Originally, I didn't believe I had a right to express anything, and I didn't even consciously understand that I didn't believe I had a right to to express anything. That much has changed. Some sites contain factual errors, and there is much I would express differently now, but I am still unable to connect with life and I am still obsessed with death. Over time not much has changed regarding my personal outlook, although I have tried to examine it from various different angles.

Style Issues:

Over the years, computers, browsers, popular screen resolutions, brightness levels, etc, have changed a lot. Sometimes this has really freaked me out. When I started out creating websites, I was unaware of how many issues there are, or how differently code can display from computer to computer, browser to browser. I experimented a lot. I have decided not to address some of the issues with earlier sites, but to leave them as close as possible to their original form.

Here are some issues with some of my sites:

1. obxesceion. This was the first site. At present, the fonts look fine to me in IE, but very jagged, small and more difficult to read in Firefox and Google Chrome. Originally, the fonts looked smoother, but I think the way they look now in Firefox and Google Chrome are technically more true to the font? This site, and most of the early ones were designed for smaller screens.

2. mia page. When this was created, it didn't look as washed out, pale, difficult to read as it does now. Brighter monitors are now more popular. This site was designed for a screen size more common years ago, and on larger ones it can look awkwardly stretched out.

[Technically, I would consider myself in remission as far as my disordered eating. This is the kind of problem that is never totally 'cured', and I suppose I will have to remain alert to triggers and changes. Years ago, I would have thought it impossible to give up my embarrassing obsession with food, and I suppose it is possible that the process of expressing myself in xesce.net had something to do with this change.]

3. Possum TV. The main image was meant to be adjustable to all screen sizes, but I didn't realize that screens would become less square, more elongated over time, and now some of the image is cut off on newer screens. Plus, on very large screens, the journal pages may display awkwardly. There are also issues with possum movies. I think they display properly in IE but not Firefox. However, most people would be more likely to look at them on YouTube.

[I think this site gives the wrong idea about feeding possums (how much, and what types of food), and over the years some of the original 'facts' about possums obtained from the internet didn't seem to be true of the possums I encountered.]

4. exoterica. On larger screens, the background of the opening page tiles in an awkward way. It was designed for a smaller screen.

5. Fonts might be too small for some people in certain sites, including early ones and my 2008-2012 versions of xesce.net. If a quick zoom in or out is wanted:

ctrl +
ctrl -

7. Blue Tongue Blog and exile on meme st (also a blog) were discontinued, partly because it was unlikely I would ever receive responses (for the exile blog, I commented on some of my own posts). Blue Tongue was eventually discontinued officially when Yahoo360 cancelled blogs. exile was a WordPress blog, and was extremely slow loading, and when working with the software. I had a problem with spam bombing, but managed to fix that by installing Akismet. At present I have no plans to start a new blog. I think I will find it less restrictive to just create individual diary entries, with no rules regarding format. I have tentatively decided to call a new diary exile on meme st and might eventually use it for some of the ideas I originally had for the blog.

8. Psychoanalysis (from Comments, xesce.net 2010). (Sort of a 'style' issue:) This was a creative attempt to apply the ideas of others in analyzing my personal situation. I was trying to get at more facets of the whole, but I suspect it was not academically or intellectually rigorous enough for people to think it was worth considering seriously. Another issue might be that most people don't trust or respect psychology or psychoanalysis. Many people believe the past is in the past, and we shouldn't dwell on it.

9. xesce.net 2013. This version of the site is a fixed size, not adaptable. The main image is large, and I realize this lack of adaptability might be a step backward, but I have decided to leave it. I am finding it harder to gather the energy to deal with websites, and all of the issues that it is necessary to address.

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How many changes to my old sites can I make without losing the original vibe? Do I remove them entirely as obsolete? Or do I include them to provide a timeline, and a way to trace my path through the years? Am I better at expressing myself now, worse, or about the same?

I realize now that what I have to say is complicated enough that it's unlikely I can sum it up quickly enough for large numbers of people, no matter how well I say it. I suppose that's an argument in favour of either keeping it to myself, or picking and choosing who I try to communicate to very carefully, but the reason I had a website in the first place was that I had no visibility in the world, and no way to find others to communicate with. I was extremely isolated. I knew my chances of connecting were slim-to-nonexistent, but it still seemed to me that for myself, I needed to try. I realized that meant I would destroy the illusions some people had about me, and that it might lead to further isolation, but I had reached a point where it seemed to me better to destroy those illusions than to keep people in my life under false pretenses.

Recently, (end of June 2013) I took all of the content off xesce.net. Maybe the surprising thing is that I had managed to leave content up for 12 years before hitting delete. A combination of things led up to it, but maybe it was inevitable that I'd slip back into that pattern. In the past I always eventually destroyed anything I wrote or created.

In the last year and a half, I'd spent more time in online 'social' situations, and some time emailing. There were situations in which I was not appropriately patient. Or polite. Basically, I think almost all of this interaction ended disastrously. Could these things have been fixed? Yes and no. I could have hung in there and 'proved' something like 'yes, I am capable of seeing I lost the plot there and that I have learned something', but the reason I lost the plot would not have been solved by staying around to resolve things. I was a time bomb no matter what way you look at it. I was building relationships on false pretenses. It was only a matter of time before I lost it in other ways.

I began to feel overexposed. I had been reading too many comments of the general public online, the same things over and over. I thought I was contributing something ugly to the world, and probably tainting others I had known with a kind of stigma related to being associated with someone like me, and since the original reason for creating a website didn't seem like it would ever come to be (connection, understanding), it seemed to make sense for me to withdraw and keep it to myself. Maybe it had been necessary to brave sharing myself with the world, and maybe it helped me to understand how I got to where I am, but maybe it was time for a change.

By change, I don't mean that I was ready to move on to a new phase in my life, start living, reaching out, etc. Without the website, the only thing likely was that I would be as isolated as before, but have no presence in the outside world at all. But if no one noticed whether my website was there or not, did that really matter?

Now my assessment is that I need to have a website, for myself, even if everyone in the world thinks it's repulsive, stupid, ridiculous, embarrassing, whatever, or if the only people who visit it do so through misdirected searches. It's my support system. I'm not pretending to help any person in the world except myself. If the website bothers people, angers them, disgusts them, etc, they have the choice to leave. I really doubt young impressionable people will think I'm cool or that I'm making suicide seem cool, but I am not the only influence in their worlds, and hopefully if I have a negative impact there are other messages out there with more (positive) power, for those other individuals.

For all my sites/versions of xesce.net, I have asked for GK's help with the code - except for this new 2013 xesce.net. For this one, the code might be a little ugly, but I have done everything myself.



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