Hey there! If you're here, you're wanting to know about me! How cool!

My name is Theodore/Cryptidize (he/they/xe/it). I'm in my mid twenties, jiving and thriving, doing everything my little heart desires. I'm trans, queer, auDHD, and I have DID. I draw, write, make music, create jewelry - I code and make websites and create resources for people to share as well! I'm also learning blender and many other programs right now (you can never learn too much!) so I'll be showing off the rad stuff I make often on this site. This is the first (and only) personal site I've dedicated to myself, so if you find something else pretending to be me, let me know immediately!

Characters:

Keroppi (Sanrio), Undyne (Undertale), Grillby (Undertale), Pinkie Pie (MLP:FIM), Fluttershy (MLP:FIM), Anna (When Marnie Was There), Sonic The Hedgehog (From... You know), Tails (Sonic The Hedgehog), Bloo (Foster's Home), Zenyatta (Overwatch), Lucio (Overwatch), Ellie (Last Of Us), Elizabeth (Bioshock Infinite), Taako (Adventure Zone), Sora (Kingdom Hearts), Riku (Kingdom Hearts)

TV Shows & Movies:

What We Do In The Shadows, Sonic Boom, My Little Pony: FiM, Inuyasha, Serial Experiments Lain, Case Closed, Kamisama Kiss, Soul Eater, Full Metal Alchemist (2003), Yu-Gi-Oh

Games:

Tears of the Kingdom, Undertale, Deltarune, Breath of the Wild, Animal Crossing, SOMA, Super Mario Galaxy, Mario Kart 8, Kingdom Hearts (RE:Chain of Memories is my fave but I love the rest too), Silent Hill 3, Okami, Portal 1&2, Subnautica, Pokemon: Legends Arceus, Stardew Valley, Slime Rancher, Hypnospace Outlaw, Katamari Damacy, Subway Midnight, Everything is going to be OK, Ib, Inscryption

Music:

My Chemical Romance, WILLOW, Owl City, Destroy Boys, Left At London, Eva Grace, Margarita Siempre Viva, Foo Fighters, 100 gecs, Laura Les, The Cranberries, Flyleaf, Of Montreal, Alice Longyu Gao, Ashnikko, Siiickbrain, Hector Gachan, Against Me!, Evanescence, Devon Again, Le Tigre, B Boys, Crumb, Brian David Gilbert, PUP, Mag.Lo, Bo Burnham, Superorganism, Porter Robinson, System Of A Down, trndytrndy, Vylet Pony, Franz Ferdinand, Modern Baseball, Meet Me At The Altar, The Front Bottoms, Tomppabeats, Shawn Wasabi, Tally Hall, Drive45, Hatsune Miku, Pinkshift, Doll Skin, ABBA

Other Interests:

Theoretical Sciences, Space Sciences, writing music and stories, technology and coding(HTML5), cooking, synthesizers, music theory, poetry, digital art, singing, jewelry making, 3D Modeling, playing instruments (currently learning ukulele, guitar, harmonica :] )

Youtubers & Podcasts:

DogBark, Brian David Gilbert, My Brother My Brother and Me, intranetgirl, Radio TV Solutions, The Slow Mo Guys, Elyse Myers, SnapCube, Ally Hills, Odd Tinkering, Bill Wurtz, F**kface, Where Do We Begin?, The Adventure Zone, Wonderful, Sawbones, doddleoddle, Good Mythical Morning, Klangphonics, Snake Plays, Spag N' Hetti

There are a lot of internet manifestos out there. Lots of people want the web to be a lot of different things, and that's totally fine. There's many different schools of thought around the subject and I just felt like it was time to speak my piece.

"It's surprising how many people equate "the Internet" with "social media". It's like having access to 1,000,000x the Library of Alexandria every day, and only being interested in keeping up with what people are talking about in the lobby." -sadgrl.online

The internet is many things. It's a portal to the whole world. A living, breathing network of human experience. It can even be a friend, an enemy... As time moves forward, we are continuously threatened in this space. Hacking and viruses are just some of the worries that a normal user faces, which has slowly moved down the rungs of priority. Nowadays, the normal user worries more about spam - about corporate-run annihilation of history - about how they can connect to the web of humans trying to place their flag on digital land. With the presence of social medias, I personally have watched from ~2012 to present how the internet has been altered, and it all starts with Facebook.

