Well, what can I say about me? Call me MERRYJEST. 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 composer, 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? In any case, I did my rounds around the internet, alright, in the early 90s.
During the early 2000s I was a psychedelic avatar in the Napping Cat's Dream, which lasted a good ten years. It was a community unlike many that existed on the internet- it all started as a comment board around a webcomic ("Master Zen-Dao Meow"), and it slowly morphed into a roleplaying and social forum, with the comic slowly fading into the background as the setting. It got pretty involved, as the open nature of the NCD made it a nexus of different realities and timelines. The original psychedelic avatars were characters depicted in the webcomic, but eventually things progressed to the point that the state of psychedelic avatarhood would be awarded to members who had made large contributions to the community via art, roleplay, discussions, debate (yes, there were forums for each one of those things), etc.
The creator and writer of the comic, Furilius Pitch, would commission the Psychedelic Artists for art for the new avatar's card and, then, there would be an elaborate post done by The Dancing Yin, the Mistress of the Forum (who embodied the chaotic and changing nature of the Yin principle and acted as a Veronica-type to Zen-Dao's other love interest, Wendy, who was clearly the Betty). The Dancing Yin would recite a poem, complete with dancing art that portrayed the new avatar's apotheosis, and they would receive their shining new card that they could use in their signature. I was lucky enough to be avatar #89, and my card was drawn by the talented SEBY.
I got my card early enough in the dream's history that I didn't get a Dancing Yin ceremony, but rather Furilius Pitch announced the avatars, as you can see above. I'm including a snippet of what a Psychedelic Avatar announcement looked like later in the Dream's history here:
Becoming a Psychedelic Avatar is one of my fond memories from those days, and I made friends through the Dream with whom I am still in touch even after 25 years. In fact, many of us reconnected several years ago and have made a place of our own where we keep tabs on each other. Unfortunately, the more granular legacy of the Dream is lost forever, as the structure of the forums only allowed the wayback machine to archive a tiny part of it. You can see a snippet from 2002 from the Wayback machine here.
My character had cameos in other comics, such as Gaming Guardians and Powergamers. Although each place had its own community attached to it, there really wasn't anything like the Dream... and there really hasn't been anything quite like it since. As the Dream closed its door in 2009, I started wandering around and minding my own thing, taking care of my own projects. As far as we know, the Dream is technically recoverable in some part. Karol Luis has an old drive with some of it, but locating the drive and then getting it to work may be an ordeal in and of itself. Still, it's a project that would be worth looking into sooner rather than later, if at least for archival purposes. As we gravitate away from the toxic medium that social media has become, perhaps it is time for places like The Napping Cat's Dream to come out of the mists again. Who knows?
So what's up with my avatar, my persona- or, I guess, fursona if you will. Right. 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.
What are my interests? Well, I am an avid reader- both fiction and non-fiction, with an interest in history and philosophy. I'm a gamer, I write and - of course- I perform. I'm also interested in online spaces and worlds such as Second Life, where I've been peforming on and off for almost ten years.
Well, now you're pretty caught up to speed! I plan on developing this page and add things of interest as I go along. I hope you come along for the journey and have some fun with me, fellow retronauts!