About the author

Picrew portrait of me

I've had many usernames over time, but for now I mostly use Aral, Aral Khanym, or more recently, Aral of Xiaohe. I was born and raised in France, although I never really felt French. Sadly, I don't have much memory of the Web 1.0, as I was born on the very tail end of the 1990s.

I did though hang out on old Youtube, Neopets, Skyrock (which was a big thing in my country, the French equivalent of Myspace kinda), and other sites that were part of the 2000s internet. In my teen years, I was always hanging out on deviantART. I saw the boom of social media with my own eyes, and while it often took me longer than my peers to follow suit and did so to fit in, I never was much into mainstream social media. The only exception to this is Tumblr, but I use it for a purpose (posting about my Sims game on a blog, and some art on a sideblog) and it's rather recent.

My interests are quite varied. I'm an artist (formerly furry only, but now both human and furry), a writer (Russian-language for the most part), and I play the dombra, although I haven't touched it in a while now. But mostly, my interests revolve around literature, world cultures, languages, history, metaphysics, spirituality, and psychology. I've always been a curious person and I don't think this will ever not be a defining characteristic of mine. I learnt both English and Russian on my own, practicing with natives on the internet, and am now learning Portuguese as well.

This is rather short, but I don't like just talking about myself and saying things. I prefer those things to transpire through what I do, or write here.

Contact

Email: heartoftheurals@gmail.com