2025-07-02 22:12:00
Stuff can cost a lot just to exist, and it usually involves money just to access it. That sucks for me, who's currently broke but would also like to have nice things sometimes.
When I try looking beyond being broke, it's surprising to see how much people are actually willing to offer things for free, when they can. The free games/zines on itch are a prime example of this!
What I have in mind though is the physical stuff that you receive from trading art with others.
In 2023, I was tabling with friends when I discovered the joy of art trades. An hour before the event officially ended, we left our table unattended and went around the venue with our merch, trading them with fellow exhibitors (tables left just as unattended).
The energy was contagious! Lots of squealing, lots of excitement from seeing art made by others. Do I know this character? I absolutely have zero knowledge, but I love that you drew them! Would you like a cat sticker? The answer is (almost) always yes!
I have two questions for myself regarding this:
I think a more important question to ask myself is why would I offer something I made that cost money for free. I haven't actually thought about it until now. Something for me to probe into later.
Stickers are usually offered during art trades, as they're easier to carry around. I have stuck all of the stickers I received through art trades on most of my sketchbooks. Most of the artists that I traded with are people whom I just met at the event, never to be seen again.2
I'm already on my way to filling up the back cover
Most of the things we traded with each other are intended to be sold for profit, but that's momentarily forgotten in the simple joy of just sharing things with each other. It's freeing not to worry about that for a while.
Zine trades are also a thing too! Something I just learned last month.
I started making zines, and I'm proud to say that I recently made a new one. I traded my WDYDLYROOT????? zine for a copy of Aswangism by Tridax Zines! I was happy to see them in person again! Just being in the same space with people who put a lot of heart into their craft inspired me to do the same with my own art.
There are things I'm considering to give back to the community with as little barrier to access as much as possible! This year, I'd love to:
Hopefully, putting these in writing prompts me towards actually making it happen. I'm looking forward to it already :>
These aren't directly related to what I'm writing about, and in fact may even contradict it, but I want to share them here for their focus on free stuff. I guess I have a lot more to unpack about my own biases towards offering things for free, but that's for next time!
Better Than Free: An article that highlights 8 qualities of a thing that makes it worth paying for instead of getting it for free.
Free Games and Why We Should Pay For Them by npckc: A zine by a game dev who makes free games, and why supporting these games is important. I haven't actually read this yet, but I'm listing it here as reference for myself!
2025-07-02 08:58:00
I have made something! It’s a zine!
PJ texted me last week to ask me about starting a blog. I decided to make a little zine for her and while I was making it, I figured I might as well give it a place to live on the blog.
It contains a little guide to Bearblog, indie web directories, and a shoutout to 32bit.cafe.
So here’s the cover:
Here's the first two pages:
And here’s the link so you can download it and re-print it yourself. It’s double sided and one page. Fold it once in half, the vertical way, and then again, horizontally. Give it away to all the people in your life who'd like to blog!
Obligatory disclaimer just in case: please don’t make money off of this and please don’t take my name off of it! Thanks!
I have long been flirting with the idea of making a zine. My wonderful physical world artist friends Maddog, Kayla, and Aly have been making zines for many years now and I have long loved consuming the things they make. More recently, I found Vero through Bearblog, and picked up a few of her super dope zines and I totally recommend that you take a look at them too - they’re fab. All of these artists have had me feeling very very inspired indeed :)
Last Friday, my friend Megan hosted a craft night for our bi-monthly girlies night. Megan is the sort of person who collects plenty of bits and bobs that adorn her entire apartment. Sitting on her couch, I’ll always find something new to stare at, or some funky drawer to open to reveal some little bizarre collection. Craft night is the perfect sort of activity for her to host, as it means plenty of fun things to choose from when we sit down to collage or make bracelets or keychains or bejewelled cigarette cases.
So, in Megan's whimsy apartment, surrounded by friends on a hot night in June, I made my first zine - a personal one. I’ve called my personal zine series “Hardly Doing Much.” I’m hoping to make a new one every season, I’ll post my first edition on the blog eventually. The zine series was named as such because the reality is that I’m always doing a billion things, so much so that I didn’t really have enough room in my 8-page mini zine to give a snapshot of what my life has looked like over the last few months. Oh well - oversharing is what this blog is for.
