Sufficient Unto the Day

=== 2025-04-18 13:41:01 Friday

It bothered me a lot for quite a while that people didn't like me in "gemini" spaces, sites like "Midnight Pub", or "Blue Dwarf". I managed to assume I'd have more in common with frequenters of such than the web at large.

But it turns out I don't belong in and around most people.

I mean, I've known that for many decades, really. But since I developed software quite a while *and* could write with what I want to believe is above-average skill, I assumed I'd be welcomed by others who felt more different than alive the masses.

Nope.

A significant problem with walled-gardens - regardless how thing the walls - is they attract people willing to conform the garden reality, which generally isn't too different from mob reality. People look around nervously, wondering how to act, slowly imitate others in the venue, "one of them" morphs to "one of US", and next thing you know they're indignant when a newbie comes along and doesn't immediately fall inline with unspoken mob expectation.

Well, I'm just not wasting my effort on such spaces anymore. I need the approval of ignorant others far less than I used to think I did.

Writing here is all the joy, and none of the fitting-in bullshit.

=== 2025-04-18 13:28:34 Friday

Blogs tend to have an "About" page.

It's tempting. But creating permanence is contrary to the spirit of this blog. This place is about daily renewal, not about living up to a fixed identity.

My wife is napping on the couch kiddie corner to me. A car in need of a muffler just went buy, and I can still hear its lower frequency growl slowly fading, supplanted by the sound of lawnmowers and an air freshener running in this room.

Who/what am I?

Merely a bathroom drain hairball of interconnected thoughts I pull up for examination from time to time.

But there's nothing real to it, not in some real physical universe kind of sense.

It's thoughts repeated, their significance in constant relative change, their connections morphing, turning inside, being forgotten into irrelevance until suddenly remembered in a burst that shoves others aside, throws the entire picture into inter-relational recalculation.

Then I'll remember others' thoughts on the theme of self, and suddenly the entire mental landscape is all very "Oh yeah... *that*! That's IT!"

And those stone ripples will also subside upon the water's/mind's surface, or be overcome by bigger ripples and/or waves.

=== 2025-04-18 13:14:14 Friday

I've been rather down on online for months, maybe longer.

But it's slowly becoming clear that my own attitude and expectations were the problem.

I've known for half of forever that the thoughts of most people aren't particularly interesting. It's mostly whining, gossip, and murmuring. I mean, me too on the whining front.

So here I've this delightful little site. I'm going to feed it each day because I've wanted something like since I was a kid: a place to express and possible be read.

Conversely, I'm a lifetime library lover, and the web is just a different kind of library.

It's all good in the blogdom!

=== 2025-04-18 11:01:50 Friday

Expanding on the previous entry a bit:

The desire for permanence might be best categorized as a mental illness inasmuch as it's making of a demand of a reality whose hallmark is impermanence.

I think it's healthier that people experience each others' current state, and not feel compelled to catch up with their past.

Creators mistakenly feel compelled to keep all their writing online so that someone chancing upon it can read it all.

But who has time for that, really?

In a way, it's a self-worship stance, making their work more about people getting to know *them* as their thinking/feeling/experience progressed from some point in the past through to now.

I think we need to let go of that silliness, and experience others online as they most recently are. You might never have chanced on their site to begin with. Why not settle for their current state of thinking/feeling/experience, and then move onto someone else's current state. And so on.

Why not?

I think it solves much internet misery.

=== 2025-04-18 10:49:07 Friday

A few remarks about a couple others' thoughts on the internet:

Is the internet dead? Are we?

"Maybe its not that the internet is dead, but really we are. Maybe its not that these new agencies without subjectivities are eerie, but we are all agencies without subjectivities. What is unsettling is the collapse of agency and identity that we all face, as we become increasingly irrelevant to our economic and social world. The end of the year is an opportunity to clean up and reset for the upcoming new semester. I found myself clearing out old bookmarks—yes, bookmarks: that formerly beloved browser feature that seems to have lost the battle to 'address bar autocomplete'. But this nostalgic act of tidying led me to despair."

We're dead when wailing and gnashing of teeth under the free-willed individuality delusion.

