the link somewhere so I thought it would be a fun idea to share them with the world and I guess talk a little bit about why I find each one a little interesting. I’ve found a few really neat ones and I love what a little window they are into people's lives. I know the common adage is that sharing photos and personal details is more of a modern internet thing, but a surprising amount of people liked to share their photos, personal stories- pictures of cosplays and family members and days at the renaissance faire, and more back on the “old web”... it made me realize what really changed was that now that will to share and connect is being exploited. Anyway, it makes some of these sites feel sort of like reading through the photo album of a dead relative.

WARNING: Do note that these pages are from the 90s/2000s and often have language or political stances that may be disagreeable or distasteful... Take this more as a historical analysis than an endorsement of each site, as some of them I definitely don’t endorse at all. And tread carefully on the archived pages if that kind of thing is dealbreaker for you. Nothing outright hateful or bigoted will be spotlighted, but still. You’ve been warned.

Hmm, where to start... Well, everyone likes video games, right? Let's go with this fanzine archive page, OnFile... The site is full of interesting gaming related stuff (including a glossary of 90s-era gamer lingo!) but the best bit, imo, is the absolutely incensed review of Earthbound on the “Darkside” archive, with the verdict: “Hopefully, Nintendo has realized its mistake in releasing EarthBound and won't let something like this happen again.” Is this why Mother 3 was never localized? It's pretty funny how the writer also disliked Super Mario RPG, which is also pretty well regarded now. The whole archive is such a bizarre little time capsule, from the terrible political rants on the Counterpoint page to Concept’s discussion of the OJ Simpson trial to Fantazine’s prediction that the Atari Jaguar “will be huge”. There's even a glowing review of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night... from when it first came out! This whole site is a historical goldmine.

On the topic of Castlevania there's also this incredible review of Harmony of Dissonance I found, courtesy of someone who didn't play the English version. I am captivated by the idea that the two castles are in “real time” and “Dracula time”. What does that mean? Is one meant to be in the timeline where Dracula wins? Does Dracula experience time sped up? Slowed down? Fascinating implications. Anyway, I’m shocked they managed to intuit most of the plot and figure out how to progress through the whole game without any of the text. And the most shocking of all: no complaints about the soundtrack! Also, look at this passkey generator for Castlevania II! Very tempted to test it out for myself to see if it works. The site has some other passkey generators for other games but as Castlevania II is one of my favorites that’s the one I shall highlight.

Alright, I think that's enough gamer goo for one sitting... Here’s another fun one. If you know anything about 90s-2000s era fandom/fanfiction drama you have probably heard about Anne Rice’s efforts to take down all fanfiction based on her work, it’s pretty infamous. I was curious and went looking for websites from that time that were reacting to the debacle and (in addition to a page that recommended J.K. Rowling, Marion Zimmer Bradley and Neil Gaiman as better authors to support, a list that has definitely aged like milk with 2026 hindsight, lol) I found this INCREDIBLE Declaration of Independence page. Independence from Anne Rice, of course. Signed “In Cyberspace, All Hallows Eve, 2000” and complete with a list of fonts to download so all the digital signatures look like they have different handwriting (I of course downloaded all of them, WHICH TOOK FOREVER. There are some neat ones in the mix so it’s actually kind of a blessing! I might use them sometime...). This is amazing! I just love the idea of a fandom and its characters unionizing against the author. The page seems to be part of a larger directory of New Orleans related pages, but I found it hard to load most of the pages linked on the index... Anyway, to save you the trouble, here’s a screenshot of my painstaking historical recreation of all the fonts. The only one I’m not super sure on is Armand’s font, one can never be too sure which font named “Arabian” is the right “Arabian”...



I also found Le Cafe de Vampire, a site FULL of Vampire Chronicles fanfiction- I guess it survived the purge long enough to be archived/mirrored. There's tons of other stuff too, images and quotes and even The Sims screenshots! It's really cool if you're into The Vampire Chronicles. I read some of the fics and they're pretty decent!

So far I’ve highlighted a bunch of fandom-y nerd sites but I think one of the things I find most compelling about these Geocities/Angelfire archeology digs is that just about anybody could make a webpage. Including the elderly, children, average joes, anyone! And of course... Catholic Cyber Moms.

