Why I Made a Website

A Disorganized Ramble About Social Media, My Projects, League of Legends, and My Plans For the Future of This Site

12/22/2023

I guess it all comes down to a few factors that I think kind of, I don’t really want to say ruined my life, even if sometimes it really feels like it? But things have really affected how I view myself and my work and sort of the internet as a whole within the last couple of years or so.

Part of it was for sure the pandemic. It started when I was still in highschool, and it absolutely axed my social life. I stopped talking to friends in real life, I started retreating from social media and kept up with them less and less.

Things were always really stressful for me when it comes to social media, modern social media platforms are hardwired to feed you the most “engaging” (controversial inflammatory slop) content possible in an attempt to keep you transfixed and on the site.

With the covid-19 pandemic, with everyone inside and on the internet more often, things were just exacerbated. It served as a catalyst to make the already volatile internet social scene even worse.

Everyone was online, everyone was in their house. People were, dare I say; chronically online. A lot of people got very depressed over the pandemic, including myself. A lot of people learned a lot of things about themselves over the pandemic, including myself.

When the quarantine started, I couldn't handle being on social media anymore. I had been on places like twitter and instagram for a while and stayed on them for a while after the pandemic started, but I eventually just had to delete everything. Even if I didn’t actually delete any of my socials until maybe 2021 or 2022, I don’t really remember very well.

I couldn’t handle it anymore, I couldn’t keep track of everything that was happening. Everyday I felt like I could accidentally stumble onto something that could ruin the rest of my day.

I’ve always been very easily stressed, and in some ways the internet fucks it up even more, and in other ways the internet makes it easier to deal with.

I’m still on tumblr, admittedly it's the only social media I can deal with. Maybe it's just easier for me to curate what I see with it compared to everything else I've tried. I don’t interact with people on it, I mostly just use it for memes.

League of Legends

This was writen before the current patch.
This section is written assuming the reader understands League of Legends gameplay and terminology. It can be skipped, it’s not needed for further sections and their context.
[Click here to be bumped down to the next section]

Over the quarantine I started playing a lot of League. I had been playing since 2018 and being inside all day just gave me more time for it. It's become quite a cornerstone of my daily and weekly activities.

I like League! I think it's a fun game to play with my friends and I’d like to say I’m pretty good at it, or at the very least I’m pretty good at a few specific champions that I think are fun.

In 2022 I took a break from League for about half a year. If you’re reading this, you might be aware about League's notoriously toxic community. It is a multiplayer, player versus player, strategy game. People can get extremely heated about things.

So all of that sort of started ruining the game for me and I had to take a break for like, 6 months. I started playing again back in October of 2022, I think. It’s been a while since I started playing again.

When I came back, I knew that I had to treat and think about the game differently. The break let me calm down, and it was worth it, the game feels much more fun now.

Now I take the game a lot less seriously. It still stresses me out but it’s a bit easier to deal with overall.

I use /fullmute all, every single match. Does wonders. No more spam pings. No more junglers blaming the laners for not rotating when they’re the ones who invaded early and got killed because of it. No more tower diving mids dying because they took 3 towershots trying to get a kill yelling at the jungle for not ganking enough. No more getting insulted for playing the game slightly suboptimally. No more getting insulted for playing the game normally.

In addition to that, I stopped playing summoner’s rift without my friends. Who would have thought that being on call with people constantly made a multiplayer strategy both more fun and significantly easier to play.

I started playing more arams, and diversified my champion pool a bit. Prior to the break I pretty much only felt comfortable playing mid (Diana, Ekko, Lux) and the occasional jungle (Lillia) or support (Seraphine). Pretty much just mages or assassins.

Not that mid lane is bad (well, it kinda is), but when I started playing again I knew I needed to start playing other roles more often, just to have more fun.

I started playing support and adc more often. I got really into Lissandra and Tank diana in arams. I even ended up getting mastery 7 Lissandra a couple of months ago.

The game that gave me the "S" I needed to get my final damn mastery token.

