my website, swedish cults, college, and the heat death of the internet

February 22nd, 2026

i’ve had a website for as long as I can remember. my own personal chunk of the internet started as a blogger blog that i somehow convinced my parents to buy me a domain for evolved into the site you see today. i’ve jumped from blogger to tumblr to github pages and now finally to neocities, building and scrapping the pages styles almost yearly at times, with the sites purpose changing with it. at first, it was a blog for development of my small flash games, then a place to showcase my professional applications to be employable at a company seeking young and aspiring developers to join their ranks, and now, whatever this is haha.

because this place has existed throughout my life, it has changed drastically with me. i’ve always struggled to find a personal “brand”, not knowing how to represent myself to the world when i don’t fully know myself either. its changed themes drastically through the years, starting as an embodiment of my depression, shifting into more bland corporate blank slates devoid of personality.

as ive gotten older and transitioned, ive been soul searching and figuring out what it means to be me. this has mainly been an offline thing for me, with the exception of my coming out post. ive had too much work at snoozy to even think of myself as an “online persona”, and the state of the internet has only pushed me away from wanting to think about it for a long time.

recently, after feeling some doom about the state of bluesky and its not very trans-friendly ownership, i did the usual and look for a new social media to call “home”. i tried mastodon for a while, and while i met a few cool people on it, it fail to really catch my attention for long.

after i put the app down, i thought a lot about what that even means. mastodon didn’t provide me with a stead amount of dopamine for me to justify using it. is that mastodon’s fault, or how i have been conditioned after years and years of social media to think thats what i need in an internet space?

im not alone, there’s a large number of people who are just kinda, sick of it all. with the rise of ai slop, we’re really seeing it come to light. more people are quitting social media daily, returning to a more physical life.

i grew up on the internet. it gave me some of my closest friends, and hell i found my partner on twitter before elon burned it to the ground. a life without it honestly sounds… scary…

that being said, i knew i was missing out on something. i mean hell, how do normal people do it?

so last year, and more recently this winter, pearl and i flew to sweden to spend some time at spelkollektivet, a gamedev co-living and working space, because while we wanted to spend more time irl, i have a company to run haha

my time at spel has honestly been some of the most refreshing time i’ve had in the gamedev space. its nice to talk to people who share my interests face to face again at this scale, the first time since college. hanging out with people, adventures to the nearby town växjö, and even having massive hytale lan parties has been some of the most refreshing time i’ve had of late. i think the main reasons people look at it and think “it’s a cult” is because the people who go always wants to go back, and imo thats because it has a real, unfiltered, no bullshit community.

i feel like i had a taste of that in college, but it was heavily diluted by a massive amount of “professionalism”. my therapist is probably so sick of me talking about college lol.

the best way i can describe the vibe of my school is to paint a picture. its march, 2019, and im off with a large group of friends to GDC. the previous weeks, i have been incredibly anxious, as both faculty and my friends have been pushing me to find parties to network at. my school has beaten into my brain that i have to give as many people as possible my business card or ill never make it in the industry, and the only way to do so is to beg someone at a big triple a company to hire me.

anyway, i did train jam, and had an absolute blast making something. i get to GDC and proceed to basically lock myself in the airbnb or awkwardly wander around the show floor. i went to like one party that i fucking hated, and i ended up taking a day off and walked around the town where we were staying and made a box of kraft mac and cheese shapes (fight me they hold the cheese better). the ENTIRE time i was getting flack from my peers for not networking enough, not putting myself out there, not getting black out drunk at parties and waking up with puke in my mouth and 5 business cards in my pocket from people i don’t even remember. i hated my school’s idea of networking, and these days, my “network” are all a bunch of cool people that i befriended that JUST SO HAPPEN to also be gamedevs.

but to get back on topic, my website was poisoned by this shit as well. when i got to college, my website was a tumblr blog. one of the FIRST things i was told is that no one would care or read my blog, and that i should convert it to be a stock portfolio. i unfortunately did, and it took YEARS for my blog to return, which regularly gets brought up to me in random conversations (i think like 5 people have mentioned that they have read my posts to me, which is insane to me). i just remember it being so demotivating deleting everything i built, and for what? the idea of landing a shitty triple A job? one with almost no job security and massive yearly layoffs?

i continued to refine my website, making it more and more professional. i asked a ton of people for advice and feedback, turning it more and more into a soul-less site rather than a personal page. one change hurt like hell too. i remember i asked my mentor at the time for advice, and they told me to take my face off my website, because i “wasn’t a looker”. my pre-transition, depressed, and self-hating self cried when i went back to the dorm that day, and i took my face off my website.

for anyone who doesn’t know my story, (what a weird post to learn about me from) shortly after college, i started my indie studio snoozy kazoo, and for the last 5 years i have been making my own games full-time with an amazing team. anyways, this website has just been, sitting here. i refined it shortly after turnip boy robs a bank to make it slightly more personal, but it still had its professionalism baked in. i used it as a platform to post my coming out story, and its just been around since.

after putting down mastodon, i started working on a new version of my website. life got in the way, so it was delayed for a little to focus on our new game rizz dungeon, but i ended up sitting down during a free weekend and finishing up a small v1.

this version is important to be, because while it isn’t the coolest, flashiest site on neocities, its more ME than my website has been in a decade. its edgy, unprofessional, and fuck, it has a picture of me AND my girlfriend (who thinks i’m a looker) front and center on the homepage. im proud to be myself, im proud of the work ive done, and im proud of who i have molded myself to be as part of my transition. i dont fucking care about “professionalism”, i just want to be ME.

as time goes on, this website will change. i will be inspired by more sites to do weirder and put more things on here. i will redesign pages, rewrite descriptions, hell maybe put some games on here as playable html things. i don’t know what the fuck ill do next on here, but i will guarantee it will be incredibly ME, and no platform, mentor, or industry peer can take that away from me