Facebook was revolutionary because it took the Myspace logic (connecting with strangers and friends) and altered it. Facebook was a way to connect with school peers, friends who moved away, family members, coworkers, and much more. It was the best way to get everyone you knew in real life all in one place and because of that, the site exploded into the forefront. LinkedIn came soon after, connecting the entire corporate world in one fell swoop. I remember being 10 years old and making a Facebook account so I could join all my friends in posting online, which I had never done outside of Zwinky or Fiesta Online. I remember posting so much crap, but that was the point. I remember my feeds being clean, concise, and that user-friendly UI was prized. I remember it being a safe place for children to talk to their friends.

If I were to post the two feeds side by side today, it wouldn't even begin to look like the same site. You wouldn't recognize it. I can't open that app today without having to wade through at least 3 ads before I see any content from a human... But that's not just Facebook. It's everywhere. Every social media site is lousy with monetization, and I think it coinsides with LinkedIn's creation. I'd be wrong to say it's completely their fault - Ethan Zuckerman is partially to blame for the invention of the pop-up ad. "I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web," he writes. "The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services. There is no single 'right answer' to the question of how we pay for the tool that lets us share knowledge, opinions, ideas, and photos of cute cats... but 20 years into the ad-supported web, we can see that our current model is bad, broken, and corrosive." The web as we know it is suffering from the bloatware that is ad-space. From loading times to background tasks, internet browsers like Chrome put a heavy hand on your CPU. It's when users take their internet experience into their own hands that we can start to roll this back. Adblockers, alternate browsing, privacy add-ons, VPNs, all of these tools can be used to fight back against the ever-persistent ad-monster that is Google.

"You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity." - Mark Zuckerberg

THIS was the fundimental backbone of social media in the corporate world. The undercurrent of the world's most powerful connection link - to break down the barrier between online interaction and self. Advertisers want your "truthful data" to harvest and own. They want full profiles on you: where you lived, where you went to school, every person you know, the interests you currently have; they want it all so they can fit you into a demographic so major companies can advertise Right To You. This was the leading philosophy of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter - anyone running a social media. The end goal was to harvest things from us. To manipulate us into buying more. To scare us into feeling helpless. To do anything to wrangle the "general public cattle" into the money farm that is constant advertising.

LinkedIn added an additional layer of corporate control - the idea of personal branding, and self-promotion over self-expression. Now, LinkedIn was something I wasn't truly familiar with until I was in college around 2017. I was taking a "professional development" class for my degree because my school wanted to put emphasis on how important work connections and self-promotion was - how my industry was based completely around who knows who and how "professional" you can act on social media daily without fail. My industry, mind you, is graphic design - something that can apply to any company in any situation - so the fact that this was how I was being taught felt like a failing of my school. I passed the class just barely, because I knew how much of a crock of shit it all was. I made a LinkedIn and promptly abandoned it... But before I did, I got a pretty firm glance into what the "corporate blogging" world actually looked like. How it was all just a bunch of advertising to the people trying to self-promote. None of them were saying anything of real value. I feel as if that class perfectly summed up my college experience - arbitrary systems are in place to keep hierarchy. Play the game, be professional, don't make waves. Don't stand out too much. They heavily discourage the use of an online persona, once again pushing the "truthful" profile. This is how people are being taught to do business in the corporate world.

