A Small Update + Thoughts on the Upcoming Year
Hey. It's been another minute. I really don't mean to keep letting my website stagnate for months before making the updates I planned for (like the Shrines for example), but I keep getting burned out. I keep cycling between being super productive and burning out and doing little to nothing effort-intensive for weeks or months. Whether that's building my website, making pixel art or writing. I might talk to a doctor about that at some point, because I really would like to do all these things without my brain turning into fuzz all the time.
Anyway, we're now coming up on the end of 2023. Which means that this website has been up for almost a whole year now. I thought I would've done a lot more with this website by now (seriously I have so many fun little ideas I've been wanting to implement this whole time). But it's still cool to have crafted my own little space on the world wide web over here and to have met some cool and amazing people on Neocities.
Honestly, I'm not looking forward to 2024. The reason for that is very tied into US politics. So I'm putting it in a little clicky box right below this sentence so you don't have to read about that if you don't want to.
Warning: Discussion of anti-LGBTQ+ politics
I hate to drag politics into this space, but living in the US right now as a queer person is making this near impossible. The Republicans are trying their hardest to make being queer illegal. They signed hundreds of bills attacking trans people's rights alone.
2024 is an election year, which means that there's a chance that the Republicans will win. If they do, they're planning on enacting something called Project 2025. Basically what this means is that they plan on installing a dictatorship. All same-sex relationships and the existence of transgender people will be deemed "pornographic", and they plan to outlaw porn. Which makes being queer in public illegal. This means that if they succeed, I may very well have to remove all mentions of queerness from this website. If things get really bad here, I might even become legally obligated to hide who I really am in public, or worse...
Sure, I live in California, one of the bluest states ever, but this is still really scary. Being a trans lesbian is a big part of who I am and I don't want to have to give it up just because some people are disgusted with people who aren't like them. It's part of why I made this website in the first place, to express my true self as freely as I want. If I can't do that, then what's the point?
It's very possible that they won't win and that everything will turn out fine. But I can't help but worry because everything I hold dear seems to be hanging in the balance right now.
Despite all this, I really do hope that the next year will be a good one. I hope to do more things with my website, including some reorganizing and maybe a site redesign. And also to be more productive in other areas of my life too. I really wanted to write some stories but I've been hit with major writer's block this year. Hopefully 2024 will be the year I write more than a few words down? Who knows.
See you all next year. And by that I mean in a few days. :p