The Male Hysteric

I'm still alive. I am behind on my reading, and should still make posts on the last two books I've read and not done anything about (Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir and Yield Under Great Persuasion by Alexandra Rowland). I guess in the interim I've read fanfic and Frieren, which is fine, I guess, but not the same as reading.

There's just... a lot of bad things going on around me and not all of them are online, and I keep thinking about how things used to be better, but I do not know where those good things are. And honestly I'm a different person than I was then, so now I need different things, just in time for everything to feel so closed off.

Getting into stuff like vaporwave, messing with computers, etc., all feel like distractions and while I get that distractions are necessary to an extent I am not sure what would even be fulfilling. I am tempted to try to get into zine space but I think my confidence is an issue. I have been writing consistently (even if it's only one sentence a day, I've at least been touching the current WIP every day), and I think my new year's resolution will be to have a finished draft. But overall I don't really feel good. And I don't really know what to do.

When I look at the small web stuff it is interesting and there is a big dream there but right now it feels insufficiently social right now. Perhaps I am looking at the wrong places.

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.

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.

When I was little, I was obsessed with Sanrio. I mean I still love Sanrio but I used to, too. But much of the merchandise you find these days is pretty different than what you would find back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Sanrio has two different product schemes, products they produce themselves versus selling the license to other retailers to produce goods with their characters. When I was a bit older I noticed they started selling Hello Kitty items at Target and Hot Topic and I thought they were fake, though really it's strange that I thought that way because it would be difficult for these large retailers to sell obvious bootlegs. However I was right that the quality of the merchandise is noticeably different, in that items that are licensed to Target, Hot Topic, and now Miniso, Joytop, Alibaba, etc seem to be lower quality than items produced directly from Sanrio... and also that at least where I am in the United States, items directly from Sanrio are somehow even more difficult to find than they were twenty years ago.

One of the trends of this licensing scheme has been to match up characters with specific colors in a way that the original merchandise did not and tends not to do. In this scheme, Hello Kitty is red/pink, My Melody is pink, Kuromi is purple, Cinnamoroll is blue, Pochacco is green, and Pompompurin is yellow. It used to be that it wasn't difficult to find, say, blue Hello Kitty merchandise, but finding a licensed blue Hello Kitty item is pretty much impossible and it's almost all licensed merchandise. Anyway, since 2015, Cinnamoroll has been in the top 3 of Sanrio's character rankings, and has won first 7 of those years, and it makes me wonder, is it because he's wildly popular and adorable, or... is it because everyone likes blue? He's cute, don't get me wrong, but also, he's not really playing fair if he's taken over the entire color blue, is he?

I dunno. I think my favorite is Chococat, probably because when I was like 8 years old and I first decided I was going to write a novel I started in a Chococat notebook. What's interesting about him though is that while he's consistently ranked highly in Western countries (#3 in the US!), he does poorly elsewhere, ranking 46 overall. I'm not really sure why that is? Possibly in the West a black cat character is seen as edgier and therefore more interesting, or maybe in Eastern countries they think he's just a Jiji knockoff.

I'm getting back to it, doing 3 things again. I want things that are from humans to be of human interest rather than The Algorithm or whatever. So, I've got 3 more things this week:

Just Put Stuff Out There, a blog post by Matthias Ott on why you should just… put stuff out there, on the internet, and the balance of thinking enough to make what one puts out intentional and not thinking to hard about what you’re actually putting out there.

Author Charles Stross experiences a google alert on a book review generated by AI for the first time. So, related to the post on ‘garbage’ I made a few days ago, that ‘garbage’ is now being generated for no real reason. I guess if you have google alerts, this is a caution that maybe they’re not going to be useful for much longer if they have been.

Continuing with the nostalgia theme an interesting neocities site, the 99Gif Shop seems to be an archive of old gifs in all of their oddly-timed glory. Give it a look!

I will not apologize to my own blog for not updating. I will not, I will not...

Anyway. Currently cupbearer twinks is off and science fiction dissociative issues story is back on. Please do not ask my logic of how I decide what projects to work on. I don't know. I have diagnosed ADHD.

I've also been looking more on neocities and retro web stuff. I have also become a bit more involved in mastodon. I am thinking I need to get into RSS somehow to keep my sanity as Twitter continues to deteriorate. It LOOKED LIKE as of December 2022 Dreamwidth was looking at becoming compatible with ActivityPub, which would mean that people would be able to subscribe to my DW on their mastodon feeds if they wanted to, which would have been VERY exciting and would probably lead to me posting here a lot more... but alas, I have no idea what DW staff are up to and they seem to implement features very slowly -- this feature was first recommended all the way back in 2018 and they were hemming and hawing about privacy features but I'm guessing Twitter blowing up kind of put a fire under them with this. I still do not know if it will ever be implemented though, or if it is, if it will happen in a timely manner. Crossing my fingers.

I am still looking into using neocities to create a more permanent home for some of my writing (primarily essays at this point) rather than just blog updates. However building a static site, though they're quite stable, is a significant time investment and it would mean having to differentiate between what I want to post where, which is difficult enough given how diffuse social media networks etc are. But still, there's something about having control. However, looking into it, I am getting seriously sidetracked by all the shiny things. Like oh, I need a good layout, do you remember tile backgrounds? I need to design a button! What about a guest book? etc. It probably doesn't help that I am getting weirdly heavy nostalgia looking at all these sites because of how much making stuff like this was my pretty early childhood (like, legit, elementary school. I had a weird childhood). The concept of smol web is so fascinating. There are so many complex retro websites designed by teenagers who weren't even alive when this stuff was the norm. I don't know. It's a lot.

