Thoughts
Typical blog posts and random ideas I have
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Rediscovering the old web!More things will definitely be here soon... when I write them
My Project 2025
29 November, 2024, 9.42am
The 2024 US election was the first presidential election that I voted in. It felt momentous but also scary.
And the outcome knocked my feet out from under me.
Hindsight is 20-20, so it feel disingenuous for me to say that I was preparing for Trump to win the election. But I think there's a grain of truth there. I do believe that, while I was cautiously optimistic that the Democrats would win, I was holding space for the other outcome. What I wasn't expecting, was that it would be so resounding. I thought we'd be fighting election results for weeks, that we might have another January 6.
That didn't happen. Trump won. Both the electoral college and the popular vote.
So, we now look forward to what that means. I've been thinking a lot about how I want to live my life, not just during the next four years, but the days that come after that. For basically all of my adult life, I've felt like my values are not represented by the over-culture I reside in. I disagree with the premise of infinite growth and exploitation that underlie capitalism. I don't align with the hyper-individualistic narrative that I'm supposed to embody. It saddens me that the ideas I hold as core to my identity - kindness, inclusion, care - make my views radical.
"…nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change"
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
I think I've avoided leaning into the title "radical" for a long time because it made all too clear how much I don't fit in. But "radical" does something else too. "Radical" is activating. It suggests purpose and conscious actions. So, I've decided to own "radical". Not just wear it like a badge that I can take off when it doesn't suit the situation. I'm going to start living it. Actually living it.
This isn't as big of a step as it may appear. I've lived in radical ways for a long time. I don't pay attention to fashion trends. I mend my own clothes. I buy second-hand. I (try to) grow my own vegetables. I talk about issues that matter to me.
But all of these things have been layers to my life that, yes, I've engaged in, but not in the deep way that I see a true radical engaging in them. I slip up and buy crap I don't need because I want it and it was advertised to me. I'll buy things that I do need from big box stores (or, unfortunately, Amazon) when my bandwidth is too low to search out those items second-hand. My garden is, at best, a hobby which (let's be real) fails to provide food for even one substantial meal a season. I do talk about important issues, but I could focus myself better in this area as well.
And this is something that I think most progressives (or wannabe "radicals") do. They want to do these things, but they fall short of living by that ethos. It's easy to fall into the traps of capitalism. Capitalism feels nice. It's easy to press a button and get exactly what you want delivered to your door without any energy from you. And all the costs to humanity and the environment are hidden behind layers of marketing and free-trade agreements. It feels better to sit in your home, distracted by the endless stream of entertainment instead of looking outside at the countless atrocities and acts of harm happening ever second.
I'm guilty of this, and when I realise I'm doing it, I feel immense shame. Which sucks, because I actively stepped into capitalist dissociation to avoid negative feelings!
Time to be actively and decisively radical.
That's my pledge for 2025. My project 2025, if you will. I'm living this coming year true to my values.
1. Practice Anticapitalism
This involves a few things. Mainly, it involves not buying new shit. I've done this before, so I know I can do it again.
- No new clothes. I have so many clothes already, I don't need any new ones. If I want something different, I can repurpose my existing wardrobe. If something wears out, I mend it. If I need a new item of clothing, I will make it from scratch or buy second-hand.
- Make do. Repair. Second-Hand. For all essential purchases of items around the house, I will not buy new. I will fix what I can, and buy second-hand if needed.
- No frivolous purchases. Full stop. I'm going a year without buying shit.
- Gifts for people will be either hand-made, a gift of labour, or purchased from a small independent business.
