Hello people inside my little screen! The Mystic Ruins now exists in your circles.

In 2022, I created a Notion page called 'The Park'. It was shared between my friends and it housed a range of information; a map of our favourite places in Naarm, different essays or poems we had written, our scores from anytime we went bowling together. The Park was my pride and joy. Don't get me wrong, it's still my pride and joy, and it's still active! But I wanted something more.

I absolutely SUCK at coding. I went to a fancy pants private girl's school that preached about getting women into STEM, but unfortunately I was too obsessed with learning not-code languages to understand python. But now that I've learned how Neocities worked, I'm sad I didn't get more into it. I have autism (can you tell) and the recurring patterns of code and text are so pleasing for my brain.

The Park has grown over almost four years of existence. It grew from just a little field with a playground to its own pseudo-country. Every page inside it had its own name, a reference to something within my friend's lives. Every person also had a homepage, and can you guess what mine was called? The Mystic Ruins, of course! Inside the Mystic Ruins I organised my whole life; schoolwork, art projects, books I read, movies and TV, absolutely everything in my life went in and out of the Mystic Ruins. Inside this page was Tails' Workshop, which was where I organised all my personal projects. It got to a point where if I was working on projects, I would think of myself as in the workshop.

[a pic of tails in his workshop (he so me fr). Source: Sonic Channel]

Now that the Mystic Ruins exists on Neocities, this does not mean the Park will cease to exist. But it means now I have a place to display the things I have worked on to the world. I am addicted to Instagram but I just hate it now. There's so much hate and AI slop and data-theft and AAAAAAAAAAARGH. This new Mystic Ruins is a way to share my thoughts and projects to people who actually give enough of a damn to read about them.

Perfect Timing

Recently I've been having a weird crisis which I will probably turn into a zine, because what are emotions for if not to be exploited for creative profit.

The crisis has some from a realisation that my stance on friendships has been lightly flawed. In my mind, a friend was anyone that I cared about. I realised that this definition did not include an important detail; whether or not these people cared about me. The details of this particular crisis can stay off the internet but it made me realise I don't want to give so much of my energy to people who won't even see the fruits of my mental labour.

This isn't to say I'm gonna stop caring about people forever! Quite the opposite, really. I give my heart to everything and everyone that comes across my radar. But what it does mean is that I'm gonna stop making myself depressed because I try and talk to people who don't even care that I exist. And instead, my thoughts will be relayed to here, a place where only those who are invested enough to seek my thoughts shall find them.

So thank you, dear traveller, for stumbling across these ruins. I hope you will stick around!

Always in your orbit,

andro-venus :)