I originally happened upon Catholic Cyber Moms while looking for angel gifs on Gifcities for a website project last year. I just had to know the context for what on earth a “Catholic Cyber Mom” is. It was actually a sort of community page for Catholic mothers to connect with each other, complete with digital prayer candle pages and memorials for dead loved ones and stuff. And like, I am the farthest thing from a Catholic Cyber Mom, I’m nonreligious and I don't want to have kids, but something about this site gave me a weird sense of empathy. Like, realistically I probably wouldn't get along with these ladies, I’m a lesbian communist and I’m extremely pro abortion. It's enough to give the average Catholic mom a heart attack, cyber or otherwise- but I think it's just so fascinating reading through the member list and the prayer request page. (There's something interesting to be said about the idea of “digital ritual” and how they incorporated the prayer candle gifs, an altar of sorts... I find the intersection of technology and the occult really interesting and I could write a whole essay on that). Many of these Catholic Cyber Moms experienced great hardship in some way, and it's just so fascinating reading about what drew them to believe, as someone who just can't think the same way. (Also all the interesting hobbies... Shoutout to the lady who raised goats, by the way. That is just awesome.) It's just interesting seeing a glimpse of someone else, of people who have lived such completely different lives from me, and see plainly all the ways we are similar, too. It’s such a weird feeling! I dunno, I just thought it was an interesting page.

Next I want to highlight this interesting poetry website I found, I don't remember when exactly... It’s called Dance of the Unicorn, and it was created by a woman named Karen in Australia... and there are so many poems! There are fantasy themed ones but most of them are based more in real life- and the webmistress had a pretty tumultuous life, if some of these more grounded poems really are true stories. I think my favorite is “Perfect Stranger” on the Song of the Wolf page, as it’s such an evocative interpretation of death and acceptance, but each one is an equally interesting little mirror into this user’s life. The Mystery Poem is also really neat, with each verse being a submission from a visitor. The little story they put together is so cool! It’s also a neat coincidence that the last line added is “My end is drawing near”, very metatextual. Karen, if you’re still out there somewhere, I love your work! It makes me want to write more poetry...

I also found this interesting site run by a whole family from Arizona, called Clan Copp (as they liked Celtic stuff). I like the drop-down navigation system but this unfortunately makes it pretty hard to navigate the site now that all the links redirect to yahoo’s homepage rather than navigating to the archived pages. Thankfully the “next” and “back” navigation buttons work well so you can navigate the whole site. Sites like these where it just chronicles everything about the users’ lives are so cool to me, it’s just such a shame all those photobucket links are down, even on the Wayback machine! Out of the stuff that I can still view, though, I really like the wildlife photography, interesting trivia about Arizona, the memory game (which is tragically missing all its images!), the family history, and of course Kelleigh’s page. I love webpages made by kids, they are so interesting! Lots of adoptable cyberpets and links to all her favorite sites. The whole site is fascinating to click through.

Another good one I found is Mama Hawk’s webpage, made as a collaborative effort with her “website guru” granddaughter. Just look at that tiled kitty face background! This whole page is adorable, I am so charmed by reading about this grandma’s life. She’s got pictures of her favorite actor, links to all her family’s pages, and even has some dragon adoptables she got from that aforementioned granddaughter and has written out personalities and little stories for them. How cute is that?

Also I of course had to feature an interesting horse adoptable site run by someone named Tingelingly, the sort of cluttered way the images are laid out in the stable and tack room are so cozy, it really makes it look like an inhabited space. It’s really neat to click through and look at. This kind of stuff is a huge inspiration for Clovenglade! The tack room is especially impressive, I aspire to this kind of web design. And all the pedigree certificates are so immersive! And of course this comes with a glowing recommendation to check out the Double Horseshoe Ranch page that the webmaster got a ton of their horse adoptables from, it's like a full fledged petsite run on Geocities. These sites are so on my wavelength that I wish I could somehow tell the webmasters how much I love their work and ask what they think of my own equine efforts... carrying on the flame from this kind of unfettered creativity, you know? I wish Clovenglade was this cool. I aspire to make something this awesome.

Speaking of stuff up my wavelength, I found a page with a review of a Suspiria DVD re-release... and, intriguingly, a link-banner to a page with an interview with Jessica Harper. I clicked on it assuming it might be a transcript of something from the DVD or its booklet but it was actually conducted by the webmaster! And isn't that so cool to think about? The lead actress of one of my favorite films, doing an interview for a random movie-reviewing Geocities page? I feel like that kind of thing could never happen today. It's so interesting to read about the whole process and the way Italian movies were made back then, and Argento’s process in general and how much respect she had for him as a film maker and his highly visual style. It is such a cool read and to think it was hiding away on an old Geocities page!

As the final page I want to discuss, I went with an interesting goth-themed site called Children of the Night Unite, which functions as a sort of guide, with a glossary, lists of bands and such, a timeline, and advice for people in the subculture, young and old. I think the “Future of the Goth Community” page is interesting to look back on considering how goth has been continuing to thrive, a lot longer than other similar subcultures, both because of the “snooty older goths” keeping the music the focus and the music scene evolving outward from its origin into a bunch of appealing subgenres. There's a ton of links and interesting stuff and it's a definite time capsule of a certain flavor of 90s era gothickness.

