[I'm reusing my MelonLand admission essay for signing up for the forum here, with only minor edits, since I think it captures my feelings and where I'm coming from well.
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Hello fellow web revival people!
My web alias is "WraithGlade", which coincidentally is also the name of my Neocities website.
I'm proud to say I've updated my Neocities website at least once a day every day since its creation and intend to continue doing so! Most of the updates are just in the "Journal & Changelog" page of my site. I'm a person with very diverse interests and so I often end up spending a lot of time exploring many obscure topics, so sometimes it takes a long while for updates to the other pages of my site to happen, but I always document what I'm up to on my journal page at least!
More personally speaking, I am here because the web revival movement (among other things) has helped me to gradually revive some of my creative spirit and hope, which in contrast was in rough shape for most of the past decade or so.
I used to work as a AAA video game developer at a well-off company (a job I got immediately out of college), but the work environment became toxic for me (as often happens in the AAA game industry unfortunately). This, combined with the increasingly suffocating creative environment of the dominant exploitive parts of the internet, caused me to have trouble creating anything at all for the past decade despite previously being a AAA game developer.
The end of college right before getting that job was when I was most creatively functional.
Luckily though, stumbling upon the web revival movement and forums like this one has restored much of my hope for the future of the internet and for having a voice of my own with meaning and reach.
I have thus been able to recently start creating again gradually, whereas before I was so riddled with anxiety and bad conditioning from my previous toxic experiences that I could hardly bear to even open a compiler or an art program (etc).
The web revival movement (plus other constructive and boundary setting changes I've been making to my life) has helped me to gradually heal and to become increasingly creatively functional again, one step at a time.
Basically, the TLDR is that I'm a partially creatively traumatized ex AAA video game developer who is trying to repair the creative ecosystem of my own mind, and looking for like-minded and compatible individuals to share a community with such as here on the MelonLand forum.
I hope you will accept me into your community. Likewise, I intend to treat you all with the high degree of dignity and nuance that any kind of community requires to be (and to stay) healthy and constructive.
Thank you for reading and have a wonderful day/night/etc!