may 31st, 2021

thinking it's maybe actually turning out to be really bad that from the moment you experience
a piece of media there can be an easily accessible pre-cooked community around it that shunts
all subjective variation between art into the same roster of image macros with static tones
& attitudes! you'd think the togetherness is good but it turns out like everything else, that
the worst things are the most common & the best are the most secret. & like always
the internet greases that & lets it reach a really grotesque extent. the impulse to not
be stuck alone with a piece of art is so quellable on the internet that surely it's
preyed on whether intentionally or as some emergent thing

july 28th, 2021

this is the piece of writing with which i originally inaugurated this page, & i think subsequent
entries - which i feel can stray a bit from the conceptual center that i would have liked to
keep more strictly near - should be considered in comparison to what i present in this entry

-

i think there is something weird about "the most mysterious song on the internet."
not the song itself, just it as a cultural thing. i don't know if i can verbalize
it. i just think there is something weird. it rubs me the wrong way

i guess i might just be over-interpreting it. but whenever i think about it, i feel like
it's being treated as a flagship of obscure media itself. while having millions of views, &
a video about it with nearly a million views by one of the million youtube documentarians
who insufferably have stylized templates for their thumbnails. so if it is obscure media's
flagship, it's not that obscure itself. that idea contradicts itself anyway

you know what i would love...? to be out on a walk one night & find a cassette on the
ground, to rip it & find some interesting arcane music that i couldn't find any info
about. that would make my week. i'd value it forever. it'd feel like mine

i don't think t.m.m.s. is any less real than that hypothetical experience. it doesn't seem manufactured.
some guy taped the song long ago, couldn't figure out what it is, & people still can't figure it out!
it's organic, it's fair. fate hasn't organically afforded me a neat tape on the ground yet, though. it did
kind of afford it to the t.m.m.s. guy, & now that experience is distributed across millions of people

if t.m.m.s. signals that other people are hungry for this sort of thing too, but only to an extent where
they're comfortable just having it presented in a cozy youtube format by the people who either dig it
up, or are just quick on reporting whatever is dug up, then... well, there's an audience for it. & i think
content creators eventually start doing really weird stuff when there's an audience for anything

i dread the idea of people manufacturing "tape on the sidewalk" experiences, i dread the idea of anyone
trying to put out "mysteries on demand" as if they're something to produce with no relation to the
bell curve of explainability for all the different things that actually happen in the world...

either manufacturing it, or like. greedily evacuating things from the realm of obscurity to the realm of. things
that have been totally desecrated by like. Pad Chennington. establishing a very blatant conflict between the two

every time i hear about Tramp Stamps, i kind of wonder if they're... you know, first there's bands
that organically have inspiring rises to fame. then people try to package that as a narrative & sell it.
industry plants. then people catch onto industry plants. so someone packages the narrative of an
absurd industry plant to get the attention instead. expecting everyone to "catch on"

why did a person make each individual thing that comes out of my laptop? is this or that
thing "authentic?" am i outsmarting the contextless signals? screw it, daniel johnston was
an industry plant. screw it. everything on reuters & the new york times is a lie, screw it

stories upon stories upon stories upon stories upon stories upon stories upon stories & each
layer of stories breeds a new generation of art inspired by stories, uncanny in its subtle lack
of being informed by real experience, & people can publish stories about the art too! then
we can talk about how good the stories about the art are, & turn that talk into a story!

october 22nd, 2021

you know when you see something that seems really great, maybe even very original, in a way that's
totally happenstance & not especially reliant on any underlying context, & then you find out that
it's like, a reference to something - a reference which, incidentally to just making a reference,
also happened to hit you in a great way as a product of how it's hiddenly operating on the logic
of whatever it's referencing, which, from your uninformed perspective, sort of freed it to be a
bit more chaotic than most things? or maybe it's an instance of a meme that's just particularly
esoteric if it's the first variant you're exposed to. so you find out that it's one of these things,
& you think: haha, darn. i thought i actually had something for myself there, but there
it goes, another one of my simple little idiosyncratic animal experiences, assimilated
into the hulking alien mass of preexisting globally distributed culture

october 31st, 2021

the more time passes, the more i settle into this belief that there really is an approximate
moral character to more obscure media & immoral character to more mainstream media...

