2025-12-21 05:12:00
Ahoy there.
For about a year now, I have been anti-social media, I've deleted all my accounts and really only use Reddit as a resource for niche subjects (best game in XYZ series to start with, etc.)
I've been trying to figure out what to call this sect of the internet, the clear web, the normie web, the dead web, the corpo web. I'll stick with the dead web for now since I view that space as, well dead. The term to encompass the corporatized parts of the internet.
I wanted to catalog some of the personal changes I've noticed in myself since quitting all social medias earlier this year
CW: mentions of suicide and violence. If not in a good head space, I recommend skipping to the next section.
I've notice that my sensitivity to things has increased. I used to be someone who wouldn't even flinch at a beheading video. Gore, violence, porn, distressing encounters, and other forms of hyper-stimulus on the internet were ultimately nothing to me for a while.
Since quitting, I've regained a certain sense of disgust or emotion towards things I see online again. For example, I was watching a micro-documentary on YouTube about MySpace, and in it was talking about a teenage girl who hung herself due to cyberbullying that stemmed from the platform. The documentary showed the audio from the 911 call from the mom; hearing the agony in her voice knowing the scene she witnessed sent a chill down my body that I haven't felt in a very long time.
The offing of ol' Chuckie Kirk was something I normally wouldn't have flinched at, but against my better judgment I watched the video and it fucked me up for a while. If I saw this video 2 years ago, I probably woulda went "damn!" then moved on.
I now am acutely aware that I do feel things again for what I see online and take steps to avoid it. It's interesting seeing how much my attitude has changed about seeing things that are particularly distressing.
For a while, when I was on social media frequently, I would get inundated with all the worst. Every day I was reading of what the Dipshit in Chief was doing this time, some tragedy unfolding, some human rights violation. It was taking a toll on me.
There is little to gain from being THIS aware to what is going on in the world. I didn't lose my awareness that things suck in the world right now, but it's also not healthy to be constantly reminded of it every day.
I feel a greater sense of community in online spaces, niche/indie web circles feel close. I cherish my friends at the Gazette, and it's truly amazing what even this little community does.
The discord server for it has grown so much with so much fun things to interact with (question of the day channel, a hall of fame channel for when one of us says something funny, other stuff, a file sharing system, etc.). I have never met these guys in real life (hell I barely know what 90% of them look like), but I consider them just as much my friends as anyone else I know IRL.
Since quitting social media, I've found these niche spaces the best places to connect with other people. As much as I wish my IRL friends lived closer to me, I am content with my "European friends" (as I say shorthandedly when explaining who I'm talking to to my wife) and my friends in other spaces (like my classic Halo group).
Another thing I've noticed since quitting social media is how... normal people are? Like, you see online and it's just endless talk about politics this and drama that. When you step outside and talk to people, there's a surprising amount of people who are seemingly just as removed from this other world as I am. They have their opinions, sure, but it rarely ever comes up.
Politically, people IRL are much more moderate. If you base your view on say conservatives from what you see on the conservative subreddit, you'd think they're a bunch of blundering morons. However, I know quite a number of conservatives (often by proxy of them being parents of friends) and they seem just as pissed at the current administration as I am. Hell, my best friend's dad, a lifelong Republican, went to No Kings and it wasn't to counter protest.
It can be almost jarring seeing how stark of a contrast reality seems compared to what you see online, then it hit me. The internet is mostly bots now. So, it's hard to tell if the really stupid things people are saying on reddit or youtube comment sections ever came from actual people. Every now and then I see the cracks even in these echo chambers. Going back to the conservative subreddit, there are some that believe Trump had little to do with Epstein's trafficking (as foolish as I think it is). However, they're admitting that it's harder and harder to hold on to that with each day.
It makes me hopeful that these people will eventually come around. Even if they don't it still at least makes it seem like people are waking up a little bit. The red hat-wearing MAGA nut is becoming a smaller and smaller minority. Even my next-door neighbor who flew a Trump flag every day outside his house and even had a cutout of Trump on his lawn has taken down both and they have stayed down.
In all this, I think it's important to remember that real life isn't the internet. People are so much more varied than we might think from these comment sections from hyper-curated feeds.
I feel different, happier, now than I did prior to quitting the corporatized web. I don't really miss any of it. It took way more from me than it ever gave. Even when it claimed to connect people, it was far from that.