"Exploitation is encoded into the systems we are building, making it harder to see, harder to think and explain, harder to counter and defend against. Not in a future of AI overlords and robots in the factories, but right here, now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket... This is a deeply dark time, in which the structures we have built to sustain ourselves are being used against us — all of us — in systematic and automated ways... We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically generated by anonymous software. As a result, we no longer understand what is happening around us. Underlying all of these trends is a single idea: the belief that quantitative data can provide a coherent model of the world, and the efficacy of computable information to provide us with ways of acting within it. Yet the sheer volume of information available to us today reveals less than we hope. Rather, it heralds a new Dark Age: a world of ever-increasing incomprehension. " - James Brittle

Recently, I've been introduced into the concept of Sludge Content (I recommend this video on the topic from Lily Alexandre) and how the never-ending deluge of ads, corporate content, and now AI content has been doing something weird to our brains. Sludge content takes advantage of your attention in a weird human-brain-hack that makes it hard to even think by feeding you the scrapings and recycling of the web in a collage format. This is why sludge content is so captivating and mind-numbing while being completely unsatisfactory. I never end a Youtube Shorts rabbit hole feeling like I learned or gained anything of value. I never come out of Tiktok Sludge happy that I spent my time like that. All these videos are looking for is retention and views. The longer you're in the hole, the more money they get. A lot of this content is humans feeding a robot to create endless video content to flood the system and get as much money as they can. It doesn't matter if they're banned, because they can just make a new account, because there's no punishment for this kind of behavior. In fact, it's rewarded often. The video listed above doesn't offer much in solutions, and for good reason because these systems that keep life this way are huge with a lot of money behind them. It's not up to the individual to tackle these systems... But we can take measures in being aware of what we watch. We can push back against sludge content by being mindful about what we watch. Don't go down that rabbit hole. Ignore the For You pages of the world. Seek out what enriches you and your mind. Something that makes your smile and laugh, or think and consider, or makes you want to create.

Like I said when we began, lots of people want the web to be lots of different things. CURRENTLY, centralized web is run as such:

• Advertising and ad space through Alphabet/Google is unregulated in terms of size and scope
• Corporations and brands running social medias/major web domains are exploiting the average user daily
• Individuals brand themselves in order to be successful
• Video Hosting sites currently under Google Monopoly
• Most communications run through major corporations/Spyware (Social Medias/Discord)
• Search Engines are actively hiding info and controlling what we see
• Blatant lies from trusted sources is at an all-time high
• Internet safety knowledge is scarce, online personas are discouraged
• People are quick to make friends and cross boundaries
• Most major video-hosting sites are filled with Sludge Content. Most sites in general are lousy with "Content" instead of human creation.

I know a lot of people have different preferences, so here are my goals for decentralized web:

• Ad Monopoly Limits: Either limit adspace/amount of ads per page OR limit Corps (no/less ads for companies over $1M~ company value? Like do I truly need to see more ads for coke or mcdonalds?)
• Web Decentralization: Social Media Giants become more irrelevant as webrings and individual web ownership gains mainstream attention and/or alternate open source projects fill their place.
• People can either be harder to market (ie. be advertiser un-friendly by being openly queer/explicit/"unprofessional") or not share every piece of their lives through the video-blog format. Life/child/pet vlogging shouldn't be a thing anyways, as these leave people open to exploitation, privacy concerns, and consent issues.
• Visibility given to alternate video hosting (Peertube, etc) via Search Engines (Google hides these and other Search Engines) OR word of mouth
• New Methods of secure End to End encrypted communications become mainstream (like REVOLT, Signal, Matrix)
• Change how we search (with a new engine like DuckDuckGo or an aggregated search engine)
• Find ways to connect to the independent journalism world/smaller news sources?
• Curate internet safety learning environments; instruct how to create a secure online persona
• Encourage anonymity and educate on base level boundaries. Discourage overfamiliarity.

Some of these are outside my ability. I know on a personal level, there isn't much people like you or I can do... But knowing our enemies and what we're working towards is part of the fight! Tell your friends to switch off Discord, protect yourself and your identity, push against Google and Corps like it whenever you can - creating videos and blog posts about how to be safe on the web, how to set up VPNs and adblockers, how to stop using Google altogether. Call your local gov't. Make some noise, be annoying about it, demand they educate themselves on what they're making policies about. With dedication and teamwork, we can trend in a new direction. I'll be writing articles on internet safety, coding, and more for the average user, in an attempt to help this process along. If you're knowledgable on the topic, contact me! I'd love to interview you for my work.