i realized it's been five years since i changed my un to nebular (i truly thought it was only a couple years ago...) and then logging into aff today informed me that it's my ten year anniversary on this aff account (my ten year anniversary on my first account was back in october) and it just... sent me into a spiral. and an intense desire to change my un again. i fell in love with a name that i was going to name an oc of mine and upon recalling that name, my finger perhaps... slipped. 

i remember applying to my first applyfic on my old account eleven years ago, i remember the story (a rival group to girl's generation) and the ulzzang i used (hwang jimin, the grip you had on my neck...) and i remember how godawFUL the app itself was. gosh we literally typed a few sentences and called it a day back then. no layout codes, no turn in posts, i'm really showing my boomer age here.

do any of my fellow senior citizens remember the phase when applyfic authors used online forms like typeform to apply?? my ty laptop used to shut down and i'd lose everything. truly the dark ages but it was honestly the most wholesome time in my life.

around 2014-2015 is when the applyfic game really started to amp up (at least from what i remember), more people were getting familiar with coding and everything started to become so pretty. i remember not having as much fun back then because i started to stress more about how my app looked instead of the contents. i started to make more friends though, and the fics were so lively. there were like 5 new ones everyday it felt like. 

i finally learned to balance making my app look nice while also prioritizing the contents too... it's crazy how long i've been doing this for and yet i only feel like my apps just recently started to get good. to be honest i find it more fun to write these days. i got really into the competition of it all back then, but now i just focus on creating something i'm proud of- it really took me ten years to realize that this is the key (the old age is setting in ig).

anyway, i just wanted to reminisce today. i'm not sure for how long i'll be on this ship, but considering i started falling in love with applying all over again, i can only hope we can keep chugging along even further. — mindashii, hobipie, nebular & now, starliet.