the early internet of the 1990s, and the early 2000s especially, is a wolrd that while sadly lost occupies much of my mind. memories and a yearning to return to a world long since gone. i recently went on 4chan, a lot. I know, a poor descision. but 4chan hasnt changed much (code wise) since it debued. culture wise it has also remained years behind social media and corprotized internet circles. it was nostolgic in a way
I have since spiraled into my addiction. Reading hundreds of pages of blogs from decades ago, most with broken links and missing images, but the writing stil in tact. just people, writing about whatever and leaving it for the world to see. theres a certain beuty in that dont you think? I think the internet has really lost some soul over the years. maybe its futile to try to revive any, but i can try.
So, prior to today i had a txt file with the original "post" in it. I was a bit foolish to think that anyone would read it. i am even more foolish to have decided to format all of this in HTML and try to set up a static Web1.0 type site. but i dont care, this is making me happy and my stupid green on black color scheme is making me smile.
you know, its the stupid things in life, really its the small and stupid things that are the most joyful. my dumb little "website" running off notepad on my computer that ill probibly never have the actual ability to share is making me feel good. and i think thats worth while. the small stupid things that we are encouraged to ignore or push away are the things that i think might be most important to a healthy mindset.
recently google has decided to change to a new form of tracking. it is even more invasive, and i am still so incredibly done with the moder internet; im running out of reasons why i enjoy my time on the internet. reddit has memes sure but at what cost, twitter is a shitstorm, facebook is facebook, discord is agressivly monetized and full of pedos. what about the internet do i keep going back to?
maybe thats why im doing this. why ive gone back to IRCs and /a/, why im so bored of the internet of the modern world. some soul was lost in our progress over the years.
if you are reading any of my blog entries, its because of neocities (either that or i finally gave in and paid for a domain, but probibly neocities). it really is a great service, its how im writing the HTML for this stupid broken page right now. but it feels odd, it feels like a crude emulation of something far more mystical. prehaps it being more user friendly than the original GeoCities is part of it, and prehaps the way others have used it is also part of the difference. or maybe the past we seek in our nostolgia doesnt exist, not now nor in the past, and we are doomed to find disapointment if we try seeking it. regardless i enjoy writing, i think that blogs that could sit undiscovered for years are a special sort of thing, more akin to a public diary than the post it board social media tends to become. and theres something a bit more personal with me writing the HTML of this than if i just poped onto twitter and typed out some notes about my day.
to emulate what i would do on twitter: Just finished my download of #Lain took me 10 hours but its worth it to have 1080p
i dont know, i dont think that me downlading a file with just 3 peers over the coarse of 10 hours is all that really happened there, me paitently waiting with the light of my laptop flickering across my pale, computer bleached skin wondering if itll ever finsih is mundane in a way, not the sort of thing that isnt worth sharing; but the sort of thing youd tell a friend in a cozy cofee shop, not scream into a megaphone in a store. maybe thats part of why i preffer things like this
I am sure if you are reading this dinky obscure neocities page then you are familar with the internet (and there is about a 30% chance that your my sister helping me with javascript because i hate javascript). but for the miraculously uninformed, the internet is a miricle of wires in the ocean and code constantly on the verge of collapsing that connects all of the developed world (who can afford intent and time to use it). at one point it was to share science stuff, idk i didnt read the wikipedia page on the invention of the internet thats not the point. then, it became more accessable and if you could write some HTML you could put your thoughts up on an eyesore of a personal webpage, complete wiht blinking text and marquee. And then, as with all good things, something started to creep into the air, slowly but undeniably grasping at the interet.
it was capitalism! yes, you now have to pay to read the news from any fancy places, and privacy as a concept is rapidly being exterminated from the earth and our minds by the geniouses at Google and Amazon in exchange for profit. there are few corners of the web with copywrite dates newer than '05 that arent in some way monetized. this is an enivetable event in any society living under capitalism, and ive already spoken on my emotions on the situation. but is there any solution?
