the basics

hi, my name is mae (i also go by the nickname 'ginger' occasionally), i'm 24, a second-year MA history student; barista and it's half of my personality

libra

enfp

enneagram 5/7 (i claim two and i'll die on that hill)

green is my favorite color, can you tell?

why am i here

lollll y'all if you're reading this in december 2025 i made this, made a whole plan to develop it, and then the semester absolutely got my ass. kids, if you think you can work two jobs and be in grad school full time, you're absolutely wrong. anyways, onto the blurb i actually wrote for this thing
i've been in and out of internet/digital phases for most of my life. i was super involved in a handful of band and tv show fandoms as a teenager (as well as being a constant lurker on aesthetic tumblr.....i miss her), but i've never been super digitally literate and never had the drive or interest to figure it out. getting into adulthood, school essentially became my entire life (don't do two bachelor's degrees at once and then immediately go to grad school kids your life will never be about anything else). tbh my frontal lobe is really cooking and now i actually have a will to do things other than academics and rotting in my own thoughts, so i ended up here. i guess this is part of my testament to myself (or the void) that i can be someone outside of just the girl that has always been good at school and terrified to do anything else. and that there are people and communities to find and cool things to create outside of corporate soul-sucking social channel

currently consuming

*for more info see my likes page

tv show: a heated rivalry

movie: lemonade mouth

book: babel by r.f. kuang

game: this christian children's game from 1994 that i found on the internet archive

academic projects/ventures/etc

my internship!

how it's going: i got called the "cracked intern" by my supervisor :-) i love my team, i love my work, and i'm going to be so sad when i go. i'm working as the lesson plan intern for a history education nonprofit, so i do a lot of little administrative tasks like scholar coordination and hunting down copyright licensing. i also did the primary source research and curation for two of the lesson plans!! i want to eventually work in museum/public history research and curation, so this was a really neat baby opportunity for me

my (maybe) soon-to-be-published paper

how it's going: deadline has lowkey been pushed back twice already....so now it's due in early february. i think i'm more and more equipped to handle it as time goes on, because i feel like my writing has been improving so much, and the bad habits i have had have been getting much easier to break

thesis research

how it's going: i did my first chapter and submitted it! i think i have an idea of how the rest of it will go, but part of me is worried about how it's gonna all come together next semester. i have the concepts of a plan (sorry for the reference) so hopefully i hit my stride early on. my research is on christian children's video (and eventually digital) entertainment, and it's just been really, really fucking fun. i hope it stays that way and doesn't get stressful

i was working on a digital history/humanities project on the 100, clexa, and fan reaction to her death

how it's going: i presented it in October! i ended up doing some fanfiction data analysis from ao3, visualizing the trends of alternate-universe tagged fics around the time of lexa's death. it was kinda difficult, because it was an event that i lived through when my brain was still young and mushy and it was really hard to not imbue my own research with my own experience of the whole thing. on the other hand, though, it was really beneficial because of my familiarity with fandom trends in the couple of years after her character was killed off. at some point (i think like,, late august) i really leaned into that, and things fell into place. by looking at the alternate universe tagging spike (which is an insane graph) and the increase and nature of fan activity following the character's death, this really beautiful picture emerged. the 100 has always stood out to me because the general allure of the fandom outside of tumblr and ao3 is the universe it's set in, but the clexa fandom has always seemed so separate from that, and it's because the writers (on purpose or on accident) created a character that was a genuine refuge for young, queer people, especially girls and those socialized as such. the reaction to her character's death was a show of grief, yes, but the way that fans claimed the character as their own was really something beautiful

next steps: at some point, hopefully through january/february provided that i have the bandwidth and inspiration, i really want to turn it into a publishable article. maybe i'll work on it the rest of this week that i'm home, or for the couple of slow weeks at the start of this upcoming non-coursework semester

longer-term projets

what they are/how they're going: so right now i'm doing linkedin learning courses on javascript and unity, i think i'm gonna table the unity one for now and focus on javascript tbh, since that'll be much more useful for what i want to do immediately. i'm also just running whatever ao3 data analytics i feel like on a given day. i'll probably make a page for those graphs or something

site to-do list

format likes page
add and format a page for my random fanfiction data charts. they are very entertaining to me.
add my moodboard to my homepage :-p
make this pretty and maybe make friends and neighbors idk
make my comment box page less sad:-(