Notes on stuff I'm thinking about. For short-form posts, visit the stream.
When I came back to blogging after years of being in and out of it, I did so mostly because I wanted to leave social media behind.
Sure, some people never stopped. There are people who have been blogging for twenty-plus years while the rest of us were tweeting away. I admire, envy, and wish I were one of them.
Because I wasn't, I ended up carrying a lot of social media assumptions into blogging, and they're starting to surface.
Something that has proven beneficial for me, as an adult with ADHD, is to isolate activities. My brain works better in single-task mode, and I stay calm and more focused. I'm also more productive when I do these things, but that's not really the point. The point is that they make me calmer. I'm relaxed when I get shit done.
This past Saturday I was fighting the comments embed on this site, trying to adjust it for some changes and make it look like it belonged with the rest of what I have going on here. At some point I looked at the giant list of overrides I was maintaining just to make it feel somewhat integrated and realized it didn't make much sense.
I've been thinking a lot about publishing photos for myself and my close circle, and in a second iteration of memories. The principal lines of thought are these:
A couple of nights ago, I was about to post a song on The Headphonist, my music journal, when I decided the design I'd put up a couple of months ago wasn't doing it for me anymore. And because who needs sleep?, I went ahead and started hacking together a whole new structure for the website.
Back in 2019, before the world ended, I was trying to learn JavaScript. Serious JavaScript, not just hiding and showing things like I'd always done for microinteractions in websites.
As one of my exercises, I published an app to collect people's favorite things. It was centered around a single sentence saying "My favorite [a] is [b]". There was no purpose other than having fun, it was totally anonymous, and I didn't know what I was doing at all, so as soon as it started breaking apart I had to put it away.
Taste dictates what music you listen to, your favorite food, your drink of choice, your clothing style, the books you read, the TV series you follow, the movies you watch — and rewatch. How you speak, how you flirt, how you react to other people. How you present yourself to the world.
Beyond that, taste dictates who you're friends with, and that's either because they match what you value, or because you appreciate their own taste. In some wonderful cases, it's both of these things.
Social media goes against all that.
A few days ago I stumbled upon this blog post by Matizeta where he talks about "the alive internet" and shares several ways to bring humanity back to the web.
For years I've been having a love-hate relationship with Instagram. I'm still there because I value the interaction with my friends, some of them remote, but I'm always annoyed by the quantity of ads that show up in my feed.
Now that I'm fully coming back to the small/indie/personal web, I'm trying to take with me some of the activities I use the corporate web for, and it occurred to me that taking a piece of instagram with me would be a great idea.