This is an informal site so this is an informal about page.
Like many of my generation, I am one of many names. My official pen name is J Samuel Diehl, but we’ll see how long that lasts. Lately I’ve been going by Tyr Animer, a handy moniker that has a fun origin I’ll share below. You might have also seen my other names such as nulloperations, Dronebrain, or Quie Fraxus. If you know either of those last two names, you’re like in a group of 12 people, and you should say hi because I probably haven’t heard from you in years.
Here’s a bunch of tags that can be used to describe me, not in the order of importance, just the order I think of them. Which has interesting implications, but I digress: I am a writer, a disabled gal, a gamer, a streamer, a podcaster, a blogger, a trans woman, a wife, a proud pet parent, an atheist witch, someone with goth mom energy, 40-something, a lover of dry humor, nocturnal, ~vaguely horny~, friendly yet shy, outgoing but private, full of multitudes but also boring, and a pretty decent friend.
And those descriptors are kind of the things you’ll find here on this site. It’s an informal blog, both audio and textual, and is just me sharing me. It’s not meant to advertise anything, that’s what the writer site is for, or to make loud clanging noises to garner attention. This is my little cubby in the web. You’re welcome here if you’re cool. Otherwise, eh, go find your own spot of joy.
Introductions out of the way, some neat things:
The blog goes back to 2006 technically, but rebooted back in 2008 after the site screwed up. I then archived much of the old site back in 2014, and still have a lot of the old entries locked up somewhere. The podcast started in 2011, and when the site was archived in 2014, all of that early stuff went into storage. In 2024, I restored all of the old podcast entries included all special series such as the Dog Days of Podcasting and the NaNoWriMo content.
I consider myself a third generation podcaster, not part of the early adopters, nor the major pioneers that set the field ablaze in the late 00’s, but part of the bubbling crowd in the early 2010s that found a cozy and fertile feed to grow a podcast within even though I kept my garden a little small. I’ve hosted several short-lived series including Five Things We Like, Ruin Your Childhood, the Trans-Dimensional Cafe Podcast, and Midnight to One. I was the SysOp to the second generation of the Hiddengrid and hosted the Sixth World Chronicles series on that show. I was a host on the amazing Seize the GM podcast and the lovely short lived Something Ventured podcast. I have always enjoyed it and will continue to run amok in RSS spaces so long as I remember how WordPress kind of works.
Oh right, the name; Tyr Animer. So, the name has no intentional connection with a Nordic deity, although I admit a certain curiosity of the theme. It started as an attempt to make a handle for a Star Wars character back in the halcyon days of Star Wars Galaxies. Tyr has the short bite of that sort of name. I almost certainly had heard the name prior to that in relation to the Norse deity but back then I wouldn’t have taken the time to research such a choice in handle. Maybe there’s influence, maybe not. The, uh, last name, uh, actually comes from a streamer of the adult content variety when she shortened the handle I was using at the time: Animer. Had a nice ring to it. I choose to provide no additional details about that part of the name. So, Tyr Animer. I like the double R sounds at the end and I think it has a nice mouth feel.
I like this page. I think I’ll put more random bullshit on it in the future.