ey i'm blogging here a blog by alex daily

Category: Journal

On mail

Posted on by Alex Daily

Alright, I’ve had a day.

So I bought a new chair. Well, my parents bought it for me, because it’s my birthday soon, and my chair has not been getting less creaky, it has felt like it could break in half for a while, good useful gift that I’ll get a lot of daily use out of for years. Happy birthday to me.1Well, on the 17th.

Ordered it online, because none of us felt like shoving it into a car and all that hassle, picked a delivery window when I knew I’d be home. That was yesterday, the morning of the fifth, I was home the whole time. It did briefly announce it would show up today instead, right while I’d be at the cinema, but that only lasted about an hour. A little weird, not a problem. And I am, indeed, home the whole time. And then the delivery window ends, I check the mail box, and discover the delivery person has missed me. Funny way to find out I wasn’t home at all.

It is at this point that I start to seriously consider my previously announced intention to destroy and eat the next mail van I see.

Anyway, now I’ve got to get this 22kg box from a supermarket a kilometre from my house. Which is a lot more hassle than it would’ve been with the car, for anyone. Realise that might be a lot for me on my own, so I ask the Brother, who lives 300 metres away from me.2Close enough that we can juuuust about wave at and see each other if I go up the roof. He’s happy to help, and leaving a work a little early, anyway, so we go that same afternoon.

The Plan: We take my bike, pop the box on top of the bike, two pairs of hands should get it home. Simple. We’re Dutch, we could solve a murder with a bike and two pairs of hands, and we could do it without the hands if we needed to.

Halfway to the supermarket, my bike announces its plan to decouple from three of the spokes on my back wheel. Clang clang clang. Thunk, thud. Three loose at once, damn. The metal on the wheel has bad cracks in it. That’s gonna mean a new wheel, baby. Sigh. Oh well. It’s a 10-year old bike, it’s a miracle it’s served me this well this long. I’ll take it to the guy after I come home.

Get to the store, pick up the package. Well, two packages, they had a book for me, too. Coincidence. We try a few different angles, get it on the bike, standing up on the, what do you call that, the pakjesdrager, literally the “package carrier,” the metal shelf thing over the back wheel. A package carrier carrying a package. This works fine, almost exactly like I’d expected.

It is at this point that I’d like to talk about the ways in which you’re wondering how this is gonna go wrong. Maybe the back wheel collapses. Maybe the box falls off. Maybe the whole bike just explodes. Maybe– No. It goes wrong in none of these ways. The box is heavy, it’s a bit of a walk with that kind of weight, but we know what we’re doing. Two hands on the bike, two hands on the box. We get it home. I thank the Brother profusely, and offer to buy Subway tomorrow, before the movie.

Once I get the box in the hallway, I suddenly have a thought. I ask the Brother, hey, if I go inside, can you do this real quick? I do, he does. The thing that should happen… doesn’t.

There’s a beat, like a silent penultimate panel in a comic strip that overuses those.

My doorbell doesn’t work.

fml.

  • 1
    Well, on the 17th.
  • 2
    Close enough that we can juuuust about wave at and see each other if I go up the roof.

On blogging (II)

Posted on by Alex Daily

The oldest revision of this post is dated 21 September, 2023, and I think I must’ve deleted four or five different versions of it between then and now. In its first iteration, it was about, what have we learned from blogging for a month, from being off the old web forum for a little? What has changed about how I think, how I exist in the world? In a later iteration, I go through a bunch of posts and go, what worked, what didn’t? I posted none of these, obviously. They all felt annoying.

5 days into 2024, what I think each of these iterations have in common is what I’m trying to say with them. So let’s just say it without structure, without format: To a tee, every single revision of this post is trying to say, hey, I’m… better off.

In the end, the basic truth of it is, the fact at hand, it’s, with that one door closed and this one opened? I’m happier. Six months in, I like myself more, I like the shape of my life better, I like the sound of the two dozen audio tracks playing constantly in my head a lot better, than I did a year ago.

That’s all I wanted to say. Happy new year.

On long Mondays

Posted on by Alex Daily

I haven’t really done traditional journalling-style blogging here, so let’s find out if that’s a thing I do. Some things, maybe, aren’t best served by a weird joke on short text-based social media.

