Hey there!

My name is Lian or Lianna, and I am the webmaster (webmistress? webmattress?) of this site, Libre Town. In real life, I am a 23 years old agender/nonbinary person who is working on their degrees in linguistics and computational linguistics at a popular university in Germany. However, I am more than that. If you clicked on this page, you probably want to know more about who I am, so stay tuned and keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times.

Hand-drawn anthropomorphic bunny character with green and black hair holding a Monster Energy can.
Commission drawn by the wonderful KardiaIsLazy, here in a resized version.

Table of Contents

Because this page is quite long, I decided to make use of some newfangled technology: a table of contents.

Click the yellow headlines in this list to get transported to their corresponding position on the page, and if you want to, use the yellow 'back' links throughout the site to return to this here table of contents.

  1. Personal Biography
  2. Hobbies
  3. Me and the Web Revival
  4. Points of Contact

Personal Biography

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I was born in February of 2001 in Westphalia, a midwestern region of Germany. I fortunately had the luck of growing up in a loving family who supported me in my interests and whims, especially when it came to learning about the world. I was a child who did not particularly care for other kids or child-appropriate activities, but instead always soaked up knowledge and sought the company of adults. This, more coincidentally than anything else, led to me reading and writing fluently before elementary school. Therefore, it was decided that I was to be "diagnosed" as a gifted child, and I was put in special socializing groups for others my age with similar fates. All that, in combination with the early blooming mentioned earlier, led to me entering elementary not at 6 years of age as is customary, but when I was 5. In addition, I skipped first grade and immediately entered second grade since they considered it silly for me to enter first grade if I could already read and write.

This all may look like a huge privilege, and in some respects it was. I don't think it actually was that great in retrospect. It made me two years younger than everyone else in my class and unfortunately, pretty arrogant and isolated among the others, with me considering my peers of the same age childish and not "worth my time", thinking of myself as "mature for my age" and essentially better than them. In other words, the "giftedness" totally went to my head and I became insufferable. I was sensitive to criticism, to any kind of emotional hurt and anything I perceived as infantilization, so I did not get along with most people, especially the kind of adults who bend down to kids and put on a high-pitched voice to talk to them.

This, paired with the constant age difference throughout life, caused me to miss out on almost all social aspects of childhood and youth, since nobody wanted anything to do with the weird attention seeking kid two years younger than everyone else. No sleepovers, no friendships, no relationships, no summer camps, no clubs. I was sensitive, easily hurt and opinionated, which was why I ended up not being fit for challenging activities like sports, friendships or outdoorsy stuff and instead decided to isolate from everyone else and spend my early life in front of the computer. In retrospect, this circumstance and the lack of affection from anyone except my parents, who even were a bit more emotionally distant (although no less loving) than others, explains a lot about my current-day mental health issues. I have not known affection or friendship until way later in life.

It was this age that I grew up on a wide variety of video games, forums, programming, fandoms and everything digital. After years playing Nintendo games and miscellaneous DVD retail PC titles I don't particularly remember that well, I finally discovered and spent all of my free time playing Minecraft; which became my main "fandom" and portal into the world. Let's Plays, modding, forums, adventure maps, song parodies, the whole package. But I also discovered a wide variety of other games, mainly more Nintendo games, Midtown Madness 2, Civilization, the Sims, Spore, among many others. I learned some programming, knew my way in and out of a computer, and generally spent my free time on the internet. I ended up meeting my first girlfriend (boyfriend at the time) in 2014 on a Minecraft forum when we were both in our teens, along with my first-ever real friends. Through them I entered the furry fandom and therefore became a Minecraft-obsessed gay teenage furry (the horrors!), and started embracing my own queerness, although I had no word for it back then. I had known for a long time that I was kinda gay, but this was the time I really started making experiences in either direction and began thinking about my identity.

My real life stayed largely untouched by this online social renaissance though and I still did not find (or seek) any real life friends. I did have some people I enjoyed being around during recess and all, but this never extended beyond the school day. This only changed in 11th grade, when due to never having learned how to study efficiently, my grades fell to the point where I had to retake the year. Naturally, this meant I had to meet an entirely new year of people and leave my old classmates behind. In the new classes, I found my first real life friends, with whom I bonded over common interests in gaming and roleplaying! At this point, I enjoyed being in the background of a social group, talking to everyone and getting to know everyone's secrets and hidden woes as they were venting to me, and subtly using these to steer the social group in this or that direction to benefit them all; for example, subtly pushing two people who I knew secretly had crushes on each other to finally date. Have you read Jane Austen's Emma? That was me. I never used that manipulativeness nefariously, of course, although it unfortunately made me into a compulsive liar, a habit I worked a lot on getting rid of throughout young adulthood.

