Hi, I'm Harper, she/her ♡
Trans woman. Autistic & ADHD. Soft, bratty, stubborn, generally techy. I spend my time turning annoyances into tools, feelings into pages, and my own little corner of the internet into something that unmistakably belongs to me.
The short version
I'm Harper. I'm a trans woman, openly and unapologetically out, and I'm both autistic and ADHD. That last part explains a lot of the architecture around here. I hyperfocus hard on the things I love, and right now that list is Hazel, Hilray TV, this site, music data, and whichever tiny friction point has annoyed me into inventing a control panel for it. I need the things around me to make sense and to be automated wherever possible, or my brain keeps the tab open forever. That sounds like a small quirk until you watch me spend an entire weekend deleting a thirty-second manual task from my life. I will feel good about that for months.
I'm not a professional sysadmin. I just manage my own gear: a home PC, a home server, and one budget VPS. I ended up with a homelab because I kept saying "I could just build that myself" until it became true. These days that means a Discord bot I built from scratch and keep expanding, a browser-accessible video library that still lives safely at home, and whatever this website has become. None of it is anybody's job. That's exactly why I like it. Nothing here ships against a deadline, so I get to build things properly, break them at 2am, and fix them again without justifying the detour to anyone.
Want the 2006 version? I rebuilt this introduction as a glittery old-school profile, complete with blurbs, comments, and a Top 8. Visit my Myspace Recreation →
What I care about
Trans & queer advocacy
I currently serve as a Queer Ambassador, doing education and advocacy work around trans inclusion. Most of that work is far less dramatic than people expect. Mostly I help people understand the small, everyday things that make a real difference for queer and trans people, like getting a name right without making a production out of it. My full story →
Neurodivergent & unapologetic
Being autistic and ADHD shapes how I work, how I love, and how I build things, special interests and hyperfocus included. I'd rather be upfront about that than spend my energy masking it, because masking has always cost me more than it saved. How Hazel helps →
Systems thinking
I love understanding how things connect, whether that's infrastructure, workflows, or communities. If something is inefficient I want to fix it, automate it, or at the very least understand why it's broken. Half the projects on this site began as me being mildly annoyed by a process.
A little of my own writing
"Respect isn't a lot to ask for. Use the name someone gives you. Don't out people. Don't assume you know someone's story. None of that costs anything; it just takes a little consideration. That's most of what advocacy actually looks like day to day: small, consistent choices that add up to someone feeling safe being themselves."
What I'm actually into
Video games
One of my top passions, full stop. I gravitate toward games with strong progression, survival mechanics, and RPG systems, the kind I can sink hundreds of hours into and still not be finished with. I will optimize a build, hoard materials, and turn a co-op night into an accidental research project without noticing.
Marijuana
A regular, unapologetic part of my life, and a real part of how I manage stress and my own neurodivergent brain. No shame here. Just chill vibes and, on a good day, a quieter head than I'd have otherwise.
Coffee & Monster
My fuel of choice, in roughly equal measure. Coffee in the morning, then Monster to get through the rest of the day. Ultra White, Monster Gold, and OG Sugar Free are my go-tos, in that order.
My dog, Harley
Not an interest so much as a whole personality trait at this point. She's my shadow, my road-trip buddy, and my daily reminder to go outside and touch grass. She has her own page → I'm also, apparently, a genuinely good dog trainer. Long story →
Psychology & the self
I read a lot about the mind: trauma, identity, relationships, and how people work instead of how they're supposed to. It's part curiosity and part processing my own stuff, and I've stopped pretending those two things are separate.
Teaching myself to code
I'm self-taught, still learning, and mostly focused on Python right now so I can keep building Hazel. Every new module I add starts with "wait, can I actually make it do that?" and ends a few hours later with something that works, plus a much clearer idea of why it didn't at first.
What the archive remembers
I pulled my own data exports from Facebook, Instagram, Google and Reddit, mostly out of curiosity about what was in them. It turns out I've been leaving evidence all over the internet since 2011. Some of it is funny, some of it is a little pointed, and more of it is still true than I expected. None of the quotes below were written for this website. They were already sitting there.
"Typical person trying to figure out this life stuff, one day I'll wake up and everything will be clear. I like talking, I like thinking, let me know if you want a conversation."
I found that one a bit hard to read, in a good way. The person who wrote it was waiting to wake up and have everything be clear. That's not how it went. Nothing arrived pre-explained. I slowly built enough scaffolding around myself, some of it literal Python, to stop needing it to be. The second half hasn't changed at all though. I still like talking and I still like thinking, and that's most of the reason I'm putting together a stream, because "let me know if you want a conversation" is basically a mission statement I wrote for myself by accident.
The rest of that same bio was a joke list I had clearly workshopped: "Hardworking, Hardtail / Road Cyclist, Animal Lover, Music Enthusiast, PC Builder, Hardcore Gamer (FPS / MMO / RTS), Certified Bacon Expert, Unofficial QA Tester and I also have two monitors!" Four of those are still accurate. One is now aggressively out of date, because I have considerably more than two monitors.
Receipts, in the sense of actual receipts
Everything here is pulled from a real export with a real date on it. That's a different kind of evidence than me telling you what I'm into. I've been consistent for longer than I'd have guessed.