I really love going on these archive binges. I think on today's internet it's really hard to remember that the person on the other side of the screen is a real being who thinks and feels just as you do, but going through all these Geocities links makes me remember that so much easier. I think that's one of the most profound losses that was brought on when these parts of the “old web” were shuttered as social media became the new star attraction. The personal web was, well, personal. I feel like I could have known all these people in another life, getting such a peek into that personal space they had curated.

I think that's my big takeaway from the gameified version of browsing Geocities, the acclaimed Hypnospace Outlaw. The characters are often funny and absurd but it's easy to see all the outlines and contours of a real life lived, or as close as a video game character can manage. The way that the game centers communities and groups of people as they interact with- and are often at odds with- the corporate-built platform that is Hypnospace always makes me think of the notion that Marxist filmmaking tends to center on large groups of characters and collective action rather than a central protagonist... Hypnospace Outlaw’s developer, Jay Tholen, is a communist, so it made me think about it, and I think presenting this take alongside my archeology dig illustrates my great takeaway better than a straight up review... I found a Steam discussion where he talks a bit about the political theming and touches on it:

“As for legit politics, Hypnospace Outlaw is probably one of the most political things I'll ever make, but it skips the political window dressing that many games lay on thick and attempts to express political ideas through its world and narrative. I'm not a fan of 'political' games that use abundant leftist and/or queer imagery to attract an audience that largely already agrees with said politics. That's more marketing than it is legitimately expressing a political ideology. It rarely amounts to much more than flavor or style or a call to a particular tribe. These are the kinds of empty 'politics' that AAA games throw in and tbh I don't blame anyone for outright rejecting that. In the long run this is going to hurt legitimate progress because many young people will see this as a fad/phase as they grow out of their formative years. Often their fervor for very real injustices is thrown out with it. Hippy culture is an excellent example of this - it became a clique and commodified style and by the 80s half of those people were Reaganites. Politics are are best addressed via mundane and relatable characters of different ages and classes, and the very real impact that corporate or gov't choices make on their lives.”

I think the game accomplished this successfully. It's a game that made me think about how people use the net and engage with and against the ways in which they are exploited by the people that run it. It made me feel empathy in the same way that the Catholic Cyber Moms page did. And it made me think about how Geocities wasn't really a perfect haven either. Once Yahoo acquired it, LGBT webrings were censored, and branded watermarks were pushed onto pages, the platform was eventually shuttered, and now we live in the modern net where such issues are compounded exponentially. Fanfiction authors played in a copyrighted minefield, and lovingly-crafted sites were kept online on the fickle whims of a large company that was eager to eventually let them go. What made Geocities special wasn't just that it was free hosting or that it's charming and retro, and it was hardly the antithesis of today’s corporate web. No. What made it special... It was the collective of real people who called its neighborhoods home, the same people who made sites its founder compared to “the gnome in somebody's front lawn”. That’s crazy! Imagine having no idea, no appreciation of the beauty and authenticity your platform had facilitated.

When people go trawling through the archives like this there's often kind of an ironic “lol so retro!!! crazy web design!!!!” detachment to it or a surface level enjoyment of the aesthetic, but I highly encourage everyone to just... go looking at webpages. Glean as much as you can about the people who made them, what they valued, what they were passionate about. Realize that the internet is a vast city filled with real people. People who are like you in so many ways!

I had so much fun putting this list together and I definitely want to do something like this again... Maybe with themed lists, like a post specifically for interesting Pokemon or anime sites or Warrior Cats, stuff like that, or a collection specifically of sites from the Enchanted Forest neighborhood. I also feel obligated to give a big thank you to Olia Lialina’s One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age research blog, which really made me interested in really understanding what Geocities and the online zeitgeist was like at the time. I’ve been going on archive binges and collecting up interesting links ever since I started reading it.

As for the banal life update stuff: I HAVE BEEN SO BUSY WITH WORK. I had like a full week of shifts all crammed in a row. I may be a part timer but I sure feel like I’m working full time... Oh well, I need the money. My birthday is coming up (AND SO IS THE SITE’S THIRD ANNIVERSARY WHAT!!!! I don’t have anything planned for it, oh bother...) and my parents are taking me to Universal Studios as a present so I can finally check out the Universal Monsters themed area which I have been pretty intrigued by. Last time I went I saw a really cool show/presentation about monster movie special effects and it was the highlight of my trip (in addition to that visit being the last Harry Potter related thing I got to enjoy before JKR went truly off the deep end, like I’m talking mere months before her TERF freakout) so seeing the studio’s classic horror output given a full land is gonna be so neat. I haven’t really sought out a ton of publicity or videos or anything about it (or most of their recent theme park additions tbh) so I will be going in blind.

