writing for my best-faith reader (me)

27 Feb, 2023

I was thinking about how to start this post (first entry! first blog! how daunting), and after typing up what looked to be the beginning of a very long manifesto on writing and anti-perfectionism and all that jazz, I decided I would make an incredibly normal post.

(I have no idea yet what my aim is for this blog, but I'm doing my best to go against my usual tendency to map everything out exhaustively prior to a Great Undertaking™ and consequently lose steam before I even try.) (Go with the flow, bitch! You'll figure it out at some point!)¹

my normal blog post

Today was a particularly chill day. I woke up late because I was up coding a page on my Neocities site until almost 6am (!). I don't have any experience with coding besides Tumblr, but learning it has been really fun and satisfying so far. It's a nice balance of logic and creativity that really jives with my brain.

Neocities is such a great little thing. I miss the tail-end of Web 1.0 that I got to explore when I was a kid with unsupervised internet access, and this way I get to relive that but with all the privileges of being a grown-up lol.

I also made my first mutual the other day! The guestbook interaction gave me a much larger serotonin boost than I expected lmao.

I'm impressed by the number of people who have been on Neocities for some years now, and even more impressed by the ones who have sworn off social media. I have my own complaints about Web 2.0, but I've also been an obsessive Twitter user for over 10 years. I don't think it ever crossed my mind that you could be online as much as I was and have as much or even more fun while living "off the grid."²

I'm starting to get it now - working on my own site is so absorbing, and browsing other people's sites even more so. It's a nice refuge from the contentious landscape of Twitter (which is really the only social media I frequent these days³). After starting my Neocities adventure, I found myself getting drained looking through even my private account timeline with just my friends on it. I felt like I could see more clearly the psychic damage we were getting from how we're normally expected to live, with social media being one of those larger unspoken structures governing our interactions these days.

Anyway. I'm sure Neocities is going to come up again at some point but I've talked about it too long and I'm still trying to write the rest of my normal blog post.

I was thankful that I didn't have any morning meetings and could work remotely until noon. I got up at 10⁴ and went to sit in a workshop at 12. That went on for like six hours. It's a workshop I don't usually have to do anything in, so I just sat there brainstorming how to arrange my site like an obsessed person.

When I got out, I spotted a cat in the parking lot and went to approach, as I usually do. It started meowing up a storm the moment it saw me trying to interact with it, which from experience I know is a positive sign.

He was very cute and also had giant balls. He wasn't skinny so I assume someone around was feeding him, which is good, but he was predictably mangy (as street cats tend to be) and had a few wounds. I wish I knew how to take care of those.

Next time I have to go to that office, I'll see if I can bring a can of tuna.

ok insane again

GOD. Great that I mentioned the psychic damage thing in the normal section of this post because I'm bringing it up here. I never see the results of Social Media Psychic Damage in me more than when I'm trying to get my thoughts out, because I always immediately assume a bad-faith stance. To my own thoughts.

If you read the footnotes, you'll notice that too! I imagine I will use footnotes a LOT to house my brain's backtalk just to keep the post itself less back-and-forthy and self-combative. I usually try to get all those arguments out as they come when I journal, but this is a blog. I don't know if there will be any readers - and I don't... know if I want them actually - but by virtue of it being public, I assume this blog will be read⁵, and I don't want it to be THAT hard to read.

It's been a while since I've written long-form, so I'm rusty and will probably need a lot of practice in Not Second-Guessing Myself, but I would really like to try and make this a habit. Try and ease back into saying things with my whole chest and claiming them and not being afraid of backlash. I think it helps that there are no comments on this platform too - it feels less like a performance and more like something for me.

So here I am, practicing - not just writing without fear, but reading what I write without judgment. Who else can I rely on to read my work in good faith but me?

#blogging #daily #web #work