I do somewhat miss social media, at least how it started and the idealized vision of what it could have been. I remember playing CarTown with my dad on Facebook, and posting stupid stuff to my Facebook profile. I could see what mundane things my classmates were doing.
It's funny, we used to mock people for posting the most mundane aspects of their life on social media, but nowadays it seems like we are craving that level of uninteresting content in the midst of chaos.
In a world where you are seeing the war-torn faces of children and the evil of modern geopolitics, it makes you yearn to see someone's boring dinner in your feed.
Pirate is wearing Bluey pajama bottoms and shirt
Pirate is feeling relaxed
Pirate is reading Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams
Pirate is playing Gears of War 2
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2025-12-21 05:04:02
On a long enough timeline, everything on the internet transforms into ‘social media’.
Social media is all about metrics. To be social online, to prove one is social online, is to acquire likes, subscribers, notes, replies, comments, and retweets/stacks.
Ergo, soon enough, everything on the internet transforms into an agent of progress and aggrandizement, wherein the primary—albeit somewhat tacit—purpose of any undertaking is to grow, acquire, or accumulate.
There is nothing wrong with someone wanting their work to be read or heard, of course. But an artist or writer wanting their work to be seen is vastly different from the artist in question creating something for the purpose of it being seen.
The aforementioned, aggrandizing form of the internet is parasitic. If a communal, networked site currently doesn’t have some form of likes, subs, or engagement metrics, you can rest assured that in time, it will. These new engagement metrics will, equally in time, infect the users of said site. The infection in question will transform the user’s (creators') brains into ‘content’ machines, wherein they will no longer create for the sake of art or writing, but for the sake of clicks, likes, and subscribers.
The issue is that the ‘content’ which accrues the most engagement is that which is the most universal, homogenous, safe, accepted, and tolerated. This is to say that any site that includes some form of engagement metric will, eventually, cater primarily to the lowest common denominator.
The best, current example of this is Substack. A site that originally began as a service focused on both showcasing and protecting all forms of writing has quickly transformed into just another run-of-the-mill slop machine, complete with low-effort image/meme posts, video snippets, and AI garbage. It is now, speaking in terms of culture, useless. Substack is dead, long live…websites?
So, I’ve moved back here, to a website. It’s built on Bearblog, the ethos and attitude of which seems perfectly fine to me. Self-hosting was an option, but why spend all that time mucking around just for clout? There’s words on the screen, read them or don’t.
It’s easy to ‘argue’ for likes and subscribers if one believes that popularity is equal to quality. Sometimes this is the case, sometimes it isn’t. So, really, what engagement metrics do is induce laziness. They act as a confusing, haphazard filter that is at best meaningless, and at worst, obfuscating and apathetic.
I’m against them. I’m against engagement metrics. I say this as someone with a world-renowned podcast. Someone who has experienced both ends (bad book reviews and 100,000s of listeners) of the spectrum. They do nothing to bolster creativity and do everything to hamper it. A true artist or writer shouldn’t care if their work is read.
Create to create.
True art is created when no one is watching. When it is assured that there will be no pay-off. When it is accepted that it will never be understood, talked about, or even read!
True art bursts out.
Is the fear of your work not being read or seen really about the work? Or is it about you?
2025-12-20 13:41:19
I've assumed for a while that gamers would have mild distaste for genAI material, in the same way that they have distaste for asset store assets and, for some reason, the Unity engine. It turns out that I was wrong - they hate it a lot more than either of those things.
I saw Liz England posted about a market research survey from a reliable vendor, Quantic Foundry, which showed that audiences genuinely loathe the technology. Unsurprisingly, players who care more about story hate it even more than the rest of them. Less than 8% of gamers have any positive feelings toward it at all.
62.7% of the survey respondents have very negative feelings about it. Over 85% of all the respondents had at least some negative feelings about it.
This is wild as hell. GenAI boosters are very common on Reddit, Bluesky, and other platforms where people speculate about What Gamers Want and what the future of game development will be like. As long as these survey numbers hold, I'm going to dismiss that kind of boosterism out of hand, and you should, too. There's no reason to assume that this tech will be the norm going forward for game art, audio, or story. The people who insist the audience will prefer it have no idea what they're talking about.
2025-12-20 07:03:00
The title is poking fun at the type of person at work that implies young people are lazy while doing jack shit too, and I use ‘Boomer’ colloquially, meaning not just the late ones born 1955–1964, but also the some of the early Gen Xers born 1965–1970.