Right now I think adc and support are the roles I feel the most comfortable playing. If I have a friend online playing with me, we can just play in a lane together, and it's much easier, for me at least, to coordinate as an adc and support compared to a top and a jungle for example. It’s nice.

They aren’t live as of writing this, but the current PBE changes are something that really have me excited about. The new void rift, the removal of mythics, arena coming back. It’s all so spicy. As someone who prefers gamemodes like aram over summoner’s rift, I think arena might be my favorite gamemode in all of league.

I’m fine with nexus blitz, the games are fast, but it sometimes feels like a smaller summoner’s rift with added mini games. It’s fine, and I don’t want to say it’s boring, because I don’t think it is. But I have been spamming almost nothing but Seraphine and Lux, and not to toot my own horn but I'm pretty good at both of those champions.

I’m Mastery 7 on seraphine, I only have that on like, three champions. I’ve been constantly having pretty easy games, which might sound great but it gets boring after a bit. Some challenge is kinda nice, slightly.

Am I flexing? No, I'm being correct and based.

The new champion Hwei, holy shit.

He’s kind of hard as fuck to play? His abilities aren’t even that complicated individually, but he’s got 10 of them! Fucking 10 of them!

His splash art is so good though. The artist, Bo Chen, is a really talented illustrator.

So, I do this thing when I play league and video games in general. When I'm stressed, often in a fight or in a game that’s just generally going a bit bad, my hands shake a little bit. I’ll misclick, a lot. It makes Hwei impossible for me to play.

At least with champions like Ekko or Diana or Lux or Seraphine, if you misclick one of your abilities you’re like, fine. They don’t have super long cooldowns on all of their abilities. Like yeah it’s embarrassing when you miss an ability when you didn’t even mean to cast it but you’ve got like 2 or 3 other abilities to fall back on, and that scuffed q or whatever will be back in like 5 seconds.

Hwei’s cooldowns are so fucking long though. He has 10 abilities, 10 ways to misclick and like, 15 second long cooldowns.

My own personal hell.

I didn’t really like his design when he was initially revealed, but his spell effects are so pretty, they go SO hard. Though playing him on the pbe a couple of times I grew to like his design a bit more, his joggers and slippers and off the shoulder top are kinda cute, he’s emo.

But that’s enough about League, that’s not really why I'm making a website. This ramble got away from me. I’m kidding, I plan on making a page with all of my league stats because live, laugh, love or whatever and is actually a pretty big factor in me working on the site now.

The Meat and Potatoes Of It All

The biggest reason for me making this website, I think, is that social media makes it very hard for me to share art, character designs, and information about my world or stories. Even just talking about my characters, who I think about almost all the time, casually is hard.

I even find it hard to do over someplace like discord. I have all this high concept worldbuilding and story bullshit in my brain, but don’t even know where to start. I don’t even have most of my worldbuilding written down, my brain doesn’t have folders, that’s not a smart organizational system.

Like, I want to do things with my stories and my worldbuilding and my characters. I don’t want it all to just be things that sit there in my brain and draw once but never again.

I wanna make comics, I want to actually design my characters that are only ideas, I want to make cool illustrations. But I haven't really been organized enough to have a comfortable starting place with anything.

In comes the website. Here I plan on making sorta-but-not wikis for my projects. Everything will probably be forever a WIP but it's better to have this stuff somewhere than nowhere.

My main projects, as of writing this are Unfundamental and The Abyssal Saga. I have some side projects, mostly pretty small in scope comics, but I'm less married to finishing them. Now, don’t get me wrong, I still love my side projects, but they haven’t been all-consuming like the aforementioned main projects.

Unfundamental

Unfundamental started out as a joke between me and some friends in a middle school music class.

I remember the moment it started weirdly well. It was in October of 2016. It was close to halloween but a few days before, though I don’t remember a specific date. Somewhere in the ballpark of the 20th to the 29th.

I had just come out as trans to my immediate family, close friends, and a few teachers I trusted. “Just” as in less than a week prior. This project has a lot of, not angst necessarily, but it’s heavily influenced by my transness and my experience with it even if it’s not explicitly about “Being Trans™”.

