Why did I make this website? Yeah, let's start there. Microblogging's done me dirty
everytime I try: Twitter, Instagram stories, blusky, there's nothing so small
without thinking this'd been better livetweeting or making a blog, so I made a blog.
This, you're reading it. I wanted to find one of those cool sites the kids (me)
are using for spending their time, like Dreamwidth or SpaceHey, or Tumblr,
oh a Tumblr in 2025! How fun that'd be... but I have issues with all of that.
The y2k resurgence feels off to me. I wasn't online for a lot of the 2000s
but when I eventually got there I dealt on old tech, so I ended up getting
a lot of those experiences. There's two ideas in my mind of the internet in
the 2000s, centralization taking over all the old more individual sites and
the drive to be in, to be popular. There was LiveJournal, early Blogspot, before
it became a linkhub, early Tumblr before it became a cliquehole... all the old
places for people and their little rotating groups of four or three to like a post
and then leave for them to wash up again on those shores. I go back to those,
it's a ghost town you know. Posts go from once a month to once a year to completely
abandoned, every link is dead, every little thumbs up is from an account with a
password that was written on a piece of paper that's now either thrown into a bin
or forgotten in the bottom of a table, behind drawers, never to see light again.
Not like it needs it. Then there's the fakeness of it: everyone collapsing to become
a part of the next phenomenon to hit the web. The worst person you know just posted
a status update about your favourite thing that they used to call you slurs about,
and how it was "soooooo awesome!" People in countercultures, in new spheres of fandoms
never seen prior didn't just operate on the social networks we now know and love,
they had listservs, BBS networks, IRC, Usenet, (does anyone remember Usenet??),
to keep this thing alive but give it a bit of the secrecy that it sometimes warranted.
I'm not denying that there was the problem of coolness within these circles as well,
ask ska fans about emos during the worse half of the first 21st century decade and
you might get a hint. That only furthers my point, how this secrecy is what kept
these scenes alive with more of its weird glory than otherwise, if it had been
mostly fodder for Friendster or Facebook. Those scenes are way better off than say
modern EDM or Twilight. And now that more private modes of sharing this information
are more popular, we're seeing more of this weirdness come about! Echo chambers are
birthing the next great authors out of Transformers fan servers, our next great
is going to have been on the Prefab Sprout Amino probably, Timothée Chalamet
was based, the real based in between being a cokehead and being racist! Proper
based man! Knighted by Lil B! See? These modes of communication are coexisting now,
long after the last great blogger has turned her computer off and gone to that
artists' meeting in downtown she'd been invited to a year before. Seeing the resurgence
of these third forms is a bit odd to me (resurgence? DW has been around since like 2017)
but of course I can't comment too heavily. This is a fourth form for me. The personal website,
a one way mirror in the place your bathroom window would be. You can't like, you can't comment,
you can only share the link around to get other people to see what happens around here.
I like this fourth form, it's comfortable: total customizability, no worry about any
interaction, no rules, yeah man. I'll leave you with this other ream I wrote
back in March with a sprained ankle.

I really don't miss the old internet, tbh. I appreciate its view of everything being little islands, connected by small forums, thin bridges between every information center, so decentralized. it was cool, I give it that. those forums I used to browse were so fun. my issue is that because it was so bridge to bridge, islands sunk and bridges fell to entropy, burying everything that it led to. sometimes, those bridges were lit on fire. when I go back to some of those old places I used to frequent, old blogs and websites, it makes me a bit sick. half-eaten, now extinct bugs and trojans in the spiderwebs, the occasional "wow, it's been ten years!" message from someone that had a whole life ahead of them, that they're currently living. I like it more centralized, because then it can divide itself and not be one mass. it's like European civilization, with Visigoths and .Commacks, raiding and pillaging listservs and now-forgotten blogs and hubs in flash mobs, until some thin man with curly hair that abandoned his brother built the Roman empire. it divied itself up into the triumvirate to sustain itself, since one part could never be as close to another as it would like to be without becoming something else. there are still riots and neo-Pagans trying to reclaim their rights and homelands they left, but thankfully no one really cares anymore about that. we're in a relative Pax Romana.

-Currently listening to All Her Ships Were White by the Alaskas