Today, or well, yesterday, I discovered a thing. Finally, organically, I found the tilde verse. I have yet to enter, but I have been reading up on them. I read Paul Ford’s entire Medium post about the creation of the first tilde server, tilde.club: https://medium.com/message/tilde-club-i-had-a-couple-drinks-and-woke-up-with-1-000-nerds-a8904f0a2ebf
This to me sounds like the smol web I had been looking for. The idea of the chat in Road to Gehenna. I was going to make my ramble vault. That turned out to be a lot more work than I wanted and I ended up not doing that. I did find Joplin, which is a good medium. Vaults exist for KDE. That’s nice.
Now, the thing is, chat rooms when I was a weeun, we kind of a no no. My internet usage, in the late 90’s and early 2000’s was pretty innocent and tame. Retarded Animal Babies was pushing it. Sum 41, ooooh, I think a friend was nervous our parents would here when they said ‘abortion’. I think. Or maybe I’m misremembering. Regardless. Ramble and type, I can do that. And I kind of do want a place to put rambling thoughts and rants, or just ideas, thoughts, short stories, stuff. Somewhere it can be shared, but not just shotgunned out into the wider, highly critical, rage/engagement bait driven attention economy of the facebook/twitter-verse. Nor the cesspool of scumbag anonymity of 4Chan.
I’d rather put my silly shit out there where someone who isn’t going to just be a troll for the lols, or the engagement, or to get their insecure rocks off can just shit on it. I’d rather there be a place where it can be ignored, or appreciated quietly, or engaged with by like minded weirdos.
I hide little notes at work. Actually, I have a little note book, about palm sized - on the cover it says “Tiny Thoughts” and it has lines for the date, topic, space to write, and little stars to rate yourself? I dunno about that last part. Anyway, I also found some tiny books, a little bigger than a thumbnail, at Michael’s. I wrote entire rambling things in there, about OG Broseph, Cheesedick and the Factory of Doom. But I didn’t get much back from that. Getting other folks, even folks who I work with, who are kind of on the same wave length of goofiness, to engage or reciprocate or add to these kinds of things is like herding cats.
I have written stuff about my made up character, Joseph Pennysuckle -> Jeremiah Joseph. I have some rambling rants, and some other things. One thing I worry about is reciprocity. I used to post a fair bit on r/modelmakers, when I still was building, but I just kind of stopped. Before the pandemic, that space was different, then the pandemic happened and it seemed like every hobby got spammed. Then the chang eto reddit in 2024 or 2025, and things just aren’t the same. But anyway, I would kind of feel bad for posting stuff and hoping for a little bit of engagement or feedback, but not always being super into everything people were doing. A lot of them just weren’t my thing. Now so many just seem like ‘professionals’ or autistic folks without jobs who are way too good for normie or hobby, even decent hobby level, folks - especailly on r/minipainting. That is kind of what killed it for me, I think. It distorts the view. There was a like of rage/egagement/whatever bait, where people would say “my first one ever” and it’s very clearly not. “I just watched a bunch of videos and just copied it”. Yeah, I didn’t then, and I still don’t now, believe any of that. It’s just lies. But people were too often afraid of calling someone out, and to be fair, if you do, you end up like StackExchange in a way. But the liars and bullshitters got annoying. Karma Farming. That’s it.
So, I kind of would feel bad, feeling like I was karma farming, before I knew what that was, if I didn’t engage. Like going to a model show or a farmers market and looking at everyone’s stuff and having to comment (nicely) on all of them. That’s the self-imposed pressure I felt. Eventually, I just stopped engaging. I feel like half of the internet is for nothing more than for someone to come along and take a shit on a comment for their own satisfaction. “Wow - profound. How astute! You’re so smart.” But yeah, I stopped commenting on almost everything, because it just generally isn’t worth it. Someone is always so much smarter, or if you have a question it’s often some snarky, but useless comment, a comment that says “I don’t know” (wow, thanks), or some other derivative.
