If you picture the internet as a virtual world, you might imagine the big social media sites/apps as the major cities. Everything happens there, all your friends are there, and you can spend almost all of your time there without ever having to leave their sphere of influence. Maybe you hop over to a different city when things are boring in your usual haunt, but for the most part, your time on the internet is primarily dominated by these cities, and by the major shopping centres and cinemas like Amazon and YouTube. These places give you everything you could need to fill your time. For plenty of people, that’s more than enough.

Not for me, though.

Don’t get me wrong — in the real world, I like a city. Plenty to do there, and everything in walking distance, or accessible via public transit. But in the real world, they’re not setting up obstacles and distractions with the intention of actively preventing you from leaving. There usually aren’t restrictions in place preventing you from easily communicating with your friends in a different city. Real-world cities, at least outside of the ICE-patrolled United States (I don’t live there), aren’t encouraging people to start fights in the streets for the sake of spectacle and corporate profit. Generally speaking, there is at least a veneer of, if not optimism, then at least hum-drum status-quo to a real-world city.

In the social media virtual city, however, there’s a reason they call it “doom-scrolling.” Everywhere you look, you see new horrors. New headlines being obsessed over at length (with only very few people actually reading the article), new flame wars being fanned, new algorithmically-driven rabbit holes to fall into and potentially radicalise you. The worst of humanity is on full display, day and night, but if you’re lucky someone might post a picture of a cat as a palate cleanser. It’s probably an AI-generated cat, though.

But the internet wasn’t always like that. I mean, yes, there were always flame wars and rabbit holes and general toxicity, but it wasn’t a concentrated firehose that kept you pinned down by hopelessness or constantly angry. Everything wasn’t hand-fed to you by an algorithm in small, high-dopamine bites that kept you addicted and eroded your attention span. Right now I’m guessing about three quarters of everyone who started reading this page got bored and left after the third paragraph because TL;DR. And no shame or shade to any of them — it’s genuinely hard to rebuild your attention span after at least a decade and a half on a steady diet of fast-snack information. That and frankly, most people are overworked and exhausted (or, like me, may be dealing with a chronic illness that makes even reading difficult at times), and long reads may be legitimately overwhelming for them. That’s fine — everyone should do what works best for them.

This site isn’t meant to be a place to market myself. I’m not looking for engagement or followers. I’m not trying to build a brand. At most, building a community would be a lovely thing, assuming enough like-minded people happen to stumble up onto my digital doorstep.

. . . But first and foremost, this site is meant to be my home.

So, you’ll likely find inconsistencies in tone and imagery, and an extremely wide variety of content spanning across my many varied interests, from my various fandoms and artistic creations, to enthusiastic exploration of how to rebuild the Old Web, to magic and spirituality, to health and wellness, to simple everyday thoughts and scribblings in my online journal. I welcome visitors to enjoy perusing the things that interest them, and to feel free to ignore the things that don’t.

The site itself is very much a reflection of me, but for a more compact summary of who, exactly, Nikki Scarlet is, visit the About Nikki page.

If you have questions about this site, check the FAQ to see if I’ve already got an answer for you.

For information on where some of my content may have been sourced from, see the Credits page.