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My name is Pipon Pinesisak or Pinesi for short. I am 24 years old. I've always been fascinated with the old internet and due to my absolute love of Hypnospace Outlaw, I wanted to try creating my own website under Neocities!

I am of First Nations descent (Indigenous Canadian) and have been reconnecting with my culture starting in 2023. I made good progress in relearning my language and learning about cultural stories and various things, I actually used to be ashamed of being a native up until I started to read Vinland Saga. Vinland Saga might've actually changed my life because ever since I read it, I started embracing my cultural identity and heritage.

I'm also an artist and draw as a hobby. I like playing video games, watching anime and recently picked up buying physical manga as a hobby (and boy is it an expensive hobby!)

funfact: my name means "Winter Bird" in my language! (it's not 1:1 though as it is based on my native name).

A few of my interests:

How did Vinland Saga make me reconnect with my culture you might ask?

Well... Back in like... the fall of 2023? I was looking for a new manga to read while waiting for new Berserk chapters. I read through chapter 0 and thought it was fine until I got to the part where Leif Ericson is telling stories about his voyage to Vinland (which happens to be what Vikings called North America). In his voyage he and his crew are chopping down trees only to see people approaching them from the hilltops.

This single page is what changed everything for me and made me think "I have to see this manga through." I needed to see if they were going to portray the First Nations people in a racist way later on or do it well and to my surprise, they executed their depiction really well!

Throughout the Vinland Arc of Vinland Saga I carefully read through all of the Mi'kmaq words the Lnu (native characters) spoke to see if I could find similarities to my own language (which happens to be a mix of Ojibwe and Cree) and luckily enough, my native language is Algonquin like the Mi'kmaq language in the manga! A prominent example that comes to mind is the Mi'kmaq phrase for "What is that?"

In my language, the phrase would be "ko-kwa-nan weh?" and discovering that was very cool and enlightening and it's inspired me to relearn my own native language a bit more. I ended up talking to the elders in my community as well, I spent more time with my grandparents and asked them about our culture and language, how to say certain things and it's generally just been a really good time.

Prior to Vinland Saga I usually kept the fact that I was First Nations a secret online because I didn't want to be discriminated against or looked down on. In online circles I often did see native people talked about in a bad light. Not only was I inspired by Vinland Saga to reconnect with my culture, I also found a manga with a pretty impactful message about peace and the damage war can do to people. Heavily recommend.

Just what the heck is my avatar?

My persona or little avatar is inspired by a few things such as:

Akira Toriyama- While I've never watched (or read) Dragon Ball growing up (I wish I did, I feel like I missed out) I recently purchased Akira Toriyama's Manga Theater and when I was reading through it, there were little snippets of a younger Toriyama's rookie days as a Manga artist, it showed him struggling to get several manga off the ground and submitting shorter mangas to Shonen Jump and a bit where he's excited about getting paid, calling the editor to ask about feedback etc. That was really inspiring and encouraging to me as an artist, all helped with how he portrayed himself as the little robot-looking guy.

"Thunderbird" by Nyle Johnston- Probably the most visually obvious inspiration in this bunch, Nyle Johnston's artwork has been a recent favorite of mine and one of my favorite pieces is the Thunderbird!

Xatu- Might not be very obvious but since I was looking for a more bird motif, Xatu came to mind because Xatu is especially native coded, so why not? I like the whole cloak-feather type wing look he's got going

Punpun- He was the very reason I wanted my avatar to be bird themed (along with my native name being bird themed as well) and while it's less apparent now with how simple I tend to draw my avatar, my avatar was initially supposed to have a human body underneath the cloak much like one of the ways Punpun is depicted in the manga.