3/15/2025 - phone experiment
I woke up this morning and my phone's screen stopped working. What's weird is that I didn't drop it or anything. I set my alarm last night then woke up to a loud alarm that I couldn't turn off because the screen broke.
I thought I would use this time to try something new for a couple days. I was thinking of trying out a "dumbphone" but I'm not sure I want to commit to something like that. My favorite phone I've ever had was a Nokia Lumia 920 that I still have. I am going to boot it up to see how it still works. I will probably eventually get my current phone fixed back and switch back but this will be a good exercise to potentially root out the ways that my phone negatively impacts my life.
edit: just kidding, they take different SIM cards fml. Also the Lumia is locked to AT&T. Guess im getting my phone fixed :-/
2/21/2025 - as an american...
I'll probably write a blog post about this eventually but since last November, I've been trying to figure out how to anchor myself in an American identity which I don't feel bad about in the face of a certain someone.
So far, I have been looking to important and uniquely American creators of meaning. Authors like John Steinbeck, Kurt Vonnegut, James Baldwin, and Willa Cather, though imperfect, help me to see a deeper historical view of the country. Also, musicians and artists like Woody Guthrie, Charlie Parker, Winslow Homer, Stephen Shore, and Bill Frisell are so important for me in relating to America as an abstraction. Again, I know significant social issues of their own time exist within some of these artist’s and writer’s works, but they offer so much clarity to me in the face of a presentist view of the country that dampens a contentment to identify as an American in the first place.
I grew up in a family with a couple American history teachers so talking about and trying to understand the country feels like a magical subject to me. I do feel complete shame in the way the country is moving. I am not yet ready to feel shame about being an American.
2/12/2025 - gaming too much
I've been gaming a lot recently (mostly multiplayer) . I've been having mixed feelings about gaming as a whole recently. They distract me from things like making music or writing for this website which are more deeply satisfying. Those two activites make me feel good after doing them in a way gaming certainly doesn't. Also, heavy gaming as a habitual activity seems to contribute to feelings of anxiety and depression when disconnected from them, which we all know by now I guess. Gaming is fun in moderation for sure but I feel like most devs who make multiplayer games have realized that the only games that survive are very addictive. Looking at you Marvel Rivals.
Thank you to Team Fortress 2 for being my favorite game and for being enraging enough for me to avoid playing it for hours every day.
2/2/2025 - hmmm...
I was just driving and saw a guy on the sidewalk pointing his finger and yelling loudly. I looked around but I didn't even see anyone around there for him to be yelling at. On the back of his t-shirt were a lot of words but I only caught the last bit: "has anger issues and hates stupid people!"
1/26/2025 - resolutions
One of my new years resolutions is to complete some sort of significant musical project by the end of the year. I have daydreamed obsessively over the last 2 1/2 years without making much of anything. I am afraid that I am wearing down my creativity by not acting on my ideas. My nightmare is that I will shut off my daydreaming because I expect that I won't act on it.
Goal: publish some sort of something on the music page of this website by the end of March. Fingers crossed :-)
9/22/2024 - no generation gap
Over the last year or so, I've noticed that I've started identifying people by their generation more and more. I'll attach certain ideologies to Millenials or Baby Boomers that are relatively unimportant. I think as a whole American society is becoming more and more obsessed with sorting people into generations because young people and old people are having a harder and harder time relating to each other. New technologies like social media, of course, have established all sorts of positive feedback loops in different American subcultures and create a superficial sense of belonging. Boomer-hating narratives prevail on tiktok, instagram, and reddit while anti-millenial/gen z narratives dominate cable news and facebook groups. These stupid things prevent us from forming a sense of solidarity across age groups about the problems that face us.
No technology should be so powerful that it manages to sever the connection between elders and youth.
9/17/2024 - content consumption progress
I have set some roadblocks in my media consumption so now I feel a bit healthier. It has been a couple days since I started this and I think it is actually going to be sustainable. So far I have:
- Disabled youtube, facebook, instagram, and reddit from my smartphone
- Disabled the same group of sites from my desktop from 7:00am to 5:00pm
- Added a youtube shorts blocker to firefox on my desktop
What this means is that I basically have no access to scrolling short form content and no access to social media throughout the work day. What I've noticed is that the impulse to browse these sites is still there. I don't think I have any sort of severe dopamine receptor damage, but it does feel like something is missing in my mind. I think that will heal over time.
This is not to say I have become a productivity machine but I feel like the following activities are healthier for me to partake in. I now tend to read stuff on discord servers on my phone, read blogs on neocities, read books, or most importantly: play mario kart super circuit on my GBA. Somehow even that last thing feels more satisfying for my mind than scrolling youtube shorts.
9/4/2024 - teenager movies (i am not a teenager)
Teen dramas are my guilty pleasure. I love the fantastical and exaggerated quality of teenagehood that exists in these shows and movies as well as the music that accompanies them. There's just this deep sense of optimism in the characters that is reflected onto the setting and soundtrack.
I think when we were all kids, this media tricked us into thinking this is what being a teenager is like which is of course false. I would say I was looking forward to becoming a teenager. Some sense of 'cool' would seemingly accompany the transformation. The joys and hardships aren't as idyllic as they are on the screen. No house party was as wonderfully dramatic as in Clueless or 10 Things I Hate About You. However as I progress through my 20s, it is so clear that these teen dramas depict the experience of teenage years in retrospect. Of course, we know these movies were written by middle aged people and this would be an extension of that, but as I age it really does become my perspective of my high school years. The sense that anything is possible has just started fleeting and maybe that's what I yearn to feel in these movies.
I greatly enjoy my rose-tinted goggles.
(what's got me feeling this way)
8/28/2024 - Neocities unlocked my internet creativity
Whenever I started this website, I didn't really understand why it was so immediately alluring to me. Even just putting the most simple text box on a page felt incredibly satisfying. Neocities and the Web 1.0 format encourages creativity and self-expression in a way that the new web simply does not. I had never experienced this until a couple months ago. Some of the initial dreams for the internet was this democratization of ideas and connection with each other. It is a shame that this dream was monopolized by a few companies. They kept that core idea for social media but have warped it to fix their business model and molded us to fit around it.
The recent emergence of a class of "creatives" is very strange to me. We all feel this creative pulse I'm talking about. Why should a class of content creators be the de facto expressors of creativity? I think it is the environment established by youtube/tiktok/etc. that encourages only a few to rise to the top and be the primary arbiters of creative output to a general viewer. Instead I wish things would be more communal so we don't have this immense gap where only some people's art gets validated by fame. In this system, the rest of us assume a primary role as consumers. It's not that we can't post anything on these social media platforms, it's just the metrics and algorithms discourage us from feeling deep satisfaction about it the way we would interacting with other people irl or on a more direct platform like Neocities.
8/26/2024 - diary established
Diary page established. I want to use this page to place ideas that I don't care too much about developing into an essay or blog post.