I’ve been working hard on the essay content for my lesbian vampire project, I’d say it’s about halfway done and I’m pleased with it thus far! I took a little break to write out this blog post but I’ll get back into it now that it’s finished. I think I have a solid idea of how I’m going to code it all as well, what graphics I need, et cetera. I think it’s gonna turn out really cool! (And it’s a good excuse to revisit some old 70s horror movies I haven’t rewatched in a while!)

Well, that’s all for now... My throat’s been hurting all morning so I hope I’m not getting sick.

Today's song is: Sad Lovers and Giants - Lost in a Moment

Today's tarot is: Ten of Wands, Knight of Swords, Four of Pentacles (reversed), Page of Cups, The Magician

Something I do a lot is write down ideas in my google docs whenever I get them in case I want to use them later. A lot of these are video game ideas that are far beyond my scope but are fun to think about how I would make them if I could. I’ve done this since I was a kid, scrawling ideas for my epic social wolf MMO in my creative writing notebook. I have a few I’ve come up with so I figured I might do a little infodump about them.

-2.5D Pokemonlike where all the Pokemon are demons. The graphical style would be kind of like DOOM in that you’re in a 3d environment but all the textures and entities are flat sprites and such, with a lot of visual inspiration from the night color pallettes of gen 2 Pokemon. It takes place over one summer in the late 90s in a small, dreary religious town in midwest America while the main character is staying with her mom for summer vacation, and finds a sigil in the town’s surrounding woods which she disturbs, which begins summoning the demonic creatures. While she and her friends are befriending the demons and figuring out how to battle (with fun attacking names like blaspheme and betray...) the paranoia in the isolated town begins to grow. I think instead of Pokeballs there would be a “sigil drawing” system where you have to spend multiple turns drawing each line in the sigil to bind a new demon, but that also makes your demons vulnerable to attack. Some demon attacks can undo sigil progress, too. It would be a commentary on the religious hysteria around Pokemania and I think the demons would go back to their own plane at the end of the story... A bittersweet ending. I have a really great title for this one but the pun is too genius and I don’t want anyone stealing it so I will not say what I would call this game. A key inspiration for this one is Hazel’s Inside the War on Pokemon video.

-Calender based virtual pet game (but weird). The idea here is that you’re the first tester who’s meant to observe and care for the world’s first wholly virtual creature that can manifest in the real world. Low-poly 3D style visuals. The game progresses based on your computer’s local calender and it’s kind of like Fin-Fin on TEO the Magic Planet in that you’d be kind of a passive observer (less passive than in Fin-fin though). The pet won’t die due to lack of care or anything but you are supposed to regularly interact with it and feed it and such otherwise its mood will decrease. As you progress the game by checking in (and the story would only progress when you come to visit the pet, it wouldn’t go on without you, unlike its mood), the virtual creature starts to “go wrong” and glitch out (as does the rest of the game), with the lead scientist tutorial character trying to convince you to put it out of its misery as it cannot survive in the real world. From there you get two endings, either going along with her and euthanizing the computer creature or finding another way and escaping together with your little friend. This one is based on a very formative Pokemon memory I have when I was first getting into the series and obsessively reading Bulbapedia trying to learn about literally every Pokemon ever, and finding out about Porygon-Z and reading its dex entries (“Its programming was modified to enable work in alien dimensions. It did not work as planned”). It freaked me out! The idea that you could take a living creature and break its body and its mind by installing malware onto it is creepy!! What are the alien dimensions? Is it the Distortion World? Is this ever brought up again? What the hell is up with Porygon-Z? I’ve always kind of wanted to tap into that weird unknowable terror I felt at ten years old reading Bulbapedia. One of my creepypastas (A Wish Granted) takes a lot of inspiration from this feeling and I honestly have observed that a lot of the horror of Pokemon creepypastas is the horror of seeing a dying, suffering animal in pain. So, yeah, that’s the inspiration.

-The Original Horse Game. I’ve discussed it before, it’s basically the idea I brewed down into what would become Clovenglade. Snowy wastes, wild horse taming mechanic, open world, a fairie realm, et cetera. I’ve discussed it before. If I recall correctly I gave the full blow by blow of the plot on my blog shortly after I released the Pony Tales expansion. (God, I need to write up my usual blog post about Galloping Games soon...)

