ey i'm blogging here a blog by alex daily

Month: September 2023

The meaning of life

Posted on by Alex Daily

Written for school, translated and slightly adapted for here.

Between the weather, the time at the end of a very long day, the… tremendous amount of energy coming from the other class, and also the difference in… maturity between us, I found it hard, in the context of class, to give an answer to the question of what we perceived to be “the meaning of life.” I also found some of the answers given frustrating, and the thought of engaging in dialogue with them filled me with even more despair than the weather already did — I’m sorry, but once you answer that question with “reproduction” you’ve lost me — but here’s a few words of an answer, anyway.

I do not have the bones for religion. I was born without them, I was never taught how to do it, and for that to change today would be a voluntary act of self-delusion. Religion, in my experience, has always been something intrusive, something that tries to intrude upon my life through cracks and gaps.1Blog-exclusive footnote: My view on religion is more nuanced than this, and if we’ve known each other for a long time you know this about me. But it’s a 400-word — 396, but I found four more. — answer to a philosophy question aimed at 19-to-21-year olds. Please understand this context for any writing from class I might post this year. Does that mean I never think about this stuff? Frankly, I find it hard to imagine there’s anyone who hasn’t at least rotated it in their head a little. Especially if you’re an artist, an educator, or both. But I do think a good answer has to come from inside you. Well, from inside me, in this case.

So here’s my good answer. First a motto, and then something more like a mission statement. The first is, “The river flows the way the river flows.” I say this a lot. It’s a mindset I try to keep central to my life. On a roaring river, there’s no way to paddle back. Can’t be done. No regrets. But no regrets doesn’t mean you can’t make corrections, improvements to your course, or plot one out. That can be done. And here’s your mission statement, “Enjoy yourself, have a good time. Improve yourself, be better tomorrow than you were today. Connect those two things in every way you can.”

And isn’t that enough?

  • 1
    Blog-exclusive footnote: My view on religion is more nuanced than this, and if we’ve known each other for a long time you know this about me. But it’s a 400-word — 396, but I found four more. — answer to a philosophy question aimed at 19-to-21-year olds. Please understand this context for any writing from class I might post this year.

Sunday #1

Posted on by Alex Daily

I’m trying to invent blogging from scratch for myself here. This format is pretty directly inspired by the “weeknotes” a lot of people in tech do, but one, that’s a lot more “job,” and a lot more “journal,” than I’m really doing right now, and two, frankly, the relationship between my life and people in tech is the problem I’m trying to solve here, I’d rather they not be… any kind of guiding light for me in blogging.

So right now these are called “Sunday” recaps, the idea being, here’s some stuff that doesn’t entirely stand on its own but that I still feel should go here, posted some, probably not all, Sundays. When there’s Enough to post. A lot of the time it’ll likely be mostly spare bits of writing, though I’m sure as I come to think blog-first it’ll generate additional, original writing, too. Heck, I wrote this before I added a bunch of notes on updating my website. Here I am, tech-blogging anyway.

Now I just need to start thinking blog-first.

Below the fold, notes on updating my website, some bits and bobs from my Letterboxd, some media diet notes, and a podcast recommendation. Oh, that’s already quite a lot, isn’t it.

Continue reading “Sunday #1”

On blogging

Posted on by Alex Daily

Is anyone happy about the state of the internet in the Year of Luigi 2023? Search sucks now, what you do find is riddled with generated text and SEO land grabs, and everything you use every day has either been ruined by a billionaire or is owned by a billionaire with ruining-it aspirations, which is a problem if you like using it because it’s kicking you off the boat, and a problem if you don’t like using it but are forced to because you’re chained to a boat that sucks to be on even more now. And that’s just what’s top of mind right now because they’re the examples everyone uses when complaining about the state of the internet in the aforementioned Year of Luigi 2023.

So what does make me happy on the internet? What are my e-raindrops on digital roses, what are my electronic brown paper packages tied up with @string? Mastodon, obviously, because that’s where my friends are. Comics of all kinds, from snazzy webtoons to archives of ancient-and-still-running newspaper strips. Playing board games with friends and strangers alike on a website from 2002. Finding little personal websites is a big one. I love clicking on a link in something posted 15 years ago and seeing it still go somewhere. Remember, before he sold it, the way Wordle sprung up?

So what’s the string that ties all of these packages together? It’s all pretty people-first. I think it’s also pretty… billionaire-last. What I like here is the people. You could get rid of the billionaires1Who aren’t people., and everything I like about the web would still be there, but the same isn’t true about the people. No people, no internet worth having. So how do you get rid of the billionaires, or at least solve the billionaire problem2I stand by my pitch of, we make a list, we guillotine number one, and then we look knowingly at the rest.3As always, references to the guillotine in my writing should be read as, we do everything we can, starting with the options they’re willing to go along with, and if that doesn’t do it, well, you know. I talk about guillotining like this because I’m far more interested in being very clear about what the end of that particular road looks like than I am in negotiating. for yourself?

