Pictured: Big Boy next to his foe, Better Boy.
Yesterday morning in the midst of a shower I finally remembered I had created this site, so of course I had to come and write a new entry. I've gone through some old entries and pruned them. While they're good for observing my past headspace, I think I was too much of an oversharer, even in my extremely brief time of making these blog entries. Although I doubt I have any regular viewers or followers, I admittedly felt nervous when I saw I had accumulated over 20,000 views on my site. I'm considering removing some tags, just to become a little less visible. Obviously because I am posting on an online platform instead of my own personal paper diary, this is a self-made issue. In the future, if I continue making entries I think I may focus on more innocent and casual subjects. I'd have trouble deleting it altogether, this little site I scrapped together is still comforting to me. And I like looking back and seeing what I was doing and how I was feeling at the time, even if it was messy.
I've gradually become disconnected from the online world but I still think about Neocities from time to time, and the late night hours and days I would spend grueling on code I often barely understood for a passion project I had (lol). I don't use any social media anymore, technically. The exception being for one place, where I just look at and post birds, and that's it. No Twitter, Tumblr, whatever they got going nowadays, etc. I do like to do research in subjects I'm interested in, which does lead me to the unavoidable community forums, but I'm solely a lurker. I rarely glance on Discord, but I have foolishly used it as a place for text and file storage in the past so that keeps me connected to it. But most of the time, I'm disconnected. This keeps me sane. I spent pretty much all of my key years of development online, since the mid 2000s. Maybe that makes me something like one of the first generations of "iPad babies", except I was more like a PC baby. Either way, I can confirm it messed me up.
Left: Anasaitis canosus, the twin-flagged jumping spider, staring at me. I find if you hold your hand out, jumping spiders will just leap onto you. You can make it a game for them to jump from hand to hand.
Right: I'm pretty sure this is a sweet little baby southern toad, Anaxyrus terrestris. We found him while trash collecting and he crawled up my jacket.
So yeah! I do occasionally boot up the PC to do some stuff still. Sometimes I play Brotato, and very rarely TF2. I like TF2 but it's got the kind of community where I have to mute both chat and voice. I recently got a subscription to Cornell Lab's BirdWise which I would really recommend to anyone who likes birds and wants to get better at visual identification! It compares photos of different bird species over and over with the goal that you become able to differentiate them with a high accuracy. It's been really fun to play because it's an effective learning method for me. That said, song and behavior are super important for bird identification when you're actually outside looking at them, which sadly it doesn't offer testing for, at least for right now.
I finally made progress on accepting myself as a woman after nearly a decade of rejecting it since being a teenager, which has been good for me overall. Going too far into detail isn't warranted here IMO, but it's been a crazy rollercoaster ride dominating my life and mental health that thankfully has pretty much slowed to a stop. In a space where I'm safer, have purpose, and have given a true opportunity to reconnect to my original love (nature!), I feel like I've finally started to connect back to the person I was before in a way that's hard to explain. I definitely hate myself and my body less. Phew. Not much has changed in way of my dress or my name.
Speaking of nature (well, kinda), I've finally gotten into fishkeeping, and shrimpkeeping! I keep betta fish and I've only had the confidence to keep ghost shrimp with them, since they're 30c a piece, lol. Eventually I do want to keep neos though. One of them is super chill with shrimp, but the other two seem born to be shrimp annihilators. I also keep hissing cockroaches and a few species of isopods: Cubaris sp. "Panda King", Porcellio laevis "Dairy Cows" and Armadillidium vulgare "Magic Potions". I currently have a lot of hissers because the female of the pair I bought gave birth. For the longest time I thought I only had about 7 little hisser babies, and that something had gone wrong, since Google says anywhere from 15-60 in a clutch. Well, literally several months later, I counted at least 16 out and about in the tank for the first time. I was shocked. Clearly they have lots of spaces to hide in this enclosure. As they get older and grow, they seem to get friendlier and chill out in the open more. That, or they've become too chunky to fit in the hiding spots they used to.
Also, I keep plants now too, which have been an enriching addition to my life. I'm still pretty new to it so I am hardly a connoisseur, but thankfully so far I've managed not to kill anything besides a succulent, which I'm not sure why are marketed as easy plants. I keep a few pothos, a philodendron, a spider plant, a string of pearls and a string of hearts, a lithops, nerve plants, a croton, some catnip, and whatever many aquatic plants I keep with my fish. I also have a venus flytrap but it frightens me ngl. I accidentally killed a few of it's heads due to the soil drying out but it seems to be doing well now in it's current set up. I recently bought a ceramic drill bit set to add drainage to some decorative pots and now my boyfriend and I have developed a slight obsession with drilling holes in things. It's a great way to repurpose old mugs, or make a cute pot out of something else you otherwise wouldn't expect to become one.
Left: My slightly sad looking venus flytrap. Did you know they're only native to the coastal bogs of North and South Carolina? That surprised me for some reason. I guess I'm used to seeing foreign plants.
Right: This custom-made mug from Goodwill clearly has someone's baby on it. I joked that his name was Creampuff and he definitely loved to bite the grandchildren. Not pictured in this photo, but there's a golden pothos in the background of the mug's photo, so I planted golden pothos in it.
So yeah, that's my life right now. Of course I've wrote this while feeling exhausted in the early AMs, which seems to be when I get the most motivation to work on Neocities for some reason. Also a few more things I forgot to add, I've also gotten pretty decent at cooking, I think! And my bf and I have recently gotten into picking up trash, which is giving us even more reason to go outside and bug, bird, and creature watch. But I've rambled enough for tonight, so here's where my entry ends. Goodnight!
Pictured: It was really nice visit to the pond. The weather wasn't too hot that day.
Here's a snapshot of what's up, like those bios that you filled out on dA back in the day:
My daily mood:
A little worn down due to living circumstances but doing good enough regardless
What I'm listening to:
Six Songs for Invisible Gardens by Green-House
My favorite site right now:
BirdWise by Cornell Labs
My current favorite meal to make:
Chicken dip because it's easy as hell to make and very yummy
The bird I am currently seeing and hearing the most of:
Silly little Northern Mockingbirds everywhere :)
The bird I am currently captivated by:
Mergansers and other ducks currently hold my attention.