-This one goes way back, I had the idea back in high school. I originally envisioned it as a PS2-styled 3D style but I think nowadays the way I envision it I’d make it a point and click adventure game or with kind of an Daggerfall/MS-DOS inspired aesthetic. The plot was mostly a vehicle to have a werewolf protagonist: every hundred years a werewolf is born in a cursed town who transforms on their 16th birthday. The protagonist is that werewolf, of course, and the tutorial would be that birthday, socializing with your fellow townsfolk and getting birthday wishes in the day before the sun sets and she is transformed and ritually hunted by her friends and neighbors. She only escapes because of her childhood gal pal who manages to muzzle her and hide her away before fleeing from the town. The rest of the gameplay would be about going from town to town, building up reputation and friendship and looking for clues as to how to break the curse while avoiding being found out and keeping your humanity bar high so you don’t transform. If you do transform (which you do every night) and the towns’ hunters begin chasing you, you may have to kill townsfolk you are attached to or risk fleeing. You can potentially sway hunters to your side if you invest a lot of time into building up your reputation/friendship and there’s be a whole questline to discover the secret. Two endings, one where you become a human, and one where you embrace your true self as a wolf of the Carpathians (maybe your reputation would also determine whether your companion would join you in your wolfing).

-Creepypasta virtual pet site, in a very particular kind of way. It’s presented like an old and kind of neglected- but normal- petsite with cute and toyetic designs, kind of Neopets-esque. When you join the site it is seemingly cute and normal enough, there’s even a forum with a huge backlog of posts to read through and minigames and the like, but you notice that the pet you chose at the start has a different username affixed to its profile. And then stuff starts to go... wrong. Blood everywhere, messages of vengeance and anguish, etc, as the pet begins to corrupt the site in a sort of haunting. Basically, they’ve all become creepypasta monsters after their users grew up and abandoned them. To appease each pet you need to discover more about them by interacting and caring for them as well as reading the forum and learning about their previous owner and their life, with each person feeling real and fleshed out. The anguish of their abandoned pets would of course narratively parallel their own and each pet has a different brand of horror it uses to gradually mess with the site. Your job is to find and appease all of them, letting them move on. Once you’ve healed all of their souls, the site is mysteriously shuttered.

So yeah, those are the games I would make. They’d be really cool...

I... I also have some bad news, it feels wrong not to share... I recently witnessed my neighbor's cat get hit by a car. It happened right in front of me. Right in front of my house. She was a dear friend of mine and she always came to visit us and hang out in the garage. In a way she was almost my cat, too. She was the neighborhood’s. I will spare all the horrific gory details but I would like to give a eulogy, because it feels wrong if I don't say anything and pretend to be my normal happy self and that nothing is wrong. It is cathartic to write.

To Cheddar,

When I met you I had no idea I would be the last one to see you alive. I had no idea I would cradle your bloodied body and carry you to the garden- your favorite place, I’m told- hoping for a miracle that would never come. I had no idea I would see you take your final breath. I had no idea. I didn't think things like that could happen to me. I didn't think life was so fragile. I hope you were at peace as your life faded, in that minute that felt like a horrible, creeping hour. I hope you knew I was there to help, as your thrashing grew still as I lifted you into my arms. Everyone keeps thanking me for carrying you to your home to your final rest, but I feel so useless for not being able to prevent what happened. But there was nothing I could have done once that car struck you. Nothing but carry you to peace and call your absent owners, with the burden of sharing the worst news possible. I did my best. I’m sorry.

They buried you with your favorite toys. They're keeping the other cats indoors, now. They're naming the garden for you, they're commissioning a statue of you. But nothing can plug up the absence I feel when I’m switching the laundry to the dryer and expecting to see you, to hear your squeaky little meow, so sweetly demanding because you knew I would always take some time to pet and cuddle you. When Autumn looks out onto the driveway, in his clueless puppy way, thinking you'll be there to greet him, not knowing- never being able to know- what happened. In every moment, I expect to see you there, that this was all just some horrible dream, and in some ways that is more painful than the bloodiest image of you that still dwells in my mind. Somehow more painful than watching your life fade away, watching your last breath escape into the January air.

To Cheddar, I love you, and I hope you know that, wherever you are. I love you so much. May your garden grow, full of endless life that should have still been yours.

I’m sorry to be super serious on my blog- I usually try to post fun stuff- and I’m sorry if that was upsetting but I just wanted to make a little dedication because she mattered so much to me. This is probably the most sudden and tragic loss I’ve experienced in my life and everyone keeps treating me like I’m some hero because I carried her out of the road in her final moments. But there was no world in which I would have left her. It's an impossibility to me. I couldn't have left her out on the asphalt like disposable roadkill. She was my friend, an irreplaceable part of my life in this house, this neighborhood. Please, keep your cats indoors and drive slowly and carefully in areas where pets may be roaming. Don't be like that jackass who didn't even stop when they hit and killed a beloved little calico cat who had run out into the road.