i mean, it doesn't even have to be media, just "obscure" & "mainstream" as untethered adjectives
engaged in conflict. like the obscurity of one's childhood, making someone who they are, vs
subsumption into mainstream & uniform traditions that ignore & overtake who they are

lots of stuff sends the message that rallying around agreed-upon cultural touchstones & reflecting them, for the
sake of socialization, is easier than existing alone as exactly what one is, shaped by circumstances no one else had

i think diversity is good! mainstream centralizes, & it diminishes diversity by producing & reinforcing
patterns (a tv show can affect people in all sorts of unpredictable ways, but its precise nature still acts
as a consistent seed, so maybe the uniformity of this seed can be said to seep in, in diverse ways)

while obscure specificity breaks patterns, its responses strike from alternative angles, & it
certainly encourages diversity because if everyone committed to this particular attitude of
fighting to retain themselves then i imagine people would be totally heterogeneous...

that possibility is sort of alien to think about & probably impossible, i am not sure if it would be good
or bad, but i guess my feeling is that... what homogeneity there is should be super fragmented,
the clustering should be productively minimal, like, collaboration entails homogeneity so
there should be a compromise where there is as much collaboration as possible?

november 2nd, 2021

i think when people act inhuman (i.e. reflect the alien inhumanity latent in many aspects
of life (i.e. play a part in propagating it, but only in tandem with being victimized by
it themselves)) it acts as lubricant for someone else to internally dehumanize them

conversely you could say that everyone could hypothetically be made to constantly behave & appear so searingly
human that it'd be impossible for anyone to dehumanize anyone. not that that is actually possible, but i think
that extreme of the human direction illustrates the effect & potential mitigation of the inhuman direction

it's way easier to hate someone when you think they act like a brainless pig, even if it is in a way that the culture
they live in has partly led them to. which means that, if that kind of mutual resentment is beneficial to that
culture, & i mean the self-sustaining propagation of that culture even if is a hostile one to the people
living under it, then the inhumanity latent in it will probably become more prevalent & reflectable

(direct link between this post & the following one)

november 11th, 2021

my vague tentative theory is that a feedback loop has to be maintained, through systems like:
expressions of humanity being watered down & perhaps coming through in art, which then
teaches the audience its watered-down standard & perhaps inspires further works of art

the dual end results, i suspect, are: 1. the diminishing of unfiltered humanity within people who buy into watered-down standards;
2. the generation of unproductive resentment & separation & misanthropy among people who don't buy in, as they know this
is all absurd but find a deficit of counterexamples to it... this is why i think the slant towards the concentration of
attention on mainstream media is not just "tasteless" or "bland" or whatever snobbish judgment but pure evil

i don't want to fetishize old art & say it has some deep fundamental mystical connection to reality but i think there's something to be
said about uhh. like ongoing, worsening, multiplicative refraction of people's processing of their own lives as it becomes informed
by their reflection on art whose artistic lineage is being refracted through increasing layers of increasingly marketable art &
sterile alienated bureaucratized ways of life, right, like, is it not worth trying to theorize about "cringe" relationships to
tv shows or whatever, embarrassing fandom culture, is there not something, like, hyperreal about it, i just don't see
anyone else typing anything like this, if someone refers me to the already-existing book i can just shut up

i really truly may not be thinking straight at every little junction of reasoning in these paragraphs, i am just having a careless
sleep debt typing-a-lot day, i'm not concerning myself too much about it. i HOPE you are cringing SO MUCH. (actually
i don't, i am embarrassed to make anyone cringe, i am just telling myself it's my goal as a coping mechanism)

ok ok ok ok ok here's a REAL justification for being stupid: even if i am being incredibly naive & u[p my own ass & making
obnoxious attempts at being self-aware it's like, uh, something in place of where a void could be, like if someone can
feel my fleshy real other-person thoughts writhing around behind what i type then that has some value even
if on some other layer of processing it is just annoying. okay. i will stick with this.