And to mention youtube, I have never really understood this concept that folks push, this idea of a community, “like comment subscribe, I wanna hear what you think in the comments below”. For fuck’s sake. That shit. Smash the like button, or whatever creative, beaten to death bullshit people come up with to be ‘clever’. Anymore it feels like a song and dance, a check in the box, or jumping on the bandwagon like the cringe lords of yore, having the whole family get in on making a parody video of gangam style or whatever shit flavor of the week trend it was in 2014. Hrrmph!
Anyway, I partly lost my train of thought. At this point, blah blah blah, enshittification. Yes. I didn’t read the book, but I did read Wired article, and then read the <> page/entry on the idea. Then I watched Adam Conover interview Doctorow on his podcast/youtube channel. And then time went on, and I got more into Linux, and started to get more in FOSS (I’d already been into both, but kind of came back to them), get tired of Wandow 11, started to see the enshittification everywhere. And then it became a thing, like talking about dummies and magats in reference to the Dunning-Kruger chart. And then, I felt like it was no longer that relevant, because it was everywhere, and I see it, and not a lot of people either care, want to know about this, talk about it, or have the time to blather on and listen to me talk about shit they either don’t care about, or don’t have time to care about, or might, but have things that need to get done, so idealism and independence and vendor lock in and walled gardens of software, trash SASS and shitty “Pro” versions matter less when things just need to get done. And the cycle continues. And the we hit the peak when the Norwegian gov’t gets in on the game calling out enshittification for what it is. Digg, popped up, was gonna be reddit but better, with ai for humans. It lasted a month. One fucking month. It was kind of shit for that month, inundated in bullshit like sports or celebrity who cares what. Just another link aggregator, but worse than reddit. Lemmy is cool, but I feel that has slipped more recently into the reposting of someone’s twitter/mastodon/bluesky post. Wooooooo. Witty, clever one liner. That’s cool. Sometimes, but it’s basically the digital equivalent of bumper sticker logic. Dunking on shitbags has its place, but it gets old. I wanna see new stuff, weird stuff, something original. So much shit these days it just reposts of toktok, yes, toktok, or twitter, or reddit, or tumblr, whatever. It’s like, and maybe it was Doctorow, or maybe he was quoting or paraphrasing someone else, saying the internet has become 5 sites all showing versions of the same thing. It’s a series of varying sized mirrors. Oh, and new articles. Lots of new articles, more on Lemmy, which is good, and sadly, a better way to get new than Flipboard or the news on TV anymore. It’s an echo chamber, sure, but better than a fox news echo chamber.
And then there is the debunker/awareness slide into cynicism. Nothing is new, we’ve seen this all before, everythign has a dark underside and follow the money. Who stands to benefit. Everything keeps getting worse and the zuckerburg, and the leon, and the palantir douchebags who wanna steal all your data. Yay. Enshittification. Yay, knowing more stuff and everything is usually something bad. I feel like nothing can just be anymore. Everything has to have dark side, and evil underside, you can’t like this or that without knowing, and caveating away the acknowlegement that X is bad. Maybe it’s from my getting into Magic the Gathering, hard, for a 6 month period, only to burn out, both due to mental fatigue, from deck building with little pay off, and also just the fatigue of sooo many sets. Then on top of that, all the shitty universes beyond shit. Fortnitification. I really am pretty indifferent on Harry Potter, but jesus is Audible pushing this new reading of it hard. And the weird world of MAgic the Gathering nerds and the need to be outraged and boycot and ban everything harry potter because JK Rowling is a typical conservative. Yeah, I know, she’s like rob schneider or rosanne bar. I guess that one is a whole different beast since having an IP you like associated with a kind of generally shitty person. I dunno. Whatever. But there are some really weird and loud and obnoxious, performatively so, folks in the magic space, where you ahve to be 110% super for trans folks, or you’re evil. It feels really kind of high school-ish. I have trans and gays friends. But none of us have feel it’s necessary to go grand standing and virtue signaling on the internet to make all of our opinions know. And judge everyone else for their opinions.