The young people don’t wanna work anymore, huh? You know what makes me not wanna work anymore, too? Shocking behavior of the residual boomers at the workplace. Seems like everyone has some sort of horror story about their coworkers who are close to retirement.
Many outearn the others at work due to seniority, more opportunities to negotiate, or having joined during better conditions ages ago… but now do less than anyone else. E-Mails? Not responding. Calls? Not picking up. Office? Is constantly on a break. It’s often faster to just do it yourself than involve them.
A new way to do things? “We have never done it that way!”
Why do we do it this way? “We have always done it that way!”
New tech? Refusal. “I only have 1-3 years left! Why should I learn that?”
Their memory is bad, so they’ll insist on a topic never having been brought up before. “We’ve never discussed this!” meanwhile, protocol says they agreed to it in the last meeting or even brought it up themselves.
You give them documents to read over, they skip half, then write an angry comment about how that half is missing. Their Word annotations are cryptic. Their angry emails with 50 exclamation points and red and cursive capslock turns out to be because of their own mistake. They won’t apologize, though.
They call you over to solve a tech problem. You see 99 unread emails in their inbox. Next time you talk to them about a topic that was shared via mail, they smile. “Oh I didn’t read any of that. I just deleted it.” They laugh. Okay then.
Good luck getting the boomer to understand absences. You are sick or on vacation and return to missed-but-redirected 10 calls and 5 angry emails that pretend you’re just ignoring them. Meanwhile, they’re ignoring the shared Outlook calendar, your Outlook out-of-office message, your redirected phone number, your Teams status, and your absence note on your office door. But how could they have known, right? It’s your fault.
When they happen to take over your work during your absence, you return to more work than you started with, because half the procedures they took over have some documents missing, deadlines missed or other mistakes and you spend the first day back at work correcting that. But beware of having a simple accidental typo - the boomer will let you know, with the boss in CC.
It’s the 15th of December, 9-10 days until Christmas, 16 days until NYE. While everyone else keeps working and tries to get stuff done before the year ends, the year has already ended for the boomer. “Why are you coming to me with this? It’s literally the end of the year. We should discuss it in January.” Now your shit is stalled because someone doesn’t wanna make a small decision like where and if a specific document should be saved. You wouldn’t even ask if they didn’t insist on micromanaging the place at the weirdest times.
Those types of boomers are also successful in delegating work they don’t want to do. They get others to fix the tech for them, to call the IT department for them, to up- or download and zip or unzip files for them, even to rename files for them. It’s incredible. Things they were doing just fine years ago already. They know how to weaponize incompetence. These are people who once finished degrees or even a doctorate, but now cannot deal with text.
And everyone tiptoes around it. “That’s just how they are! We can’t change them. Just do it for them.”
I understand aging poses challenges and I will experience those too, but not every boomer is that way, and people can do better! I see some smart, engaged, passionate and focused older people at work, too. They’re competent, they aren’t learning to be helpless, they put in the work. They don’t act entitled or like 40 years of work were enough to now free them from all responsibility or scrutiny. If you treat yourself like you’re too old and stupid for everything, it’s going to become true in the worst way. Don’t let yourself get left behind.
I am just so tired, man. I am tired of being overruled and outearned by people who are very openly hostile to work in a way that negatively affects everyone else. And it’s these same people who wanna tell you that the younger generation doesn’t wanna work anymore and that they, of all people, should earn even more. Fuck off, you know this place would be on fire without everyone cleaning up behind you.
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2025-12-20 06:38:40
In 1968, Chilean artist Roberto Matta gave a speech titled The Internal Guerrilla at the Congreso de la Cultura in Havana. It's a speech about art and revolution. Prior to his departure, Matta left with poet Jean Schuster, executor of André Breton's will, a collection of notes titled Infra-réalisme.
For Matta, infrarealism is a defense against alienation.
Alienation is of course at the root of the problems we see today in our digital lives. The discourse surrounding platform decay and the state of the web is a reaction to a new reality: we have built a digital infrastructure hostile to meaningful human development.
We find ourselves at a strange crossroads, where conventional wisdom tells us that the internet is a tool and not an end in itself, but after 2020 something changed. To keep the world running in the wake of the pandemic, the digital sphere took on new responsibilities. Forced to stay away from each other physically, we moved part of our lives online.