And I've decided to call my little zine studio "extra punch press." I found an old newspaper at Megan's that had "extra punch" written on a page with a cool image of these two guys in a boxing fight. I liked the many meanings behind extra punch - whether it's literally in a fight, or like the beverage, or just more of something. I'm hoping that my zines will be many different things, and hopefully a bit punchy.
The zine I’ve shared here is only my second ever zine!
I’ve been finding that blogging has been the subject of many of the irl conversations I’ve been having with new friends and strangers. I’ve been directing people to the same resources over and over, so this zine will certainly be helpful in my life.
These included tips are just my go-tos when trying to teach people about the small web, and by no means should they be considered a comprehensive guide to this little world. I've always thought that when you give people some basic tools, they will often find their own ways to make cool things, surpassing all expectations. I’m looking forward to seeing what people make, once they’ve got this as their jumping off point!
Lots of people I’ve talked to have also expressed the difficulty in leaving social media or generally just reducing their time on the big web. It’s not always memorable when things come up in conversation and then are later dismissed so I figured giving someone a physical thing to hold in their hands would maybe be more effective at pulling them over to the small web from the big social media overlords.
If you find this is at all useful to you, or if you decide to print a few copies for yourself please let me know! Would be cool to see this being used!! You can contact me here.
And lastly, this zine is dedicated to my lovely friend PJ, who may soon make her Bearblog debut and bless us all with her beautiful poetry!
Happy July and Happy Blogging!
love n hugs,
sam
2025-07-02 00:16:00
It's the summer!!! Here is the beach.
Just some easy pictures from Santa Monica Pier. I was so sick for so much of the early year that I completely missed spring, and summer has now leaped out to surprise me.
I have been completely obsessed with taking photos with old digital point and shoot cameras lately. It's not just nostalgic - it's also pretty fucking cool to use a camera that does not post process the shit out of everything, even when it doesn't look particularly "old school". Once you start to see the phone camera post processing at work, it's impossible to ignore.
2025-07-02 00:00:00
This is part of the weirding way that we will teach you. ==Some thoughts have a certain sound, that being the equivalent to a form.== Through sound and motion, you will be able to paralyze nerves, shatter bones, set fires, suffocate an enemy or burst his organs. - Paul Atriedes, Dune (1984)
Herbert's power structures are narratological bioprophecies - "my mind affects my reality" - messianic hyperstitions feature prominently; propagating antisynthetic jihadist religions, genetically manipulating the birth of a saviour and seeding self-serving histories in cultures vulnerable to propaganda. Even the final hurdle for eschewing reality - violence - is overcome with the weirding way fighting style.
==Human willpower and intent supercedes and imposes upon reality.==
There is deliberate obscurity to the details, only the input and output are understood - psychically resonant commands form an interfacing language between the will of the wielder and the reaction of their target - before manifesting as violence and movement. The outcomes are independent of the means - collapsing into an obfuscated uninterpretable event horizon before re-expanding into effect. Indeed the means do not matter - whether real or reacted to as if real their effect remains the same.
To learn this weirding way, one must first understand
The sense of wrongness associated with the weird - the conviction that this does not belong - is often a sign that we are in the presence of the new - Mark Fisher, The Weird and The Eerie (2016)
Weirdness is a ==dissonance of structure-frame rather than of substance.== Wrongness by essence prerequisites an extant rightness of shared-frame - a predetermined manufactured consensus reality. Without a reality to violate it offers no transpositional potentialities, becoming pacifying fantasy neutered of its deframing capabilities. [Frame]lock1 reduces the possibility space to hedonism and its competitors - the extraction of pleasure from familiar psychomachinery without producing novel productions. Reliance on the same stimulus requires escalation to overcome habituation, presenting as infinitely growing demand - highly suitable to this particular status quo.