I do want a lightweight web presence that I can call my own (even if it's on neocities, static pages are pretty transferable). I WILL get it working eventually. Maybe. I don't know.

For better or worse I have been getting into enneagram stuff. I am a 5, apparently, if that's not obvious from this blog. There is a lot of, uh, what I can best describe as processing going on in my life right now and this helps, maybe. Some. It's confusing. Every time I think I've figured it out it keeps pulling me back in, you know.

In the meantime I am looking for a new job and looking to move to a safer state. Even if this is constantly occupying my mind, I don't really want to talk about it, unless you can actually hook me up with remote SQL jobs. Then please contact me.

Hello, I know it's been an eternity since I've posted. I tried to get onto tumblr because I was realizing twitter was bad for my mental health (just before Musk started fucking around with buying twitter prompting a potential exodus -- no seriously I was doing it before it was cool!!). Tumblr is actually a very fun site. I used it a lot from about 18-24 -- when Homestuck was The Thing, if that's any indication of what my experience was like -- left because my dashboard was out of control with content I didn't like (before the porn ban -- again, BEFORE IT WAS COOL!!), and now I've returned maybe a bit more mature and able to curate my feed better, though that's obviously not something I've been able to do with twitter so the big advantage I've had is "starting fresh." I've seen some basic-level craziness with the pro/antishipping stuff but for the most part my experience hasn't been too bad? The crowd seems to skew a bit young for me, though.

I do think some of the reason I've been able to miss some of the crazy is because I've mostly been blogging about Frankenstein literary analysis (with a little Dracula, now that Dracula Daily is the thing). When you're looking at a book as old with as much analysis already existing as Frankenstein it does a little to weed out some of the immature reactionary stuff, but there are still some number of people who can't separate text from blorboism, for lack of a better term.

I'm brain-depositary there if you're interested, btw.

Anyway, this is a really long preamble to the fact that I need a static site to store this stuff. I've been posting essentially fully-functional essays on my tumblr and tumblr is a really, REALLY bad place to store essays. I've been thinking of having a static or mostly-static site with maybe a guestbook for a while, to store an index of resources and some of my writing like media analysis essays or tutorials that need a stable web address for access. I have a LOT of complaints about how the internet functions now, that corralling people into a limited number of social media sites, algorithmic searching, putting everything on video, etc. has made it essentially impossible to FIND and KEEP resources stable online. They used to say that when you posted anything on the internet it's there forever but our corporate overlords have found that it's more profitable to make nothing last and force us to create endless 'content' for them to keep making inaccessible as their combines churn.

Anyway, possibly out of nostalgia's sake, I picked up my old Neocities site, cleared out what was essentially an art project/html practice site, and was looking to start building there. I spent a lot of time in elementary school building a static geocities site to host pixel art dolls I'd made and was reaching deep into these reserves when trying to build anything on neocities and kept remembering how I did things, thinking naively, with all my code experience as a mature adult that this could not possibly be the best way to manually build static sites, and then trying to look up what I was trying to do, and learning that, dear reader, it was -- I'm mostly discussing the lack of includes to make pages consistent, etc. This got me looking at static site generators like Hugo, making me wonder if I really wanted to go that route because I would really be learning something completely new here or if I should just do... something else, considering what I want to do, or to just go really retro in my site building and not even bother with stuff like real sidebar navigation on neocities.

So friends, if anyone is indeed reading my posts, I am asking for advice on what to do here. Do I continue on neocities and go full 1999 on this static site that I want to build, considering it's the equivalent of an online bomb-shelter anyway, or do I go find another site builder and host that can make it a bit more modern? I don't have my own domain name and would rather not have to subscribe to anything for now, but being able to download my site locally as a backup is definitely a plus. If you think there's anything else I should consider for this site, I'd be much obliged if you told me about that as well. Thanks.

In the meantime I've been thinking about having more serious posts on here but in the meanwhile I'm having serious early 2000s internet nostalgia, thinking about the geocities and pixel art I made in elementary school. Some things have definitely improved while I do think the way most social media is, putting lots of people in a small pit to fight it out and intentionally making them see content that makes them angry for "clicks" has... well, made the world worse.

Back in the days of neopets I had a geocities website with a seafoam green background and a page counter where I posted my pixel dolls. I was very fond of certain artists, and one of them at least, KawaiiHannah is incredibly still around though she seems to do traditional art mostly now though her pixel art is still online.

I was thinking about how I probably would not have the patience to do pixel art now. I mean, I have a lot of tedious hobbies and interests, sure, but I guess the reward for it would not be as much now. There was a lot of community around this stuff and now I have no idea what I would do, it just seems like shouting into the void. I mean there's doing art for art's sake, I know that and do that, but like, when I do that I use physical media, because having something that's not just computer data is... well, it's something, at least.

I was looking at carrd as an alternative to the old-style static sites and I have a resounding maybe. There's also neocities, but again I do not know how much I remember of HTML and CSS and if I have the patience or energy to make a new site from scratch right now. There's also, you know... what I'd put on it. I don't even know. It's hard enough to maintain a blog, because I think I should have something important to say to post. A static website? That's even moreso!

It's really hard to be the change one wants to be, especially when there's no one else around. I really should use this site more. Bleh.