The site

About	YOU ARE HERE
Art	My gallery. Almost all of my art worth sharing since my early days, circa 2017.
3D Art	3D models of the non-functional variety. Perhaps VRChat models, once those are done.
GunCAD	3D and 2D designs, technical data, etc, usually related to firearms.
Digital	Programming! Hardware! Games, websites, scripts, general computer things, etc. I will fill this out once I think my projects deserve their own page.
Audio	I have made music on occasion. Some of it I think is worth sharing.
Photography	Art without a pencil. I enjoy walks at odd times of day in strange places.
Writing	I write at length about many things. Maybe one of them appeals to you!
Archival	Anything I think deserves to be preserved, but may be bad form for, or won't really fit in with, the Internet Archive. I'll try to mirror anything I host here on there, too, and vise versa, just for redundancy.
Contact & Elsewhere	Links to other places I can be reached, or my creations can be accessed.
Everything else	Anything that doesn't fit with the rest.

The site's pages were written in PHP, HTML, and CSS using Notepad++. I tried to avoid JavaScript wherever possible. Where it was required to do what I want, it is minimized as much as possible.

Visual assets, if not made using CSS, were created using a combination of Clip Studio Paint (no longer recommended, use Krita instead), Adobe Photoshop CS6, and MS paint (32 bit, W8.1).

The site is hosted locally, served by a small PC running Windows 10, using WAMP as my web server software stack. This site was specifically designed to run without requiring a database - everything is written solely with PHP and relies on various JSON / text files stored in different places for any metadata storage.

I'm using Dynu for DNS, as I'm still on a dynamic IP due to being in a residential IP range, and I purchased the domain through Namecheap. I'm not paying for SSL or HTTPS, that's handled through Let's Encrypt.

I wouldn't recommend you do it this way yourself. It's better to run NGINX direclty on Linux if you know how to use Linux, instead of routing it through WAMP with a reverse proxy. You also won't have to deal with the mess of problems that using Windows comes with. It's also much more organized to use a proper database instead of whatever nonsense I'm doing here. On top of that, hosting things yourself has undoubtedly gotten more difficult over the years due to all of the new standards you have to account for when starting a website. It'll ultimately be best for most people to just pay a company to host the site for them, so you can do the fun part, which is designing and using the thing. I'm just doing this for my own weird idea of fun.

Myself

I'm Cal / Caliber, AKA Amber, née 8762e13. I'm an engineer, computer user, artist, etc. I grew up in Michigan, and I've been around the US for the vast majority of my life.

Where I came from

Today, I mostly see my childhood as a series of great missteps, and the vast majority if the time I spent was in service of things that would only lead me away from the people closest to me. I grew up in a pretty rural part of Michigan for the vast majority of my life, and an even rural-er part of Missouri when I was still too young to think or speak. When I finally gained the ability to read, most of my time was spent on the computer. As early as 2005, I was regularly using an old Gateway Solo my mom had gotten from her work to play Age of Empires II and browse web forums and Wikipedia, even while I didn't understand much of it at the time.

Games were... about the extent I used technology for at that time, rather than anything productive. I'd used MS Paint, sure, but nothing serious. I was more interested in seeing how things worked and taking them apart / putting them together than I was in using the tools they were created in service of. This sort of tinkering carried through to a number of skills I still use today, though if I had a choice, I'd have started on art a lot earlier than I did.

My first encounter with furry stuff is hard to pin down, but I think it started around the same time I found Deviantart? 2013 maybe. A lot of memories from that time are hazy (and every computer I had between that Solo and the office PC I was using in 2014 are long gone), but the earliest files I still have on my PC that aren't text files full of ASCII art are memes and such from the Prequel Adventure community. Basically a Homestuck-alike but made by people who like Elder Scrolls stuff. A number of people split off from there into a little discord group chat, then later a server circa 2017 - that became the same group of people I'd later meet up with in Ohio and Colorado, a handful of years later. Each of them equally furry as I was, if not more willing to talk about it.