The original form of the word - "Wyrd" - is stranger still, evoking fateful predeterminism regardless of means of travel - the present immanence of an emergent inevitable future. These ==Fates== are often horrific, tragic and ironic. The irony is a principal component; the inevitability of outcome is baked into reactionary avoidance, ignorant dismissal and intentional manifestation - all resolve to collapse the contradiction that can no longer self-sustain into a stable lower-energy state by feeding energy into the system. Only those who accept the inevitable outcome, rather than attempting to subvert or seize it, ultimately guide it. Where Oedipus re-enacted fate in his avoidance of it, Achilles knew his fate and performed it. Given a choice between eternal glory in an early death and a long life in obscurity, he chose to perform his fat(e)al role and enter the metanarrative, ==feeding corpse into corpus.==
What is your purpose then, if not to decide? If not to act? This is to misunderstand the flow, you are it, the decisions you make are as predetermined as the ones you have made - whether agonisingly deliberated or instinctual - ==your systems of will were created for you before you had the supposed willpower to decide upon them yourself.== Your thoughts. Your addictions. Your dismissed thoughts and beaten addictions. All predetermined outcomes that yet must be performed. Perhaps you can decide the minutia of the performance but your script remains the same, rebelling against it only reveals itself to be the next scripted page. You nonetheless do have one choice - to live content or suffer ascension to the metanarrative. This is ==Fate==, well understood by humans before the neoliberal destruction of competing systems of thought that object to the "rational economic unit" we have been reduced to - severed from the universe, blindfolded and given unlimited options to go with limitless lack of purpose.
Today you are forced to be an atomic unit in the metanarrative network - Homo Economicus - because every alternative was destroyed in
Lead me, Zeus, and you too, Destiny, To wherever your decrees have assigned me. I follow readily, but if I choose not, Wretched though I am, I must follow still. Fate guides the willing, but drags the unwilling. - Cleanthes' Hymn to Zeus (3rd Century B.C.E.)
Today's Homo Economicus, we are assured, is a rational actor with immutable preferences and foresight. Driven only by individual desire measured against social desire dictating objective value. Yet the priests still carve arcane runes into economic models, drink IPOs and read the tea leaves in them, feel futures in the vivisected bowels of a QBR. Holding esoteric, arcane knowledge in structures needing a decade to be indoctrinated into. ==The ruling class is somehow always ahead, as if rewarded by divine right== - 'Dame Pelosi reached her station by virtue, of course she can feel the way the wind is blowing, of course the birds sing to her in portfolio.'
Fate, now, has been rejected by modernity as an irrational power structure that propped up authoritarian prefeudalist systems of control. In the process rationalism also vivisected and discarded systems of abstract understanding - ==organic memetic structures== - that evolved utilitously. Evidence-Based Medicine led the way in the demonisation of 'bias' - the final collapse of all subjective frames into one theoretical objective one. Researchers forever in search of a lower-order 'hidden variable' to explain phenomena previously explained in abstract narrative theories. Risk calculus superceding all other narrative frames, a typical capitalist realism, to institute an objective rationalist framework.
The Miasma Theory's failures to prevent Cholera outbreaks led to the birth of a rationalist framework of epidemiology - moving from the maintenance of communal fixtures like air and the health of the community to the health of the individual. ==We reduced communal health to empirical systems of probability== rather than the accumulation of case studies functioning as a communal story. The result in our most recent apocalypse was a terribly ironic reversal - the over-emphasis of a waterborne explanation for the spread of covid (in the form of airborne droplets) over an airborne one. Social distancing and handwashing were functionally ineffective in comparison to ventilation and masking. Evidence for masking was disputed by the erroneous assumption that it would increase face-touching and thereby transmit droplets directly to points of entry. By contrast in Japan and China - the immediate adoption of an airborne vector of transmission theory greatly prevented spread and prompted wilful masking behaviours.2
It is difficult to dismiss as coincidence that cultures with a firm mode of irrational abstract framing lasting into modernity (in the form of spirits and essences of natures as they interface with the humans occupying the material plane adjacent to them) were better suited to adopting abstract communal behaviours that prevented great harm. ==The certainty of the value of individual liberty and freedom itself in the west becomes maladaptive== - prioritising minor expressions of freedom (indeed masking itself became an immediate signal/counter signal of group affiliation far in excess of its import as an intervention) over the greater health of the community. "My air is not bad, my water is not bad, I am not ill" takes precedent over the health of home, community and village.
