january 7th, 2022
the act of writing a music review & how it can almost inevitably feel like watering a thing
down to its particularly expressible aspects, i.e. precisely where much of the power isn't
january 19th, 2022
(me conspiratorially interpreting the automatic display of a youtube comment in the app, which says the song will "play over the
credits after the end of the world") digital mechanism which makes accessing the song inseparable from the supply of an intrusive
interpretation which has been popularly selected for its inevitable shallowness - this effect accumulating across many videos to
have a widespread chilling effect on undisturbed personal & original connections to nearly all media, & playing a small
part in the ongoing attempts at what would under ideal conditions be the psychic destruction of all of humanity
- at this point, something happens to Neocities which causes any change i make to a page to display immediately for others, but with a
delay of about twenty-five minutes for me. this breaks my established workflow & forces me to abandoned the "centered paragaphs" formatting -
march 3rd, 2022
i believe that even when a real exchange takes place on the public internet, or is reported there, then mere observation can directly make it into something unreal (even in the absence of commentary that might take an explicit approach to biasing the viewer's perception of it)
two people can have a genuine exchange, & then the exchange can propagate across the internet partly on the basis of its apparent sincerity. people may think it played out in a funny way, & the sincerity provides the additional satisfaction of witnessing something organic rather than performative
the exchange is endlessly repeated as it splits into a million embeds, screenshots, & screenshots of screenshots. i don't think this portrayal & repetition is where the exchange becomes meaningfully unreal. i think it's ok to assert that each of those portrayals still contains the reality of the initial exchange
it's specifically at the point of entering a viewer's mind & being processed in the light of being something presented, with an implicit justification for its presentation & maybe a quantitative indication of its popularity (i.e. a suggestion of consensus that it deserves to be presented) that i think it transitions from something real to an unreal thing playing out in a way that is superficially identical to the original thing
these aspects of it make implicit statements about the content which play a part in both blurring the division between content & actual online occurrences, & the silent & unnoticed formation of conventions about the natural ways of taking certain things, i.e. the particular form of a screenshotted exchange can carry the implied assertion that person B in the exchange "lost" or that everyone visible in the screenshot is part of some milieu that you're meant to find embarrassing
at this point, now that the main priority for a majority of people processing the original exchange is not the original reality of it, but whatever catharsis they've been primed to search out & mine from it in light of the implications made by the mere fact that it's made its way to them at all, i'm comfortable not calling it a real thing anymore
i believe that this can apply even to one's processing of an exchange which hasn't yet propagated, perhaps never propagates at all
this is basically not a system of sharing funny exchanges but a system of buried "ore veins" of unrealized cultural catharses, whose natures can be dictated by normative standards. a vein can be mined only when social media, in its process of combinatorially generating endless social dynamics, generates one that happens to perfectly resemble the vein & thus makes its location known to people. but the dynamic & the vein ultimately have nothing to do with each other
still, despite the lack of actual relation between the "vein" & the interaction which resembles it, maybe the former can affect the latter: the endless exchanges that people have could be affected to some extent by the distortions in public sentiment which could be introduced by the constant appropriation of exchanges into snowballing reinforcements of this or that sentiment
i believe this can penetrate into one-on-one interactions. consider whether you could screenshot some unassuming comments about which you don't really have anything to imply with your act of screenshotting them, send the screenshot without comment to someone you have a rapport with, & have them try to agree with a sentiment that they assumed you were implying
march 8th, 2022
wrt the previous post
i expressed the idea that the particular form of a screenshotted exchange could imply a way that the person presenting it intends for it to be read. i'm not sure that this actually makes sense. i think that part may have been poorly thought out
the idea i expressed would be one form of a more general phenomenon that i was thinking about at the time, & in that post i was trying to arrive at it. but i stopped short of it, instead describing it within the particular context of screenshots. what this general idea retains is the dynamic where the particular form of something has a very authoritative relationship with how it is interpreted
the central idea can be illustrated by the sense that no one has to write an article which fetishizes or narrativizes the authenticity of Daniel Johnston's music or its relationship to his mental illness anymore, because the stereotyped form of interpretation implied by such an article has become sufficiently ingrained that people will tend to apply it on their own
maybe this makes what i was trying to describe in the first post clearer, the idea that the degree of authenticity in anything presented has been made irrelevant because all things tend to be equally reduced, during the act of observation, to unreal narratives in the shapes of the original (perhaps authentic) things. all things are seen teleologically, their interpretation oriented towards what catharsis or voyeuristic fascination they would seem intended to bring if they were originally meant for consumption. under this mode of engagement life may feel like a natural carousel of the catharses once offered by now-outdated human interest articles
