Turtles-Paradise

About Suzie

I am in my mid-twenties, married to a wonderful and amazing man who crossed the atlantic and suffered through endless red-tape and aggressive border controls in order to be with me, and currently residing in the UK. I live in a two bedroom listed historical building that’s very pretty and damn cold in the winter. I have a small patch of ground on which my first attempts at container gardening are flourishing.

About turtles-paradise.net

About ten years ago I created my first website. It was a ludicrously garish red-on-black site hosted on some obscure free site domain name. It promoted my artwork and comics, and had a hit counter that I got orgasmic over every time it ticked past another ten hits.

Since then I have built hundreds of websites, some for fun – like my popular Final Fantasy 7 Turks shrine – and some for profit.

One of the first domains I picked up was turtles-paradise.net. Always intended to be my ‘personal’ website, it was normally a blog, sometimes a tutorial site, and occasionally dead. I always returned to it, however, as my skill at creating websites grew.

As the internet evolved, so did I. I visited the Big Green Gathering, and was struck by a talk on permaculture. I have always been convinced that western society was fundamentally broken, that the more, more, more approach to pretty much everything was going to lead us nowhere… fast. I have seen first hand the damage that the de-humanisation of our culture has caused. Rape, abuse, escapist behaviour, depression – too many people struggle with the fact that conventional society simply has no place or use for anyone who doesn’t fit the ‘average’.

The values of permaculture resonated strongly with me, and informed many of my choices. To complement and enhance that, a community of minimalist bloggers sprung up and I began devouring the many hundreds of posts on simplicity, mindfulness, being present and in the moment, and using our time on the things and people we love instead of on soul-sucking jobs, mindless entertainment, and slowly poisoning ourselves.

In April 2010, I wiped turtles-paradise.net clean, and set up the site you now see. Intended to be a place where we connect the dots, and where I document my journey towards living consciously and sustainably, I hope tp.net will become part of that community of blogs that share my ideals.