A few weeks ago I wrote something on Substack that I couldn't stop thinking about.

I called it The Internet Feels Fake Right Now. That's Not an Accident.

It was about the quiet disorientation of being online right now. How you can scroll for hours and not remember a single thing. How you can be seen constantly and still feel unseen. How content is no longer scarce — meaning is.

And at the end of it I asked a question that sat with me long after I posted it.

If someone wanted to understand you without an algorithm in the way, where would they go?

I didn't have an answer.

Not yet.

I've been building things for years.

Games. Music. Books. A grief research project. An archival app called Etherith that I made because I lost a friend and then lost the digital space where I grieved her and I couldn't stop thinking about what that meant.

All of it was scattered. Across platforms. Across profiles. Across spaces I didn't own and couldn't control.

The essay made me name what I'd been feeling for a long time.

I needed a house.

Not a profile. Not a template. A house. Something I built. Something that looked like me.

So I started.

It was late. Later than it should have been. The part of your brain that second-guesses things gets tired at that hour and goes quiet. You stop asking whether something is a good idea and start asking whether it feels true.

Every decision came fast.

The homepage should feel like a zine cover. Yes.

There should be a paperdoll. A Black woman with locs — my character from Tender, already made, already mine. Yes.

The cursor should be a VHS play button triangle that turns red when you hover. Obviously yes.

I wasn't performing taste. I was just following what felt right.

Somewhere around 2am I saw her land on the homepage — the character, extracted from the sprite sheet, background gone, placed exactly where she needed to be.

I laughed out loud at my own screen.

Not because it was funny.

Because it was right. Because she looked like she belonged. Because for the first time everything I'd made was in one place, and the place looked like me.

That feeling — when something you made fits exactly where you put it — I don't know if I can explain it to someone who hasn't felt it.

It's quiet and enormous at the same time.

By 4am I had twelve pages.

Games. Music. Books. Etherith. The grief research. A devlog. An About page. A 404 page where the character points at a door marked EXIT.

All of it connected. All of it mine.

What I keep coming back to is the nav bar.

Home. Digital Grief. Games. Music. Books. Etherith. The Studio. About. Press. Newsletter.

I moved things around for a while. And then I put Digital Grief second — right after Home — and everything felt settled.

Because that work is the most serious thing I've ever done. And I didn't want it buried. I didn't want someone to have to scroll to find it.

It goes second. Right after you arrive.

In that essay I wrote: the question is what kind of presence you're building in a time where everything can be generated, copied, and forgotten just as quickly.

I know what mine is now.

It's here.

It's twelve pages and a VHS cursor and a cassette player and a character who cycles through outfits when you click her.

It's the grief research and the games and the music and the books all living together without any of it feeling like it doesn't belong.

It's a place someone can come to understand me without an algorithm deciding what they see first.

I'm 54 years old.

I built it from scratch in one night.

And it looks exactly like what I saw in my head.

That almost never happens.

This time it did.

auramation.xyz

Read the essay that started it: The Internet Feels Fake Right Now. That's Not an Accident.