a particularly sinister weapon in this respect is that of "epistolary narratives," particularly "alternate reality games," which bring into the dominion of this phenomenon even the most loose & fragmented things that any kind of superficial mystery could be read into. this phenomenon does not even have to depend on drooling, brainless youtube videos which present mysteries on a silver platter. suppose that one comes across a genuinely mysterious set of webpages, there in front of them, unmediated by a youtube video - this genuine mystery can have a tendency to be immediately supplanted in one's mind by the sense of narrativized & officiated mystery that they are already craving to appropriate it into
to me it's not about the stereotyping of art or mental illness as much as about a stereotyping of any conceivable thing, a dynamic & autonomous process of stereotyping which takes root in a person's cognitive habits & proceeds to incorporate any new thing into itself. a formula which apprehends any thing & produces the "expected narrative" to be derived from it, freshly derived, with no need for this narrative to be fed to the viewer by supplementary media. this "expected narrative" can then express itself in e.g. brainless youtube comments that act in a cyclical manner as simultaneously the entire real manifestation of an automatic narrative & the public response to that narrative - its self-reinforcement of its apparent reality
to me this all constitutes a universal repression of the true nature of events themselves, which are wholly relativistic & lacking in any inherent meaning. i think this is in line with the effects of capitalism on culture, which is to say that the reduction of all conceivable narratives or events to ones with only automatic & objectified routes of interpretation, by way of an autonomous cultural tendency to produce from the qualities of any given event a stereotypically natural style of interpretation, is in line with the notion that a maximally profitable audience for this sort of thing would tend away from diversity of interpretation & towards consistent & uniform responses to things - things which then need only be impersonally & methodically applied to the audience, who are now less interpreting subjects & more objects who are acted on
- Neocities seems to go back to normal -
march 30th, 2022
i have a lot of internal conflict about writing things on the internet
the contradiction is this: prizing experiential immediacy,
& vouching for it through contradictorily diffuse &
mediated means of communication, like blog posts
my ideal of experiential immediacy sacrifices its authenticity in the process of attempting to
vouch for itself in some invested public manner. what compels me to make this sacrifice is
a residual concern for whoever may be at the other end of this diffuse communication
that is a reasonable concern, i guess, which owes to a general want to
try to do good by the means that are available to me - to at least
try to disperse humane ideas & manners of engagement
can i in good conscience permit this central contradiction, though? it is a rough conundrum. am i sacrificing my
own experiential immediacy? if anyone likes what i type, am i incentivizing them to sacrifice theirs, perhaps
it seems like the ideal of experiential immediacy can only become real in obscurity. one must largely find it
for themselves. it is like the Tao: there are no words for it, it lives in the reality which words seek only to portray.
it gathers in unpopular places. it is everywhere, at all times, readily accessible & usable, yet it evades any search for it
Wittgenstein's ladder. the immediate & unarticulated practice of looking at the stretch of grass a day or two ago. text post
april 10th, 2022
picture in your head the currents of attention which are formed in a system wherein pieces of culture are valued & trafficked & presented based on
their obscurity; how this creates a spectrum between the two ideal spheres of pure obscurity & pure spotlighting, with the latter incessantly striving
to siphon from the former; how this develops a sort of beautiful intricacy as a result of its self-contradictory nature wherein, the more attention a
spotlit thing draws, the more value it acquires as a spotlit thing, but the more it also loses as an obscure thing - despite it being spotlit on the
grounds of its obscurity; how this stratifies the consumers of cultural objects based on their varying tolerances for that phenomenon of
self-contradiction, with those with lower tolerances contributing to a sort of increasingly particulate fragmentation in distribution
of attention, the riding of a line between the genuine obscurity of the objects vs. the ability to have commonality
around them which is a large part of the incentive for the culture in the first place
april 13th, 2022
to me all of life feels covered in an external layer of grimy filth that extends across all its sectors. i have to dig
it away to find whatever is worthwhile in any sector. i feel like the top layers of everything tend to naturally be
occupied by opportunists vying for attention, the people in the world who inevitably find themselves needing
attention that they can put towards some end, & so need to find a sector to appropriate into a source of it
often people with disdain for a subculture are only giving that subculture's name to the same filth which naturally
covers its surface like everything else. neglecting to ever dig past the filth, they mistake its single repugnancy
for numerous repugnancies exuded by every sector of life, & become needlessly disgusted with the world
april 17th, 2022
"picture in your head the currents of attention..."
