About This Site

From the time I was a preteen, my parents used the computer as a babysitter to keep me entertained. That was back in the early 2000s, when social media was barely in its infancy and when tiny forums and personal sites on places like Geocities accounted for what seemed like almost the entire Web. I was fascinated by the world inside the computer screen, which then seemed completely separate from the world outside, but also boundless with so much to discover. You never knew what wonders you would find on each website you visited, and browsing involved active exploration and reading instead of passive scrolling and viewing. Sure, I read and saw some things that I probably shouldn't have at such a young age—shock sites and websites run by various extremist groups, for example—but for every dodgy site, I found at least three others that brought me joy and taught me about things like history, other cultures, older pop culture, and crafts, that I probably wouldn't have learned otherwise in my drab offline life (or at least not until much later).

At the time of writing this, I'm thirty-two years old, and I miss the way the Web used to be. I had forgotten a lot about those Wild-West days of the Internet until mid-2023, when, on a whim, I looked up a fanfic I remembered from my youth and decided to re-read it and explore the site that it was now hosted on. Before I knew it, I had fallen down a vintage FF7 site rabbit hole, and from there moved on to exploring dozens of other sites, including a couple that were familiar. It was, as Karen Carpenter sang, "yesterday once more." (Yes, I like the Carpenters. No, I don't care what you think of my taste in music.) Reading through all those sites made me want to start my own about my own interests, but not a modern blog on a major social media site. I wanted an old-fashioned website like those in the era when people built their websites as they pleased from scratch and it was still cool to fly your freak flag online. I guess you could say I wanted an escape to a simpler time when the Web was less homogenized and less commercial. (I wrote a little bit more about my values here on this alternate About page, if you're curious.)

So, you want to know more about me? My real name isn't Chicot; that's just a pseudonym. My real name's Michelle. I have three degrees (two bachelor's, one master's) and I was into the dark academia aesthetic and lifestyle before anyone called either "dark academia." I see labels as a way for small-minded people to pretend to understand those they really don't, so I refuse to label myself or use anyone else's for me unless I'm quoting them. My usual pronouns are she/her, being AFAB, but I honestly wouldn't get offended if someone called me "he" or "they": I don't identify strongly as any gender in particular, so anything but "it" is fine with me! I don't like willfully stupid people, bigots, or xenophobes, and I refuse to let AI do my thinking for me. I have a muse, and my muse looks like this:

Image: An old public-domain postcard from 1911 showing a white cat asking its recipient, 'Why dont you write' [sic]

As for my interests, take a look around this site. I doubt that I'll ever make sites devoted to all my myriad interests, but I have covered some of them. Pretty much all of this site is still under construction and probably will be for a while given that I work full-time, but so far I've uploaded content related to the Final Fantasy games and the manga The Promised Neverland. I also have an old, long-neglected history blog and a slightly newer blog all about a spooky old Canadian daytime drama called Strange Paradise, which can be found here and here, respectively. I rarely update them anymore and I now think that some of the older content is a bit cringey, but they both have a decent amount of fans, so I leave them up.


Why Chicot?

Chicot was the nickname of a certain Jean-Antoine d'Anglerais, who served the French kings Henri III and Henri IV as both a court jester and (at least according to legend) a soldier. He became a famous historical figure when Alexandre Dumas père made him the deuteragonist of his novel La dame de Monsoreau, depicting him as Henri III's loyal if cynical companion who spies on his behalf to protect him from the court intrigues going on around him, while offering witty commentary on the various figures of the king's court. The novel was one of my favorites when I was in college, and Chicot was (and still is) my favorite character.


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