On billionaire-owned platforms4And I keep referring to “the billionaires” as shorthand because the Twitter issue is so fresh, but, say, platforms owned or controlled by black box megacorporations like Google or whatever the company that runs TikTok is called are clearly part of the problem, too. I am restricted in doing so. On these platforms it’s very common for what you put out there to be considered in some way in the public domain, you don’t control what happens to anything you do, you are never the captain of your own ship. And the trends are in the wrong direction. YouTubers chase the algorithm like dogs chasing cars, TikTok has kids saying “s🥚🥚🥚” and “unalive” because to say “sex” or “death” is to hex your relationship with the algorithm.

I don’t know what the solution is here. I do know I don’t want this, and that I don’t think anyone should want this. I think I can alleviate some of the issues, at least for myself, simply by being more conscientious about how and where I put things out into the world. What do Mastodon, this blog, little personal websites, all have that I don’t have on the big platforms? Here I have ownership, control, and freedom.

Baio5Who I have one-sided joke beef with., there, in 2016, in the post Kottke quotes, quotes Kottke from three years earlier saying the blog has died. No matter how much we might constantly ask for it to, the situation has not meaningfully changed in the decade since6Though I guess I can now name, like Baio asks, a great, single-author blog that started in the past few years. I wonder why this one stands out to me so much. and it doesn’t particularly look or feel like it will. But the web isn’t a sea, where the rising tide brings inevitable change over and over again on a regular schedule. The web is the people on it, it’s me, it’s you, it’s all of our friends, and all of our aunts. And change is the decisions we make.

Starting a blog will not make the problems with the state of the internet in the Year of Luigi 2023 magically go away. But I can at least live the change I want to see.

  • 1
    Who aren’t people.
  • 2
    I stand by my pitch of, we make a list, we guillotine number one, and then we look knowingly at the rest.
  • 3
    As always, references to the guillotine in my writing should be read as, we do everything we can, starting with the options they’re willing to go along with, and if that doesn’t do it, well, you know. I talk about guillotining like this because I’m far more interested in being very clear about what the end of that particular road looks like than I am in negotiating.
  • 4
    And I keep referring to “the billionaires” as shorthand because the Twitter issue is so fresh, but, say, platforms owned or controlled by black box megacorporations like Google or whatever the company that runs TikTok is called are clearly part of the problem, too.
  • 5
    Who I have one-sided joke beef with.
  • 6
    Though I guess I can now name, like Baio asks, a great, single-author blog that started in the past few years. I wonder why this one stands out to me so much.

It sucks that the Old Place is still there.

Posted on by Alex Daily

I’ve been on the internet my entire life. I remember my first introduction to it in the same kind of visual flashes that I remember learning to ride a bike in, that I remember elementary school in. I can see the room it happened in. If you broke me down to my constituent parts you’d find the internet amongst the rubble right next to things like comics and reading in bed and taking a quick sip of water from the fridge if I’m gonna stand up anyway, you’d find it next to whistling along to music and the vague belief that if I sat down at a piano I’d be quite good at it despite having never touched a piano in my life. There is no “me” without the internet. But that doesn’t mean I can’t define “the internet” however I damn well like.

I was on Twitter for sixteen years. Literally half, at 32, of my entire life. It’s not easy to be 16. But Twitter made it easier, because Twitter was where I found my people. Some people must never find theirs, and I can feel it chafe when I try to make new friends online, now. Not that I don’t manage. But when I was 16, somehow, we were all in the right place at the right time. I– We– The sheer luck that we found each other.

In the end, then, what I resent about what happened to Twitter, first slowly, over years of time, and then, more recently, very quickly, is that it’s still there. It’s called something else now, and I knew, in my heart, even before the most recent turn, that it would never feel like it used to again, because I’m 32 instead of 16, and because, frankly, it was weird that the website where we talked about what we had for dinner also had elected politicians and famous people and literal criminals on it in a way it didn’t always. I knew I could never go home again, but it sucks that it’s still there. It sucks that it feels like I could still go there. It sucks that I could go there and for a little while know where all the doors go without it feeling like I have to know which ones are the exits just in case it all goes wrong. I’m not easily upset, but I’m upset.

Because it sucks that it’s still there.

There is no “me” without the internet. But there is a “me” without Twitter. There’s gonna have to be.

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