I’ve been distracting myself by working hard on new features for Clovenglade. My lovely little paracosm where nothing goes so awfully wrong. Well, that's a little dramatic... But after I finish up an expansion I usually have a number of little tasks I like to finish up before I am satisfied to move on to the next project. Since I recently figured out some of the things I can do with saving to the browser’s localstorage I have been testing the waters with adding new persistent features and mechanics to Clovenglade, which makes it feel more and more like a real game. Now, you can draw only one card a day, which I always sort of envisioned for the Wellspring but didn't know how to implement. That was actually the start of it. You can also earn a bonus card in the Memory Match game. But I also got thinking about what else I could add! So now.... drumroll please... your furniture layout in Canter Cottage is automatically saved (and I cleaned up the page a little), and all click and drag features on the site should be mobile compatible and much less tedious to code in (I also added reset buttons to all of my dressup games at Laura’s suggestion!).

The Stable also got a little upgrade- your horse’s stats are persistent. They'll get hungry and thirsty and so on every day, but their stats can also decrease naturally when you play minigames, enter races and generally explore around Clovenglade, so it's a good idea to keep an eye on your steed’s condition at least once a day. Not that it does anything but add immersion of course, they can't die or anything. I’ve been kicking around other ideas too, I was thinking about adding in a card binder to the cottage library to view all of the cards you’ve collected so far, as well as a system for coins so you can buy more furniture, pets for your horse, treats, cards, and other stuff (and earn them through races and minigames). All for fun of course, no real cash involved EVER as it is against Clovenglade’s spirit. But it all makes it feel so much like a real game! I am so excited to implement it all. (While I was at it I also made it so that you can save your character on the Warrior Cats shrine, and generate new prefixes and suffixes separately, you're welcome!)

I’m making some extra graphical updates to Clovenglade (mostly making the races a little more flashy) but once those are done I want to work on a new shrine project of some sort... I’m still kicking around ideas for how I want to go about it but I do know what it will be about. Due to vampires being involved I was thinking about having it be presented as a creepy castle to explore with point and click (which I will readily say was heavily inspired by Hallowdaze’s Manor game) but I’m still trying to think of the most seamless way to integrate the analytical text content into the “gameplay”.

That’s all for now. I’m doing better than I was last week when the tragedy happened but I am still horribly shaken by everything. I’ve been working hard and trying to keep my head up. We’re going to buy a catnip plant as a gift for Cheddar’s garden soonish, it just feels right. Being productive is the most comforting thing I can do! My birthday is coming up and apparently the Umamusume movie is going to be in American theatres soon after so I hope I can catch it on the big screen. I showed Laura Road To The Top recently and she liked it and she's excited to watch Beginning of a New Era with me.

Today's song is: Mors Syphilictica - How Long

Today's tarot is: Four of Swords, Nine of Wands, Three of Swords (reversed), The Heirophant, Five of Cups (reversed)

Around the end of 2025 I had liminal spaces on my mind, and the potential horror media that uses it aesthetically. I’ve always found “liminal space” imagery very effective and particularly images of playplaces, children’s libraries, swimming pools, and other examples of “Child Architecture” and I wanted to ruminate on why exactly I find that kind of imagery compelling and how I’d like to see it used in art, since I think a lot of “liminal horror” is kind of missing the melancholia I associate with the imagery. This won’t be super structured, it’s just some thoughts I’m chewing on.

Like, there’s kind of an artifice to it, right? I’ve always loved “indoors-outdoors” architecture, ceilings painted like skies, fake trees, that kind of stuff. When I was a kid I asked my parents to paint the little entrance to my room to look like a cave (I even had a blue sheer curtain as a waterfall). I love that kind of stuff! Liminal spaces are often feel “fake” in their emptiness in the same way. It’s a kind of artificiality even knowing it was once inhabited by other people.

There’s also like, I think I said this before, a comfort-discomfort juxtaposition. My favorite liminal space imagery evokes childhood, a particular era of childhood, but childhood does not necessarily mean safety and simplicity. I find that analysis content on this kind of thing misses the mark- I’ve seen a lot of youtube videos where the narrator will posit that these spaces feel eerie because it makes us long for a simpler time, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. That’s surface level! I think it taps into the inherent contradictions one finds when contending with traumatic memory. The room where you played with all your toys, read books and had sleepovers is the same one where you might have been hurt or first contended with the pain of living. Where something bad happened. These images make you yearn in spite of the horror, the emptiness evoking how this has all been left to rot. Should you let it? Is it okay to want it all back? To want love from the hand that bruises?