Eventually these individualist explanations meet a reality that cannot be explained by them, and turn into the paranoiac "They are polluting my air, they are polluting my water, they are making me ill". This libidinal spirit of the irrationalist human remains today in the form of Paranoia, and can go one of two ways, the most important being
[T]here is something "crazy," something of a madness, in radical freedom... freedom is at its most radical a disease, something that parasitizes on our organic wellbeing, something destructive and self-destructive... - Slavoj Žižek, Freedom: A Disease Without Cure
Without necessitating a deep dive into Mccarthy-era history, we can identify paranoia as a useful tool of social control - an impetus soaked into society from top-down propaganda that prompts both surveillence and self-regulatory scrutiny. Simultaneously, however, paranoia can be an anti-authoritarian mode of analysis - assuming nothing on the surface level and viewing all forms as shaped by hostile manipulation is a ==deterritorializing impulse.== Where these two modes dissect is at the incision between the egoic self and broader psychosubstrate - whether you believe this hostile manipulation to be targeted ==at you.==
In the height of mutual Cold War paranoia, both sides pathologised paranoia in modes utilitous to their operations. The soviet union developed vyalotekushchaya shizofreniya, or "slow progressive schizophrenia" to incarcerate dissenters and subject them to psychiatric interventions (resulting in as many as three times the number diagnosis of schizophrenia as western countries like the UK) under the principle that their paranoid rejection of soviet structures could only be irrational. In the same era, Mccarthyist Americans engaged in paranoid delusions of assimilation, brainwashing and sleeper agents - the only explanation for their anti-American sentiment being the hostile manipulation by the enemy axis of power. In both systems ==paranoia was used as a tool of control in a narcissistic frame== - all frames that conflict with America must be aimed at subverting america/ the USSR is so perfect that only a madman could believe it to be otherwise.
==Paranoia is not only a weird state, but a hypervigilance to the weird== - residing in conflict with the structure-frame and necessarily delegitimized by and delegitimizing it. The paranoia they aim to suppress - that being the correct identification of hostile manipulation of the forces around them without the following assumption that these forces are aware of or directed at them is the revolutionary, utilitious mode of analysis. ==The hyperparanoiac believes these vast uninterpretable hyperforms extrude briefly enough into frames of understanding to be sensed, but never wholely enough to be fully understood.==
==The Leviathan exists but is indifferent to you== - to be appropriately paranoid is to adopt this Lovecraftian frame of understanding the hostile forces that doom humanity. This is how the spectre of irrationalism can be reconstituted and given form - in an awareness of the unknown - a fascination with what remains present in
when we cross the line to the boundless and hideous unknown - the shadow-haunted Outside - we must remember to leave out humanity and terrestrialism at the threshold - H.P. Lovecraft, Letter to the Editor, Weird Tales, 1927
We buried the future somewhere in this shadow-haunted Outside - eldrofuturic poltergeists occasionally emerging into the material plane to thrash about senselessly in the hope of a flung polemic mortally wounding a superstructure, before burrowing back into the rhizome awaiting a next moment. USSR, Cybersyn, Occupy, Corbyn, Sanders, CHAZ, Jan 6th3 all pruned at the branching point from the neoliberal end of history. When fate cements into history it becomes always-inevitable, there could have been no other timeline, nothing new. This is where the intrusion of the weird begins to manifest and Lovecraft's work is most valuable - ==the fictional manifestation of extrusions from another plane are indiscernible from other hyperforms.== The retro-interrence of the new - crafting an ancient lore and mythology that never occurred in our frame yet can forcibly historicise potential futures can short-circuit the future to the past bypassing our languid present.
