Well, what can I say about me? I started my forays into the internet as a wee lad in the late 90s, telnetting into MUCKs, MU*shes and MOO*s and browsing the nascent Web using NETSCAPE, all through the untamed power of a 14,400 modem. In those days, that was pretty close to a Mercedes in the information super-highway (well, not really, but you do what you can to cope). I somehow managed to miss the cool old tech like BBSes (which are still around, believe it or not), but still managed to hop on at the point in which computer tech still had enough of a component of FIOY (figure it out yourself) to grow technically competent. Anyone who spent hours trying to get their games to run on their DOS machines knows exactly what I'm talking about (I'm looking at you, Lord British and your Ultima VII).
I had many aspirations when I was a teenager: I wanted to be a visual artist, an opera singer, a writer and a game developer. Funnily enough, I've managed to actually accomplish a good chunk of those- I am a full-fledged opera singer, and the media that surrounds this site is art of my own making. I've had some of my poetry published in anthologies... and I'm still working on the gamedev side of things.
But hey, baby steps, right?
This isn't my first website, but it is the one I've put the most personal effort into- going back to the basics and doing it like in the good ol' days of hand-coding HTML, just like my first website in Fortunecity, where my webcomic was hosted.
Oh, right! I used to have a webcomic called The Nightyard in the early early 2000s. It did fairly well at the time, for yet-another slice-of-life webcomic about a guy coming out of the closet...
I know, I know. But it was still not a thing everyone and their uncles had done by that point! In any case, the webcomic got enough circulation and eventually got to participate in the second annual Keenspot Great April Fool's Day Comic Switch. Following a catastrophic hard drive failure and the collapse of furtopia (where the strip eventually moved), all traces of the webcomic are now lost to the sands of time. Even the Belfry comics index lists it as lost. I had to recover for a moment at the surprise that the BCI was still around. I don't know why it's that shocking, to be honest, considering Gopher is still around, so. I even got fan-mail! Unfortunately, I no longer have a copy of the fan-mail I received because I had Gmail at the time... no. Not Google mail. The original Gmail, which is no longer around. Yes, I had Garfield mail. But having an email that read merryjest(at)catsrule.garfield.com was simply too good to pass up, okay?
My avatar, my persona- or, I guess, fursona if you will. I am technically a furry- although I meet some of the requirements to be labeled as such (an interest in anthropomorphic characters), I'm not active in furry communities exclusively. I haven't been to a furry convention in over fifteen years, and the last time I attended a furry meet, Barrack Obama was still president. I'm not exactly typical. I'm not a typical opera singer, either, and most of the time I tend to gravitate towards doing my own thing instead of playing into group dynamics. It's not that I'm antisocial (I'm extremely extroverted), but I don't consider myself as belonging to any one group exclusively. That's probably because I have a very wide array of interests, and the fandom-obsessive lifestyle is a little bit too restrictive for me.