probibly not. but there are ways we can fight it. for starters dont give these pigs get money paying your identity. PrivacyTools.iot has some helpful guides on softwhere and alternatives to use to start to reclaim privacy. though work and education are still going to force you to submit to google and the like. the other way we can combat this is by supporting any form of push for de-comerialization of the web. Neocities is a good place to start as it is made up laregly of people nostolgic for (or jelous of those who lived through) the Geocities days of hobbiest and the early web. because if we look to the future, its clear to see that privacy will wither completely, and the internet will become increasingly monetized. imagine in a decade you have to pay to store files or stream at high quality on youtube, thats not unrealstic at all with the path society has been on for the last few centries.
for the first time i think I must make it abundantly clear who I am politically. if you could not already tell I am an an anarchist, but more specificly a gay as fuck anarchist: a Queer-anarchist, both in that I am queer and in that i believe in the ideology of Queer-Anarchism. as such I do not believe in a gender binary, not only is the notion of one activly harmful to people as whole but to me as an individual on a daily basis and persoanl level. and I will be aproaching my experiance shopoing from a pretenitous anarchist perspective.
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what is it about loud patterns on button up shirts that facinates me so? why am i drawn to them? whatever the reason they are rather pricy and come with a decision to make: do i buy the nice ones from the womens eile or the ones that fit better but might cause dysphoria from the mens. I have made the choice to try both these options, disastisfied in many ways by both, but have found something interesting. the clothes i buy (or steal) made for AFAB people are thinner, and often less sturdy. they feel like theyll fall apart if i ever got caught in the rain compaired to the AMAB clothes. at the same time the AMAB clothes have a much smaller pallet unless i am in a store specializing in bright colors as part of their A E S T E T I C. this is not in any way new, that clothes reflect and reinforce the gender binary and gender roles: but i made the connection today to capitalism. because my hatedred of capitalism seems to infect all aspects of thought, i realized that it is profitable to breed insecurity. why pay for clothes when you could pay extra for clothes that reinforce your gender? why is that suits and dresses are more expensive than a good coat or a nice shirt? part of it is that they are harder to amke but a large part of it is the social capital they hold, the conotation of buisness and masculinity, and the strong conotation of feminity that dresses hold. the more theoretially unisex (and acceptable in common society it is) the less social capital it holds: formalware (or what the bore-shwa-zeee want us to wear to be at the apex of the socal world) are the most gender clothes of all and that cant be by mistake right? idk, just a thought i had today while shopping. Tommorows blog will either be more lighthearted or missing (i will be celebrating my aniversary and might not have the spare time or will to write an entry).
oh, and just to hold myself accountable: I will try to join some webring and do work on a page to links to good sites and resources.
To anyone who has the misfortune of reading my voodo code (voodo HTML and CSS is difficult to do, and yet i have acheaved it), i apologize. to those who are lucky enough to have never needed to touch CSS let me explain why i hate this so much.
CSS is used alongside HTML for formatting and images and a bunch of stuff thats important for web design, and it runs on bullshit and desperate prayre. Nothing about it makes sense, logically it makes sense and has rules, but in practice any one chance ruins 12 other unrelated things and undoing it only sometimes actually undoes the problems. the most efficent method for making it do what i want has ended up being copying solutions from stack-overflow and W3 and tinkering with random unrelated elements until it fixes itself. I have asked my more code savy friends, including a front end dev, and all of them hate CSS for the same reason, its bullshit. the about page is broken, and isnt up yet; the poetry page is broken, and isnt up yet, the home page is broken but is up, the links page is broken and im unsure why.
its like wandering in a cave, you can hear your footsteps echo and you think you know the layout of the cave. you can feel the wall and almost get a picture of whats there, and youc an slowly wander with some guesswork twoards you goal...and then a giant fucking furby eats you with no warning; and when your brutal death by furby is investigated it is found that you chewing mint gum before entering the cave was the cause. why are those related? why would that even be a feature? why did it only cause a problem at that specific moment?