For the past… probably eight months1This started between semesters last year. my schedule at school has included a… very rough 9:30 to 21:30 Monday. Last year that last class was Art History, with just the six of us.2I’m in the short version of the art teacher course, because as a fully licensed cartoonist I’ve obviously already got a diploma for the art part and I just need to do the teacher part. This 2-year version typically picks up between six and a dozen people a year. Last year most of our classes were just the six of us — this year most of our classes are with the third years of the 4-year version. Come next semester we’ll legally be fourth years. That specific configuration, with a fairly relaxed teacher who had the whole year to convey information to us, worked pretty well. Acceptable execution of a shitty situation nobody was happy about.

But this year, that last class has been Education3Or “Onderzoekswerkplaats,” technically, if you’d like a great word for Hangman or Scrabble, but that’s really just the other half of the class we call “Education.”, which means, a lot of fairly heavy information in the philosophy and pedagogy zones, which means, class from a teacher who is great but also a sentient bouncy ball even at literal night.4Esther! Calm down! All of this, surrounded by 25 energetic third-years whose primary passion appears to be to generate with their mouths a bed of static noise that makes it impossible to think. If you’d ever wanted to experience cognitive overload, room 4.18 at my school was the place to be on Mondays from 18:45  to 21:30.

I’m not kidding when I say cognitive overload — it’s like it was scheduled specifically to totally fry my brain. The volume of the information we were supposed to take in ratcheted up through the morning and afternoon, then came essentially to a total stop for Media5For me, anyway, because, like, video editing and HTML, please, in my sleep, I’ve got an exemption, I could teach this class, but even if you’re new to all of that it’s honestly a fairly chill couple of hours. and a lengthy dinner break, only to then launch right back into the HARD KNOWLEDGE of yer BILDUNGS and yer GERT BIESTA and yer THE BANALITY OF EVIL. This didn’t do justice to the great, well-prepared, informative classes, and it didn’t do justice to us as students who would be eager to learn and work with all of this information under better circumstances. I’m sorry, but after a full day like that you were just never gonna pull anything meaningful about the banality of evil out of me at 21:00.6In the morning I’m a writer, in the afternoon I’m a poet, in the evening I’m a comedian — but at night I’m a haunted shell of a person, apparently.

But that’s all in the past tense, because as of next week7No regular classes this week. Media8And the third-years’ Music class, too, I… have to imagine. is moving to Tuesdays, which makes space for that late, late class to move to the much more reasonable 15:30 – 18:00 slot. And thank fuck for that. It’s a little like, and this is definitely a metaphor that’s way too heavy for this specific scenario, I’ve been told the war is over and I’m now just waiting to learn when we’re being shipped back home. This war, if you’ll continue to allow me the metaphor, has taken its victims — by what we now know to be the last battle9Last late class. half of my little Six of Us gang wasn’t showing up any more. One of us was approaching a burnout, one chose to prioritise their family. I was being a real trooper, but I’ll definitely need a real refresher on this info before the end of the semester, and, like, by that last class I was giving a presentation lying down on a table because that was the only way it was gonna happen. What would another few months of this have done to me?

  • 1
    This started between semesters last year.
  • 2
    I’m in the short version of the art teacher course, because as a fully licensed cartoonist I’ve obviously already got a diploma for the art part and I just need to do the teacher part. This 2-year version typically picks up between six and a dozen people a year. Last year most of our classes were just the six of us — this year most of our classes are with the third years of the 4-year version. Come next semester we’ll legally be fourth years.
  • 3
    Or “Onderzoekswerkplaats,” technically, if you’d like a great word for Hangman or Scrabble, but that’s really just the other half of the class we call “Education.”
  • 4
    Esther! Calm down!
  • 5
    For me, anyway, because, like, video editing and HTML, please, in my sleep, I’ve got an exemption, I could teach this class, but even if you’re new to all of that it’s honestly a fairly chill couple of hours.
  • 6
    In the morning I’m a writer, in the afternoon I’m a poet, in the evening I’m a comedian — but at night I’m a haunted shell of a person, apparently.
  • 7
    No regular classes this week.
  • 8
    And the third-years’ Music class, too, I… have to imagine.
  • 9
    Last late class.

