Seryndelle's Sanctum

About me

Hey there! I'm Seryndelle (she/her), the webmistress of this site. I'm 25 years old, and I live in sunny England. ☺

The name "Seryndelle" is one I made up in 2023, inspired by the concept of serendipity—and making it sound fantastical. Serendipity is an important idea to me. I often think about how lucky I am to have the life I do; it's bewildering to think about the various paths my life could have taken if I'd made any choices differently.

Here are some fun facts about me:

• I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons since 2019. I ran a campaign that lasted 54 sessions between 2022 and 2023, and I've just started running its sequel for the same group of players.

• I've been a fan of Doctor Who since the reboot first aired in 2005. My joint favourite Doctors are the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee) and the Twelfth Doctor (Peter Capaldi). I even wrote and directed a pantomime based on the show!

• I love acting! It's probably my dream job. I was most recently in The Yeomen of the Guard, a light opera by Gilbert & Sullivan, but I've been in all sorts—stage and screen alike.

• I graduated in 2022 with a master's degree in Philosophy. My dissertation argued that tabletop role-playing games could be called an art form in their own right, rather than existing merely as a subcategory of some other art form, like theatre or literature.

About this site

This is my latest (and hopefully, most successful) attempt at maintaining a site on Neocities. The previous iteration of this site, first created on 23 June 2023, was constructed using Sadgrl's Layout Builder, but this time around, I wanted to make a site in keeping with the principles of Brutalist Web Design. I was especially impressed by the personal site of Po Kamnuandej, whose essay Modern Web Design Is Problematic inspired me to take this approach to the design.

I've also been active on Neocities under a different username in the past, and that website attempted to take a skeuomorphic approach to design. It was modelled like a fantasy town one would stumble across in a game of Dungeons & Dragons—or perhaps Zork would be a better comparison, given that it was a purely text-based site (much like this one).

However, skeuomorphism—playing the role of a Dungeon Master, almost—felt like it emotionally distanced me from other members of the Web Revival community who happened to be viewing the site, so I got rid of it. My new approach, I think, is to lean into the aspects that set websites apart from other art forms, and in doing so, make the most of being here on this beautiful World Wide Web—the most important development in human communication since the printing press.

Contact me

If you're feeling chatty, I'd love to hear from you! As well as my guestbook, which you can access through the navigation bar above, there are a couple of ways of contacting me.

I am a longtime lurker on the Melonland Forum, so I can be reached there via direct message. My username there, unsurprisingly, is Seryndelle.

Even better, you can email me at seryndelle@proton.me too. I'm more likely to see an email than a forum message, meaning that you'll probably get a quicker reply from me!