you can "win" by painting a beautiful painting then spending a day with ur friend with the painting present,
then burning it. or if you want to be less dramatic just spend a nice day with your friend since whatever you
do will be an ephemeral artistic composition of environmental factors. maybe as part of the composition
you could paint a beautiful painting & then spend the day with it present then burn it
june 15th, 2022
when i see a professional artist get in the tumblr radar with stuff that has that same uniform paint tool sai disney movie concept
art look i feel like they had to have deluded themselves into conforming to a set of ruling aesthetic standards so as to keep alive
in themselves a comforting notion that there's still some holdout region of the system that has any interest whatsoever in
nurturing & rewarding any of their creative passions, voluntarily lowering the bar so they can hop over it. nightmare
june 29th, 2022
concept: Spotify begins quietly incorporating location data into its algorithms, in the form of various weights & biases that
respond to it. this is done in an experimental attempt to create a number of pre-decided aesthetic milieus concentrated around
various cities - typically small cities which lack distinctive or firmly rooted regional identities in the first place. for many
of the people in these cities, these prescribed aesthetic tendencies simply feel like the quaint & happenstance character of
where they live, & no one realizes that their particular milieu is one of many being fed by a ubiquitous system that is
masking its homogenizing influence by introducing this tightly controlled, geographically vast variation into itself
july 27th, 2022
every little circumstantial dissociation from qualitative centralization can create magic... i mean if you
just grow up "out of the way" & thus become "something out of the way," & thus proceed to enact magic
but naturally it all becomes less & less likely, insofar as qualitative centralization is allowed
to proliferate. because that's something about centralization... it accelerates itself. as a
boundary expands it takes in more, faster. the death of obscurity is the death of magic
it's cultural forces that can feel very out of our control. how much can we take
qualitative diversity into our own hands? to what extent can we overcome the
centralized elements imparted to us at such a young age? one can feel so broken
august 19th, 2022
everyone deserves to find beautiful art, to see the best things in themselves reflected out in the world & know that they're real &
to feel seen in that way. no one should have to settle for works that merely become highly visible as icons of nostalgia, frivolity,
sadness, playfulness, wisdom, of whatever property, such that they're settled for as things "close enough" to the highly personal
feelings that a person actually needs to see outside themselves, which may end up left abandoned in their comparatively difficult
specificity, maybe never even acknowledged, for having never been brought to light by things that really spoke to them
november 8th, 2022
art based on love can be some of the best art possible for various reasons or some of
the worst, most genuinely repugnant art possible for depicting it in a dominant aesthetic
language & creating the suggestion that it & the language have anything to do with each other
if you don't get this then we are not remotely on the same wavelength
november 15th, 2022
conjecture: if your daydreams aren't consistently a million times better by your personal standards than
your favorite movie or your very favorite pretty picture you've ever found on tumblr then you are a corpse
november 17th, 2022
spurious elaboration on the above post: it's not about daydreaming being prioritized to a point of
detriment to externalized art. i think externalized art does naturally have an infinitely diverse
appeal separate from that of daydreaming, & it is infinitely worth exploring... what the post is
about is, i guess, to use externalized art as a comparative example against which i valorize
daydreaming as an indicator of the health of one's connection with their own self
the point is: not losing one's full sense of intuition & imagination - & the unfiltered essence of themselves which is
contained in those things - a loss which might might be undergone by, for instance, reflexively limiting one's daydreaming
to what seems like it could be reasonably externalized, or excessively conforming it to an exterior artistic language.
(maybe these things would be done to preemptively alleviate a sense of loneliness in being stuck alone with one's dreams)
i fear the idea of losing touch of myself such that i fail - even with such a private & so whimsically controllable
venue - to let it be something multisensory & perfect & not tied down by any prioritization in that moment
of assembling something that i could necessarily see myself making another person understand (even if that
would be nice to do, of course! & taking time to truly realize such a vision is probably where some of the most
incredible art has come from. i just think there has to be time for some kind of above-&-beyond self-intimacy)
i think i phrased the original post sort of confrontationally because what i really had in mind at the time was the idea of
a person conforming their daydreams to the boundaries of some totally watered-down or commercialized aesthetic palette
but i also had things i find very beautiful in mind! so i think the real point underlying this is that even the
most incredible & Tasteful things can be seen as exterior things that maybe should at best function as
very general pointers for the direction of an internal canvas they can never live up to, this being done
not in alternative to them but for the sake of personal honesty & of freedom in one's own mind
(if this seems almost counter to the whole idea of inspiration it's because with this point
i want to push into a kind of uncertain speculative territory to see to what extent
i can find it agreeable - "what if even the most inspiring thing ever is still...")
