Begin The Begin

Last year during the height of the pandemic, I quit social media. The long and the short of it being that I’d come to realize that the feed is a cognitively terrible way to present information, even setting aside the way in which it’s gamified to trigger dopamine responses. The problem, for me, is that my brain overloads when presented with the problem of a database as opposed to that of a narrative.

My return to blogging became something of a casualty of quitting social media, in part because that return had become somewhat inextricably tied to Micro.blog, whose feed might not be algorithmic but remains, being a feed, the cognitive problem of a database. Even absent the service deciding for me what I should see, it remained a jumble (if not the jungle of something like Twitter) of context collapse.

Months of blogging got unceremoniously sent down the memory hole (although I have a private copy)—my mediocre autism blogging, for what it was worth, I did methodically transfer into Tumblr—and I went my merry way into a mostly asocial internet as an adjunct to my mostly solitary offline life.

The problem is that I keep having things to say, and that I need to find a way to say them without concerning myself in the least with whether or not anyone is reading them, or if anyone cares. Back in the earlyish days of blogging, I could keep up with interesting blogs, and interesting blogs could keep up with me. Then everything became social media and I spent a decade subjecting myself to its cognitive violence.

So, I’m trying again. There are no comments here; posts do not accept trackbacks, pingbacks, or webmentions. I’m not linking this site to any social sites, and that includes those whose feeds are not algorithmically-driven.

In an attempt to make some distinctions, this time around I’m pulling some things out into widgets. Rather than trying to blog every article I read, and every change to what my current fiction or nonfiction reads are, those sorts of things will simply live in the site footer. This includes a sort of status updatewhere I can just give a quick sense of what’s going on with me at the moment.

Any one of these things mightalso become a longer blog post, if I feel the need for one, but this way anything that might once have been a tweet can just live in a semi-static widget, keeping the blog itself relatively cruft-free.

Last time around, I also routinely sidetracked myself into the frustrations of trying to customize anything and everything. This time, I am trying to just let that shit go. Either things work the way I want them to solely through plugins and minor tweaks to CSS, or they don’t.

It’s unclear what the specific motivation is here. (Typo: notivation, which, of course.) Perhaps some combination of a week of minor Pfizer pfatigue (more on this later) that also happens to lack the usual Friday therapy appointment.

Final point of interest: the two days I spent on considering and devising this reboot were an exemplary instance of autistic hyperfocus being both useful and problematic, in that while the falling away of attention to anything else is what enabled the site coming together so quickly, repeatedly forgetting to eat only makes the pfatigue worse. Autism is not a superpower.