david wolfpaw • 6 Dec 2024 • Reading time: 5 minsI feel like trying a different style of newsletter today, just because. If this is harder to parse or find interesting links than before (or if it’s easier!) please let me know.
This week I tried spending more time distracting myself from life and the internet for various reasons. Some are more personal than I want to get into here. Some you may know if we talk IRL. Some I feel stupid about and regret, some I feel depressed and heartbroken about.
We’re all going through something, however different our circumstances are from one another. Patrick Fealey wrote for Equire about his life as a homeless man in America, reminding me that it only takes a few things to happen to completely upend a life.
Maybe you can get lucky and find something that resonates with others, like when Martha Wells came up with Murderbot, and her publishers pushed for a series. Often I feel like Cassidy Williams, with enough side projects partly complete that it overwhelms me.
Plenty of us feel lonely, even if we’re around others. I’m thankful to have a lot of folks offline to be with, but I can imagine the harm that comes from losing spaces, such as chat in online games, when it comes to being able to meet and interact with new people. Maybe these people should move to Webfishing, a game that is actively creating a Third Space for communication.
It doesn’t help when you are part of a niche subculture or in a marginalized group. Soatok has a few ideas for why that is in his article “Furry, Queer, and Lonely“.
Sorry for talking about uspol here, but it’s kinda hard not to when that is so much of my life. Do I care that some Liberals and Democrats have really shitty takes, blaming trans activism for Kamala Harris’ presidential loss? Only in so much that I know that these shitty takes are being broadcast via places like NY Times to an audience looking for someone to scapegoat. You know, as opposed to 75 million other people who voted the other way.
I don’t care that Biden pardoned his son. I think that he should keep going! I don’t care that journalists have discovered Bluesky, except that it means that Twitter might actually fade more rapidly now. I mean, we already know that Twitter is a Hate Machine. I do care that the UHC CEO was killed, mainly because even with motive unknown, the words written on the bullet casings can give us a pretty good idea.
In the online space, Automattic is finding that it can choose to conflate wordpress.org with the WordPress project when it feels like it will help them confuse a judge, despite the fact that this is a fully private site owned by Matt Mullenweg, separate of the foundation. Also I guess there are worse ways to spend Bitcoin earnings than make elaborate treasure hunts with an attached book, though not nearly as whimsical as Forrest Fenn’s treasure hunt. It’s probably easier to grab a Redbox and save money on all of those free DVDs!
As usual, I’ve been watching too much YouTube. It’s my coping mechanism dangit!
Plus, I feel like I learn a bit. I never knew as much about Vincent Van Gogh as Pip the Badger lays out in this excellent essay. I live in Florida and knew nothing of Floridaland, the epitome of our theme park culture.
I always joke that on the internet, everyone knows that I’m a dog. But still, online anonymity can be a blessing when it comes to self-exploration. That is until I think about how hard it is to be truly anonymous, especially with insidious tools for surveillance disguised as helpers, like reCAPTCHA.
Alright yall, experiment over. Please take care of one another and yourselves, and I will see you next week!
If you made it this far, why not share this newsletter with a friend? Or share with me some of the things that you found that you liked this week. Either way, I’m thrilled!