An audiophile since at least 2017
My Reddit export contains an unhinged headphone comparison I wrote in May 2017, going track by track through a Sennheiser HD600 against a HiFiMan HE400i, both running through an O2/ODAC stack, arguing with myself about bass response. It's thousands of words long. Nobody asked me for it. The songs I called favourites in it are on the music page →
Playlists older than some of my friendships
Google handed back my YouTube playlists with creation dates attached. "Electronic" and "Rock" both date to 2017, "Celldweller" and "amo" to 2019, "lofi" to 2020. The Celldweller one was created in January 2019 and I was still adding songs to it in July 2026. Seven and a half years of quietly maintaining the same playlist.
Subscribed exactly where you'd expect
My subreddit list isn't subtle: r/electronicmusic, r/DnB, r/dubstep, r/audiophile, r/rap, plus r/the1975 and r/aperfectcircle specifically. I also once posted a full ranking of A Perfect Circle's discography, unprompted, in a thread about mixing. I stand by it.
The longer versions
Three parts of me got big enough to stop being paragraphs on this page and become their own. They all live under About Me in the nav. This is the short pitch for each.
Gaming
Progression systems, survival, and RPGs, plus the MMOs I keep going back to and the hour counts that give my whole taste away. Over five thousand hours in World of Warcraft alone. I'm not going to defend that.
What I'm playing →Character sheet
My brain runs on XP bars and completion percentages, so at some point I built myself an actual sheet. Ability scores, skills, inventory, quest log. The numbers are made up; the self-assessment behind them isn't.
Roll for initiative →Dissociation
Parts, ego states, and what an in-progress diagnostic process looks like from the inside. The honest version, including the parts I don't have an answer to yet.
The long story →People (and creatures) I love
I'm endlessly grateful for the partners in my life. I'm polyamorous. The love, support, and trust in my relationships help me be the best version of myself every day. Being loved by more than one person hasn't divided my attention the way people assume it would. Mostly it has taught me to be clearer about what I need and to say it out loud instead of hoping somebody guesses. And then there's Harley, my dog, who has no idea what any of this means and loves me for entirely uncomplicated reasons.
Personal & vulnerable Being little, and the people who look after me ♡ Please open this part with curiosity and kindness.
I'm also a Little. That comes from processing trauma and from the dissociative side of how my head works. That side is its own long story and has its own page now. It isn't a label I use lightly. It shows up as age regression sometimes, and it's a coping tool that a couple of my partners hold space for. I'd rather be honest that it's part of me than pretend otherwise. I already spent enough years pretending.
Being little, and the people who look after me
This is a personal site, so I'd sooner say this plainly than leave a gap someone fills in with their own guess. Age regression is important to me. It isn't a performance and it isn't a bit. It's the mechanism my brain reaches for when the adult version of me has been running too long without a break. Having somewhere to put that down for an hour is a large part of why I function as well as I do the rest of the time.
I have caregivers. That word does a lot of work and people tend to imagine something much stranger than it is, so: a caregiver is someone who holds the structure when I can't. It looks like being reminded to eat something, being told to close the laptop, having somebody notice I've gone quiet before I've noticed it myself. If you want the nerdy version, it's a healthcheck. Something outside the process watches whether the process is still answering, because a hung process is always the last thing to know it has hung. It's care, given deliberately and received on purpose, by adults who agreed to it. The dynamic is affectionate, not dramatic, and most of it would be completely unremarkable to watch.
The things that get me there aren't complicated. Bluey, which I will defend as a great piece of writing to anyone who wants to argue about it. Hilda, for the same reasons plus the colours. Goldfish crackers, a food group. The softest clothes I own, and at this point that's most of my clothes. And Wolfie, my wolf stuffie, who has been through enough car rides and bad nights that he stopped being a stuffed animal and became something closer to a permanent coworker. He gets propped up on camera during calls sometimes. That's a very silly thing to type out and it also just helps.
None of this is a secret. None of it is the most interesting thing about me either. It sits alongside the servers and the code and the dog, not underneath them. If you want the actual explanation of what caregiver/little dynamics are, what littlespace is, and the difference between the version of this that's a coping tool and the version that's a kink, that's the caregiver/little page, and it's written for people who arrived confused, not for people who already know.
to restworks every time
More photos from the archive
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Currently
What I'm building and reading and up to changes often enough that I gave up pretending it belongs in an evergreen biography. The current snapshot lives on the homepage, refreshed whenever I remember to. Short version: still deep in Hazel, Hilray TV, this site, and whatever new system my brain has decided absolutely needs to exist, with a Monster within arm's reach at all times.
How I work, and how to check me
One thing worth saying on the page that is supposed to introduce me, because it shapes everything else here. This site has a rule: nothing goes up because it sounded good. If it is a number, it was counted. If it is a quote, it is what was actually said. If I cannot show you where something came from, it does not go up at all.
That rule costs me things, which is the only reason it means anything. The music page has no listening timeline, the single most requested thing on it, because my library export contains no dates and I will not plot a chart I cannot prove. A streaming-history section that was real and honestly reported got deleted because it measured a service I barely use. Seventeen artists on the genre galaxy are labelled as having no confirmed connections, instead of being quietly given a plausible-looking line to somebody adjacent.
The corrections are published too. When the infrastructure page spent a day claiming five running game servers and only two were up, that went in the changelog alongside everything else that broke. A build log full of fixes looks worse than one full of features. It is the only thing that tells you whether to believe the rest of the page.
Some of it is enforced by machine, because a rule I have to remember is not a rule. The deploy script refuses to publish if a number on a page disagrees with the data file that page loads, if a referenced file is missing, if a heading level skips, or if one of the private pages has picked up a social preview card it should never have.
Everything under About Me
The pages in this menu, grouped. Some of it is who I am. Some of it is how my brain works and what I've built to work around it.