Around 2017 or 2018, one of the people I liked most in that friend group outed herself as transgender. This was something I was very interested in as soon as I heard about it, admittedly mostly as it generated a lot of drama, intrigues and division among the friend group, things that made school life more interesting, and because I had a crush on her. I realize now how tasteless that attitude on things was, but at least I did stay supportive throughout the darker times, especially as trans-related conspiracies and abuses within the friend group cooked up about this all and reached the entire school over time.

In 2018, still firmly within that friend group, I also decided to transition, just as I graduated. I cannot remember the specifics why, but in hindsight I believe it was just a way to leave my "old self" behind and become a person I liked more, mostly following the example of my trans friend in school. Remember the lack of affection throughout life? I assume I thought that the transition would make me into a more likable person, somewhat pressuring myself into it as a last resort option to fix my life. After graduation however, keeping in touch with my friends got harder and harder and eventually faded out entirely. And partly I also left them on my own grounds: being trans politicized me and I ended up being active in a local socialist youth organization, and the people I met there were better friends than I ever had in school. I finally learned social skills and worked on losing a lot of my arrogant and antisocial tendencies. As I grew I also realized a lot of problematic attitudes and jokes that were commonplace throughout school and my (then former) friend group in particular, like "joking" apologia for the crusades, offensive "jokes" about minorities, ironically excusing fascism or German nationalism, all the ironic alt-right memes and the prevalence of cringe culture harassment of others. All those suddenly were very obvious in hindsight and I am glad I left those toxic circles behind, even if (thank god) I never participated in that behavior in particular.

I barely have any memories of my transgender phase, but I know that I flourished for a while, making real friends for the first time and getting rid of a lot of the toxic traits from my teenage years. I also remember vividly how the political part of things was very healthy to me: I took on responsibility, began to study linguistics at a university I was referred to by a friend in the organization, I had real friends all of a sudden, took the train to dozens of cities and towns and protests all over the country, and I made a hell of a lot of experiences during that time. I had regular meetups to attend, festivals or events to go to practically all the time, I learned a lot about history and political and economic theory, and I even got myself into trouble here or there at protests. It was the best time of my life, really, but one I never want to relive.

Unfortunately, these things do not last forever. Certain toxic parts of my personality survived even beyond the transition; an attention seeking and very self-centered narcissistic attitude led to me taking on political responsibility more for the title than for anything else. I was super confident in my gender identity and very forward about correcting people on pronouns and names, sometimes to an unreasonable and combative degree despite my lack of 'passing'. I still often behaved arrogantly and egotistically and hurt people I loved. Most of all, I realized that none of my male socialization had gone away, and I was still acting, interacting and thinking like a guy, and that it was completely obvious to everyone around me.

Eventually, all this got way too much, especially since I realized that nobody was actually taking my gender identity seriously for the above reasons. People were, essentially, just pretending to play along. I stopped going to parties or gatherings throughout the latter half of 2019, and when Covid hit, I was barely active anywhere at all. I had to move out of toxic situations that I got myself into often and my mental health deteriorated. I realized how insufferable I was and quickly, this house of cards I built up with my identity began to crash as I realized that I was not authentic in my gender identity or personality at all, that I was mostly just a guy playing a role that I could never fulfill each day instead of being myself, that I was talking myself into all kinds of mental illnesses that I really didn't have (mostly for attention) and that I myself was the reason people pushed me away.

I retreated from most of society during Covid except for my partners and one or two closest friends. I suspended my transition and went into something of an identity limbo. I just lived day-to-day and lost most of my social life and progress in the process. I gained a lot of weight, and most of all I grew really bitter with the world, with my failed transition, and with people who were more fortunate than me. I was cynical about everything, attempting to eradicate every sliver of vulnerability or emotion from my life, because I bought into cringe culture entirely, just mainly directed at myself. At times, this bitterness and frustration led to me pushing away even more people, which in turn dug me in even deeper.

Throughout 2022 and 2023, I recovered but only partly, coming out of my shell more often and trying to reconcile my failure at transitioning with a nonbinary or agender gender identity I feel at least a bit comfortable in. I still suffer from a lot of bitterness and occasional toxic personality traits, but it is getting better and I am getting a hang of things again. I noticed that a large part of my issues were also rooted in unhealthy use of social media, which also pushed me towards the web revival right here and led me to find hobbies again (such as maintaining this website!). Instead of attention-seeking activism and constant label and identity shopping, I decided to find more offline hobbies; I started to read the literary classics, hack around with computers again and listen to analogue music away from subscription services and social media. I decided to move to e-mail, write letters and find hobbies away from the computer too. I wanted to be a positive influence on people around me and finally grow to be a nice person to be around.

