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On stages of grief, or, an attempt at an exorcism of Twitter’s ghost

I promise I’ll stop blogging about Twitter soon. But it was such a huge part of my life for so long that its demise1With hindsight, I think in the end we’ll consider its true demise to have happened years ago. makes it a ghost I need to perform an exorcism on. A reverse ghost, I suppose — my spirit is haunted by a place.

It’s been… about a month.2I consider my canonical final post to have happened on 19 August 2023, though when I realised I wasn’t going back, I did post to both say so and link to this blog, and then replied to a friend. My exposure to Twitter since then has been fairly limited; it continues to exist in culture, so sometimes I click on a link to a tweet, and once or twice I’ve typed something into search to figure something out about a current event. I close the tab quickly. In and out.3I also have hard limits set up. I’m allowed 15 minutes on my phone, and 10 on my laptop. I rarely break a minute. This felt bad for a little while, because it sucks, as we’ve established, that it’s still there, but it doesn’t any more.4Part of this feeling is a vague sense that I may have been the life of whatever party was still there for me to participate in.

That is, as I understand it, how grief goes.

I’ve had, all things considered, at 32, a fairly charmed life, at least in terms of the amount of grief experienced. And obviously, though I refer to the website’s demise and its ghost, none of this is actually like a death. But grief is about loss, not, necessarily, death. It is, I think,5Darkwing Duck voice: “Let’s get poetical.” about the irrevocable closing of a door, the turning of a door into a wall. It used to be there, and you could go there. And now you can’t. And this, again, sucks.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in 19696Kubler-Ross, E. (1969). On death and dying. so famously proposed a model of how grief, broadly speaking, goes that here in the Year of Luigi 2023, where you can fairly reasonably dismiss it as outdated pseudoscience rooted in evidence that is anecdotal at best,7Modern research is mixed on whether people actually experience grief in five clear stages, and if they do, whether they cleanly move from the first to the fifth; one study will find that they kinda do, another will find that they kinda don’t. Personally, I reckon, and a reckoning is where I should note that I’m not an inch any kind of scientist, that the prominent cultural place of this model may have, by now, influenced how people who have been constantly exposed to it in the culture for all their lives describe or even actually experience their grief. I say, waving at the camera. we still won’t shut the fuck up about it.8Obviously it was me who first brought it up in this context. And I do get why, it’s not an uncompelling narrative model for how this messy thing about messy lives works. But lives are messy. Not everyone will react according to a fixed script.9Darkwing Duck voice: “Let’s get autistic.” But I’m a storyteller,10I usually say “cartoonist,” but really, the big thread running through all of my interests is an interest in storytelling and how to do it. so maybe a narrative model is what I need.

Let’s go through these in order.

Denial (201? – 2023)

Oh, I’ve definitely done denial. Heck, I think I might have been in this one the longest — the feeling that Twitter is probably evil has been there for long enough that I can’t even quite pinpoint where it starts. As B was quick to point out — no, it was not always full of Nazis. But there’s a point where it was the site we became friends on and a point where it was the thing it is now11I don’t even think of the recent takeover as “now.”, and something12A lot of things. happened in the middle there that made it not just happen but irreversible.

I stuck around, obviously, for friendship. But did I always defend it that way? I mean, this is Denial, right. The road from “there’s nothing to defend” to “some people feel the need to defend” to “quite a lot of people are confused why you’re still on there” was paved with quite a lot of just not thinking about it. For all that was going on, for a long time, the thought of quitting Twitter only ever really crossed my mind when other people were doing it. In hindsight, yes, I was ignoring issues that would today send me packing from any other site, and should’ve sent me packing from this one years ago.

I knew the rot was in the walls for years before I ever admitted I was coughing.

Anger (2023)13These look like movie titles. The Stages of Grief Pentalogy.

I’m not a particularly angry person. I was annoyed with Twitter a lot, a lot of things over the last few years made me unhappy with Twitter.14See “Depression.” But the anger really only hit once I realised I’d actually quit.15Like so many other people, I threatened to “move to Canada” if this or that happened and I never followed through. In the end what did it was the demise of TweetDeck. And that was anger that this Place that had been so important to me for so long was being taken from me, that it was still there and I could still go, but never in the same way again. That’s what I was16Am. It’s cooled off, but it’s still there and will be for a while. angry about, not anything a billionaire did, not that the place had for years been riddled with rot. I was angry that it was over and that it didn’t feel like my choice.