2. Practice Eco-consciousness
Much of this will be covered by not buying new stuff, but I can also do better in other areas, mainly in the amount of waste generated by packaging that comes into our house. I want to drastically reduce this as it's something that distresses me greatly. However, I have had to give myself grace on this aspect during grad school because reducing packaging is time-consuming and time is not something I have a lot of right now. This means, that attempting to reduce packing that comes into our house is going to wait until I finish my PhD:
- Seek out refillable options for cleaning supplies and foodstuffs
- Create a go-bag that we can use when we go out that includes re-useable cutlery, serviettes, and food containers for leftovers
3. Be Radical
This is harder to quantify. I think what I mean here is that I don't want to hide my true values anymore. I want to be clear that I am concerned about climate change, about LGBTQIA+ rights, about racism and bigotry. I want the things I teach to be infused by this worldview. I want the conversations I have to uphold these values. I want my very existence to make the world feel safer and brighter for people who are currently feeling downtrodden. Again, I recognize that I need to give myself grace while I'm finishing my PhD, so I will do what I can within my means until July, but I want my life post-PhD to be actively pursuing a better world.
- Be authentically me
- Learn to teach in an anti-colonial way
- Use my privilege to make those who have less privilege feel safe
- After my PhD, find an activist community to be a part of
Reading through my plan, I see how my last value is the hardest to put into words and clear actionable goals. There's definitely work to be done there. I've decided that this is just the first draft of my plan for the year. I'm going to continue to work on it and adapt it. And I'm posting it here to be accountable.
It's too damn hot to do anything
8 September 2024, 5.17pm
Sigh. It's extremely hot today. Well, hot for San Diego. And San Diego has a way of turning people weak. Especially if you live by the coast where the temperature sits around 20-26 degrees celcius throughout the year. You habituate to this perfect climate, like a tropical frog in a climate-controlled terrarium. Then, BANG!, heatwave! The temperature jumps 10 degrees celcius and even though you grew up reguarly sweating through those temperatures in Brisbane summer, your body is completely unable to process what is happening.
All this to say that it's hot. It topped out at 36' today and I'm not okay with that. 🫠
Anyway, I've done some updating to site today. Started to play around with some different looks and implement my own art into the site. As much as I have some heavy nostalgia for blinking backgrounds and the scrolling marquee, I always preferred going my own way when it came to design. So I'm going to use this as an opportunity to get creative and have fun.
Stop everything! I've re-discovered the old web!!
21 August 2024, 3:40pm
A Rant about Social Media
I've pretty much always been suspicscious and disappointed by web 2.0. I held off joining Facebook for quite a long time and have actively avoided other social media sites like the plague. The irony is not lost on me that one of the major events of my life (meeting my now partner) would not have happened without Facebook, and I definitely admit that there are some positives that I have gained from these services. That is why I have been so reluctant to outright delete everything and completely move off social media once and for all. But I do find the list of reasons I stay has dwindled significantly. Right now, I can think of two reasons I stay on Facebook:
- The handful of memes that bring me pleasure, supplied by the three-or-so meme groups I interact with
- I can keep in touch with my family there
Other than that I find myself spending less and less time on social media. The ads annoy me. I have to do an annoying series of secret clicks to get a feed that shows the most recent posts first instead of what the repetitive -A-L-G-O-R-I-T-H-M- deems is acceptable for me to see. And election season is in full swing which inevitably means avoiding most news sites if I want to keep my mental health in check. I've also found the shift towards extremely short videos that came with TikTok incredibly annoying, realizing that I have two ways of engaging with media... either in a single static meme image or a 90 minute video essay. There is no in-between. This has meant I've basically given up on Instagram. And I have less than zero desire to create a TikTok account.
I don't want to be a brand
Another thing I've been thinking about a lot over the last couple of years is how there has been a shift in the way we think about our presence online. We're not just putting our ideas out there for people to reflect on. Or using it to share things in our life that matter to us anymore. Instead we have to think about our brand image in the way we post. Our "online" life has become so carefully curated to project an image of what we think we should be. I had moments where what I was choosing to do my "offline" life was based on how it would appear "online". This is fucked up. So I decided to just stop posting. You might have noticed this... or maybe you haven't. Lord knows the algorithm doesn't favour individual people over advertisers or influencers. I made a conscious decision to not blast every thought I had on social media. I avoided posting photographs of what I was doing and instead just live my life. It definitely helps that doing a PhD means I doing really do that much these days besides read articles, analyse data, and grade undergrad papers but I still stand behind my decision to post less.