On constellations

Posted on by Alex Daily

I’d love for this whole thing to be more conversational.1This includes a missive to you, Dear Reader — please feel free to strike up a conversation either here in the comments or on Mastodon if something I say on here makes you think, or feel, or just want to say something. Don’t hold back. It’s the new 1999, there’s no rules — all we have is how we decide to go about things. Inherent to social media is that most of what you say is gonna be ephemeral — if the web is people, a tweet toot is a sentence whispered to yourself, and if you’re lucky somebody else hears it and you connect. I’m not a Dead Internet2From the Atlantic: “The Internet Is Mostly Bots” (archive.is) and “Maybe You Missed It, But The Internet ‘Died’ Five Years Ago.” (archive.is) truther,3Hm, a loaded word. but at its worst — my worst, maybe — I can’t deny that the Old Place sometimes felt like that. Being online, even though the web is not a sea, sure felt like a scream into the water sometimes. Unheard by all but nearby fish.

The opposite of that feeling, on the Old Place anyway, was the couple times a year somebody, often a bot, often a person doing very specific searches, would like/fave or otherwise acknowledge a post from Too Long Ago. And this felt RUDE. To confront me with my own words in the notifications column that should’ve been a safe space? I don’t even like myself from two weeks ago, and this is from two years ago? Wow, okay.4That’s why it felt rude to me, anyway, but I feel like this is a common sentiment.

But that’s not conversation. So let’s start talking.

I’ve been clicking around blogs. Old blogs, current blogs, pandemic blogs, blogs by people who you might have heard of, blogs by people nobody remembers, blogs the people who were there hold up as the great blogs, passion project blogs with two decades of dedicated writing on it. It’s funny how something from 1999 can resonate while something from 2016 utterly fails to. Allow me to quote the thing that inspired me to write this, a conversation between bloggers from 2010 that managed to resonate.

Below the fold, other people’s words. Continue reading “On constellations”

Review: “Five Nights at Freddy’s” (2023), or, the Modern Cinematic Experience

Posted on by Alex Daily

Posted a few days after the fact — I saw it 27 October — because I reread it while compiling the first media roundup post and decided I wanted to preserve it in full. Other versions of this post have appeared on Letterboxd and Mastodon.

I have returned from the cinema subscription members only Halloween screening of 2023’s Five Nights at Freddy’s, where there was free Fanta and popcorn, approximately 150 giggling teenagers, and an attempt at an interactive pre-show quiz that just imploded.

Truly, the trinality of cinema.

Let’s do this in reverse order.

The quiz thing is kind of a shame because all the questions glitched past and I think I would’ve known most of them and so could’ve plausibly won something. (Test run these things, y’all.)

The 150 giggling teenagers totally worked for this movie specifically — I can’t help but see all the clichés, I metagame twists, I see story structure before me like it’s the fucking Matrix, but a teenager excited for the movie based on the video game they know from the YouTube videos doesn’t do that, and I think I would’ve enjoyed this a lot less without over the top “oh my god”s and “what the FUCK”s at things I, you know, might make fun of.1I was glad I was sitting front row, though, so I didn’t have to see the teenagers with what I’m sure were one hundred brightly lit cellphones in hand. Also worth nothing, the weirdly huge reaction at a random waiter — that I have now learned was portrayed by one Mr Mat “MatrickPatrick” Pat, who is at least a YouTuber I’ve heard of.

The Fanta2Orange. Both Zero and regular were available. was flowing so freely I came home with a full litre and a half of Fanta, I’m not even fucking kidding.

And the movie: Was good. Fun, solid, balances what I understand is fairly limited game play and deep lore in a way that works as a movie. The comparison to Willy’s Wonderland3I think of myself as on the record as a Willy’s Wonderland enjoyer, but I guess I’ve given it three stars and no review, so it may be due for a rewatch. is fair, but I think they’re doing different enough things that they can religion co-exist dot jpeg.

Anyway.

A perfectly cromulent time at the movies.