Bargaining (202? – 2023)

At some point denial did turn into defending it. I can’t quite pinpoint this one either, but the most recent flavour of bargaining was stubborn defiance, this idea that I was gonna be the one to turn out the lights, that I was gonna be the last cockroach in the irradiated wasteland that was Twitter. I don’t know how I was imagining that going,17Thinking about it now I’m picturing MMOs being turned off, everyone getting together one last time until the servers go down. But who would’ve even still wanted to be there? Yeesh, what was I thinking. but in the end it lost to, well, it’s not called Twitter any more, is it.18My understanding is it’s now called “U+1D54F 𝕏 MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL X.” Catchy. Can’t wait to send a U+1D54F 𝕏 MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL Xeet. The wasteland went away before the cockroach got a chance to go home.

Depression (2023)

Look, Twitter, just, what Twitter was like, has made me depressed19Not depression-depressed, just sad-depressed. before. Like, during Gamergate.20While writing I automatically put an asterisk in there, for once we dared not speak its name. In which a famous actor offhandedly called me a pejorative term, and I spent the next two years trying to have reasonable conversations with people who thought my reasonable conversations were games they could win by calling me slurs, or by sending me pictures of corpses or all the large guns they’d like to use on me.21I assure you this is an accurate summary of the whole affair for everyone involved. I would not call this my not-depressed-at-all phase — I was looking for a win that I knew in my heart would never come. That’s not a happy mindset to be in.

After that it’s, well, gesture vaguely at everything that’s happened in the past decade yourself, you can figure it out. A lot of this overlaps with the other phases — left unable to do anything about everything that I found frustrating or depressing about Twitter, it got punted into denial, and occasionally came out as annoyed anger. But it really came to a head when Twitter got bought.22We need not say his name. The purchase turned it from a place where I could tune out the bad, just pretend it wasn’t there while I talked about movies or Doctor Who, into a 24/7 discussion zone for the bad.

Every electric car or rocket that exploded, every server pulled out of the wall, every stupid dog logo, every giant glowing cross on the roof, every stupid thing he said — became the topic du jour. Even amongst friends, even amongst an increasingly deliberately curated feed.23I’m sure between rounds of despair I occasionally participated myself. Who would I have had left if I’d unfollowed everyone who was talking about his every move? Two bots? No, wait, he killed those, too.24RIP in posting Millennialbot.

Acceptance

Twitter was important to me. It left a permanent mark on my soul. It got to do that because I made friends there, yes, and the depth of the mark is because of the weight of that friendship, it’s there because of my friends. I will forever be grateful that it got to make that mark, because I would be worse off in every way without it. Without you. Without y’all.

I wrote my way through this to try to, well, perform the exorcism. I hope I’ve done it. But these stages of grief? They overlapped a lot, and none of it happened in the right order. It’s nonsense. It’s a narrative device, and it barely works. Maybe I should’ve done the Monomyth instead. But acceptance?

I’m getting there.25Darkwing Duck voice: “Let’s get there.”

  • 1
    With hindsight, I think in the end we’ll consider its true demise to have happened years ago.
  • 2
    I consider my canonical final post to have happened on 19 August 2023, though when I realised I wasn’t going back, I did post to both say so and link to this blog, and then replied to a friend.
  • 3
    I also have hard limits set up. I’m allowed 15 minutes on my phone, and 10 on my laptop. I rarely break a minute.
  • 4
    Part of this feeling is a vague sense that I may have been the life of whatever party was still there for me to participate in.
  • 5
    Darkwing Duck voice: “Let’s get poetical.”
  • 6
    Kubler-Ross, E. (1969). On death and dying.
  • 7
    Modern research is mixed on whether people actually experience grief in five clear stages, and if they do, whether they cleanly move from the first to the fifth; one study will find that they kinda do, another will find that they kinda don’t. Personally, I reckon, and a reckoning is where I should note that I’m not an inch any kind of scientist, that the prominent cultural place of this model may have, by now, influenced how people who have been constantly exposed to it in the culture for all their lives describe or even actually experience their grief. I say, waving at the camera.
  • 8
    Obviously it was me who first brought it up in this context.
  • 9
    Darkwing Duck voice: “Let’s get autistic.”
  • 10
    I usually say “cartoonist,” but really, the big thread running through all of my interests is an interest in storytelling and how to do it.
  • 11
    I don’t even think of the recent takeover as “now.”
  • 12
    A lot of things.
  • 13
    These look like movie titles. The Stages of Grief Pentalogy.
  • 14
    See “Depression.”
  • 15
    Like so many other people, I threatened to “move to Canada” if this or that happened and I never followed through. In the end what did it was the demise of TweetDeck.
  • 16
    Am. It’s cooled off, but it’s still there and will be for a while.
  • 17
    Thinking about it now I’m picturing MMOs being turned off, everyone getting together one last time until the servers go down. But who would’ve even still wanted to be there? Yeesh, what was I thinking.
  • 18
    My understanding is it’s now called “U+1D54F 𝕏 MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL X.” Catchy. Can’t wait to send a U+1D54F 𝕏 MATHEMATICAL DOUBLE-STRUCK CAPITAL Xeet.
  • 19
    Not depression-depressed, just sad-depressed.
  • 20
    While writing I automatically put an asterisk in there, for once we dared not speak its name.
  • 21
    I assure you this is an accurate summary of the whole affair for everyone involved.
  • 22
    We need not say his name.
  • 23
    I’m sure between rounds of despair I occasionally participated myself.
  • 24
    RIP in posting Millennialbot.
  • 25
    Darkwing Duck voice: “Let’s get there.”

