hi how's it going. to me it feels like the calm before the storm as i wait for the masters results, mid october. but let's not dismiss september.
new on the site: uhh making a list this month because there's a fair bit. artlog is on the longer side of things as well.
now for the usual list of links:
one might assume, reading my posts and webpages, that i have a bustling love life that i choose to not talk about for privacy's sake. "wow", one thinks, "look at their concise yet pointed reviews of various media! that's as fuckable as it gets, could i at least get a kiss?". i appreciate your compliment, dear reader i invented at 3am for a stupid little paragraph, but i don't talk about my love life because it's just not there. you know damn well i'm an oversharer.
well, as a confirmed bachelor observing the behavior of my friends as one would an exotic beetle, i've always thought the idea of romance a tad overcomplicated. i did use to identify as aroace, and though i don't anymore, that aspect hasn't changed. ultimately, it seems to me, the difference between a bestie and a romantic partner is just sex, and that's purely by convention. so i've never felt much interested in seeking a love interest; it feels like skipping the essential step of being good friends.
that's why i'm not on apps: the idea of romance would weigh heavily on my shoulders, giving a background of romantic-compatibility-or-nothing to every conversation, and i'm already pretty bad at those (through text; i'm better in person i prommy). well the alternative is to just befriend a girl at the bar and later text her and ask her out on a low stakes date to see what happens. i never expected to be in that situation but wouldn't you know it, i somehow turned myself into the person who asks a girl's number at the bar and then texts her. it was a fun change of pace from what i usually do. this is all to say i just oughta text people more often i suppose. i can turn myself into someone much more sociable than i ever imagined.
due to cohost's demise so shortly after twitter being blocked on brazil, i've considered writing some sort of social media meta. i've gone back and forth on it and i think i settled on not writing too much (editor's note: mission failed. badly. skip to art if you'd like lol), because we're all tired of this. but i have the poster's spirit and if i do not comment on these sort of events i explode.
but honestly i don't have that much to say. it was weird seeing the different reactions. i had a twitter for less time than most (joined in uhhhh 2022 i wanna say, after losing a bet), and it was mostly to talk to / at / with my irl friends, which is why i never linked it anywhere. i do not like twitter and twitter-likes. you could not pay me to create a bsky account, because i think the ux of microblogging sucks and is bad (this has always been my issue with mastodon and the fediverse in general: why are you trying to create twitter 2 instead of a different paradigm?).
but when given the opportunity — nay, mandate — to jump ship, i'm seeing my friends shift their screen time to the absolute sludge of tiktok and instagram reels (and, i guess, bluesky — people have not had good things to say about the userbase but i don't put too much stock into dead timeline complaints). and i don't mean this as a moral superiority thing (though it's kinda inevitable... sorry...), i just find it alien. i have always found instagram's ubiquity strange: how can a social media based purely on images be the main one people use. it doesn't make any sense. it's twice as alien with tiktok, which i can't call socmed — it's the same thing as youtube.
of course everyone's already talked about how most people would rather be consumers, not posters. i think i hadn't noticed it firsthand. it's made more obvious when compared to cohost's exodus. it's different, we had way longer to discuss and plan and share resources, but truth is that due to its nature as an indie social media website, the crowd has been pre curated into people that are dissatisfied with the sorry current state of the internet and seeking alternatives about it, so they're more likely to consider a personal website as a possibility and rss feeds as a worthwhile medium. like, there are people in this world that use algorithmic feeds, and their complaint isn't that someone else is choosing what they see, but that the algo is making bad choices.
i don't like complaining about this too much because i think it might make me sound unbearable. i just mean to say that i see the rift widening between big platforms that want nothing more than sell your eyeballs to advertisers and cook your brain, and loose indie web people like you and me. and it makes me feel some sort of way. because i wanna be where the people are and interact with people and because to me the way forward, the only sustainable way (as in, sometihng that can be sustained long-term) is having control over your shit, and that means doing stuff yourself, which is, by necessity, kind of a hassle. but the alternative is being in places that suck controlled by people who suck, and being aware of both these things but keeping at it out of inertia. like. idk. how can i convince my friends that change is possible but takes a little work without being the biggest killjoy in any conversation duckduckgo search.
here's an underbaked social media concept (also being referred as a protocol, which i'm not sure i'm doing correctly). please treat this as bad scifi rather than a serious proposal. i do not know what i'm doing. i'm literally just having fun with my keyboard — which is why i feel this is better here on the artlog than as a separate thing. at least for the time being.
this is a toy protocol, like pico-8 is a fantasy console. it's a bit gimmicky because the point / goal is the novelty. it's playing around with a different form of communication instead of trying to create whatever socmed, but good this time. kinda like spring83.