Fatefulness bridges this gap - accepting that reality bends to history in the way an improvised interactive story might follow the flow of a player. In one such narrative game, Baldurs Gate 3 - your ally The Emperor's loyalty or betrayal is induced by your suspicions, rewriting his history in an ontological feedback loop based entirely on the observer's perception. His actions always inevitable and foreplanned formed on the assumptions and investment of feeling by the player. This 'unrealistic' inconsistency of motive was a common critique - ironic that the rationalisation of an end-state belief or even outcome has been shown time and time again to be ==post-hoc neque proptor hoc - The Ends creating The Means.==
Neoliberal frames of finite, objective reality blind the unattuned and induce paranoiac panic in the attuned. Hyperstitioning new realities is pathologised into schizophrenic 'breaks' or subversive signalling by hostile forces directed at our glorious monuments. Causality cannot be reshaped by narrative fiction if it is not allowed to interface with the structure. ==For the neoliberal - weirdness is an alarm== - a fear of
I'll just say it: Donald Trump and JD Vance are creepy and, yes, weird. ==We are not going back.== - Tim Walz, 2024
One such alarm went off in the summer of '24 launching one of very few successful Democratic memetic attacks on the right-wing psychostructure - designating them "weird". A momentary lapse of awareness (the correct and default state of the liberal being obliviousness) where ==progressives realised their hegemony had been intruded upon by a cognitohazardous psychosubstrate they were ill-prepared for.== The same groups that praised this narrative reassertion of the normal over the immanent weird similarly praised Trump's campaign (for its strategy, not morality) for its rebuttal:
Kamala is for they/them, Donald Trump is for YOU - Trump Campaign, 2024
The ultimate failure of the Harris Campaign strategy was in its timing - by the point that they attempted to reframe MAGA as 'weird' - an emerging immanence and divergence from structure-frame to be smothered in the crib - it was already fully-grown, culturally dominant and poised to overwhelm their institutions. Where calling MAGA 'weird' was most successful was in appealing to the liberal ingroup white-knuckling control of the hegemony before it was wrested away from them. MAGA reaffirmed its new dominance by tying 'the weird' back to Kamala - anchoring the campaign to introductions of The Other (They/Them) into a now sanely conservative cultural norm. The apparent success of the line of attack was bound up in infuriating the right - attempting to setback the overton window after rightfully gained hard-won territory.
They had spent a decade ritually hyperstitioning a new reality into being - only for the last gasp of the neoliberal order they despised to be an attempt at gaslighting them into being 'weird' again - a deeply
...Trump's campaign was possessed of a sense of effervescing excitement, of anarchic unpredictability, the feeling of belonging to a building-movement - Fisher, K-Punk 2016
This attempt at forcible temporal shunting back to the moment of MAGA's emergence was re-traumatizing - triggering the same feelings of displacement, rejection and isolation that instigated the birth of the movement to begin with. Trump's movement overcame, integrated and weaponised their cultural trauma but never resolved their PTSD - remaining vulnerable, emotionally if not strategically, to these attacks. ==MAGA is itself a temporal sticking point - Make America Great Again - a perpetual retro-interring of a futuric installation of a fictional history.== Precisely the mode of hyperstitioning discussed so far - and where much of the excitement for restructuring of society comes from in radicals across the political spectrum. Tragic that it was our enemies, but joyous that it was possible at all to exorcise the specters of lost futures.