  • 1
    I was glad I was sitting front row, though, so I didn’t have to see the teenagers with what I’m sure were one hundred brightly lit cellphones in hand.
  • 2
    Orange. Both Zero and regular were available.
  • 3
    I think of myself as on the record as a Willy’s Wonderland enjoyer, but I guess I’ve given it three stars and no review, so it may be due for a rewatch.

It’s just some web forum

Posted on by Alex Daily

In the ongoing evaluation my relationship with social media, today1Well, Wednesday the 27th, I guess. Dinosaur Comics’ T-Rex weighs in with a persuasive argument.

T-Rex: "Today is the day I remove the phrase "social media" from my vocabulary… and replace it with "web forum!" That IS basically what they are, after all! There's no magic trick to them — they're just some messageboard: a web forum you sign up to and then can see what other people said on said forum." Dromiceiomimus: "Okay, sure, but they're really important forums!" T-Rex: "Are they though?? REALLY??" Utahraptor: "T-Rex, did you see what today's main character posted on social?" T-Rex: "I try to stay above forum drama." Utahraptor: "Okay, fair, but did you see what stupid changes they're making to Twitter?" T-Rex: "Oh, no, sorry — I'm on a different forum now." Utahraptor: "Ah. Cool." Narrator: "Later, T-Rex considers tying the success of both his personal and professional life to posts on a web forum." T-Rex: "Hah hah hah! WHY WOULD I EVER DO THAT"

Dinosaur Comics #4104, Ryan North, 2023
And he’s right. Because framing is everything.

I often say I don’t believe in coming out, because I don’t relate to the premise, to the narrative. I’m queer, it’s not a secret, I’m not hiding anything, just because you don’t know doesn’t mean I’m putting myself or parts of myself in a box — and when I do tell you, I’m almost always just correcting an inaccurate assumption. “I’m non-binary,” no different than “oh, I’m Frisian,” or “I don’t have a drivers’ license.”2“When did you first realise you were a different kind of vehicle user than your culture assigned you at birth?” “When I nearly drove into a ditch one fucking minute into my first ever driving lesson.” It’s just a little correction.

When we talk about the large algorithmic generative models people call “artificial intelligence,” so much of the language is people-language. We “ask” these models things, we have “conversations” with these algorithms, when the words these things generate are not reflective of accurate information we accuse the models of “hallucinating.” All of these are real things people do, and not actually what these things do. I don’t want to diminish the sincere connections some people feel they’re making with these machines, but all that’s happening is the software knows how to put words in an order that seems plausible, based on your prompt.3Tip: Try prompting ChatGPT to tell you how many times the letter “N” occurs in the word “reconnaissance.” It’s just been well-tuned to follow your lead. We have to talk about these things the way they actually are.4I’m not innocent here, either — the Enemy has put the people-language so in my head that this was not easy to write.

Social media is no different. Framing is everything.

Twitter is just some web forum. You sign up, and then you can post, and see what other people are posting on the web forum. Truly, how is that different than the rickety phpBB forum you used to hang out on in 2006? What actually is meant to make it a really important forum? This or that number of posts per second? The famous people on it? The politicians? Frankly, I’ve never been entirely clear what these people are even doing on some web forum. Shouldn’t they be minding their business, shouldn’t they be sending memos to each other? Remember when the forum got real mad about some guy who was a little weird to his kid about beans? Just forum drama. It’s not the end of the world. Why would it be? Why would it be?

At my own little personal Mastodon instance, there’s no politicians, no huge number of posts per second. Nobody ever gets mad about the beans guy. It is actually just like the rickety old phpBB forum I used to hang out on in 2006. It’s not important at all. We don’t pretend it is.

It’s just some web forum.

  • 1
    Well, Wednesday the 27th, I guess.
  • 2
    “When did you first realise you were a different kind of vehicle user than your culture assigned you at birth?” “When I nearly drove into a ditch one fucking minute into my first ever driving lesson.”
  • 3
    Tip: Try prompting ChatGPT to tell you how many times the letter “N” occurs in the word “reconnaissance.”
  • 4
    I’m not innocent here, either — the Enemy has put the people-language so in my head that this was not easy to write.

