Deep Musings and Silly Little Thoughts

Personal Blog

March 15, 2026

Vertigo

So I haven't updated my site in a while. About two weeks ago I got my very first bout of vertigo, and let me tell you, 0/10 do not recommend.

I'm still recovering, some things are still exhausting. I'm working half-days (carefully), I have a nearly constant headache, and can easily overdo things making my symptoms worse, but at least the room isn't spinning all the time.

I do have on and off tinnitus though, so that's…not fun.

Anyway, there's no real point to this entry other than proof of life. I haven't abandoned this site just when I got it off the ground, I just…get nauseous easily and I'll need to have a lie down as soon as I finish this post.

I still have things to do here - I need to start posting my fanfic as planned. It'll be one chapter at a time, using Ellipsus links like I've done for the links on the left sidebar of my Blog posts. Still have to figure out how to get some system in place for comments, but that's what the Guestbook is for, I guess.

I also have a cBox but I couldn't figure out how to get it to display properly on this page. More research needed.

I do have a confession to make though - a while back I was using a coding software (I have since deleted) and out of frustration I asked the onboard AI to tell me why my website looked like crap on mobile devices. Not only did it diagnose the problem, but it fixed it for me. Now my page actually looks decent on a phone.

I'm happy with the result, but…I'm never doing that again. The entire point of this website, aside from a place to put my thoughts where hardly anyone will read them, is that I made it. Yes, I used code that I copied from other free code resources, and I'm incredibly grateful to the wonderful humans who made that possible - but that's the point - they were humans.

I am vehemently anti generative AI and, while at first I told myself 'coding is what AI SHOULD be doing, not writing stories or generating art from references it stole from humans', I still didn't like it. It was too easy, and after I used it, I was left with a sinking feeling.

So I promise, except for that one bit of help in a moment of desperation, I will never do that again.

Anyway, that's all. I'm going to go take care of this headache.

February 26, 2026

Indie Web Revolution

So I suppose my first (real) blog post here should be to explain why I'm making blog posts here!

Like many teenagers back at the dawn of the internet (the 90s), I spend my off-time in High School surfing the web without any guardrails. It was the wild west back then, before companies bought up all the real estate and sold it back to us piece by sanitised piece in exchange for our identities and all of our data.

I miss those days.

A little over a year ago, for various (but mostly politically motivated) reasons, I completely deleted my Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Netflix, Disney+, and Amazon accounts. I know those aren't all social media, but they were all done at about the same time. It felt honestly liberating to do away with so many major companies who only have their own bank accounts and shareholders at heart, but it left me with a bit of a social blackout for a while.

Honestly, that wasn't a bad thing.

I still use Reddit occasionally and I'm trying to use it less. I still sometimes remember I have a Bluesky and post on there. I scroll Tumblr and chat with friends on Discord, but other than my AO3, I don't have much of a public space anymore.

I like that, but I also miss my Livejournal days when I could say whatever was on my mind whenever, and sometimes random strangers would find me in the ether and respond. I had some of the best online interactions that way.

So I went back to my roots. I really missed my old Geocities page, and I'm so glad to have found its spiritual successor. A place I can build myself (with some coding help and a free template that REALLY made this place look the way I wanted.)

This place belongs to me. There's no company telling me to censor my words. No algorithm to cater to. No monetising of my identity. Just me and a keyboard and some ideas.

I was delighted to find out that I'm not the only one with these thoughts and feelings, and that many who feel this way are YOUNGER than me. There's a lot of us actually, a whole subversive community with our low tech websites reaching out to each other and avoiding Corporate Internet.

I love to see it. This is what the internet is supposed to be. Just people, connecting. Let's make it that again.


February 21, 2026

Well, I'm back.

I created this page as my own front page of the internet, away from social media that I'd been sunk into for the past 15-20 years or so. I deleted all accounts I had with Meta last year, and now with Discord dying, I'm spreading my horizons a bit, going back to my roots. I still have a Tumblr that I use when I need to scroll something, a Bluesky I constantly forget I still have, and Reddit if I want social interactions with strangers, but other than those I'm pulling away from The Drama that is corporate internet.

I'm Canadian, I'm a Xennial, a connoisseur of fine fandoms (Baldur's Gate 3/Forgotten Realms, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, The X-Files, The Simpsons, and several Canadian tv shows, just to name a few) and I'm a fanfic writer. In real life I do other things that I may or may not be sharing on here, I haven't decided yet.

My online presence has been constant since the 90s, but in different places all over the web. I've used the same/close to the same username name since the early 2000s (for obvious reasons - I was (and still am) a die-hard Lord of the Rings fan.) On the official Lord of the Rings Fan Club message boards, my name was 'Mel Baggins', and I also used Melanye Baggins when I wrote fanfic on fanfiction.net, but over the years I also included 'Mellybaggins' and use it pretty interchangeably with Melanyebaggins. If by some random change you think you might know me, please drop me a line!

Back in the 90s I had an old Geocities website dedicated mostly to The X-Files and Star Trek, my chief fandoms in high school, but while I still remember some of the basics, I'm a long way from my coding days. I'm now nearly 45 years old with a 9-5 job, constant exhaustion because of The Horrors, and a completely different life than I had then, so this website will be a slow, ongoing project!

My current plans for this website are:

  1. A second host for my fanfiction - currently it's just Baldur's Gate 3 fanfiction, however I intend to edit and migrate my VERY old fanfic from the early 00's eventually. (It's still stuck on ff.net and I have lost all access to it over the years.) My BG3 fanfiction is currently all posted on AO3, but because of bots I have locked my works to registered users only. Recently Ellipsus has released Reader links that allow the writer to control who can view your works and also disable copy-pasting by bots, which I intend to use to share my work here.

  2. I plan to make a blog-type page just for my ramblings and musings, like how I used to post on Livejournal, back when Livejournal was cool. This, I guess, will end up being my first entry of that.

  3. I've also, unfortunately, become pretty political over the past several years, and am a very strong supporter of the Buy Canadian/boycott USA movement here at home. I may make a second blog type page just to shout into the void about that whenever the mood strikes me, keeping it away from my fandom stuff for people who want to avoid discussions about The Horrors and just read.

  4. I may also post some recipes, as I used to do on Livejournal, I haven't decided yet.

So that's it. This space will change drastically as I get the hang of how to work HTML and CSS again, but until that, here's my handwave into the world of personal web pages.

Thank you for reading. I'm so glad to be here.

Melly.