What's New Around Here ✨

Back in January I wrote How I Built This Website — the tech stack, the monorepo, the reasoning behind it all. Six months later, this little corner of the internet has grown in ways I didn't quite expect when I started. So here's a tour of what's new and what's different.

The big one: a shared XR Space

The XR Space is the change I'm most excited about. It started as a simple "what if my site had a room you could actually be in?" — and now it's a shared space where visitors move around, see each other in real time, and leave notes behind.

You pick a name and an avatar, step in, and you're there. If someone else is in the space at the same moment, you'll see their avatar drift around too. Walk near a note someone left and it opens up for you to read.

A living, persistent guestbook

The notes you leave don't vanish. They accumulate — a growing tapestry of everyone who's passed through. Come back in a month and they're still here; the space remembers who visited.

And there's a twist I love: time capsules. You can seal a note with a future date. Until then it shows up as a little glowing locked orb — you can see that a message exists and when it opens, but not what it says. On the day, it blooms open and joins the wall. A message to the future, left in a shared space. 🔒

The strange, wonderful part: a blockchain

Here's where it gets a little unusual. Every time someone enters the XR Space, it's quietly recorded on Holy Mary Chain — a small blockchain I built and run myself. I wrote a whole post about it: Holy Mary Chain: The Blockchain Living Inside My XR Space.

The honest version: it's not a cryptocurrency, it has no monetary value, and you can't buy or sell anything. It's a tamper-proof record of presence — a way of saying "you were here" that even I, the person who runs the site, can't fake or erase. Mostly it's an experiment in what "proof you showed up" could look like when it isn't just server logs. It's also a genuinely fun and hard thing to have actually built and shipped.

I made it actually work on your phone

I'll be honest — for a while this site was kind of a mess on mobile. The home page landed on a blank cloud screen, the XR Space got cut off at the edges, menus didn't quite behave. That's all fixed now: the whole site is mobile-friendly, the clouds cooperate, and you can use everything comfortably from your phone.

A proper home on the web

The site now lives at its real address — marinminamiya.com — instead of a generic hosting URL. I also gave it a proper favicon (that little pink "M" in your browser tab) and tidied up how it shows in search results. Small things, but they make it feel like it's really mine.

What's next

I'm dreaming about keepsakes — little mementos you could collect for visiting, or for being at one of my talks or DJ sets. Something you actually get to keep. More on that soon.

Until then — come hang out in the XR Space, leave a note, maybe seal a time capsule for future-you. And as always, feel free to say hi in the chat. 🌸