diff --git a/2024_books.html b/2024_books.html index cae1035..e3b4583 100755 --- a/2024_books.html +++ b/2024_books.html @@ -187,6 +187,24 @@ Susan Sontag Most of the book was a slog, and I had to skip an essay or two, but there were two excerpts that made me feel "seen" (in an annoying Twitter way):
It is characteristic of the Saturnine temperament to blame its undertow of inwardness on the will. Convinced that the will is weak, the melancholic may make extravagant efforts to develop it. If these efforts are successful, the resulting hypertrophy of will usually takes the form of a compulsive devotion to work. Thus Baudelaire, who suffered constantly from "acedia, the malady of monks," ended many letters and his Intimate Journals with the most impassioned pledges to work more, to work uninterruptedly, to do nothing but work. (Despair over "every defeat of the will" - Baudelaire's phrase again - is a characteristic complaint of modern artists and intellectuals, particularly of those who are both.) One is condemned to work; otherwise, one might not do anything at all.

and:
All his writings are polemical. But the deepest impulse of his temperament was not combative. It was celebratory. His debunking forays, which presumed the readiness to be made indignant by inanity, obtuseness, hypocrisy - these gradually subsided. He was more interested in bestowing praise, sharing his passions. He was a taxonomist of jubilation, and of the mind's earnest play.
+ + 2024-W24 + Salem's Cipher + Jess Lourey + Part of a summer library reading challenge. + + + 2024-W25 + The Trouble with Angels + Debbie Macomber + Part of a summer library reading challenge. I had to read a romance novel for one of the slots, and I chose this one because it had "angel" in the title. Can't say I'm a fan of heterosexuality. + + + 2024-W26 + A Poetry Handbook + Mary Oliver + The same sensation as being bilingual and deciding one day to observe how speakers of one of your languages learn the other one: a unjustified frustration at retreading ground you'd covered years and years ago. More useful for an English class context than for private study. + diff --git a/2024_music.html b/2024_music.html index 27143d3..f959008 100755 --- a/2024_music.html +++ b/2024_music.html @@ -175,6 +175,24 @@ The Nearly Deads Favorite track: Thanks For Nothing + + 2024-W24 + BADLANDS + Halsey + Were you on Tumblr in 2015? + + + 2024-W25 + Wages of Sin + Arch Enemy + Favorite track: Savage Messiah + + + 2024-W26 + Malevolence + New Years Day + Another favorite of my teenage self.
Favorite track: Alone + diff --git a/blog/2023/august/interview.html b/blog/2023/08/interview.html similarity index 100% rename from blog/2023/august/interview.html rename to blog/2023/08/interview.html diff --git a/blog/2023/august/interview.txt b/blog/2023/08/interview.txt similarity index 100% rename from blog/2023/august/interview.txt rename to blog/2023/08/interview.txt diff --git a/blog/2024/03/web-aint-dead.html b/blog/2024/03/web-aint-dead.html index f14e56d..e08d2c7 100755 --- a/blog/2024/03/web-aint-dead.html +++ b/blog/2024/03/web-aint-dead.html @@ -29,7 +29,7 @@
The strategic aim of these hierarchal constructions of history is to displace truth, and the invention of a glorious past includes the erasure of inconvenient realities. While fascist politics fetishizes the past, it is never the actual past that is fetishized.

Since we have established that the Internet was never decentralized, the manifestos that push such an idea we can now interpret as not being concerned with the actual truth and how to deal with it but instead with invoking a particular emotional response.

But if fascists are preoccupied with the supposed "invasion" of minorities into their countries, then who serves the purpose of the "invaders" in the "smol web" mythic past? Most manifestos pin the blame on, as stated in point two, the corporations that captured the people who came online around the time that personal phones became useful for Internet browsing. (Many an "Eternal September" comparison has been misused.) Unshackled from the previous requirements of being at home and sitting down at one's computer, or even having a computer, many multitudes of people were suddenly granted the ability to surf the information highway whenever they wanted (or could get signal, anyway). But since the small form factor of phones, even the 2012-era BlackBerries with physical keyboards, aren't conducive for writing HTML and don't have the battery life or stable IP address to host a website (even nowadays, and certainly not back then), the new Internet users were drawn to the newfangled social media sites that allowed them to publish words without having to learn a single line of code or pay a single cent.

-

Some would go on to learn HTML and take pride in making a website they could show off to their friends and family (I should know, as I was very proud in my pre-adolescent days to have done so) but most had higher priorities, more pressing issues, in their life. And so for their purposes Twitter and Facebook were enough. And regardless if they stayed on Twitter or Facebook or tried a different social media platform, every new user increased the value of said platform, drawing in advertisers and making it harder for others to leave because of the loss of one's social graph that leaving would entail. Every fly caught makes the spider's web stickier.

+

Some would go on to learn HTML and take pride in making a website they could show off to their friends and family (I should know, as I was very proud in my pre-adolescent days to have done so) but most had higher priorities, more pressing issues, in their life. And so for their purposes Twitter and Facebook were enough. And regardless if they stayed on Twitter or Facebook or tried a different social media platform, every new user increased the value of said platform, drawing in advertisers and making it harder for others to leave because of the loss of one's social graph that leaving would entail. Every fly caught makes the spider's web stickier.

In the eyes of these people for whom the Internet was new and shiny, if not for social media, they would not have been able to publish on the Internet at all. And so it still is today. You have only to look at the fanart community for your favorite video game, particularly its more terminally online users, and watch them every time Elon Musk contemplates ruining Twitter further: they know they can make a personal website to showcase their work, but they also know that that means forgoing the algorithms and channels that led to people discovering their work in the first place. And posting to one's site and only using Twitter as a means of notification for new content, to them, just seems like extra work with no reward.

And in the eyes of most of the people who write these manifestos, they would prefer that these social media sites ceased to exist at all. They would prefer that all these millions, soon to be billions, of voices be silenced to sate their concept of technological purity. That is not to say that social media is a good thing, merely that, if the two options in the minds of the non-technologically-minded are to be

    diff --git a/blog/index.html b/blog/index.html index db70c6e..95ccd7c 100755 --- a/blog/index.html +++ b/blog/index.html @@ -32,7 +32,7 @@
  1. November 1 - I'm alive, and I'd like you to feed me something other than cans of peas
  2. October 1 - Urbit is still basically just a broken computer simulator
  3. September 1 - Workaround for external keyboards to make special characters in KOReader
    4. -
  4. August 10 - Every damn day I get emails
    5. +
  5. August 10 - Every damn day I get emails
  6. July 1 - It's never been a better time to dive into Tor
  7. June 1 - Look Torward, Young Vane
  8. May 1 - Broke Dumbass Attempts To Web3 Once More
    9. diff --git a/books/h.epub b/books/h.epub index f976f82..ddde744 100755 Binary files a/books/h.epub and b/books/h.epub differ diff --git a/index.html b/index.html index bd66075..e6c5208 100755 --- a/index.html +++ b/index.html @@ -54,6 +54,7 @@

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