the premise is i love my puter all my friends live inside it taken literally. you're sharing a directory, and fetching people's directories. that's the main idea, as well as not being online all the time. not as in "we need to unplug and live in the moment" or whatever, it's just a fun limitation and also the whole point is self hosting made trivial.
this would be something between a group chat and a whole ass www social media: you're not all stuck together (you still choose who to receive from and can block people from fetching your feed) but most of your connections will come from "mutuals in law"; you can't really expect to stumble across someone entirely new to the people in the network unless you already know them from another place.
i. each computer (and at this point in time this must include smartphones) becomes a server. this is self hosting, yes, very similar to having your own one-person mastodon instance, but specifically 1) without a dedicated machine and domain and 2) with no expectation of anywhere near 100% uptime. the server is online when you're online (or when you choose it to be). syncing between your phone and computer should be handled seamlessly when both are turned on. honestly this is the key thing and everything else is the same as with like. twtxt. except the key thing is it's not aimed at microblogging, but text-based communication more broadly.
(naturally a machine can host multiple instances ie profiles, so you could host your stuff on someone else's computer [a friend, or a stranger running a service]. but the key thing is that your social media presence is just a folder which you could host elsewhere if you wanted to — the portability is essential.)
ii. what you're serving: well, a folder on your computer, with certain expectations on names and structure. but let's not forget this is a social media platform, and not some sort of everything protocol. we're also self hosting, so things should be lightweight. in other words, we're serving posts. cohost's css crimes slay but i'm the one speculating and will use my relinquishing control framework: the writer provides semantics and the reader controls the presentation, making things a lot lighter and more accessible. markdown is the most practical for this. media should not be automatically compressed because this fucks artists over all the time, but people should be able to set a limit to file sizes and types they receive and retransmit automatically, i think, and clients could compress images if you choose to (most useful for mobile). i think the file types should probably also be restricted on a protocol level for safety / security sake... you don't want to be able to receive any old exe.
iii. i'm thinking of the profile page like a screenshot garden. this whole endeavor is not too dissimilar conceptually actually, in some ways, i suppose — your dashboard just interleaves everyone's gardens. there could be more layout customization here as a treat because i like tumblr themes and every social media is pushing heavily towards homogenization, but limited so things are still perfectly functional in text-only mode, and with a size limit because the whole thing should be lightweight.
iv. posting should be easy. duh. the client you're using to interact with the protocol should have a post composer (that would also handle saving to the proper path, important in mobile where file management is annoying), but writing the .txt or .md files directly should be possible as well since it's faster if you're familiar with the format. it should not be an entirely novel markup. same goes for the metadata that forms your profile.
v. "wait let's go back a bit. retransmit?" yeah to help with uptime we're doing something akin to scuttlebutt. followers (ie people that are already receiving your 'feed') can also host / serve / retrasmit the posts they receive. you should be able to 1) block retransmissions of your stuff (akin to a private account) 2) choose how much to retransmit and when (particularly important for mobile because you don't want to be doing that on cell data). like seeding a torrent.
vi. posts should be rebloggable, which is different from retransmitting an entire feed, it's like copying that item to your own feed with a link to the origin, and the main vector of discoverability. there should also be comments because they're the main social thing. likes can be a nice acknowledgement that your post has been read by a fellow human but hmmm i think social media can exist without them. needless to say there are no numbers here. dms are complicated because both computers would have to be online at once (otherwise, yknow, they'd go through other people and not be particularly private). just email one another like normal people.
vii. in fact, discoverability is certainly something of an issue here... that's why i said it's purely fiction and a toy, and not a serious proposal. i'll call it an exercise to the reader: how would hashtags and search exist in this sort of structure? this is the main quandary with all decentralized protocols, and i won't be the one to solve it. it kinda has to be entirely organic, people linking to one another. perhaps making blog rolls should be as expected / easy as changing your bio. it could help. in any case, this is not the kind of platform someone builds a large following on.
viii. also troublesome is that i think things should be viewable on a browser and without an account. since it's all 'self hosted' i think the latter is less troublesome than joining something like a mastodon instance, and you don't need to come up with an username etc, but the former... i suppose something akin to a rss reader browser extension could be achieved? again, we're in purely fictional territory.
turns out this is kind of a xkcd #927 — standards situation, innit? (extremely funny that the caption for this one is about chargers... surely usb-c is the one to finally solve this affair. after over a decade). it's not really meant to be viable anyway. this is for funsies.
yeah i've had the "online thing i self host from my personal laptop and as such is only online when i am" thing in mind for a while now because it's a fun concept. when further fleshing it out i poked around some other decentralized social media platforms so i wouldn't be reinventing the wheel too much (because i can't play with my toys without some verisimilitude — i also looked into syncthing for the self hosting aspect). and i've been seeing posts about how cohost could never not fail or whatever and i think this is my final thing about it: that's probably normal and healthy.
and it's complicated. a lot of people rely on various social media websites to self promote and thus earn money and not die. unless everyone wakes up tomorrow and decides to implement ubi immediately (please please please), this will remain the case for a while. but expecting every single new thing coming out to cater to that need, to being facebook but good this time, to be a website for everyone in the world... just doesn't work, and doesn't really leave much room to think about ways that things could be different. a website being tiny, niche and/or short lived isn't the end of the world, i think, if there's a healthy ecosystem of "alternatives" for connecting with strangers and acquaintances, on and offline. i'm keeping an eye on the website league for this.
never forget i am a bit of an utopian.
