Now:

A page that updates periodically about what I'm up to and into right now. A concept originally (I think) by Derek Sivers.

You are viewing the version of this page from September 13th, 2024. When it's gone, it's gone.

Making

I spent a whole lot of time making this free website. And you should be glad, because it's for you. I eventually forced myself to stop updating and improving it because I realized it'll stop being a useful learning tool if it gets any more complicated. But I'm proud of it and I believe in what it represents. Everybody should have their own website and they should be ugly and strange and personal.

Speaking of, I did a little CSS work making (just typed "worm caking") this page smoother and slightly more responsive. Try scaling the window around and check it out.

Doing

I am sick for real now. Throat hurts, sluggish and sweaty, the works. It sucks ass! It's a good time to start wearing a mask again when you're at the store and stuff. Lauren is slowly on the mend while I gradually get sicker. It's unbelievable how many dishes need done and trash needs taking out when two people are staying home every day.

Thinking

I've been reading a lot and thinking a lot about what I mean by being online, partly spurred by Cohost going down and partly as a step in my journey to mental health. Been thinking about how every big website is just fully reaction-based now. People clamoring to spread bad-faith trash and falling for it over and over. It reminds me of being at my ex-girlfriend's house when her family would put their old home movies on the TV and then shout over each other over footage from 2009 of them shouting over each other with different haircuts. Perpetuating the cycle, which I know is a hyperbolic therapy-speak way to talk about quote tweets, but that's what it is.

I've also been thinking in terms of ownership. When you post something on Instagram et al., you don't own it. Your name is connected to it, but ultimately the post exists on the street, or really in the walled garden of some rich wad who can decide according to his own grievances to just trash it. I never really put anything up on Cohost that didn't (or couldn't) exist elsewhere, but I feel really bad for people who did. Even if you archive your posts before the site goes dark, what context will those ever work in again? You're holding a dot-zip full of Prussian francs.

Posting doesn't have to be archival. The meta on the Places to Post currently seems to be "generate as much chaff as you can, which we will delete as soon as it costs money to keep." And I need you to know that I'm not coming down on shitposting. The lack of permanence or expectations of value can be freeing, and I get that. Twitter as a garbage disposal for thoughts I don't want inside me anymore is probably more load-bearing re: my mental health than I would ever admit.

a post is tiny and flat. you can put both hands around it, see every part of it. if you're a sick person inside, you can create a little something that lives outside you, that never touches the filth of your heart or spreads your poison. i wanna make a lot of those to offset me
— gale na (@poisonjr) October 29, 2023

I just think that if the delivery system of your thoughts and words belongs to someone else—someone who doesn't care about you at all and is invariably trying to exploit you—then that's thin ice on which to rest anything you actually care about, and it'll only get thinner as interest rates go up. I think it's better to own the things you make and say and also own as much of their context and packaging as you can. I'm using a web host to keep this site up, but if they went under (or kicked me out) I could spend about 40 bucks at MicroCenter and start hosting it out of my closet and nothing about it would be different. No apartheid-heir pedophile could ever put up a controlling stake's worth of blood money in the whole Internet, nor can he punish me here in my own jurisdiction for calling him that.

Also, and this is a completely worn-out observation, the atmosphere of "social media" makes people so nasty. Crabs in a bucket. When I was like 17 I had this stupid idea that the climate on Twitter might improve if the only way to tweet was via speech-to-text. Having to hear yourself say whatever abuse you're committing out loud might make some people curb it. I do still believe that putting just one extra stop between your brain and everyone else in the world's brain is a smart idea. Like when you order Domino's and the little thermometer says "Quality Check" while the driver finishes his cig out back. Like having to wait six months to buy a gun. Or, best-case-scenario, never buying it at all. The manufactured compulsion to post even when you have nothing to say has caused a lot of people problems just as much as it's made a select few people very wealthy. Those are mutually exclusive groups of people.

On the mental-health side, I've been pondering what it looks like to be "online on purpose." I dislike making webpages readable on phones (I still do it, but) because I think the internet should stay at home. It should be a place you visit between clear boundaries in your real life. I'm sicker and sicker of the internet being an ambient constant pressure that follows you around all day, to the point where I'm researching MP3 players so I can go out without my phone (if you have one you like that does Bluetooth and takes a microSD card let me know). Almost nothing on the internet is so important it can't wait until you're back at the computer. Certainly nothing I've ever made is.

Reading

Still chugging my way through Manhunt, although I'm slowing down on it considerably (I need to reiterate this is the book about John Wilkes Booth Manhunt and not the trans horror novel).

Listening

After a long slump of just shuffling my likes out of apathy, i'm back on some new shit:

This Yin Yin album got handed to me by (ugh) The Algorithm after I listened to new Los Bitchos record the other day. Both of these are good. Way above-average amounts of guitar on rotation lately.

There's a new Henrik the Artist EP out and it's sick. I feel like between Henrik and Rustie and Lolica Tonica it's been a great year for people making wild comebacks who I remember from Soundcloud ten years ago. So that's pretty cool.

As I write this I just listened through the new Ginger Root record, which is of course good, but also he's been doing this citypop-homage thing for three albums now. I'll be excited when he pivots to something new.