The Locksmith

Posted on by Alex Daily

This anecdote originally appeared as my Letterboxd review of Wes Anderson’s The Rat Catcher.

My neighbour had locked himself out, no phone, no keys, so he knocked on my door to ask to use my phone to call his friend who, one, had his spare key, and two, was apparently in the Phantom Zone, seen recently by half the city and yet totally unreachable.

So we called a locksmith, just the top result in the search engine of your choice, who was here as fast as he could have been, and instantly jimmied his way in with some WD-40, a sheet of plastic, a rope, and my door as a cheat sheet.

Which we both found incredibly impressive — I applauded without prompting, which I never do — and also, our human doors might as well not be there for this man, nay, ghost.

Anyway, the rat catcher here looks like an English version of the locksmith, which is why I’m sharing that story here in this review in lieu of struggling to find something to say about this one. It’s good, it’s like the other Wes Anderson Roald Dahl shorts.

The locksmith was a lot nicer than this rat catcher, though. There was a fistbump.

On streaking.

Posted on by Alex Daily

It’s true. I’m a streaker.

There are certain activities I like to do every day. One way or another, I count how many days in a row I’ve done them.

There’s the movies, obviously. I broke my summer-long daily streak with the first killer Monday this year, and I’m probably just gonna surrender to that Monday going forward, so it’s gonna top out at 6 days in a row for the rest of the year. That’s fine, I still watch way more than one a day on average, and my Letterboxd stats define a streak as once a week, so at 185 and counting, I’m good.1I do also get bummed out if I miss Sneak Preview, but that’s a few Tuesdays a month, not every day.

There’s the phone games. I play all the Flow Free games every day and have for years — 7.8 years specifically, because the app says I’ve played 2852 days, which is approximately since the beginning.2The daily puzzle update dropped at different times in different places and different app stores, and you may not have installed it right away. My actual streak is 2707 days, though, because I missed one day once, about half a year in. If I had a time machine, I assure you. I have a perfect since-the-beginning streak on all the other ones. 3I also play TwoDots, but that streak mechanic came in very late and for a while it was just very hit and miss whether it registered the day or not — they either fixed that or I got better at catching it, I’m currently at about 200 days.

For a while I used to say if I hadn’t tweeted in 24 hours you could safely assume I was dead.4Guess I’ve died. I’m sure there’s other things I could include in this streak mentality. I’m never late for school.

I realised the other day I was on a streak here.5To your right, note the calendar. Unless you’re on your phone, in which case, scroll down. Responsive, baby! And made fun of myself for it. But this is a different kind of streak — it’s not a mindless phone game or a passive6I mean, I toot, but. media consumption habit. Blogging is writing, blogging is productive. People have already told me they enjoy what I’m doing here, and I’m having fun doing it. Even writing this at 22:30 on a Killer Monday just to make sure I don’t break the streak.7Wait, my Flow streak should be one higher if I’m posting this tomorrow– No! Just schedule it! Walk away! Be done!

My workload at school will increase as the year goes on. Maybe tomorrow I just don’t have something that I feel is best served by writing a blog post about it. I’ll break that streak, and it’s gonna be fine. I’ll just post again the day after, or a few days later. I will break that streak.

But not today.

………Wait, what did you think the title meant?

  • 1
    I do also get bummed out if I miss Sneak Preview, but that’s a few Tuesdays a month, not every day.
  • 2
    The daily puzzle update dropped at different times in different places and different app stores, and you may not have installed it right away.
  • 3
    I also play TwoDots, but that streak mechanic came in very late and for a while it was just very hit and miss whether it registered the day or not — they either fixed that or I got better at catching it, I’m currently at about 200 days.
  • 4
    Guess I’ve died.
  • 5
    To your right, note the calendar. Unless you’re on your phone, in which case, scroll down. Responsive, baby!
  • 6
    I mean, I toot, but.
  • 7
    Wait, my Flow streak should be one higher if I’m posting this tomorrow– No! Just schedule it! Walk away! Be done!

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

Posted on by Alex Daily

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.”

The voice of the blog.

Posted on by Alex Daily

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.
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