hi! i'm ollie, (he/it/they) i found out about this place while doing research for an essay i'm cramming for, and am taking a quick detour to allow myself to swim in nostalgia for a bit. i haven't participated in any writing challenge in years, but i was on nanowrimo pretty regularly from like 2018 - 2020 and then sporadically since then until the total forum implosion. mainly on the young writer's program forums while i was still in the age bracket for those. i missed the message board/forum style of internet community so bad tbh, i'm so glad this exists. the nano forums were so formative to me, i met my now partners of 3+ years on there as well as many of my best friends. i hope to make new friends here! (if anyone was also on the ywp during the time i was on, let me know, omg, maybe we crossed paths! i went by a lot of usernames but one was "olliepaj" and variations of it. i also went by one that contained my deadname for a very long time on there as well, which i dont want to share to the world LOLLLL but it was like [deadname]_the_dragon.) i might try to do a challenge this november! i don't know for sure. i miss writing, i just worry my responsibilities with college are gonna make it difficult. fun facts: other hobbies of mine include drawing, web design (verrryyyyy amateur), rock climbing, and various video games. my halloween costume this year is the sniper from tf2. my cat's name is pepper and he's a black and white van shorthair. i found him under a shed. i speak english and polish, and am currently learning german.

Welcome! Not sure what kind of essay reseach lead you here, but I'm glad it did 😂 . My specialty is web development, not so much the design side of things (as you can probably tell), so if you have any advice on making the site look a bit nice then I'm all ears. I think 2018 was my first serious attempt at the challenge (I think I made it to 30K or so, and I was so so proud!) I was never on the young writers forums though, so we might not have crossed paths.

haha yeah, the essay is about how much the internet's changed, mainly about how most people just stick to the same couple social media sites for socializing, as well as the death of children's spaces online (like kid's MMO's, like club penguin, neopets, etc, and of course the nano YWP) (im not arguing in my essay that those places were perfect, but that they're at least better than what exists now) that funnels kids onto like tiktok and twitter and such, where they get caught up in the predatory design of the social media platforms that are designed to be addictive. i was trying to find the like announcement posts from the nanowrimo website about it shutting down, to cite as a source about the whole "niche/children's spaces online disappearing" thing, and somewhere while searching around for that i found a link to here. re. website design- i honestly love how simplistic the styling is here so so much. it makes me nostalgic for nano and is so ... un-distracting. if i think of anything i'd be sure to let you know! this is already better than anything i could have done! i rely so much on templates and tutorials and w3tools for my sites, lol. styling is definitely my favorite part of the process.