This Page is Designed to Last

"The end of the year is an opportunity to clean up and reset for the upcoming new semester. I found myself clearing out old bookmarks—yes, bookmarks: that formerly beloved browser feature that seems to have lost the battle to 'address bar autocomplete'. But this nostalgic act of tidying led me to despair.

Bookmark after bookmark led to dead link after dead link. What's vanished: unique pieces of writing on kuro5hin about tech culture; a collection of mathematical puzzles and their associated discussion by academics that my father introduced me to; Woodman's Reverse Engineering tutorials from my high school years, where I first tasted the feeling of control over software; even my most recent bookmark, a series of posts on Google+ exposing usb-c chargers' non-compliance with the specification, all disappeared.

This is more than just link rot, it's the increasing complexity of keeping alive indie content on the web, leading to a reliance on platforms and time-sorted publication formats (blogs, feeds, tweets)."

I'm thinking the best solution is giving up on insisting content must be permanent, perhaps even to the point of writers regularly rewriting the content of previously created pages from time to time, bringing the text in line with their current thinking/feeling, with events since the previous version, etc.

We should *expect* content to change: embrace, love, and maybe even crave such change.

What's mostly coming to mind is a sense of the need to cull uncompromising commitment to frequenting *only* separate sites - not participating at monolithic sites of "users", which is always a walled garden setting.

And it's okay to exclude others from awareness for their not being able to maintain their own blog/site. It's a reasonable indicator of intelligence. I can know in advance that someone with their own blog/site is more likely interesting than someone who can't/doesn't do that.

=== 2025-04-18 09:07:35 Friday

From We can have a different web

"The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it's become a lot easier. We can return."

What's remarkable to me about this reminder is that it's the same reminder sages give regarding what we really are. It's never gone: it's buried, hidden, ignored seemingly out of existence.

And yet it *is* existence....

=== 2025-04-18 08:39:50 Friday

So nobody knows how long an online career I've had.

Never became famous, mind you. But I've been there back to "GEnie" days. Back to "local BBS" days.

I guess I thought I was going to meet interesting people, and have interesting conversations.

And, yeah, a little of that happened. But it's kind of similar to how spread out intelligent life forms seem to be in the universe.

Very alone....

=== 2025-04-18 07:49:03 Friday

The previous entry felt good to write.

But I know persisting in the delusion of being a free-willed individual in a "real" physical world that includes similarly afflicted others soon enough leads to stress, anguish, and a gruelingly tiring mental exertion to making a facade of enjoying it.

It comes down to hopping off the train to known disaster sooner, or later.

You'd think it would be possible to enjoy it, and yet doth it contain the seeds of its own destruction.

And you've no idea what I'm talking about.

Which circles back to the uselessness of separate minds (aka conceptuality contexts) poorly-to-utterly-not mediate by words and other assorted symbols.

And <exhales>....

=== 2025-04-18 07:30:52 Friday

Super pleasant morning here on the couch, after my usual "get the day going" routine: return to being clothed, remove and clean earplugs, take meds, setup the coffee maker and cups for action, transfer the right amounts of the right vitamins from containers to counter, ready and microwave select leftovers, down the vitamins during the heating, relocate plate/bowl from microwave to next to the Chromebook, sit down and commence a blend of textuality and nourishment.

I almost called textuality "mental nourishment", but I've come to know better. Online text is far more a habit, more something to alleviate boredom while eating, quite possibly an excuse to not remember what *I* really is/am - the ignorance consisting of delusions of free-willed individuality being what it is.

The text you're reading was, at time of typing, merely more of the same, albeit during the beginning-digestion phase.

My wife's on the mend from a urinary tract infection. I hate to put that in terms of my sanity, but I really hope that means this isn't going to be a gung-ho kind of day, as I sorely need some inactivity leading unto sanity.

=== 2025-04-18 07:17:15 Friday

The terms "fact" and "conspiracy theory" are well nigh useless now that the internet has helped us realize they merely mean the following:

fact: what I believe

conspiracy theory: what others believe

But, of course, that's all merely symptoms of the mental illness sometimes referred to as ego.

=== ABOUT

In the name of not being burdened by what has been, and not wishing to be defined by past thoughts, this page is scrapped upon the first post of a new waking day.

=== LINKS

For seekers tired of searching
Great Gopher of Morena
ttt + computer
The internet used to be* fun