...If you can remember that at all. An oft mentioned aspect of this imagery is how it feels familiar, like you might have been there. I think this is in part because these images and their curation generally appeals to the homogenized aesthetics of 90s/2000s American suburban life, a demographic that tends to be pretty online. But this also appeals to the "fallible memory” symptom of trauma, right? Looking at a room that could be anywhere but feeling this crushing sense that something bad happened there or maybe you went there and you have this profound discomfort about it. That’s a real and disquieting feeling to have. Many playplaces and other child-friendly spaces are being abandoned, demolished and more and arcades and playplaces are becoming outdated. This, too, can lead to this eerie feeling of memory in decay.

I have stated many times before that I reject idealized nostalgia, and I think many of these -core and aesthetic movements tend to lionize the past. Y2K and frutiger aero and the like. I think web revival works because it is constructive, it is a willing decision to take the elements from a past incarnation of the web and its ideals to create a better space for yourself. Liminal space imagery and artists who play with it have the potential to do the opposite- to make it destructive. A stripping away of all illusions of the past being simpler, better. An acknowledgement of how much it hurts to grow up. Of the “rot” of the past.

I think “traumacore” as an aesthetic/art movement is probably the closest to “getting it”. As a terribly online tumblr-using teen I used to vocally criticize the aesthetic for “glorifying trauma” but I think that was motivated by an unwillingness to be confronted by art. And like, I don’t know, I think collage-work and recontextualization and playing on these disorienting feelings are all things I love to see in art so I’ve come to respect it a bit. I like how it’s inherently kind of a bit internet-y. So, yeah, consider this my official apology for not being understanding when I was in my teens :P

So that’s that on that. I’ve updated the Wellspring of Memory in Clovenglade, recently, with the new card set! It looks amazing!!! I’ve also made a rather exciting change- a cool card flip animation! AND!!! You can now only pull a card once per tab session which I think is more immersive while also being somewhat of a soft limit. If you really need to pull a card again or want to look at all the new ones right away you can just exit your tab and open it again. It even saves which card you pulled during the browser session and will continue to display it even if you leave the page to explore other areas of Clovenglade. I’m planning to make the memory-match game next, unsure how long that will take but most of the graphics are already done. I also want to add some of the saddles and bridles from the card set to the Tack Your Horse minigame.

EDIT 1/18: HI HI the game is out now! I further edited the limit on the cards both in the wellspring and in the game (which lets you draw a bonus card!) so now it should be once a day. Having it only persist in one tab just wasn't ~immersive~ enough for me. It's still a "soft limit" since you can get around this by changing the date on your computer or using an incognito tab.

ALSO ALSO! I watched Mulholland Drive yesterday and it was AMAZING! It totally blew my mind! Easily in my top 10 movies now, I love toxic yuri. I know it’s a cliche to say Lynch movies are dream-like but I think there is something to be said about how the non-reality half of the film bombards you with imagery and plot threads that are then neatly woven together in the “reality”. It really does make you feel like you’re in Diane’s head as she dreams about this fantasy life, with all the subconscious acknowledgments of what really happened got broken up and mixed into the batter, so to speak. And then when the truth is revealed... God, when I finally got to the bit where we see the context for the recurring phrase “This is the girl.” I GASPED. What a great movie! I definitely need to get around to watching more of David Lynch’s filmography since I’ve been meaning to after I thoroughly enjoyed Twin Peaks and Fire Walk With Me.

I’ve been super busy with work but I am glad about it, I’ve been needing the money and it gives me a huge confidence boost to hear all my higher ups talk about how much they love having me around and how I’m their favorite every single day LOL. (Probably a shoe-in for a raise once evaluations come, right?) I got some Thai food for dinner last night with my Christmas money stash, we walked down to the restaurant because the weather is so nice right now... Life is good.

Today's song is: El Enano De La Catedral - Chirere

Today's tarot is: Six of Cups, Page of Swords, Two of Wands, The World, Two of Pentacles

HAPPY NEW YEAR! I am so glad to be done with 2025, yuck. Super turbulant, stressful year for me. But I did make a lot of cool additions to the website and I made some necessary life changes, so it’s not all bad. I’ve got a new job, and I’m happier with it. I’ve gotten some healthier habits, got some stuff off my chest, and we even grew a vegetable garden. It’s hard to call this a bad year at all, just a difficult one...

At the start of each year, I write up a post with goals for the coming year, and I like to see how many of the previous year’s goals I met. So, let’s do that now!

“I love hosting games on my website!!! To this end, I want to learn a good free engine for making simple web-games. I want to make memory match, breakout, etc. style minigames in particular, which shouldn't be too difficult. I’ve been sniffing at GDevelop. But we'll see.”

