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.

What works best for me, and what has always worked best for me, was the internet I grew up on in the 1990s and 2000s. That internet encouraged creativity and personal expression without a profit motive. Commerce was present, of course, but once those of us who started off on AOL broke free of its user portal, corporate platforms were not the sole means of connecting with other people. People built their own websites and blogs, and shared their thoughts, their passions, their hobbies and inner worlds on a platform they controlled. Video was rare before YouTube, so long-form text posts and pages were the norm. “Surfing the internet” meant actively searching through hundreds of personal websites to see what interesting things and people you could find, following recommended links from pages and people you liked to see more of the content you wanted, and bookmarking the things you wanted to keep coming back to.

That’s the internet I’ve been working to bring back for myself. This website is part of that.

You can think of this website as a little cottage out by the woods, just outside the city. It’s old-fashioned, a little wonky, not anywhere near as sleek as what you’d find in the city, or at any commercial buildings outside of it. This house is an eclectic and antique thing, with the occasional modern convenience worked in wherever it can fit — but it’s warm and welcoming of visitors. It’s just as its occupant likes it. The occupant, when she’s well enough, is eager to share what she’s been up to, what she’s been thinking, or what treasures she’s found over a cup of tea. She is gentle and kind, but occasionally a flicker of rebellion can be seen in her eyes or heard in her voice. If she sees in you a kindred spirit, she’ll happily teach you how she finds joy in an increasingly enshittified virtual world.

In short, the site itself is very much a reflection of me and my interests. 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.