november 22nd, 2022
conjecture: internet comments sections will gradually take the uniqueness of a person's perception
& slit its throat if they're what that person compulsively resorts to for some kind of context with
which to process whatever they just saw or heard, or to get a "beat" on it, or whatever
processing in a vacuum, where one can only take into account how the work reflects off their own life & mentality, just has
a subtle fundamental difference from processing it in light of how a horde of others are reacting to it, or what demographic or
subculture they represent, or how many of them there are, & so on... ("why are there so many furries in the comments section...")
processing in a vacuum is simply the default which is only disrupted if it is willed by the arbitrary
structure of a centralized content distribution platform, which quietly snares people in habitual
second-order observation. it's the constant entrapment of a person's solitary sensory experience
with a work, & its diversion into a broad social narrative that exists far beyond them
the particular way that that uniqueness has its throat slit is not necessarily through the proliferation of homogeneous
opinions or interpretations that other people adopt for lack of creativity (even if this does certainly happen)
rather, it can be as simple as having every work that one takes in also feed back into the exact same
general temperamental shade that tends to hang over online communities, having it refrain in their
mind over & over & over, pairing psychologically with the experience of artistic exploration
or else it might feed into the internet's constant natural peddling of an addictively comforting but
fake sense of commonality or of a stable canonicity to the broad artistic dialogue, which a person
can then follow along with without fear of having to feel intimidated by the potential infinity of
interpretation. this progressively greys out all the diversities of the works being discussed
december 12th, 2022
Schnuffel as a 2008 relic has not to my knowledge been reappropriated as any kind of nostalgic meme (of the "now
let's refract it through our guiltily detached contemporary styles of processing things" variety) but i feel like if i
sent a Schnuffel song to someone then rather than processing the blissful audio on its own terms they would instead
just assume without further signs that such a meme exists & that i am kinda expecting them to play along with it or
something... here i formally apologize to Schnuffel for making him the subject of this ponderous paragraph sorry Schnuffel!
shakes you violently by the shoulders HELP HELP I NEED YOU TO UNDERSTAND THE PERVASIVE & UNDERLYING
EXISTENTIAL UNEASE THAT IS EXEMPLIFIED BY THE POPULARITY OF "THE MOST MYSTERIOUS SONG ON THE INTERNET"
AS A SELF-CONTRADICTORY FLAGSHIP FOR THE NOTION OF OBSCURITY WHILE AT THE SAME TIME BEING A REAL PHENOMENON
WHOSE INVESTIGATION IS THE REALITY OF ITS PUBLIC TREATMENT... I NEED TO GUIDE YOU THROUGH THE ARTICULATION
OF VARIOUS CONCEPTUAL CATEGORIES WHICH WILL INITIALLY HAVE DIRECT RELATION TO THE SYSTEM OF INTERNET CONTENT
BUT THEN FUNCTION AS STEPPING STONES, EACH BRINGING US TO A GREATER LEVEL OF GENERALITY, (CRUCIALLY AMONG
THESE STEPS WILL BE THE TENTATIVE ARTICULATION OF CERTAIN PHENOMENOLOGICAL CATEGORIES OF EXPERIENCE WHICH
I BELIEVE TO CENTER ON THE VECTOR OF "GRATIFICATION" & "WHETHER OR NOT AN EXPERIENCE IS 'BEING PRESENTED
FOR ME'" (THIS WILL BE USED TO ARTICULATE AN ABUSIVE CYCLE OF BEHAVIOR WHEREIN PEOPLE TRY TO USE, AS
A TOOL TO RECONSTRUCT THE REALITY THAT THEY FEEL DEPRIVED OF, THE VERY THING WHICH DEPRIVES THEM IN
THE FIRST PLACE)), FINALLY WE WILL ARRIVE AT THE MYSTERIOUS SONG'S CONNECTION TO THE CENTRAL
UNDERLYING TENSION BETWEEN REALITY & UNREALITY WHICH NOW EXTENSIVELY CHARACTERIZES LIFE :)
december 24th, 2022
ok, for this post picture that illustration of two guys on a bus &
one is sad staring at a wall & the other is happy staring at a vista
if i saw that picture while spending time face to face with my friend & they laughed at it in isolation,
i'd see a kind of beautiful silly sense that it made when filtered through their head in particular
if i saw it on tumblr, where everyone's nuances of brain filtering are hidden away, it'd just
contribute to the nightmarish feeling here where it often feels like people are just humor-
processing machines circulating pictures around for no reason, like it's an end in itself
this is how the website, when taken in isolation, presents a completely disemboweled
& upsetting image of "humor" removed from any relation to all the little nuanced
incidents it may incite, like how that picture would feel refracted through my friend
the internet's flatness, when not overcome on a case by case basis through creativity, makes
too many attempts to transmit levity through it feel really cold & meaningless & silent