I figured I'd make one of these, but man, it is hard to write about myself. I have to fuck with this page pretty regularly because within just a few months of finishing it, I inevitably change so much that half of the shit here becomes either obsolete or something I just don't feel is worth sharing. keeping it up is a good exercise though, forces me to think about who I am in a way that matters.

I'm Casper Mario Valentine, yes I picked it out myself. I'm a guy, but not a man, and I'm gay in every direction. the word "nonbinary" sometimes slips out of my mouth but I really prefer to call myself genderqueer because I'm queering my gender and I don't think there actually is a gender binary, even for cis people. I lean more towards the combination-of-everything androgyny than the neutral androgyny, so I'm all about those neopronouns and weird gendered terms. I'm Msc. Casper Valentine when I have to use an honorific, a boifriend to everyone I'm dating, and a niephew to my aunts. are some of the words I use for myself kinda stupid sounding? yes. do I care? no. I'm also polyamorous, dating a guy that lives in my head named Frey along with a girl outside of it who may or may not have partners of her own.

I'm a city dweller in New England, but I grew up in a smaller suburban town. I hate quantifying my age with a number, so I'll just say I'm old enough to have graduated college and have been renting my own place(s) for years. my degree has nothing to do with writing, though I don't regret getting it. as only partly a tongue-in-cheek reference to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, I consider myself a holistic storyteller. I view my own life through the lens of character-driven narration, something that only started making sense once I stole the concept of narrative therapy and internal family systems from some therapists that could never get me better than I do. this transfers over to my actual fiction writing, where I can create worlds with their own people and complex relationship dynamics kind of on the fly. at one point, those skills were tied up in maladaptive daydreaming and a pretty significant dissociation, but life's been good ever since I found a way to make it work for me.

the whole storytelling thing I have going on is directly tied to the interconnectedness of all things, which is why I call it holistic. I've been a spiritual guy ever since I almost died and essentially witnessed the spiritual force of the universe firsthand, but I've been experiencing synchronicity and precognition for a lot longer. my connection to spirits isn't super strong beyond the one I have with my service dog, who still sometimes visits me. in terms of named religion, I'm a Unitarian Universalist and my very queer UU church is my community. you can read more about my faith here.

I strive to create work that challenges the reader while still maintaining a deep sense of empathy with the main character. being neurodivergent and mad, I grew up pretty misunderstood, and the language psychiatry uses to describe what I'm all about only made people view me as an other. I write stories about extremely flawed people who are nonetheless human and find ways to convey their experience with mental illness that are easy to relate to regardless of the reader's own mental health. the subject matter is heavy, often involving trauma, but written with respect in an attempt to make my work still approachable for the average person. while the points I make have a political element to them, my stories are more than anything about the emotional/spiritual growth of the characters. as a little fun fact, I write most first drafts on my phone while pacing around my room, since moving my body allows me to better disconnect from this world and witness the one that's playing out in my head. when I think about my main characters especially, I often feel like I'm thinking of a friend.

when I'm not writing, I'm either creating some kind of art or learning about something new. with drawing, I often focus on characters and utilize a large-scale pixel art style, not only because I like how it looks but because I'm really nitpicky about everything and pixel art lets me be as exact as I possibly could be. the most succinct way of describing my interests in terms of what I want to learn about is that I like stuff and people———I am obsessed with all matters of artifacts and I want to consume as much of culture as a possibly can. I learn best through play, so I usually use my writing as an excuse to do things that I'd otherwise never do, like learning how to speak Spanish again or watching a bunch of films in a genre I've never bothered with before. of course, having the ability to develop new complex skills only on my own terms doesn't neatly fit into any traditional job, so I'm basically unemployable until I become a published author, yippee!

I'm a socialist because capitalism is fucked and an anarchist because the justice and healthcare system are fucked. psychology was a special interest of mine and I used to treat it like gospel, but all those years of research eventually led to me being anti-psychiatry——the cracks start showing when you notice that that it's considered a mental disorder to not unconditionally respect an authority figure regardless of how much respect said authority figure gives you. my feelings on the complete abolition of psychiatry began with prison abolition, because what makes psychiatry wrong is that it upholds the same things prison does, rather than some nonsense about how mad people should be spared from marginalization while it's fine and dandy to marginalize the "undesireables" that the justice system so graciously disappeared for all the civilized middle class whites. capitalism is the source of most of society's problems, including the material conditions that leads to "crime" in the first place. the only way we can progress is by decoupling someone's ability to work from their ability to live, along with using a restorative justice model for any harm that isn't prevented by doing so. also, all cops are bastards.

I was really into Neopets as a kid, not so much for the pets but because I thought the pages people made were really cool... that, and the Warrior Cats roleplay I was doing. I couldn't really figure out how to code on my own and there certainly wasn't anyone teaching me, so the daydreams I had about coding a really cool page for all my pets stayed a daydream. eventually, I lost most access to the internet for about four years, only to come back in the mid 2010s. it was pretty jarring for me. from my perspective, "social media" meant forums, and I really couldn't wrap my head around the idea of a Discord server being different from a Skype group chat with friends. I only started using modern social media right at the end of high school... I came out as trans and figured that meant I was allowed to use Tumblr.

I tried a lot of different forms of social media and all of them came with the same problems. ragebait made me angry for days, and when I wasn't fed it by an algorithm, I was so accustomed to being mad on the internet that I couldn't stop myself from compulsively seeking it out on my own. in supposedly leftist communities, I was surrounded by terminally online progressives that thought gatekeeping language and denying shared experiences between BIPOC and other marginalized people was somehow leftism. when I wanted to put my creative work out there, I got depressed over the fact that original content is not rewarded the same way fan art is——getting no views and engagement only through likes and hearts is exhausting. for a long time, I just felt like my art wasn't worth making if nobody cared about it.

I stopped using social media and got serious about writing thanks to the supportive audience that is my girlfriend. I knew that authors had websites and wanted to make one eventually, but I always felt demoralized by the examples I saw from big name writers. I often look for more work by my favorite writers in the anthologies I read, which lead me to a neurodivergent writer's website that was clearly coded by hand and had a whole lot of stuff that I wouldn't normally see on a site like this. it inspired me to code my own website, but after spending some time on the indie web, what was supposed to be my author's website turned into a personal site where I post whatever creative work I want and get to have fun on the internet. I'll probably have a more professional website elsewhere once I've published that includes a link to this one.

making my own website means that I don't have to care about views or engagement through likes/reblogs. if I was on Tumblr, having less than a hundred followers would make me feel worthless. on Neocities, my followers all feel like real people, and having a small community of indie web users that enjoy my website enough to follow it is a big deal! I feel free to make whatever I want now because it's for me and my peers. I also don't feel compelled to seek out content that pisses me off, and when I do stumble upon something that urks me, it's not hard to move on. there is no incentive to directly engage with anyone or start an argument, we're all just trying to cultivate our own little space on the internet and I think the world would be a better place if everyone had somewhere to express themselves without worrying about judgement.