Yet this grand victory over temporality is bound in their cultural trauma - hypervigilance, rage, psychotic breaks and disintegrating ties to linearity. Causality Collapse - if nothing can follow from neoliberalism then rather than attack neoliberalism, causality must be dismantled, if only for a moment. All that remains in a system with no cause-and-effect is what already is, mementos, monuments and sculptures displaced out of time and left in eerie states of disrepair. Dream-logic inserting garbled semantic signals into brainrot content and conspiratorial paranoia with no vector. Time travel far more like the jumbled self-looping chaotic feedback of a Primer than the stable decision-tree branches of a Back to the Future. We are left interfacing with humming objects, even the libidinal shadow has been mined and interpolated into AI giving us direct line to attuning with the sociounconscious ripples - the
I AM A FRAGMENT OF THE WORLD SPIRIT, THE GENIUS LOCI OF REVACHOL. MY HEART IS THE WIND CORRIDOR. THE BOTTOM OF MY AIR IS RED. I HAVE A HUNDRED THOUSAND LUMINOUS ARMS. COME MORNING, I CARRY INDUSTRIAL DUST AND LET IT SETTLE ON TREE LEAVES. I SHAKE THE DUST FROM THOSE LEAVES AND ONTO YOUR COAT. I’VE SEEN YOU, I’VE SEEN YOU! - Shivers, Disco Elysium
The contemporary masterwork Disco Elysium features internal voices that advise and direct the protagonist, the most important being Shivers - "Raise the hair on your neck. Tune in to the city." Occasionally, it interjects with seemingly irrelevant moments from other times and places, piercing through mundanity with a deep resonance to the city - the networked intersection of people and places - ==the imposition of superstructure on lived experience.== "Tuning in" with "the hair on your neck" forming antennal receptors to the frequencies of space, community and history. Everything is made in the shape of pain that can be felt.
The means do not matter - parallel resonances one or all of which contribute and interfere constructively and destructively result in concrete end - felt experience protruded from other frames. Vibrations pass through, they are not nodes but temporally unstable flows of energy that can resonate across time and space. Traumas come to the present fore in transcendental shock - injuries out of time. These can be personal, generational, communal, structural - and felt in physicality of social spaces expressed by the assemblage of human intent that formed them. ==While sociotraumas are shouted in the cultural productions of channelers, they are whispered in the productions of everyone else.==
This is where we arrive at the eerie - the remnants of intent lost to time - often the site of pruned branches. Failed hyperstitions in hollowed out cocoons. A haunted graveyard of futures. Trauma as infrastructure - reverberating out from sites of great suffering and failure. It is here the separation between living and ascension is most clear - where the choice is most stark. Those who failed or were failed gave up everything for nothing, leaving behind a charged void - The Pale background static imprinted behind the dominant metanarrative. ==This is a renewable energy source to be channeled into necromancy== - from Making America Great Again to restorations of Cybersyn. These are the beasts turned to oil turned to fuel for the next ascension - this is the energy to channel into
To learn this weirding way, one must first ==understand the weird.==
There are vast reserves of energy to channel into (as Herbert would depict it) The Voice. Some do this to fuel their own drives, far more interested in co-opting this resource into personal fulfilment and contentment, even economic stability. You are not obligated to choose to 'die', to sacrifice your finite life attempting to influence the metanarrative. ==This is the one true choice Fate will offer you and the one you are most entitled to enact selfishly.== If you choose to look Outside, to see the weird, to become paranoid, to Shiver - you are relinquishing control of your life to the network and converting from node to ripple. Derealizing into influence on others, ==becoming the substance they channel.==
You must give up freedom and in doing so become free, for 'none are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free' and so none are more free than those who truly believe they are enslaved to Fate. You must intrude in upon reality with formations unrecognisable to it - What are you? Why can't I attribute you? Why aren't you finite? You must induce fascination compelling discomforted attention - inducing dissonances that repel and attract in equal measure. ==Create Metainstability.==
To learn this weirding way, one must first ==become the weird.==
Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie
Lovecraft, Notes on Writing Weird Fiction
Necropolitics
Žižek, Freedom The Disease Without Cure
Writing on the roof at 2am, I hear machines but no voices, the cars drive themselves home
The Open Memetics Group - @DefenderOfBasic
Feyerabend, Against Method
[frame]lock - e.g. [lib]lock, [status]lock - a limit to comprehension induced by the inability to exit a particular subjective frame↩
Miasmas, mental models and preventive public health: some philosophical reflections on science in the COVID-19 pandemic↩
To out my anglospherism↩
2025-07-01 20:44:00
Whenever I make art, or I'm chatting with people, or I'm playing games, or I'm doing basically anything, I'm always listening to music, which... Might sound like I have a problem, and I thought so too, but while trying to figure out why I listen to music so often, I landed on more answers to other things, and I don't feel like they're related, but while I'm figuring why I listen to music so much, I thought I might share what I found so far.
