The Male Hysteric

So today I went to a recipe site that was pushed to me by Firefox. It was about how to dry brine a turkey which my husband was thinking of doing for Thanksgiving, so, you know, normal article to be pushed on me this time of year. I tried to read the article and I was immediately swarmed with ads, leaving even my proper laptop screen little space to read, and then. Then. An ad popped up in the middle of my screen. Right in the middle. An ad I could not click to close, right in the middle of the screen, right in the middle of the text, there was no way to move it. It left me able to leave like one line of text on the whole friggin laptop screen. I thought this had to be some kind of mistake so I refreshed the page, and the ad went from a square in the middle of the screen had expanded to a full stripe in the middle of the page, making the entire text unreadable, with no way to close this ad, no way to wait for the ad to finish, it just made the entire article unreadable.

I am done with the internet. Throw the whole thing out.

So as I spend more time on Dreamwidth and in indie web spaces I'm finding people are actually posting more actual content, as in essays, stories, art, etc on their small websites rather than just making them into nostalgia retro pages and that's really cool! However one thing to remember about small sites is that, well, they tended to disappear almost as quickly as they showed up. The WayBack Machine may have pieces of a website but not everything, so if you find a cool site, you might want to be able to save it locally. Or maybe you're somewhere with unreliable internet and just want a copy of your friend's fanfiction archive locally so you can read it when you want to and not when the internet is cooperating. I get it!

One of the more convenient ways to do this I've found is with Kiwix. Kiwix is an organization that makes an app that was primarily designed to be able to download and browse various Wikipedia projects in areas where internet access is difficult, impossible, or dangerous. This works by compiling websites onto .zim files, which you can find pre-compiled through kiwix, but you can also find .zim files elsewhere or even make your own, and a very simple way to do that is through the Zimit tool. Zimit has a lot of limitations, but it usually works fantastically well on most small static sites like the kinds you find on the indie web. The resulting .zim file from the tool can be used with any Kiwix application, either on a computer or a mobile device, and you can browse through the webpage to your heart's content without an internet connection. Enjoy!

I don't really have a coherent plan of action right now, but given the encroaching ID certification to view anything "adult" in certain countries and payment processors pressuring vendors to censor "mature" content and KOSA getting revived, I kind of feel like more than ever people need to get themselves a web space that isn't social media. Having a static site just seems to be increasingly a good idea, even if it's just a single, unformatted page of links to your friends' static sites, and keep a backup of your site locally in case you're forced to move.

I'd recommend getting started on neocities.org or nekoweb.org. Both have slightly different features. If we know each other and you want to be linked to my website, comment or DM me. Good luck out there.

Last night I decided to watch a video on MH 370 on YouTube. For those who don't remember, MH 370 was that famous Malaysian Airline flight that went missing back in 2014, which was a huge mystery at the time and the most likely explanation seems to be that the pilot deliberately depressurized the cabin to incapacitate and kill everyone else on the flight, turned off the electronics long enough to get far away from the expected route, and then ran the plane into the Indian Ocean once the plane was completely out of fuel. So, you know, totally horrific stuff, also absolutely wild to think about because there haven't really been any other cases like it. The presenter seemed to be a pilot with a European accent, and was going through all the technical reasons why the flight must have been piloted by someone and it was impossible for the autopilot to have done the impressive amount of manouevers specifically to avoid detection, and for that matter vanishingly unlikely for hijackers or anyone but the pilot to have done this. The breakdown of the technical information was new to me, but also, that the pilot murdered everyone on the flight and then crashed the plane isn't really new information to anyone. While the black box has never been found, this is the official theory of what happened outside of Malaysia, which won't acknowledge this as the official story to save face.

So, while there's a lot of conspiracy theories about MH 370, primarily about UFOs or a secluded military base located in the Indian Ocean, this wasn't about that. It seemed like a normal video and nothing about it seemed outlandish at all. And somehow, in the middle of it all, I got this very, very strange advertisement about why I should stop looking at porn, and how it was degrading my masculinity, and how I should click here to find out why.

I don't watch a lot of YouTube. Most of the YouTube I watch is with my husband through the main TV in the living room, like, he'll put on a podcast about knitting or reading or every so often I'll put on a yoga video. Most of the ads are excessively normie, like, literally stuff one would expect on old-school television, ads about Michael's craft stores, eczema medications, athletic wear, et cetera. I barely use YouTube on my phone, and I think most of my watching has been... psychology and psychiatry topics? And even then, I had never seen an ad like this. So really the exact moment I step into a primarily men's interest, technical transit information, I start getting routed to some kind of alt-right garbage. Wow. Just wow. This explains so goddamn much.