Unfundamental’s original concept was basically “what if chemical elements where people.” Not quite humans, but people. Things with character designs and personalities.

When the project started, it didn’t have a name. For a month or so it cycled between me calling it, because I was bad at naming things, “118 Nerds” and “Table of Nerds.” There wasn’t much of a reason behind either of these names, not that there had to be but the most thought I put behind either of them where:

• “There are 118 elements.”
• “They’re on a table.”
• “People who know science are nerds.”

But it was fine, they were intended to be used as placeholders anyway. Eventually I kind of settled into calling it “Table of Nerds.”

The very first character was hydrogen, of course. I don’t have the original art anymore since it was done in a sketch book I've absolutely thrown away at this point. I do have some older concepts I drew digitally after the fact though.

Old (2016 or 17) ms paint art featuring old designs for "Hydrogen", "Helium", "Lithium", and "Berylium." Names in quotes since they have human names now.

There wasn’t really a story or lore when this started, they were just characters I drew just to draw. That worked for me for a while, but eventually I wanted an actual direction to take the project in.

I don’t really remember much of it, since I deleted a lot of my old documents out of shame probably. Some of the original worldbuilding for “Table of Nerds,” when it actually got any, was that they were post apocalyptic humans (keep this fact in the back of your noggin for later). Each element was a human species offshoot, or something.

I remember I had written part of a script for a comic chapter or episode or whatever you call a single really long installment of an infinite scrolling webtoon. The main characters featured where a hydrogen, carbon(or maybe an oxygen?), and an iridium. The iridium was doing magic tricks and the others were watching. I even remember specifically getting to the point of thumbnailing for the comic on Medibang on an old table. I eventually super broke that tablet by stepping on it.

Of course I never really finished any of that, which is fine, I was like 15.

Eventually I changed the name again. By 2018 I was calling this all “Valence.” It’s a chemistry term, it sounded sci-fi.

The worldbuilding and characters got jostled around a lot, I would change things drastically every few months. At one point it was a thing where each element was a country-but-not? Something like that. And every few years they had a hunger games with a representative from each sent off to do death battles for their country’s political gain.

Wrote exactly a page worth of script for that version. I Made a lot of character references though, I keep them all on google drive as backup. I was going to share them but got #embarassed about it.

Late 2020’s references are kind of a mess, since that year was when I was transitioning out of the hunger games aspect of worldbuilding into a more general element themed dystopian post-apocalypse. I also hope to eventually port them over to the site.

At this point, even if my worldbuilding had for a long while had allowed for duplicates of an element, I was super allergic to not having a “main character” for each element. Like I was at the point where I legitimately thought “finishing the entire table” was a reasonable goal for myself.

For context, by this time I had multiple friends who also had element personification projects, and we all met through that. I think part of the reason why I thought I had to “finish the table” was just because I saw some of them doing that and thought I was supposed to do that also, or something.

Around 2021 I had finally settled into the worldbuilding that I have now. I won’t get too into it since this blog is already running long but basically:

• There's earth.
• There’s a secret second dimension with element/fundamental force elder gods in it.
• Leakover from the second dimension into earth give humans element powers.

When humans started getting this coincided with an apocalypse where like, monsters based on compounds started wrecking shit. Why are compounds monsters? For funsies.

Ecological devastation and like 300 years later people live in at least one corpocratic domed city and antics ensue.

There aren’t really rules for what people look like on an element basis, like sometimes, yeah, I’ll base a color scheme off of the element’s compounds or flame test or something but whatever I feel like. Non-radioactives need normal skin colors though, but anyone can have blue hair and pronouns.

Speaking of radioactive, I really like designing them since they’re the ones I let look like freaks. There aren’t really rules for what sort of “mutation” they have. Some of them are part bug and some of them are part shadow, it’s whatever.

For extra fun points I've deduced to implement isotopes as a way to have normally stable elements be radioactive sometimes. One of my hydrogens for example being an H-3 (and also the most recent iteration of the very first element I personified.)