november 21st, 2021

i feel like the prevalence of exploitable memes & phrases can quietly lower people's aspirations of self-expression. like if i'm
having a really thoughtless day i still might automatically like, frame something in my head as "virgin chad" or "liker enjoyer" or
some other template, whatever, & almost even phrase it that way, even though i hate it soo much... & that expression would
take the place of a more personal & varied expression of whatever sentiment, if i neglected to add to it further!

like, an exploitable meme or phrase is just some particular dynamic that people can put labels on, right? & a good one is very
multipurpose, it kind of hits a very precise mark of some... common element among people's general experience, some thing
that survives across many different changes of labels, right? i guess what i'm positing is that when dynamics that people can
reuse are always springing up it like, it acts against anyone feeling the need or drive to bother to create dynamics themselves

one dynamic represents many personal expressions! each instance of a particular meme is an instance
of personal expression, & so each new template that arises can act as a net, capturing many
many personal expressions which could have found expression beyond that meme!

maybe consistently having something already have been
said for you can suppress a budding sense of creativity!

i don't know, i am just always wanting to express things in the idealistic direction of some miraculous state where everyone on earth is
living as an inversion of the tendencies you'd expect. that's like, anti-entropy, right? the diminishing of image macros feels in line,
to me, with some insane miraculous state of affairs where everyone is strong & brimming with creativity & wholly dynamic
expression, no one defaults or resorts to laxly comfortable patterns. which would, you know, probably carry all sorts
of implications outside just the realm of creativity & all of that. it's not that image macros are evil, they are to
be expected, i think... that's why my imagined state of affairs is miraculous. it's unrealistic, i just, i
don't know... have to retain some belief in the possibility of miraculous circumstances

even if i feel like i'm not quite living up to this myself... when's the last time
i put out any picture or song or joke or whatever that i felt real proud of???

november 26th, 2021

too many albums exist. it's good that there's so many albums. there's so much beauty for people to explore. it's an endless
landscape. it's too much for me. i'm too weak to dive in. exploration takes place at a constant rate of "one song per song."
the speed of this rate varies with the song, but it always seems too slow. i feel like dopaminergic entertainment & pastimes
have ruined me, instilled me with impatience, left me deeply in need of repair that will be terribly prolonged. an artistic
resource, a collection of seminal works, a bibliography, a textbook, it only feels like a checklist to satisfy

i'm not sure what i want. i guess i just want to lie down, i want to fold up & escape into my thoughts instead of rigidly
conforming them to the shape of the waveform of a song. the artistic dialogue is too exhausting. i'm sorry! i'm genuinely
so sorry for regarding a richness that is present in life, & then simply feeling the urge to retract. it makes me feel like
the opposite of a being! i feel like i am choosing death! i should be donating my energy to art & receiving energy
back in turn. & i am failing. i never feel like i am sinking into anything, losing myself in anything - only studying
it, listlessly... when i do sink into anything, it tends to sort of hang tenuously by a thread, constantly at risk of
collapsing into the mere narrative of myself sinking into something, which i then observe from outside of myself

& yet, once i do lie down, to fold up, that is when an impatience takes hold - i am not at peace as a maddening
stillness & silence fall over the room. i do need something after all, as the inherent conditions of life - the
desire for dynamics & experience & mental content - it all shouts at me to just connect to what exists, to
amass/collect things to find beauty in, to allow myself to dive & explore & feel the beauty of this & that
thing & to learn. & so i reconsider diving in. but again the weight of it all, the amount of it all seems
like too much! i sit paradoxically in a limbo between retraction & engagement

i just have to try, i just have to try, i just have to try to live

"try to live..." materially secure, yet trying to live

november 28th, 2021

if you are techno-crazy, i think you will hear a song for the first time &, instead of respecting your own animal intake of novel
stimuli & approaching it on those terms, you will unconsciously use the high view count on youtube + the general tone of the
comments, perhaps uniformly nostalgic, to infer that it is "classic" or "widely recognized" music, & take to speaking about
it in a way that tends to emphasize acknowledging the "classic" quality that is alien to you over the novelty that you
actually experienced, so as to not sound naive. as if you instead possess the alternative to naivete, which would
seem to be an absolutely comprehensive grasp of its place in culture to the extent that you have been present for
every mp3 playback... when, really, each person has only their particular memories of the song, & all they
can do beyond that is fumble blindly at the metadata of its existence, the reviews & statistics & encyclopedic
info, & maybe feel like it all meaningfully represents some "commonality" around it with others