ADHD is fun, people assume its jsut that i cant sit still when i cant think or focus or control my thoughts and my entiere thought pattern is alien to most people i meet, but my favorite part (more than not being able to read without going over a paragraph 20 times, more than not being able to sit without stimulation, more than not being able to modivate myself for the god damned one thing i have to do please brain just let me think!) more than any of that, its the forgetfullness.
forget your meds, forget to brush your teeth, forget to hand in the paper i spent the last 45 hours rushing to finish, forget to go to meeting, forget to eat, forget to breath if im tired enough. what brought this rather ranty and unrelatable to neurotypicals entry in my blog? i forgot to post yesterday. I wrote it, and then forgot to update the page. I forgot my hobby.
theres too much noise. its just loud, its a loud world. the non stop hum of electricity, i can hear it through the wall and through the screen. someone pipes are always flowing, somewhere the air is always on. cars are always making noise, neighbers always playing music too loud. my own thoughts just buzzing around my mind.
ive gone out into forests, middle of the night with a blanket, just wander into the forests and find a place to sit. the birds are loud but its so much less than anything in the day. the bugs buzz but ill take it over the town. but i can still hear cars off in the distance, and a plane overhead. even midnight forests arent free of all your noise, everyone elses noise.
prehaps my sensory processing disorder makes my experiance more extream than most, but there is no denying that there is quiet so lost its hard to imagine by now. I miss a silence im unsure ive ever heard.
In making this silly little blog and my silly little personal page i have not only admired and attempted to recreate, but come to be accustomed to the charm and simple yet personailty filled web 1.0 style of static personal pages. I have already written on how i long for the internet of old, and my growing discontent with monetization and endless souless websites by endless faceless creators; but i think that I have missed some points. its charm.
i dont think its just nostolgia, as there are elements of it that i have no nostolgia for. I think that its more human, more personal. in a way it is a connection that you simply cant get on twitter or youtube or a WIX website. its just so charming, and human.
its been a while, as i said i needed to seperate myself from some stuff for my mental health but we are back. and boy do i hate the internet just as much as before. the promice of the internet was that we, as in anyone, could have a voice and communicate with everyone. thats incredible, that sounds terrific and it was (kinda) but with web 2.0 instead of us putting up content, companies make a place where everyones content goes. i can say a lot on here i cant on twitter, but more importantly i can say a lot on here and be FULLY expressing just myself. the rise of social media comodified communication, appearance, and persoanlity to a degree never before seen. this tiny blog doesnt. I want to express myself, i want to make a thing and say whatever. i need to reorganize this to not be copying the format of time cube but ill figure that out later.
the point is: youtube shorts exists and i hate it.
okay hear me out: youtube shorts is just youtubes god awful tiktok clone feature (most clips are stolen from tiktok anyway) but it is loud, fast, looping, and i never ever see smaler people on it. i see massive chanels either expanding their tiktok onto youtube, or massive chanels that steal clips from hundreds of popular tiktoks. unlike the rest of youtube, and unlike the early days, there ARE no small creators using shorts. they yse tiktok, its the same but with more tools and an audiance who actully want to watch short loud looping content. the only people who use a worse version of tiktok on youtube are people who are successful or stealing from those who are. it is just for big fish. there isnt even the illusion that small individuals can go there. unlike the poorly masked descisions of youtube in the past, they arent even trying to pretend they care about individuals anymore. no one is.
the worst part of the modern internt is that unless your reading wikipedia on lynx or scouring wordpress and neocities for hobbiests, it is a corprate world where money is squeezed out of the user at any and every turn. tired of being a product: congrats we have products for people like you: hAvE yOu HeaRd Of NoRd VpN??!?1?. theres no way to unplug, your friends and your work and your unofficial resume require you to just let yourself be comodified. it lost its soul.
mild announcement this is switching to an every few days blog, mainly because of busyness but also because i am simply not creative enough to have7 good topics a week so if i spend 2-3 days on 2-3.5 good topics a week then i think itll be better
okay so this thing has been dead and i know thats bad, letting my blog die specificaly what im against doing with it. i think the problem is i allowed my focus to be so narrow that on bad days i had nothing to write.
before we go on I have two suggested readings semi-related to the original focus
"https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RulesOfTheInternet" The rules of the internet with explanations from TVtropes, and Bo's Welcome to the internet
anyway, i reread some of WaitButWhy and noticed some weird stuff. its been too long since i read them but god their writing on some topics disapoints me, its odd how you can go back completely ruin your perception of something with more context. like watching a movie after an actor in it got #MeToo'd. on one hand id prefer this to being unaware but i wish it wasnt a thing i had to know.
tommorow i plan to write about why i love dragon quest 11s narativly broken and trope laiden story and charecters, because i need to be happy about something for once.