The main setting is Tellus, a city vaguely somewhere on the east coast so that they can have a beach for beach episode purposes. And instead of having a centralized government everything is run by the big corporations who are in an uneasy alliance with each other.

Their money is printed by Pendragon, which is basically google and amazon combined.

Dunno how to segway into this but radioactive aren’t treated very nicely. It's a whole plot and lore thing that’s just become relevant over time as I've written stuff. It used to be really clunky conceptually and I'm still working on it.

They’re not literally radioactive or anything, but I guess they can have powers that produce radiation but most elements can explode or melt your face off so that’s not really the most bonkers. Though even then I don’t really give my characters the most “scientifically accurate” powers because sometimes I want my characters to be freaks.

I have a guy who can possess people. Plutonium can’t fucking do that, it just blows up and glows.

My obligatory evil scientist organization, OMEGA, is basically a weapon’s manufacturer that studies powers to make them into more betterer weapons. They experiment on radioactives but don’t worry about it.

Actually, do worry about it, the reason why radioactive are “useful” for OMEGA is because they tend to have mutations that directly have something to do with their powers. Since OMEGA is an organization with a focus in studying powers, they find them incredibly convenient as a resource.

Omega is also studying the Fundamental Force elder gods to use them as weapons to possess people with yayyy.

The Abyssal Saga

The Abyssal Saga is a newer project, I started it in around mid 2021. It’s my more fantasy project out of the two and unlike Unfundamental I have no plans to make it something like a comic. It's just a collection of worldbuilding and characters right now.

It’s more of a for fun project and idea dump than Unfundamental since that one is very “we live in a society” and this is more “there are magic people.” It’s not like I'll never use The Abyssal Saga to talk about heavier stuff but the emphasis isn’t really on that.

The main thing with The Abyssal Saga is that it's a big magic world with a sort of elemental magic system (but not those elements) except there are 12(+1) elements and they’re less elements and more schools of magic?? They’re called elements in universe at least.

The elements are reality, dream, life, death, order, chaos, light, shadow, fire, water, air and earth and each element has a god associated with it. There's even a 13th extra evil element called destruction, for funsies.

All of the gods are based on the constellations in the zodiac (the 13th evil destruction element god is ophiuchus) because stars are neat and there are lesser gods called dragons based on the other constellations. They’re called dragons because dragons are cool and I wanted a thing called dragons in my setting without them being just monsters.

The Abyssal Saga is a much larger setting than Unfundamental, it's focused on an entire continent instead of just a single city. There’s a lot more worldbuilding things I could talk about here since I’m in the process of actually going and writing everything down. Like, some of the stuff I could mention might change so I won’t bog this already long blog post down with that stuff.

But, it’s my blog so I can leave you with a bulleted list of things I have:

• Demon lizards
• Robot space angels
• Fake people
• A mountain ranged made out of magical, highly mutagenic crystals
• Robot space angels
• Goat people
• Furries
• A Doomsday cult
• Au versions of my Unfundamental OCs

Plans and Closing Words

I plan on using this website to catalog all my worldbuilding since I've been really unsatisfied with other venues for doing that. Things like toyhou.se and world anvil are fine, I guess, but I've learned over time that the things I want out of a repository like that are so specific it's just easier to make a website for it.

I feel like having a website I have complete visual control over is going to really help me in the long run, plus knowing html and css is like, actually a pretty good skill to have i’m realizing.

If you got this far, genuinely thank you for reading. I’ve never written anything like this before and it was really nice.

This might be unorganized and unwieldy, I never really had much of a train of thought and just thought it'd be a good idea for me to write all this stuff down. I didn’t even necessarily make this for other people to read (I posted it publicly anyway because like, I didn’t not want people to read it). Like, writing is really hard for me.

I’m going to be trying to post a blog at least once a month, but I mightt have a second one done by the 31st about league of legends maybe?

Originally I was going to post this on the 31st, it was going to have an extra section but uh, things have happened? Or I guess I’ve chosen to do some things and post this now and post the extra section as its own, more fleshed out blog at a later date.