or maybe i am totally trash talking the freeing possibilities for one's
cultural perspective that are opened by technology! um who knows?
i just don't like feeling imprisoned in second-order observation

december 5th, 2021

if i let even my imagination be inhabited by patterns & tendencies that came from outside me, then there really is no quarter for
me... it's no good to default to the same old simulations of affection, or to tend toward things i could conceivably imagine creating,
or at least remotely articulating. the latter tendency is rooted in isolation - i want to hold onto the possibility of sharing what
i thought about. but if i don't lose myself in the full inarticulable fuzziness inherent to the total control that i have to
envision things that satisfy me, for wholly inarticulable & fuzzy reasons, then i've lost such an intimate freedom

december 14th, 2021

if everyone could be spurred to pay the price of alienating themselves by foregoing norms, as things to help
them interact with people & socially navigate, then no one would pay that price because all of the norms would
dissipate & there would no longer be any standards against which they were alienated... just another situation
where humanity suffers for its inability to act like a hive mind i guess! what's ironic is that the situation where
people are very homogeneous would seem to have way more of a superficial resemblance to a hive mind

december 20th, 2021

i'm thinking about how much i feel i've let my imagination wane without
really noticing, & how diminished in my humanity that makes me feel

december 5th
if i let even my imagination be inhabited by patterns & tendencies that came from outside me, then there really is no quarter for
me... it's no good to default to the same old simulations of affection, or to tend toward things i could conceivably imagine
creating, or at least remotely articulating. the latter tendency is rooted in isolation - i want to hold onto the possibility of
sharing what i thought about. but if i don't lose myself in the full inarticulable fuzziness inherent to the total control that
i have to envision things that satisfy me, for wholly inarticulable & fuzzy reasons, then i've lost such an intimate freedom

someone asked if i will respond to this realization by trying to rehabilitate my imagination through creative
projects. it doesn't have to be creative projects, i feel. that would introduce a type of pressure that i'm not sure
is productive, i.e. it would only rehabilitate my imagination toward forms that cater to being realized. i
need to rehabilitate the simple act of envisioning whatever i want to as i go about day-to-day life

i typed this in a discord channel then realized how symptomatic of this it was of a thing to type:

i keep thinking about childish fantastic wants, where one might grasp pretty early in life that they are not possible & stop
even thinking about them because what is the point. & typing them sounds almost like i am trying to sound poetic or put
on a childish face. but they really are still genuine sensory wants! i would be very thrilled if any of them happened

e.g. i do wish that i could fly, that would be very fun. i do wish the stuffed animals in my room would start talking to
me & dancing around, it would be very entertaining. i do wish the trees at the nature trail would bend down &
wrap me up in their branches & it'd be very sensorily pleasing to be cocooned in all the cool damp leaves

lots of movies & cartoons & stuff are based around this kind of wish fulfillment but they don't register
to me that way when i look at them, it just feels like the nature of what happens in cartoons & movies

i have become overly stringent about affixing myself to reality. it can get so difficult to lie there
& imagine exactly what i want to without imposing outside influence, imagined judgment,
or referring to existing ideas or styles. this feels like the definition of losing myself

my friend says that even as a kid their imagination was kind of dulled because they were overwhelmingly
focused on existential questions & that sort of thing. this feels like it may be similar to part of my problem

for instance, i am afraid of the aspects of life that may diminish my humanity, but in trying to extensively reason about
that, i kind of, ahh... my concerns & considerations may become very worldly & rigid, i guess is a way i could phrase
it. folding my humanity down, from its actual realization, to theorizing about how i can retain it & best actualize it

it is an ironic process of self-sabotage, where i greatly value my spontaneous, imaginative,
fleshy humanity, so i become greatly concerned with retaining it, & this concern becomes
so square-shoulders that it does not leave me very spontaneous or frivolous at all

there is a balancing act

or, as i've posited before: belief, that there
is a balancing act, is in fact a failure state