History
My name is Katharine, and I’ve been writing on the web for over ten years. My first website was “The Official DALnet #teenwicca Homepage,” a list of resources for an IRC chatroom I was a co-moderator of when I was thirteen (1996). Soon afterwards, I started “Gamori’s Nameless Domain,” the first in a long string of personal sites with black backgrounds hosted on Geocities and Tripod and the domains of my friends. I wrote a lot of teen angst poetry on these sites, which had names like “Impaling the Damselfly” and “Not Quite Orgasmic.” None of the files from these sites are still around, which is a shame, since I am sure they’d be hilarious. I only knew one other person “in real life” who knew HTML back then. The Archives here start in February 1999, when I was fifteen, a sophomore at Statesboro High School, and had my first domain - Sarasvati.org. Sarasvati was up until mid-2000, and featured cutting-edge (for the time) design and digital art, in addition to the diary. It was surprisingly popular, and was linked by early bloggers Jason Kottke and Jeffrey Zeldman. When people in my small town started reading it too, I freaked out and took it down. My next web project - Erendira.org - was around until late 2001, and covers my senior year in high school. I was trying out a more “experimental” writing style, rather than the typical diary format, and began posting my digital photography. The original site is still online via the WayBack Machine. There’s a big gap in the Archives from the end of 2001 until the middle of 2002, during which I moved from Georgia to New York City for college, and then dropped out of NYU and ran away with my then-boyfriend (whom I’d met online through one of the pre-Sarasvati sites). During that period I was writing mainly on LiveJournal (username “vienna”: now closed) and then in paper notebooks while I was travelling. A small subset of the hitchhiking journal entries (which were written near-daily and span from February through August 2002) are presently up on this site, and I plan to eventually type out the rest. I found myself living in Washington, DC, at age 19 and started Villanelle.org in January of 2003. The site came with me when I returned to New York in August 2004. The entire journal was password-protected until August 2006, when I decided to revive it from a 6-month hiatus.