Done! I’ve started using Construct 2 and I’ve been really enjoying it so far. It’s perfect for making simple games to put on the site. You can see it in use in the new minigames on Clovenglade. This was my biggest goal since it’s always been a huge part of my “vision” for the site to have games and stuff like that. I am super pleased to have found a tool I like.

“I’d really love to redo the CSS on my OOE shrine so it doesn't use a clunky looking template. Nothing can replace just doing the CSS yourself, and I wish I had actually attempted to at the time! It's just hard to find motivation for this kind of thing.”

Done! It was a pretty simple fix and I’m happy with the result.

“I’ve got plans for a shrine that, if all goes well, should randomize some text on the page-load to give the illusion of the webpage being “alive” and “talking to you” (if you're at all familiar with my tastes in online horror webseries you can probably guess what this shrine will be for.) The concept is that it's an in-universe website for an in-universe media property. I dunno when I’ll get around to this but I think the concept is pretty solid!”

That would be my Angel Hare shrine from late January, which turned out great. If you don’t know what Angel Hare is, it’s an analogue horror/mystery animated cartoon series on Youtube where guardian angels speak to children through the television, so the goal of that shrine was to kind of simulate that, like the angels were speaking to you through the website as well. It was a lot of fun to make and there are a ton of text variations implemented. I’d call this one a success.

“I want to get back into writing music... I wrote a lot of shitty vocaloid music as a teenager but now I want to try actually cooking lol”

Working on it! Kind of. I’m learning bass guitar slowly but surely. I hope to have something out by the end of 2026 maybe but we’ll see.

“I believe I mentioned before my idea to make an interactive pet code snippet that accommodates for any image resolution and can be hosted 100% locally, called LocalPet and based on the code for the Clovenglade stable. That's still on the table as a future plan.”

The future is now- LocalPet can be found via the menagerie directory. It’s a little clunky to set it up but I am pleased with the results, as you can probably tell considering I used it on almost all my virtual pets.

I didn’t write a ton of goals last year. But I did accomplish a lot. I added a new expansion to Clovenglade and the next one is nearly finished. I made another shrine (my Undertale essay) and I made a new Adventure Game Studio game (Werewoods) with some new experiments in using items and boolean logic and having an effect on the game world, and fun stuff, like character customization and a following companion character. I plan to use this experience to its fullest when I do my expansion to Clovenglade’s Go Riding game. And I made the Picture Palace which is one of my favorite pages I’ve made, it’s a virtual movie theatre! I also wrote a novel-length fanfiction. That was fun.

As for my future goals...

-Finish Galloping Games. I only have the cards and one more minigame left to finish!

-More games. I really like having them on my site. In particular I want to put more on my arcade, little standalone projects. It is a road I wish to follow.

-”Cherished Celebration”, the largest Clovenglade update, which will expand the Go Riding game as well as some other features. I want to have it out by the end of 2026 in some capacity.

-Better blog posts. I feel like they’re getting back into “droll life update” territory which I’m kind of dissatisfied with. I want to make more analysis content like that post I did on werewolves. In particular I want to do a full retrospective on Stranger Things now that it’s Over since it was pretty special to me back when season 1 came out and it’s only gotten disappointing from there. I also want to make a post on Hypnospace Outlaw now that I’ve played through it for the first time, though I think I’ll eschew the review format and just write about my thoughts on it. That kinda stuff. I want to shift my focus here to something a little more interesting to read.

-I want to read more, and to write more. I particularly want to make more original works.

-More shrines! I was chewing on the idea of making a shrine for lesbian vampire movies and why I tend to gravitate towards “problematic representation”. Maybe you explore the essay by exploring a castle via point and click mechanics?

-I want to be on my phone less. I’ve been thinking a lot about the sentiment that “the internet used to be a place” (in that, you visit, and you leave, and your computer is the dedicated “space” to engage with it. Like, yeah, I am kind of sick of my attention span being totally shot and always having that constant tether. I want more intention to the way I use the internet and break that addictive loop. Like, the way the infinite slop-scroll of youtube shorts can hook you so quickly is frightening. I’ve tried many ways to wean myself but always “relapse”, so I’m going with the nuclear option- I can’t turn on my phone on my days off unless ABSOLUTELY necessary. I’ve already been spending more time outside, watching clouds, stuff like that. On the first day I enforced that for myself, I saw a woodpecker just in my backyard. I kind of hope that it sticks.

Here’s hoping for a calm and less crazy 2026.

Today's song is: Hypnospace Outlaw OST - Millennium Anthem (2000 New Year’s Eve)

Today's tarot is: Temperance (reversed), Ace of Cups, Seven of Cups (reversed), Three of Wands, The Star