I used to love the internet
And through all this turmoil with what I was seeing on the new internet--the one that is dominated by gigantic corporations--I was craving what I missed about web 1.0. I used to love the internet. I spent so much time bouncing around webrings reading ghost stories and looking at pixel art and talking to people on text-based-role-play forums. When I was studying contemporary art, I would seek out artists making web-based art projects in flash. I remember being blown away by an artist who took a photo of himself everyday and uploaded it to his website (fyi - he's still doing it today). Mind you, I found this guy in about 2002 after he'd been working on the project for two years already. Instagram wouldn't be founded for another 8 years. Today, this seems like such a prosaic thing - uploading a photo of yourself and I think about this project a lot. I think about many of the art projects that were exploring the boundary between the online and the offline during the early 2000's. I wonder if there's even a boundary anymore. And I wonder in which directly the bleed occurred... is our offline self more like our online one, or the other way around?
These existential questions still tickle at the back of my head and it's been exciting to see the wave of Y2K nostalgia that has crept over the internet. The rise of analogue horror has me reliving the nights spent sitting too close to the computer screen reading through the journal of Heather Donohue as she describes her time in the Burkitsville woods hunting for the infamous Blair Witch. Of course, nothing will ever be able to truly recapture the experience of not knowing exactly whether that movie was true or not. We can't go back to those innocent days when we believed whatever we read on the internet... which is probably for the best. But when I really drill down, it's not about the doubt that was raised by The Blair Witch Project that made it so compelling, it was that it had never been done before. It was a completely new and creative way of using the internet to tell a story that made it so captivating. And while the analogue horror I've watched recently certainly coudln't claim to be completely new, they are definitely doing something more creative.
It was really my delving in to analogue horror that sparked by desire to go back to the early internet. I started to look for some of those old art projects which not a lot of luck. I had long since lost their urls so I couldn't even look them up on the Wayback Machine and Google is completely broken to the point that unless you are searching for something to buy on Amazon you have no hopes of stumbling across something interesting and undiscovered. I've been frustrated by the sameness of "Content" that I get given across all platforms I engage with, desperately trying different strings of keywords in the hopes of being given something unusual, something unlikely, something... anything... I hadn't seen before.
Then I found Marginalia. I can't remember the arcane symbols or what combination of keys plus the konami code I put into Google that led to me finding this utter delight on the internet. I'm pretty sure it was a link someone had posted on Reddit (which, by the way, had been the closest I'd come to the old web because it is less about the algorithm and more about people. At least, it is for now. But I'm sure the enshitification is not far off now they have gone public). Marginalia is part of a movement to escape the capitalist hellscape of the current internet. It's an independent search engine that is designed to find things that you would never find using the big search engines. I tinkered a bit looking for weird search terms, but where Marginalia came into its own (at least for me) is with the Random button. Clicking on this little rainbow wonder will bring up nineteen completely random websites. These websites will likely have low views, be weird personal websites, and feel very very much like the internet did 20 plus years ago. One of the random pages that I was served up was yesterweb.org which led me to the rabbit hole that is the Small Web. I'm not even going to attempt to provide links here because one of the main points of the Small Web is discovery and curiosity. Here you are on your own journey of discovering what you are interested in and I'm completely in love with it.
Why this ugly wonderful website now exists
And that is why I decided to crack out my html coding skills and hard code this baby to look just how I would have made it look when I was building similarly ugly websites in notepad back in the 90's. Yes, I am going to use animated gifs. Yes, I am going to use cluttered tiled jpeg backgrounds. Yes, I will likely use at least one scrolling marquee text effect. And maybe I'll start adopting pixel animals again. But I'm definitely pulling up my chair on this little piece of turf on the Small Web and I'll use it post what's going on in my life here. If you want to stay up to date with me, this will be the best place to bookmark. I'm not ready to completely delete my social media presence yet (see those two remaining reasons above), but it might be coming.