The author of this site – me – was never really happy with her “given” name and in childhood was always trying to change it to something or other silly.
Later, in university years, after spending a year or so named simply “Psyche” (the ‘e’ being silent) I shifted to introducing myself as “Demitria” but had no proper surname. On Halloween Eve, 1986, that name came to me, and it was Thraam. It’s not an acronym for anything, nor is it German for anything, though it amuses me that people frequently guess either or both to be the case.
If you know me really well, you already know what “Thraam” means, or at least what the story is from my end – which is about as close as you’ll get to knowing it.
This site is going to be – at least at first – a ragtag, juryrigged attempt to glue portions of my old websites from the past dozen years into this modernized system, so that the material I had on the domain involution.org, which was snapped up by an outfit in Belize that’s literally known to be the globe’s worst domain squatter, and the OLD thraam.com which preceded it, which was squatted for a short while by someone else but soon became open once it was discovered that “thraam” apparently meant nothing to anyone but myself. It’s nice to have it back again.
Within the depths of thraam.com is the site of my long-time and very far-out friend, Sync-Separator, aka chroma_if. She monitors everything, you might say. If you’re looking for her tunnel, go Sync yourself.
I am conflicted when it comes to the “new” net, aka Web 2.0, or whatever. On the one hand, the bad one, it makes everything far, far less anonymous, and therefore interesting. There’s too many wasted keystrokes and hours spent registering for damn near everything, after which you realize even if you distinctly recall that you clicked the “don’t send me email” box, you get sent the newsletter and possibly third-party advertisement “news” from “associates”. Somehow, the fact that EVERY site is connected to Twitter and Facebook makes me cringe.
On the other hand though, that damned Facebook is something I can’t ever really hate, since it’s been directly responsible for reconnecting me with friends from past phases of my life I’d possibly never have found otherwise, owing to something about its social algorithm, and the fact that damn near everyone uses it makes a big difference to that having actually been able to do that. This happened at a time I really needed it, more than anything else in life, frankly.
As for Twitter, I’ve finally had to at least partially let go of my disgust with being limited to 140 characters when my usual writing style tends towards prolixity. It’s not just a desktop computer world any more; it would appear that half the people using the net at any given time seem to be doing so through some sort of handheld slab or another. Having finally acquired one of these slabs – a midrange one with a sliding keypad and a video camera that does what it should most of the time, but isn’t one of those finger-to-glass, app-loaded, widescreened varieties commonly called ‘smart’ phones – I begin to understand why things like Twitter aren’t made for the loquacious.
So I finally gave up, gave in, and am in the process of dropping off the server a kind friend of another friend, a person who’s not even seen me since 1998 or so, but agreed to host every website I’ve made in the past dozen or so years without asking for one thin dime, and with lots of mixed feelings, begin the process of moving to a paid server that proved itself worth the cost by making things like SQL and other script-dependent features far easier to operate. I used to live with a programmer, who could help me with such things, but those are times long over with now…and the only help I have is that which I provide for myself…and JustHost’s tutorial videos.
I’m sure there’ll be some glitches as this process slowly progresses – I’m also moving the Choronzon project site here, now, as well – but with a lot of luck, patience and the grace of the Lord of All Computers And Their Networks, Techgnosis (a really attitudinal neo-godling who has gained the power in 20 years it took most godlings centuries or more to amass from us) perhaps it will all go more smoothly than predicted.
And I do get a small amount of tech support for paying for my webhosting. I’m going to be needing it, surely.
I do miss the web of 2000, based more on design than the web of 2011, which seems to be mostly about autoconnection of every site to every other site, which is full of overminimalized pages with gigantic roundedged orange buttons and a colourscheme of two or three colours at most. But here and there, moldbreakers are breaking this mold and eventually, I want to find my place amongst them.