Among other things, today I got my Tamagotchi Uni, which is a color, wifi-enabled tamagotchi which is going to likely become defunct next year (though there are plenty of non-wifi features that will still be useable, some of the stuff will no longer be).

Part of my reason for getting this is because there's a new Tamagotchi thing being released in like a week, so the Unis are on sale (if you want one, you should get one now), and also considering the tariffs I am unsure if the hot new things is even going to be available in the US at all, or if it is for a non-ridiculous markup, so I figured, if I really wanted one, why wait? Anyway I haven't figured out all the features yet but my tama has already matured into the "child" stage from the "baby." They grow up so fast...



Between this and the mp3 player and my Kobo purchased last year I feel like I am getting more into "small" electronics, or maybe non-smart electronics, or well... I still like electronics, but I want things that do not resemble a phone (I was very dismayed to find my tama playing on a phone already!). I have been looking at the subreddit r/dumbphone and some others and while I don't think I would get a dumbphone any time soon, I'm always so interested in the "every day carry" lays, and how these people often have multiple electronic devices that are not phones. Often e-readers, or mp3 players, or cameras, or hand-held game consoles, or, yes, tamagotchis, which are having a comeback. It's probably the opposite of an environmentally friendly mindset and also going to be increasingly difficult as a hobby in the US if the tariffs keep happening, but electronics used to be... kinda fun before everything was all-in-one? When the device is less all-encompassing you can kind of more appreciate it for what it is. And like, a couple weeks ago me and my partner were having to wait around forever at a T-Mobile, and I noted how every time you had to step into a cell carrier store it always took forever. And I wonder how much of it is because they haven't really updated their customer interface sales model since before your entire life was on your phone, so people always have an insane amount of data to transfer between them, or every phone that's lost is an emergency, so the chronically understaffed stores have to serve every problem.

I don't know. I just know it's a bad time for me to get into this hobby.

So because of soc_puppet's comment that Tumblr may be in its death knell (again), I'm looking into preserving meta commentary that I've done on it. I was thinking of posting it to my essays and analysis (that I want to give a snappier name tbh) on my website, but I've found that a lot of the stuff I want to save has a lot of back and forth with other users. So it seems like it might be weird putting it on a personal site. But I still want to preserve it, and if Tumblr is truly dying this time, then I would like to preserve it somehow.

So... what do I do? Link back to the original post, the original user as well as long as Tumblr still exists? Would I be better off doing screenshots even though it's more difficult to code? Other ideas? Hrrm.

So I was reading an interesting discussion started by a user on BlueSky that begins:

Share a thought about writing some may find controversial?

Outliers aside, I think the quality of any text is roughly proportional to the amount of time its author is plugged online, especially in social media.

And goes on to explain some things that I've noticed as well about some recent books, though I'm not really sure I agree with the conclusion. I do think as a society we've been wrestling really hard with what is "real life" and whether or not the online can be considered "real life", and the denial that it is "real life" has actually been to our detriment in many ways when it comes to understanding how our society has gotten to the dark place where it is now.

I think maybe more of the problem than what this user is saying, rather than that these people lack experience outside of online forums -- maybe they do, or maybe they don't, I don't actually think that's the issue -- is that they are no longer keeping these behaviors siloed to online forums, which is a different matter. I think there is very much a faux pas of bringing the online into real life that is breaking down and some people are more comfortable with it and some people find it "cringe", to use an online word, while others who have never been very online have no idea what is going on because they have no idea the depths of depravity that the first two have experienced. I think in a lot of these cases these people are writing to a microculture, which would be fine, but maybe they don't understand how big or how small this microculture is because the internet has a way of obscuring numbers of these very basic things. The experience of not knowing how many people you are talking to would be rich to plunge the depths of, but it's kind of ignored... because we don't know, and there's a profit/political motive to keep us from knowing, in the form of bots.



But there's also the factor that due to the idea of these norms being siloed and their breakdown is that it kind of seems like maybe these writers do not know how to code-switch, or, possibly moreso, even think that code-switching is somehow immoral. If you read enough books and you read enough fanfiction, you begin to see that the way these two types of prose are written is slightly different, that they exist in different registers, and when you read an original novel that was previously fanfiction with the "fan" part scrubbed off, the register still remains and it's obvious to anyone familiar with it. Blogging is not the same type of writing as what you read in a novel, or what you read in a nonfiction book, either. Posting adeptly on a microblogging site is its own skill, and arguing online is yet another, though one of debatable value. And yet there are many writers who seem to be unable to switch between these forms of writing, and as this OP says, all their writing sounds like you're reading screeds from their blogs. Rather than respecting these different forms of writing as their own art forms, being able to change how you write from one form of media to another becomes dishonest.