Music can take on many forms, it's a very flexible medium with what you can do, and while music theory can and is useful for this, it isn't a required thing, which allows for anyone with enough motivation and a tiny bit of imagination to make any tune they wish to become true. Don't have an instrument? Try a DAW! Music is a very open medium in the sense that there's quite the amount of free options nowadays, so don't feel discouraged from it, if you want to do music, do it, there's plenty of resources and options at your disposal.
Even I tried it for a while! If a-noobi like I can do it, why not you too?
These things make Music such an Incredible Thing for me, as I haven't seen so many free resources and options in a medium before, and I say this as an artist, just by searching on google or youtube already shows up lots of results to get started with your journey, which is a big upside compared to when I tried out Pixel Art for the first time, and the resources were far more scarce.
Music can also allow you to express your feelings, may it be you who's composing the song or just a listener, it allows both sides to connect in such a unique way through the power of sound.
There's relaxing songs in the form of Lo-Fi, songs to get all inside you out in the form of Metal, the million ways that songs with singers included can alter the feeling of a song, not to mention that there's songs that break the norm and even try new things in pre-defined genres (Taking the Metal example, I've seen from melancholic to happy songs on it which is just wild, to see the range that people can adapt to within a genre), which is very useful if you don't like specific genres, as no one is left out to express their own feelings.
Music is such an Interesting Thing, because while yes, there are other mediums that allow you to feel represented with your feelings, I feel like no medium can do it in both such a strong and unique way like Music does, as it's an audio-only medium. Sure, some music videos or scenes might complement it, but for the most part what gives it all the emotion is the actual song.
Music also allows for people to connect with each other, it's a voice that allows for everyone to be a part of something, may it be something joyful such as simply sharing songs for each other to listen to, to being something it ties everyone with the same passion together, like in Protests and in Sport matches (here everyone screams certain songs when their football team is playing, and that makes me so happy).
There's a strong sense of connection whenever music is involved, and I think that's what makes Music such a Beautiful Thing, because it's a medium that unifies us all in one way or another.
... You know, after reading all of this, I can get why I listen to music so often (hell I'm doing it right now while writing this), music is a strong motivation to people, it allows everyone to connect with each other in different ways, and the cost for doing it yourself is basically none. It's a great thing...
... But, if you stop and think about it, Music is in danger, and needs your support.
Now, that might sound stupid at first glance, but streaming platforms pay very minuscule amounts of money to artists for every time their songs is played, with some (such as Spotify) not even paying artists at all if their music reproductions don't pass a certain amount, which applies to a vast majority of their platforms. If every artist focused exclusively on the earnings from streaming, only the top artists would be able to justify doing this for a living, and that makes me so sad for a medium I find such a strong passion for.
So, is there something that can be done to fix that? Yeah! Support your favorite and underrated artists, buy their songs on Bandcamp, join their Patreon, buy their merch if they do that, or even just do a word of mouth with them (that one is free!). Basically anything that would help them a long way counts.
If you can't afford doing that every single time though (like I), I recommend having a platform to listen to songs (and maybe discover new artists) AND doing one of the things I mentioned above every so often, when you can. I'm slowly building up my Bandcamp that way! Every thing helps.
Now, if you excuse me I'll go listen to this song I found about being silly, I think I'll relate to it!
-AnubiArts, maybe is a bit too passionate about music.
2025-07-01 18:50:00
This is part 1 of a 3 (or 4, I haven't decided yet) part series on digital hygiene.
Email is, arguably, the backbone of the modern internet. Not only is it a means of communication, but is the de-facto identity for operating online. In this way, email isn't just how I communicate, but who I am online. Yes, some services still operate with usernames and passwords; but the vast majority of services use email as user identity. This arguably makes email the most important online account. Everything else relies on email.
