Date: July 19, 2026
I've had the pen name/username/whatever this is of "Owlkalinity" for a while now! To celebrate the six year anniversary of me having this name, here's a little bit about the history of this site!
My knowledge of the writing platform Wattpad started far sooner than 2019—my guess is that I first heard about it either in 2016-2017 from my friend, who recommended me to join the site at the time, or a bit earlier than that when I tried to read a full version of a story that I found part of on the coding website Scratch. My Wattpad account itself says I joined on July 19, 2020, which is an insane date to me because that feels way too late.
When I was making my account, I believe it was briefly under my real name, before I decided that I definitely needed a pen name. I wanted to go with some kind of owl pun (owls being one of my favourite creatures), and checked a bunch against a search engine for uniqueness. Eventually, I settled on Owlkalinity, which to this day corrects to "alkalinity" before any of my current stuff shows up (one thing that I see often is, bizarrely, my old-ass Sketchfab account that I have never used). Had I known there were so many people named "Owlkaline" on the 'net, though, I would have gone with something else (maybe Owlseeing, which I passed over for some reason). I've grown super attached to this name though...
I only officially stopped using my Wattpad account this year (specifically May 2026), but I've been inactive on it since pretty much 2024, after I took down my mediocre first draft of The Acorn Detective Agency. Besides that, if you were a reader of mine, you may recall that I had a dream journal there. I still keep a dream journal, but I don't post any of it publicly, outside of the odd Tumblr post on my mainblog.
In 2021, at some point, I redesigned my icon to be closer to my then-current art style. I also started intermittently writing an autobiographical comic book on Wattpad, Pellets!, which served a function similarly to what I want to do with articles on this very site. There was also another small change...
The first appearance of my avatar/fursona! She didn't have a name yet, though, and was always just "me" until I named her (and myself) Ivy Ianthe Ibou in 2023-ish. I remember drawing this in my media arts class in Kleki, a neat little browser drawing program that was the most modern drawing software I'd used at the time. Ugh, my art from then looks so weird. Also, yes, this cover was designed in Canva.
2021 was when I got Instagram for the first time, at a friend's suggestion (for university purposes). For some reason, even after a bad enough onslaught of weirdos for me to put a warning in my account that I'm not looking to date anyone, I decided to create a second IG account for my books in 2022.
Instagram quickly turned out to be the platform where I posted the most stuff, as I started trying to carve a niche into the Bookstagram community. I actually did have some semi-successful Reels, once that became a thing. However, I found the demand for content unreasonable, several people I followed pivoted away from Bookstagram content, I started the account over twice, and eventually abandoned the account altogether in 2024 once Meta changed their policies to allow, among other things, harmful conspiracy theories and blatant homophobia and transphobia.
It doesn't really need a mention here, since it's obviously still running, but I started my Tumblr in September of 2022, twenty days after starting my mainblog there. My far better university roommate, whom you may vaguely have heard me reference as Hylia, encouraged me to after I made far too many references to Tumblr for someone who didn't have one at that point. I've definitely been more active at some points more than others, but I love Tumblr for its multimedia nature and the fact that I can find anything there (when the search functions don't fight me, anyway).
I also found this slightly-more-recent art of myself on there at one point:
Remember how I mentioned abandoning Instagram due to Meta's policies? Me creating my Bluesky in 2024 was a direct response to that, since I desired a casual place to post some nonsense at that point.
(As a side note, I made a fuss about the policies in my stories on my personal account and pinned them in a highlight before I ran off, stating I was not going to remain on a platform that allows those things. Only one of the people I was following at the time joined me there. I was actually shocked to find my personal account still open when I had to get it for university once more in 2025!)
I decided to make a Bluesky account for this stuff sometime after. I also still post there, and it is actually where I'm the most active in recent years, though that's mostly because I suck at consistently posting anything for long periods. Though even Bluesky is hard in that regard (how the heck to people post so much on there???).
I'd toyed with the idea of an Owlkalinity website years before I actually started one—I even have an unpublished Google Sites layout from what my computer insists was 1979 (lol) but was probably mid-2021-ish, based on the lack of Adventures in Fragmentation on the list (its first cover being drawn in December of that year).
My first attempt at a site was a WordPress, which is no secret given that my first post on my on-site blog, back when that wasn't my Tumblr, was all about how much their parent company's CEO sucks. I still have a Tumblr out of begrudging love for the people and platform itself; I had no attachment to WordPress at all at that point and abandoned it in April of 2025 for Neocities, where you are right now! I love being able to have full control over my site, even as someone too young to remember what it was like in the 90s and 00s when everything was this way. Even if it's simpler than the things that some website builders offer, I feel like it's a lot more genuine, and I hope you think so too.
Thanks for sticking through this whole little history! I hope it was at least slightly interesting at times, and I hope you stick around for the future, as I continue to build the site and create new things. I'll be coming out with more articles in the future!
(Oh, and if you've made it this far, happy 6 years of Owlkalinity.)
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