This website, like my entire life really, has gone through several major changes. I don’t want to run them all down right now. I do want to reflect on how much it has changed over the years as it shows the ways I have changed too along with it.
The site started as a comic book and video game blog. I also talked about movies and other related stuff but it was mostly comics and video games. Eventually I began using it as a personal blog too so it became a mixture of both. As time went on I rebranded it into The Spiders Lair, what I thought at the time was a better reflection of who I was as a person. I chose spiders lair because I saw myself as a basement dwelling nerd who lived in the shadows with spiders. Eventually I invented the character of the Retro Witch to play out my female fantasies before I was able to fully transition. This was a mistake but it was also a stepping stone for me to eventually become the woman I am today.
I became engrossed in that character for a while. Then after I came out I took her on as a part of my identity full time. I would introduce myself as the Retro Witch and would welcome people to The Spiders Lair, where chaos resides. I chose chaos as my motif because I felt it encapsulated what I was going for, the entire thing felt chaotic and disorganized.
The content of the site didn’t change, however, as the branding did. Sometime in the midst of renaming it the spiders lair I shifted to a greater emphasis on horror content not because I felt it needed to but because my interests had changed and horror was becoming a bigger part of my life all the time. I even tried branding my podcast as a horror podcast as a result. That didn’t really go over too well but the podcast also went through it’s own share of identity crisis as it went from The Spiders Lair Podcast to the Dark Web Podcast, then back, then becoming The Stephanie Bri Show before I effectively cancelled it.
I decided to settle on naming the website after myself for a number of reasons. The first was identity. Stephanie Bri was who I am, who I wanted to be seen as and it made sense to show that in my content. Also I put a lot of thought into that name and wanted to make sure the world knew to refer to me by it. Then there is the fact the website is more of a personal blog now, gone are the days where I try to pretend to keep up with Nintendo news just to keep up the charade of being a video game blog. I no longer write about video games news. In fact I stopped writing newsy articles altogether. I want this site to be a blog that catalogs my life, including the changes I undergo, not a fake pretend news site trying to be something it never was.
Pretending to be something I wasn’t is a part of my life thus that was seen in this websites identity over the years. The branding was a result of a concerted effort to hide who I truly was. I wore one too many masks myself and via this site. Today I share not a website I crafted but a blog that reveals, little by little, who I truly am as a person. I think that is a much better way.
Stephanie Bri 