And I think this might really be the crux of the matter. So much of this is about how annoyed even queer readers are that certain writers will transplant up-to-the-second overly-online queer microdiscourse into novels set three hundred years ago, or on another planet, or in an alternate universe inhabited strictly with fairies and unicorns. It doesn't make any sense, it destroys suspension of disbelief, and makes the story more difficult to read. However, the writer probably feels that to not include this would be dishonest, somehow, or otherwise morally bad. The piece is meant to be instructive, or an honest display of themselves and their writing identity, or something, meaning that the code-switch cannot happen. The friction between the two sets of norms cannot be smoothed out.

So I guess what I'm saying is that to navigate this skillfully in the way the OP thinks is better, one has to be, in online parlance, a norm-understander, at the very least, rather than it having to do specifically with how terminally online one is. I mean, I guess being terminally online does erode one's ability to understand outside norms, or people who are terminally online generally did not have a great understanding of outside norms to begin with, but I don't think it's quite as one-to-one as suggested.

I don't know, it's hard to formulate all of my thoughts on this. There's a lot. It's getting late.

I'm realizing I'm actually very sad about Joann's going out of business. Yes I am very fortunate in that I am in an area with a few decent fabric stores -- but they're always out there and the small vintage stock and specialty quilt ones nearby might not have what you're looking for, and the big ones are a schlep. Ugh.

I started PT for my back yesterday and am starting to think that there should be an existential angst subscale for the pain scale they give you. Because just a number doesn't really cut it, maybe it's not bad but it makes you contemplate your existence too much is definitely an underconsidered problem, and feelings of impeding doom are considered medically significant so I think these are as well. (At least in my case this often means that it's nerve-related).

I think I'm getting sick of the internet, even though I'm still flipping through reddit etc. all the time. It's just not... that interesting? I wish it was interesting, I wish the good internet still existed, but I kind of doubt it ever really did. It feels a bit like a fever dream.

Last Friday me and my partner ordered Chinese and I was exhausted and ordered chow mein and the thing that was delivered was... not chow mein. According to some messed up definitions of this city I live in it's apparently like chow mein, but the thing is that it was mostly soggy cabbage and onion with no noodles and they gave you a little packet of crunchy noodles and were like "here you go! it's chow mein!" I was so fucking angry I left it in the fridge and went to sleep like immediately.

Sunday rolls around, I really don't want to waste food. I prepare a packet of chapagetti noodles, add them to the frying pan along with the chow mein and some sesame oil and sprinkle some of the crunchy noodles on top. It was some of the best Chinese food I've had. And I was so fucking angry. Because the thing that was sent to me was like 80% of the way there to being a great meal and then it just didn't have the noodles. The noodles would have been so easy to add. But if I'm ordering Chinese food, I'm not going to be spending that much and then going to cook some more. So it's unlikely to be a dish I ever have again. I'm going to have to figure out how to make my own I guess.

In other news, on Saturday night, working on my neocities website, I was realizing that after a whole week of garbage, I was actually feeling somewhat calm for once. And I realized that the reason why was because... I do not access real social media on my laptop. I only access it on devices. So working on the neocities HTML meant that I was actually giving the thing I was learning my full attention and not thinking about the news at all. It was a very strange experience.

I don't know if I really think the future is on the small web, but in a way I want to believe. I joined smallweb to get into contact with other creators. There's also some burgeoning stuff going on on bluesky. People are getting into webrings and I was realizing I cannot add my blog to a webring because dreamwidth does not support javascript. Which is probably for the better, but disappointing nonetheless.

I was bored today when I discovered the gemini protocol, a parallel/stripped down internet protocol (alternative to HTTP) that's meant to be lightweight, easy to use, text-focused...! so I downloaded a client to try to browse and the client itself is janky (search doesn't work) and the alternatives to the client on my phone are abandonware, and a disturbing amount of the capsules (equivalent to websites) were dated early in the pandemic. I had hopes and my dreams seemed to be crushed in a couple hours. I mean I'm sure there's still stuff, I would just have to access it differently. But it's such a big idea, no?

I've been slowly updating my Neocities website and at this point the web resources page has a decent amount of links. I feel like I should probably write an essay or so on blogging, and why it's important, even though, hypocritically, I do not keep up well with this blog. I don't know. I've added analytics to the website just to see what happens. I am very tempted to add a guestbook and such. I looked back and saw that I had commented out a chatbox that I had attempted to add, and looking at the site I'm thinking, wow, a chatbox goes totally against the vibe, doesn't it? But I think it could do with a guestbook. It could probably do with a lot of things that I don't know if I'm going to get to. One thought I had was to add my fanfic onto the site. It's mine, so why not?