Despite a lot of progress I made throughout those years, a severe crisis hit early to mid 2023, when a cannabis trip went awry and led to me developing considerable psychological issues. I had a multi-month phase where I suffered from major anxiety and daily panic attacks based on the fear of losing my grip on reality, losing control over my consciousness or perception, or sloppily said, "going insane". This constant background anxiety coupled with occasional panic attacks unfortunately made me unable to maintain a lot of my hobbies including partly this website. For example, I cannot stand any horror media anymore due to the existential dread they cause in me. I do not drink or consume drugs anymore whatsoever because any sip of alcohol gave me a mild panic attack. Fortunately, toward the end of 2023, the symptoms faded somewhat and I started living a half-way normal life again; but I still feel like I just got used to a permanent change in my brain rather than it going away.

Closing in on the end of 2023, I got a job as a freelance journalist for my local newspaper, that I subsequently lost pretty quickly. I was still working on my university studies in the meantime, but I also got almost-diagnosed with ADHD... I only didn't because I procrastinated on a formality my doctor needed to actually give me the diagnosis, which is very on brand for ADHD, is it not? In late 2023, my last remaining grandma passed away from a cancer, stressing both me and my family a great deal emotionally, financially and physically. As 2024 started, I began to understand my gender identity struggles more and more: essentially, my inability to overcome my own male socialization made my transition feel uncomfortable and I felt like a predatory fraud if I kept usurping womanhood with that obvious male-coded personality. I ascribed to myself the inherent inability to ever transition. All those feelings led to me suppressing my emotions and identity even more out of guilt, which is the tip of the iceberg I assumed I would have to uncover throughout 2024. At least I was getting closer to the kernel of this entire problem.

In May of 2024, the gender issues reached a new quality, with depression and self harm being at an all-time high. I realized I could not go on desisting transition, but I also felt at an impassé when it came to transitioning itself. Both options seemed terrible. I started trying out more feminine pronouns and names, with mixed results.

Hobbies

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Did you skip here because the first section was too long, or did you come here all the way from the top? Either way, have a glass of water to recharge!

Glass of water.

I have been taking on and abandoning many hobbies throughout my life, but some ended up braving the test of time. I put them in a nice little list:

Me and the Web Revival

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Recently, I have come to call my own subculture the "cyber revival", which I feel is a broader category than "just" the web revival. More specifically, I feel a special interest in most technologies old and/or obscure, in skeuomorphism, early 2000s and late 1990s design, and the web revival itself. I consider my interest in customizing usable workstations with obscure software, in zines, in e-mail, alternative social media and vintage design (to just name a few) a part of the same overall hobby.

The web revival is one component of that larger cyber revival to me. I appreciate the way the world wide web and the internet at large used to look, feel and work; with plenty of unique aesthetics to website design in both personal and even corporate settings, a more anarchic attitude towards what goes and what doesn't, and a much more diverse assortment of innovative features.

Despite all that, I don't want to romanticize or glorify the past. The internet of the days of yore was mostly a boys' club with only few notable exceptions, with bigotry and hatred normalized to a degree that rivals even the most vile corners of today's web. I consider the "web revival" of the current day (at least the one I am a part of) a healthy postmodern remix of a retro aesthetic with modern sensibilities and a healthy inclusive culture.

Overall (at the risk of being a hipster), I feel like the culture of the 2020s is distinctly different from what I grew up in in my early years as a relatively old member of Gen-Z; and it alienates me. I cannot properly socialize healthily on modern social media, I dislike flat and minimalist design, I dislike spyware, subscription services, proprietary software, fleeting relationships to art, centralization and uniformity of software and its design. I feel more aligned with the generations that came before me, for example when it comes to music as a central part of one's identity, with more varied and alive subcultures (goth, emo, punk, skinhead, popper, ...) than we have today. All of these things combine to make me who I am; in the cyber revival, on the web, and in real life.

In short, I have a website because it's the best way I found to express myself (more than a blog, social media or anything else), I use e-mail and IRC because I like them more than most messengers, I use old and obscure software because I consider it more cozy and interesting than what the modern world has to offer.

... Oh god, I really do sound like a hipster, don't I?

Points of Contact

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I like keeping my real life vaguely separate from that part of my identity that tends to be more colourful.
Hence, I use many different names online. However, the part of my personality that I express on here is not alone. You used to find me as /home/user/ on the Melonland Forums (but no longer), and as Dazego on PeerTube (although I am no longer actively creating videos). I am also in the Libera Chat IRC network as Lian or Libretown, and as Lia in the online 90s/2000s social MUD Cybertown Revival.

Casual e-mail advocacy banner.

Much more importantly, I use e-mail as my main communication method. You can reach me using the address LibreTown@proton.me and I will respond as fast as I can. I love receiving e-mail and making penpals, even if it's just a short note, comment or feedback on the website!

The same is true for my XMPP address: levalian@disroot.org.

Feel free to contact me through any of these avenues! :]