About this site

I grew up on the early 2000s internet. Quirky personal websites, spending afternoons on Habbo Hotel and Neopets, talking to friends on MSN Messenger, and discovering something new and weird every single day just by clicking around. The internet felt like a place made by people, for people, full of personality and genuinely surprising.

Somewhere along the way that changed. Algorithms decided what you see. Corporations bought everything interesting. Social media flattened the whole thing into a feed designed to keep you scrolling, not exploring. The internet stopped feeling like a place and started feeling like a product.

Riot Couture is my attempt to have a small corner of the internet that feels like mine again. No feed, no algorithm, no ads. Just a website, made by a person, about the things she cares about.

There was something genuinely magical about the early internet that I think gets overlooked. You would stumble onto a website made by some random person in another country about their obsession with a band you had never heard of, and somehow that felt more connecting than anything social media has ever managed. Nobody was performing for an algorithm. People just put things on the internet because they wanted to.

I remember spending hours on Neopets customising my pet pages and playing the same flash games over and over. Habbo Hotel had this energy where you never knew who you were going to run into or what conversation you were about to have. MSN Messenger had custom display pictures, nudges, and leaving your away message up all day so your friends knew what mood you were in. None of it was optimised. All of it was charming.

The thing I miss most is the sense of discovery. Finding a new website felt like actually finding something. Clicking through webrings and link pages, ending up somewhere completely unexpected, bookmarking things to come back to later. The internet had texture. It had corners. You could get lost in it in a way that actually felt good.

This site is my attempt to hold onto that feeling, and maybe add a little bit of it back into the world.

One of the nicest surprises about starting this site was discovering that there are a lot of people who feel exactly the same way. Neocities is full of them. People building personal websites because they want a space that is actually theirs, not rented from a platform that can change the rules or shut down at any moment.

There is something really lovely about the Neocities community specifically. People leave comments on each other's sites, exchange buttons, join webrings, link to each other just because they like what someone made. It feels closer to the internet I grew up with than anything else I have found in a long time. A little chaotic, very earnest, genuinely kind.

Finding like-minded people here has been one of the best parts of this whole project. Queer people, privacy-minded people, old web enthusiasts, people who just want somewhere to be weird on the internet without being watched. It turns out there are a lot of us, and we are all out here building little websites and linking to each other like it is 2004 again. I love it.

If you have a site and you want to be neighbours, sign my Guestbook or find me on Neocities. I would love to see what you have built.

Whatever I feel like sharing, honestly. My interests, my life, my transition journey. Resources I have found useful. Things I think are cool. Pages dedicated to the media, music, and people I love. A guestbook you can actually sign.