Weird Soda Review: Coke Zero “3000”

An energy drink-shaped can of Coca-Cola Zero Sugar Creations: 3000 Limited Edition.So I’ve had this one in the fridge since Sunday, but then on Monday I burned my tongue on hot soup, so it took me a few days of not wanting to waste it on my slightly numb mouth zone to get around to: Coca-Cola Zero Sugar Creations: 3000 Limited Edition, which claims to be a “future-inspired flavour co-created with AI.”

Now, I don’t know exactly what that means, but my guess is an ad exec somewhere got paid way too much to get a soda engineer to type some things into ChatGPT, or some other awful plagiarism generator. Whose artisanal soda recipe was this ripped off from? There may be no way to know.

Let’s get to it.

Expectations

I was pretty sure I’d seen this one go around when it was on shelves in America, but Googling it as I write this, it turns out this one is totally new, so I guess my vague recollection to expect a raspberry element in there somewhere, or maybe a blue flavour, that’s off the table. Neither the ingredients list nor the first sniff give any additional information — it’s just the same hollow smell as all zero sugar cola. The colour is the same as any Coca-Cola.

Now, a second sniff after a pour makes me feel like I might be onto something about the blue and raspberry flavours. Time to sip.

Taste

I’m very used to being betrayed by awful mystery Fantas, but I was really hoping this wouldn’t immediately send me there. And yet my first sip’s impression is… cotton candy? The vibe is definitely candular. Candesque. Of the Cand. But it’s not a specific cand. It’s just sweet. A little sour? Raspberry flavour candy as a touchstone is not a million miles off, actually. But it doesn’t taste like raspberry, not really. It’s like. You know raspberry. You recognise raspberry in the movie based on raspberry. And this is the third sequel to that movie, but now it’s all original material, and it’s not really anything like you were picturing based on raspberry? It’s like that.

Yeah, no, finishing the can, I have no idea what this tastes like. No. Wait.

Conclusion

Vaporwave. That’s it. Fuck me, it doesn’t taste like the year 3000 or like AI but like Vaporwave. It tastes: Like Vaporwave. And much like Vaporwave, it is indeed tolerable for a few sips, but quickly becomes tiresome from being so sugary and so overly produced.

I’m gonna go drink some water.

The Bowl of Petunias, As It Fell

This came to me between dreams.

It was, on the one hand, quite easy to simply forget you lived in a flying city. Sure, the clouds were quite close, but that just meant the rain didn’t hit quite as hard as it would with more metres to travel. And yes, where a dirt city1As so many derisively called them. might have the occasional body of water running through it, you had a body of air, but to bird was not meaningfully that different from to fish.

To be a citizen of the City of the Golden King2Having been renamed this after the death of the Golden King’s predecessor, the Flying King, who was named that for his uncanny magical ability to make cities fly. meant, for the most part, walking to the store like anyone else, riding your bike to work like anyone else, filing formal complaints with the Department of the Cave like anyone else.3Funerals, bathrooms, and other ways matter was disposed of worked differently, for reasons you can imagine. Life in the City of the Golden King was normal, easy, and pleasant. It was, the people thought, good.

So, when the other hand came and took away those illusions, the City of the Golden King was actually not first to learn the new cosmic truth that, while they weren’t paying attention, the age of magic had come to a sudden and abrupt end. But it was certainly amongst the first to know quite how hard this new cosmic truth could land.4If landing is what you wanted to call it.