But wait, there’s more! I’m also kind over a lot of the folks on youtube doing their talking head, somewhere between an informative video essay and just saying the stuff. This Simon Whistler or that lore Lodge guy. Whatever that blonde woman is that just they just talk and talk and talk and it’s like true crime and it’s like wow good for you. What the fucking do you rather Wikipedia article? Great. Thanks for making a video. Or my other favorite the geography student who just learned something in class and or got a degree in geography and can’t apply to anything. So now they just make videos about stuff on YouTube. And don’t get me wrong. I am totally a nerd for interesting details like that. Like weird stuff land forms all that kind of shit at the same time. It’s just kind of a thing with these geography channels. They just kind of all seem like they need to tell everybody and I mean that’s great and all but thanks. I don’t really need that. Maybe it’s also just because there’s so much shit out there and so much of YouTube has become so samey and everyone copies each other and or says all the same stupid shit. It just kind of gets old and maybe working from home for like 4 years and watching YouTube on the side. It got pretty repetitive and old and boring. And especially the people who do a video where it’s just them talking about internet trauma. Fuck right off the bat who gives a flying fuck.
I dunno. I’ve gotten jaded maybe. I feel like there is so much need to be performative. I hope I don’t sound liek a boomer shouting at the clouds about how their stealing our confederate monuments or whatever. Because, those folks can eat a dick too.
But also fun thing I quit drinking. I used to drink a lot and now I don’t. And so this last year and some change has been an interesting flailing about of hobbies and changing hobbies and I don’t know. I went really hard in the paint into magic the gathering and then I burned out and then after that I realized. Wow. I have a lot of bullshit to ramble on about out of my head and I got to put it somewhere and so I started working on that ramble vault which I may have mentioned and then that turned out to be way more work than I wanted it to be even though I do like coding and all that stuff but I felt this urgent need to. I don’t know. Get stuff done now and I had all these ideas and it just yeah it’s a lot to learn and I got impatient and I tried to do seeing I tried to go and I tried to do C sharp. I didn’t bother with rust. I shouldn’t have stuck the python but I didn’t do that either which I should have. But then I tried to learn curses and incurses and intexual and that just didn’t go anywhere. But I did go down the rabbit hole for database stuff and I learned a lot more SQL which I do like sequel but at the same time I did that and then I had the color matcher and I had another thing and I was going to make another thing and within another thing and I just flailed around and then that didn’t go anywhere. and then I wanted to make a website that didn’t really go anywhere. It was going to be my ramble vault and then that didn’t go anywhere.
And then I did make it. What do you go in cloudflare which but I still didn’t do that. But then I did find Joplin and I did start writing stuff. So we’re kind of making progress and getting somewhere. And I don’t know. Maybe I’m just old and have to talk to people. But I also don’t have a lot of friends and everyone has lots of things to do. So the friends that I do have are all fucking busy or they have kids. It’s more likely to have kids or their own bullshit that they’re doing, so there’s that.
And then I guess the other thing was getting caffeinated and also of being interested in stuff. But the wife comes home and she’s been listening to overstimulated kids and being overstimulated herself and lots of kids who blah blah blah blah blah blah blah about bullshit that nobody cares about. And then I do the blah blah blah about bullshit that I know she doesn’t give a shit about. And then I feel like a stupid ass little kid that’s just blah blah blahing about shit that nobody gives a fuck about because I’m just dealing with who cares about whatever it is the hell that I’m talking about and so then I’m just wasting everyone’s time and feeling a small child. So instead of doing that I’d rather just write down my stupid ass ideas then wasting he was time with my blah blah blah blah blah and here we are.
Also I gas a good bit of the impostor syndrome would be because of folks on you know Reddit or other forum “read the fucking manual” in regards to shit like I don’t know questions about Arch and so instead of you know being a decent person I get it the fatigue but at the same time you know he gets pretty old. That’s why stack exchange is dead because they were toxic douche bags so whoops. So I guess I kind of feel that need to do all the background research and know all the things. And by that point you don’t need to ask anyone questions because you know everything anyway.
Also, I feel like a lot of times a lot of the tech stuff I want to talk about. Very few people are actually interested in that. I know that I could talk to in person so.
Oh and I think Gemini capsules and the protocol are cool. Plus also markdown is way easier than HTML but I guess I’m lazy or dumb. I don’t know
Eh…. anyway. That was a ramble. So I guess that’s kind of my introduction. I don’t know…