hello! my name is Mei Kat, and i use they/them/their pronouns. people around here back in the day mostly called me MKK. i joined GW with this account when i was 8 years old in 2003, tho i think i had used a different account for a couple years before. i was very active in the heyday of this place, reading posts and chatting on IRC just about every day, as well as playing online games with others here, like Animal Crossing and OpenTTD. i messed around in RPG Maker a lot as a kid, but throughout the decade or so when i was active, i mostly posted my visual art and participated in things like the art quilts and character battles and such.

i graduated college in August 2020 with two bachelor’s degrees in Asian Studies (Japanese) and Fine Arts (Digital Art). i will be beginning a master’s degree in Japanese translation in August 2024. i plan to translate as a day job (ideally, media like anime and videogames), but my ultimate career goal is to write, draw, and publish my own graphic novels, along with other multimedia creations like games. i'm also now 50k+ words into a novel after a successful NaNoWriMo challenge.

here are some of my identities that feel important to share: queer (nonbinary transgender, pansexual/panromantic, aceflux), syncretically religious (mostly Christian/Quaker), physically and mentally disabled (hEDS, autism, and OCPD, among others), therian (cat), and a leftist. i have been engaged in activism within many of these communities for over a decade. some of my interests include Japanese culture (traditional and contemporary), visual/literary arts, tabletop/video games, animals, psychology, history, music, swimming, American Sign Language, and tea. i love to spend time in nature, especially going on hikes with my partner (together 5+ years now). i have kept many pets in my life (with dogs and rats as favorites), and currently, i have a pet carpenter ant (Camponotus pennsylvanicus) colony of ~700 workers that i started from a single queen in 2019.

my partner is a programmer just finishing up his master's in machine learning, and we're hoping to make games together someday. we both have some hobby game dev experience, but there are some aspects like music and voice acting for which we would potentially want to team up with others, so i'm happy to see this collaborative space coming back together! the retro feel of the design and interface really makes me miss the time before the enshittification of the Internet. here's hoping for a resurgence of the cozy feel of forum community~

Nice intro, I probably learned more about you just now in 30 seconds than I did in the last 20 years lol