Email is also where I do most of my work. From technical support, to replying to friendly emails, to receiving invoices; it is the workspace through which my occupation operates. And for all of these reasons, my email is well organised and easy to use.
People regularly comment on how quickly and personally I respond to their emails, and it's because they're generally only one of a few emails in my inbox. This isn't because I just naturally don't receive emails (I run two B2C web-services!). Instead it is because I am very active in maintaining a clean workspace. In the same way a carpenter keeps his tools neat and tidy; or a barista cleans his equipment and the counter after every coffee brewed; I put away my emails and wipe down my inbox after every use.
What's fairly interesting, though, is that people assume this is difficult. But it's not. Once I started keeping a clean inbox I actually had significantly less work, since every email I received actually warranted attention. The important ones weren't buried beneath a heap of newsletters, spam, receipts, and all the other cruft that can clog up the workspace.
Here's how I do it:
To kick things off, I have 2 email addresses. The first one is the one that I use as my identity. This is a gmail address that I've had since high school, and I use it to sign up to online services, fill in forms, and all the other things that require an online identity. I don't bother with email aliases since it just makes my identity harder to control. I respect people who do this to track data-leaks, but I couldn't be bothered.
The second email address is my conversational address. This is where people can contact me, whether it be for support or to just say hi. I don't have any web-services or online identities associated with this email address, and so every email I receive here is from a person.
My email is also not a place for adverts and marketing (we'll get to this later), or a place where I read newsletters. This is a place for work and communication. For newsletters I use an RSS reader (Reeder is my choice of client). If a website or newsletter doesn't support RSS (which is very rare) and I really want to receive updates I use Kill the Newsletter, which creates an RSS feed of received emails.
This is one of the most important parts of my email strategy. My inbox isn't a place for leisurely reading. When I open my email it's with purpose. If I want to catch up on my newsletters and blogs I follow, I can flop down on the couch, open my RSS reader, and enjoy them when I'm not also trying to work.
Since my first email address is used for signing up to websites, apps, and all the rest; it inevitably receives marketing emails (even though I religiously never check that checkbox). Whenever I receive a marketing newsletter I always hit unsubscribe. I'm not interested. If I receive another email from that company I report their email as spam. This is a non-negotiable. Companies that disregard unsubscribes should be penalised, and the only way to do this is to make their email deliverability metrics slightly worse. Maybe they'll learn. Probably not.
When a new email enters my inbox I explicitly act on it. Every single email is attended to like this:
And I just keep doing that. I found that over time, once the cruft has been unsubscribed, filtered, or moved elsewhere; the only emails that hit my inbox are important ones that require my attention. Additionally, I only receive between 5 and 15 emails a day, and they aren't buried and require significantly less cognitive load to address.
Naturally everyone's workflow will look different based on the work that they do and personal preference. However I think it is universal to say being active about email creates a better experience for you and the people and services you interact with. This is just how I like to do it.
It's also possible to control what kinds of emails you receive. If you take a look at my contact page, you'll notice that it's intentionally formatted, and tweaked regularly. I have a big picture of my face to remind people that they're interacting with a human being (this is particularly useful for support requests). It then provides easy links to the most frequently requested resources. I specify my working hours, establishing that people will need to be patient when waiting for a response from me, especially over weekends (this is also particularly useful for support requests). And then finally my email is at the bottom in non-copy-and-paste (and maybe anti-bot) format.
I encourage people to randomly email me. Especially if it's to discuss a post of mine, invite me for a coffee, or just open a line of communication. The page is set up to point people in the right direction when looking for information, help them quickly resolve their queries, and to remind them that I'm not a nameless customer support agent.
I am quite privileged to decide what emails are important, since I work for myself. However, even if you receive a lot of email that can't be filtered out, having a system around what you can archive or unsubscribe from will inevitably make life easier.
Email is a great tool when used well. It is a place of slow(er) communication, and for some a place for connection. In many ways it is an extension of oneself. I like to keep it tidy.