🍀⁉️

Unfortunately, no good story goes without conflict, and I had no shortage of that around this time. I had so many conflicting feelings stirring in my head around this time, some puberty-hormone-fueled, others spurred by things put in my head by people who didn't have the best intentions for me. It's hard to explain the extent of complications that arose in my head from the feelings I had towards furry stuff and all of my friends being furries and drawing furry art while existing in some of the spaces I did, at least without going head-first into political topics that I don't really want to dump here. Maybe I'll make a blogpost on cognitive dissonsnace in the future.

I think I failed to admit to myself for most of my life what being a "furry" meant, or what being "queer" meant. I was always stuck in this sort of in-between with ""normal"" people on one side, and all of the coolest, nicest people I'd ever met on the other. Here, maybe this'll all make more sense in context:

Long story short (still kind of long), 2014 is around the time the naïve child that was past me found 4chan. The kinds of things that go on there aren't terribly important and the kinds of people that arise from there are some of the worst on the planet, if you'll take my word for it. Definitely for the worse, this was the first place I was able to find a shared space with other people online that wasn't just loose relationships like the ones from Minecraft servers from years past, or the few friends I'd made on Steam. the culture this place breeds wormed its way into my head, too, and I became ingratiated and socialzied by a group of backwards, prejudiced, antisocial assholes.

The behavior impressed upon me in that time continued to mar my interactions with basically everyone I met in ways I couldn't possibly comprehend, up until... probably 2021. That was when that fangame came out, on the unofficial furry board of 4chan at the time, /trash/. I'm not going to name it, because it's frankly just rightist propaganda for anyone who wasn't brought up in the same spaces that created it, but IYKYK; it's a visual novel about a non-binary pterodactyl and a hopeless chud.

This visual novel seems to have had the directly opposite effect on me as the developers intended for anyone. Primarily, it made me realize, through how genuinely accurate the writing was in terms of describing chuds of the time, how much of an awful fucking person I had been to just about everyone around me for the last 15-20 years of my life. It made me realize how much more like swiss cheese than anything else all of my ideas and opinions were. It made me realize how pointless everything I had done up to that point had been, and that there was truly no purpose to the behavior other than upsetting others for some vile idea of "lulz" or simply for the sake of starting and maintaining constant arguments over non-issues.

The next 4-ish years were spent answering questions about myself, and fixing things caused by about an equal amount of time spent on the hellsite. In 2022 I regained hope for existence in general. In 2023 I started to branch out into other communities and tried to do the kind of soul searching I'd refused myself in every year prior. In 2024, I was able to fix most of the holes in my understanding of politics, and flip-flopped just about as hard as is possible in absolute terms - and I met the love of my life because of it.

In 2025, I think I've expunged most of the magical thinking from my brain. Learning and re-learning never truly stops, we're always building understanding, but the foundation for future knowledge is there, at least. I was able to understand and accept to myself that I was transgender in January, came out, and started HRT the next month (2025-FEB-07). I've been as happy as I've ever been since.

I've killed the parasite in my brain telling me it's not ok to like anything and that enjoying things is "cringe." The parasite that always said "nobody cares" and made me never start on art that I wanted to see.

In 2026, I want to say the 'hopeless chud' chapter of my life is over for good. I don't really talk to anyone from that time anymore. The people who would have tried to talk me out of being myself are long gone, and I want nothing to do with them. The few that have come along are people who were never involved in those communities to begin with.

I am forever grateful for those who were willing to put up with me for all of that time, and did not lose hope that I'd turn out ok.

🎨🖌️🎺🎶

I got into creative endeavors pretty deep into my teen years, starting with music while I was still in school. I only went so far as band class, circa 2012, until I was able to download a copy of FL studio some time in High school - though that hasn't really gone very far since. I have a number of things up on Bandcamp, and vastly more that I haven't shared anywhere, though I'm heavily considering just taking them down, given they're old, embarrassing, and just kind of terrible frankly.

I started trying to draw "properly" in December of 2017, mainly because of my other friends at the time who were awesome artists that I was acutely jealous of. I remember the month specifically, if not the date, mainly because I wrote it down on the same page. I've still got the old ruled notebook, too, somewhere... I'll post a photo here if I can find the thing.