When the flying city fell, it was the birds who noticed first.

  • 1
    As so many derisively called them.
  • 2
    Having been renamed this after the death of the Golden King’s predecessor, the Flying King, who was named that for his uncanny magical ability to make cities fly.
  • 3
    Funerals, bathrooms, and other ways matter was disposed of worked differently, for reasons you can imagine.
  • 4
    If landing is what you wanted to call it.

Let’s not call it version 1.0

Right, well, that was needed quicker than I’d expected. Pictured, what this blog looked like from 23 August to 9 September. All around you, then, this very website, what it looks like going forward. The centrepiece of the vibe: Still my noggin on a purple background.

There’s a bunch of things I still need to polish, give a little more shape to, but I think it’s best to just work this out live. You may in fact have caught me doing just that these past few days.

The Kubrick theme wasn’t a proper “version” of this site, it was a proof of concept, it was a way to give this the shape I needed it to have to get started. But I’ve started, I’ve got into the habit, and this is my first draft. Let’s go.

The voice of the blog.

I’ve been thinking about the voice of this blog, and the voices of blogs in general.

What’s the voice of a blog in the Year of Luigi 2023? Is there even such a thing? Is the concept of the blog so dominated by the corporate voice, the journalistic voice, that the blog is now unvoiced, voiceless, indistinct when it does pipe up?

As part of this thinking I’ve been reading blogs from the far-flung future year of 1999, and overwhelmingly, the voice reminds me very specifically of one thing: The exact way everyone talked on the first few years of Twitter. A word you might enjoy here is that I would call it “exploratory.” The voice is confident and excited, but knows it must be ready for anything. It has no idea what’s coming, but it can’t wait to find out.1New York-based bloggers were first to lose this in 2001. It’s a sharp turn, that one.

Is there any way to get back there? Does it have value to try? Or do we live in a world so fundamentally changed by the ever-advancing marches of history, technology, society, that it’s like asking to go to Constantinople, which exists only as a story below the city Turkey tells today? Do I actually wish I could still write like that? No, I think I just wish I lived in less interesting times.

So what’s the voice of the blog in the Year of Luigi 2023? What does my version of it sound like? I don’t know, but probably not like that of a 20-something student from 1999. How do I “explore” like the adventurers of yore? I don’t know. But I’m looking forward to finding out.

  • 1
    New York-based bloggers were first to lose this in 2001. It’s a sharp turn, that one.

Sunday #2: It’s Been Edition

One week back in school. What a destructively long Monday.

A lot of info, in the classical start-of-year info dump manner, about what the school year looks like. Go here, do this, do this as soon as possible, accumulate this, write that. I’ve let it just wash over me. It’ll happen, I’ll get there. One year to go.

We share three of our four Monday classes with another class that’s in the same place on a different trajectory, which makes sense, I understand that when there’s just the six of us it doesn’t make financial sense to treat us the same as if we were 25 people, but by gum, you forget how busy 25 19-to-21-year olds can be. How can you possibly have this much to say to each other, you saw each other four days ago! I joked the weekend before that they were about 400 people strong, and was corrected that they have the energy of an additional zero. No kiddin’. I didn’t go to Teacher School to be in a room full of noisy kids, dagnabbit.

(I understand now that eventually we’ll split back up, but what a day.)

Also shot and edited my live-action directorial debut. I’ll share it here when I get permission.

Below the fold this week: Website update notes, notes on an upcoming project. TV thoughts, a YouTube recommendation. Donald Duck comics, some Big Finish.

Continue reading “Sunday #2: It’s Been Edition”

Oops-I-Broke-It-posting

Okay, well, on Une Whim I decided to upgrade to PHP 8.0, you know, be futureproof and all that, and it instantly broke the theme1Oh, my beloved Kubrick. here. And not just the theme, the theme breaking broke the whole blog. Just spectacular.

I’d call it a miracle nothing else broke, but this is why I hate using code more complex than I understand — there simply is nothing else on any part of my website for that upgrade to break to begin with.

I’ve enabled the least objectionable theme I had lying around. Which one that is has changed twice since I started writing this. It’ll change again.

Writing my own is now obviously a top priority. Truly, I do be blogging here.

If anything else breaks here I’m just gonna jump the gun and upgrade to ClassicPress 2.0, or even just switch to WordPress, I swear to god.

  • 1
    Oh, my beloved Kubrick.

The meaning of life

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

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”

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