(fittingly, originally posted on cohost)
OR
i am worried (soft-worried, lighthearted, have light qualms about) about the idea of rss as a single solution / replacement to every type of post that's made
OR
spring83 really had something going for it
inane posting (off the cuff, phone keyboard friendly, short, close to microblogging) is the bread and butter of the social web because it's small talk. i love it for that. i love inane posting and it's the main way to feel acquainted with your fellow posters.
BUT i would not inflict my micro posts ("i wish i always had pizza on the fridge at midnight") into your rss feed. because you don't need to read that. who give a shit. and this is not to discourage anyone wanting to get into rosting or whatever, it's just what eye think. that it's ephemera, and i wouldn't want it side by side with articles and webcomic updates. i think it's pretty clear that i like keeping things nice and separated by purpose.
spring83 is a proposed protocol where every user has an assigned space they can update. this format to me solves this quandary perfectly. catching up with the "feed" becomes glancing at the couple latest inane posts by each person. because their shelf life isn't long anyway, small talk is context and time dependent. and then you can have longer, more shelf stable stuff linked there — maybe you could add your rss to your profile and it automatically links to the latest entry. that'd be real practical.
this isn't a social media / whatever proposal, but picture a layout where your "block" is sorta like this, and your "timeline" is composed of several of them at once, instead of an actual line of interleaved posts.
🖇️ towerofbabylon
they/them. read ted chiang's story of your life. sound of the summer.
latest big thing // i'm normal about the tower of babel. come closer (08 sep)
29 sep, 17:09 // really interesting article from t440 about the trackpoint yall should read it now: t440.gay/blog/2024/trackpoint
29 sep, 12:58 // who up lying in bed for two hours after waking up
28 sep, 20:00 // this movie was so bad it decreased the quality of the seventh art as a whole
🖲️ t440
your friendly neighborhood lesbian laptop (she/xe)
latest big thing // all about the trackpoint (29 sep)
29 sep, 11:58 // i'm so hungry i wish i had a cd drive
28 sep, 10:32 // dude it's not a nipple or a clitoris it's literally a secret third thing
i understand the drive to find an organic analogue for everything because of qualia and all but also put in some fucking effort to learn about computers. you can't talk about the trackpoint purely from a physical point of view. that's thinking only about how your fingers feel it! keep in mind what the trackpoint does, its closer analogues are mice and analog sticks!
and hell, even if you think of just the physical aspects, it might look like a clit, but it responds to stimulus differently. this is not to say there aren't similarities but it's just so stupidly reductive.
shit i think i'm gonna have to write a proper article on this. i'll find some stuff on how the analogy came to be so widespread in the first place because it annoys me to no end.
28 sep, 02:17 // if she's your girl why is she using my sd card reader
idk. don't worry about what i'm saying. this layout is still too microblogging and doesn't fully solve the medium length but still most yapping category of posting (what this section originally was for example). the important thing is that making fake user profiles is fun as hell and i got carried away.
just the one. i've been busy in other ways and the month flew by. this one was a request by my mother for a specific place in the house, which is why i had to use blue. blue is a lovely color but i don't like working with it. i missed my earth tones terribly.
it's called field of stylites because of the irony of the klein bottle — a masturbatory figure — being associated with christian asceticism. we all know this.
set myself the goal of itchio inbox zero by the end of this year — one way or another. i've made peace with the possibility of just deleting the entire bookmarks folder come january. maybe i'd be ditching games that would be life changing but i'll never know if i never play them, so the end result is the same. i wish i could just wormhole my deleted bookmarks to someone though. i'll plop a barebones page here on the site with everything leftover so you can pick through them.
this is microdosing my ultimate goal of wrangling my bookmarks in general. like holy shit i have too many.
and it is, of course, setting the stage to maybe finally getting around to reading umineko that's a bit of a new years resolution kind of thing but i'm in this sort of mood right now. let's call it the effects of the spring equinox.
they're taking away my film snob license after this month.
currently reading one corpse too many (ellis peters). it's been kinda slow going, it isn't gripping me much.