To die will be an awfully big adventure
just a lot of tl;dr

lost-boy.org was registered on March 14, 2016 at Namecheap. I've dreamed of having my own domain for the longest time, so to have it be here, alive, is still incredibly surreal to me.

While this is my very first domain, I began coding and making sites in 2003-2004, learning HTML/CSS through Neopets. Back then, my sites were under Freewebs, and then later a subdomain, which was hosted by myriad people over the years. Since 2019, Leprd, by the lovely Lysianthus, is where this domain calls home.

Name

When I first read J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan as a child, I was enchanted. The vast world, the boundless adventures it held—it captivated my imagination completely. Although I have a rather complicated relationship with the book now, given how many elements in it haven't aged well, I still reread it from time to time for the journey and for that one special moment in the end. It remains an important part of my childhood, and I carry the story with me always.

As I grew up, I found myself becoming more drawn to the Lost Boys, the group of children who follow Peter Pan around enthusiastically during the story, yet, in the end, choose to return to London and grow up. The original novel doesn't delve deeply into the circumstances of their decision; frankly, it paints a rather depressing picture of their fate. But I think a lot about them, their choice. Why they chose to do what they did, how deeply they might have regretted it if they were still able to remember. I'd like to think that it was far more complex than just leaving and forgetting; I'd like to think that the magic still lingered in them, even if they soon forgot the name of it.

I'd like to believe that because I'm finding that to be the case for myself personally. As I continue to age, I find myself still waiting for that moment when I become an adult. During my earlier years in college, it used to frustrate me—all that waiting: to be wise, for my life to come together seamlessly. But it's become clearer to me that the child never really goes away and grows up. There will always be something that I will never have the answers to, something that will both confuse me and bewonder me—something that will make me feel less wise than I should probably be by now. Maybe it's because I'm not "old enough yet," but I can't see myself ever feeling any different once I'm 50 or 60 or 100. And somehow that's all right. When I think of who a "lost boy" is, I think of someone who is in that obscure realm between childhood and adulthood. Maybe they're not always there—maybe they have something figured out, maybe they just don't care. In any case, it's a place I find myself coming back to a lot, and while it used to make me feel anxious, today I find that I am incredibly humbled by the fact.

Aside from the obvious source, the name was also later inspired by one of my favorite fanfiction stories, "Something, Anything, Everything" by seongnan_gom, which has unfortunately been deleted and lost to the void since I first read it in 2012. It told the story of a college student who feels detached from and unsatisfied with his life, yet is unable to explain why. Later, he becomes entangled in the complicated relationship between his friends but, after overcoming some difficulties, eventually finds love. In the end, while he finds that nothing around him has changed—the street he lives on is still a dump, his future still uncertain—he nevertheless feels differently about his life and is able to approach it more positively. While I fail to recall the final words of the piece verbatim, they left a deep impact on me. The last line went something like: "They weren't doomed. They weren't foolish. They were just a little lost." As someone who had just finished a spectacularly unsatisfying first year at college, those words were—and still are—a great comfort to me.

Finally, one of the first video games I ever played was The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Before that, my older sister and I would watch as my dad played it, and I consider it to be The Game that got me into gaming. When I first came across it as a child, the Kokiri and the Lost Woods reminded me a lot of Peter Pan. Furthermore, I found the game's protagonist, and one of my favorite video game characters, Link, to be reminiscent of a lost boy. While the rest of the Kokiri never grow up, Link eventually does—and finds that he must in order to defeat Ganondorf and restore peace to the land. One of my favorite scenes from the game is when Link returns to the Lost Woods as an adult. I love how the elements and atmosphere of the Forest Temple are similar to that of a fairytale, but with a more sinister touch. The dungeon design is fantastic in its storytelling, illustrating the rude awakening that comes with growing up.

Thus, before finally settling on lost-boy.org, I also considered naming my domain kokiri.nu. However, while I do like The Legend of Zelda series, I felt that the name was too fandom-specific, and I didn't know how I would feel about it years later from now (also .nu domains are pricey!). Similarly, I thought about naming it lost-girl.org, but it felt a bit too vague, and I wanted the association with Peter Pan to be clearer. And so here we are! I love the name a ton, and I'm so glad it wasn't taken. Nearly ten years of pining over a domain name is a long time. There were a lot of extension options other than .org, but I went with it because I like the way it sounds. The logic!

Network titles are still cool, right? Right. Rust and Stardust, comes from this little text I happened across on Tumblr. The words complement one another well, and I thought it was a fitting phrase to describe the road to adulthood, beginning with the wonders and awe of childhood ("stardust") and ending with the maturity and experience that comes with age ("rust").