Some Musings on the Internet of Today...

So I've been thinking a lot about the state of the internet lately -- mostly, about how the spaces most of us frequent (social media like facebook, twitter,  instagram and etc. ,) reduce our online presence to nothing more than a pfp,  a display name and easily consumed (and exploited) content.

You can't format your comments, you can't customize the colors or layout of your page and despite the fact that we are now expected to connect our online selves to our meatspace self by way of legal name... We are very, very anonymized on social media. Or rather, perhaps, we're homogenized -- look through any thread on twitter, any comment chain on facebook or the comments section on an Instagram pic and tell me, scrolling through quickly, can you distinguish different posters? Or does every comment look roughly the same, minus an attached gif, image or maybe a few emojis? The only thing of us that exists on a lot of social media is just what can be harvested from us. Images, words, locations and interests -- not presented in any unique and personalized way but in a standardized form with standardized text and colors... Making every one of us look, more or less, the same. We become interchangeable groupings of text on a page.

I don't know, maybe it's the recent update to Twitter's font (which overrides the font I have selected on my phone, much to my chagrin) or the fact that I've spent the last week looking at retro internet gifs and making pixel art for my own personal website while browsing neocities.org (which may have given me nostalgia poisoning)... Or maybe I'm just starting to get old...but I'm finding, more and more, that I hate how standardized the internet has become. On top of that, the widespread toxicity and hatred of anything genuine is more than I can fucking handle.

Hell, I said it earlier on discord and on my Twitter -- social media feels like the execs running it looked at 4ch*n's anonymous, depersonalized set up (and it's irony-poisoned toxicity) and said "what if every site was like this?" And then they did it without even the decency of allowing us to be genuinely anonymous... (not that you can't be anonymous on twitter or have fifteen different burner accounts but like, it's a little bit harder than just making posts on 4ch*n as "anonymous").

I cannot overstate how much that bothers me -- or how much less stressed out I have felt since disconnecting from social media and plugging into the Old Net renaissance. I feel excited about making things again because I get to fully customize every page if I want to, I can make each character profile unique colors, give it a unique layout and text instead of CSS giving everything uniformity.

I'm discovering an immense pleasure in just making things for myself again. People may visit my website, sure. But mostly, it's for me. It's a space where everything is my horrible cheesy aesthetic. I hope the old net renaissance sticks around because god, I'm sick of web whatever the fuck edition this is.

On a positive note, my roommate gave me some really great socks. 

Long Live Org XIII

Anyway, I'll have another update up soon, probably. I'm working on customizing a pair of bluetooth headphones I got as a gift from my roommate and i plan to make it into a little craft-along/tutorial.