I was still in High school at the time, and I'm glad I started when I did, because having to get a "real job" meant sacrificing most of the time I'd otherwise have put towards practicing art, and going to work as a fry cook or what have you. I ended up working in a gun store for a couple years when I got out of high school, but it's still retail, for better or worse. Just more paperwork.

I've been trying to improve my skills ever since. I've since moved to a remote job, so I have a lot more time for personal development, whether between tasks or in time that would otherwise have been spent on the highway. I still have so much to learn, but the times I do get to draw are always fun.

🖥️🔫

Art's not the only thing I've been creating either! Aside from techie stuff like this website (and a number of others I'll let you find yourself), I found out some time in 2023 that Fusion360 (now just fusion) is free for home users. This led me down a rabbithole of learning and re-learning engineering concepts, as well as borderline materials sciences. I want to use this skillset for making fursuit parts in the future, though up to now, I've used it primarily for firearms. You can see (and download!) a couple of my projects on my GunCAD page, if you are so inclined.

🗣️🔤🈯🈷️

Part of the whole "refactoring my life" thing that came with escaping 4chan also led me to re-evaluate my hobbies in general. I was using Duolingo up until late 2024, and for all the time I'd spent with it, I still wasn't able to speak a lick of the language I was studying. Come 2025, I picked up Anki and Renshuu, a flash card and general studying application respectively, both free. Using both of these for an hour or so each day (often more) has put me closer to a vocabulary usable in everyday life. I can get around Japan, read a few signs, and have basic conversations with people. It's enough to make friends, at the least.

Just those two aren't really the whole story, though. You'll want to do "immersion" (i.e. listening practice) and practice your speaking, too! any language has 4 distinctly separate skills that make up its usage, and you need to practice each one to become competent enough to survive with that language. Reading / writing, and speaking / listening. Each one serves a specific goal, and each one takes a good chunk of time to learn properly. I would advise anyone still stuck on Duolingo or similar "language gamification" platforms to get out ASAP and start proper practice if your goal is to ever use the language to speak with natives. YouTube is great for listening practice, and VRChat is awesome as a global language exchange platform.

Where I've been

I've traveled a fair bit in my life, though really only through two cultures. The parts of the US I've experienced are largely homogenous, and I hardly noticed a difference between Michigan culture and Ontario culture.

So far, I've been to:

- Canada (Only one day)

- Japan

- The US

The vast majority of travel time is done in service of meeting up with friends and family. I'll try to list off most notable trips here:

2026-JAN-01 - 2026-MAR-30 - I traveled to Japan in January of 2026, and spent most of my time visitng with the people I had spent the prior year on VRChat with, learning the ins and outs of the language and culture.

2025-MAY-03 - 2025-JUL-27 - I went to Oklahoma to visit my partner! Spent a lot of time doing housework and rennovations. Oklahoma is... depressing, to say the least. At least the town I was in. Many things to say, but I'll keep them to myself. I'm glad I got to visit at all, if nothing else.

2024-AUG-17 - 2024-AUG-24 - The most recent time I went to Colorado. I spent about a week in Colorado with a larger group of friends, many of which I've unfortunately since fallen out of contact with. Many if the photos in my gallery are from the time we spent camping there.

2020-JAN-01 - 2020-JAN-05 - I was able to meet up with a number of my friends in Columbus, Ohio for a few days. COVID-19 was just a footnote in most papers by this point, so we were lucky to have planned this when we did. A local friend was able to guide us around to some of the notable places, though it was as American as anywhere else.

Any trips prior to this were short-lived (Like the day trip to Canada), or were when I was younger and were just short stints to visit family.

Where I am now

My story is still being written. I'm skilled in many things, but no master by any means. My interests vary wildly. I'll find where I fit eventually.

I'm surviving the best that I can. Making amends and meeting new people where I failed to do so in the past.

I hope you enjoy the things I am able to share here, and that they inspire you to create things of your own.

I'll be around.

💛🩷💜

---

est. 2023