Today the consequences of that move continue to be felt, and alienation becomes almost inevitable. In the words of Paul B. Preciado, the individual "is not a physical agent, but a digital consumer, a code, a pixel, a bank account, an address". In technology circles we see appeals to a vintage web, rejection of AI tools and praise for projects that highlight the human aspect of social interactions. We see the defense of free speech and privacy rights and conversations about where we go from here.
With an understanding that alienation comes from the type of work we produce and the form in which we consume it, in Matta's speech we find a reminder to do the kind of work inherent to all of us.
The following is my translation of Roberto Matta's speech The Internal Guerrilla.
A Spanish reproduction appeared in print in Prometeo magazine in 1987. I found a transcription at Mecánica Celeste.
In my opinion, one of the most important topics proposed by this Congress is the one referring to the Integral Development of Humankind. Allow me to expose my views regarding this point, especially in relation to one of its essential aspects: the development of the creative imagination, of an intelligence that builds from poetic imagination, of a subversive imagination, of an erotic imagination also.
I understand that just as Revolution is a collective endeavor on the social plane, it is also a process which must be verified in each individual. For intellectuals and artists, for all people, I consider this personal revolution wholly necessary. Especially so if the intellectual, if the artist, if that person is conscious of belonging to a world which finds itself in the complex stage of building a new social organization, in which the Integral Development has an importance of the first order.
It is not about only being with the revolution, but about being revolutionary. And being revolutionary implies, of course, being free, or consequently fighting for liberty. Just like people free themselves through the fight against political and economic oppression, individuals can only free themselves through the fight against internal tyrannies: hypocrisy and fear. Prejudices, false pretenses, self-criticism, conventional and schematic ideals constitute the invisible (often mercenary) army against which the internal guerrillas set out to defend creative liberty. As with more consciousness there is more light, so too there is more light with more consciousness.
To achieve a cultural revolution there must be a cultural revelation, humankind's possibilities must be seen. A high sense of responsibility does not mean practicing self-censorship systematically. In the field of imagination, one must be brave as in the field of battle. The builders of a new world, in the social sphere as in the cultural, intellectual, and artistic spheres are characterized by generosity, for commitment to their work, but also by defiance, by the capacity to assume, with necessary courage, the risks undertaken by all creators and innovators, by all true revolution.
This problem does not concern the poet exclusively. I think a true person is a poet, an integral person ought to be a poet, because poetry means clinging to more reality, all reality. In the end, an intellectual, an artist, only differentiates themselves from others by their capacity to experience the world more intensely, dealing not only in facts but with imagination also. Stimulating the creative imagination of people, creating conditions for which all have access to true culture (that is, more than accumulating knowledge, but the profound interpretation and appreciation of that knowledge) is the goal of a revolutionary process prolific in its cultural field. A person forged this way will be an integral person, that is to say, a poet, even if their job is not explicitly to write poems.
Art is not a luxury but a necessity, and just like in the social landscape, Revolution confronts new problems and finds new ways to solve them, in the landscape of artistic creation and intellectual labor a truly creative imagination will propose solution to a renewed set of problems, and will find the means of investigation and expression to resolve them.
Art is the desire for what does not exist, and it is also the tool for achieving that desire.
I hope this Congress will not only meet the undeniable need to harbor information and exchange of ideas dear for artists and intellectuals. I hope for more: a discussion on how far we will let our victory over internal guerrillas depend on fruitful development and that an integral person, a poet, a new person, can become reality.
Havana. Congreso de la Cultura. 1968.
La guerrilla interna (PDF)
The Internal Guerrilla (PDF)
2025-12-20 06:01:00
There is one thing that I really miss in Bear Blog, and this is a somewhat more powerful editor. Don't get me wrong, I love Markdown but I’m also lazy. I definitely don't want to type out links and formatting codes manually every single time, like a monkey.
Since Bear Blog allows custom Javascript in the dashboard, I knew I could create a plugin to solve my pains. But being lazy, I looked around first and found two existing plugins that seemed to be exactly what I needed.
The first one was from Herman (the creator of Bear Blog), embedding Overtype. It adds beautiful syntax highlighting, but unfortunately, it broke the image uploading functionality for me. With the other plugin uploads worked, but the editor felt unstable and somewhat "meh" in daily use.
So I decided to build my own Markdown toolbar, and as sharing is caring, I’m making it available to the community.
It’s not a reinvention of the wheel, it’s a Markdown toolbar, after all. But besides the usual features, it offers a few specific improvements.
In the settings, you can toggle an Advanced Mode for even more features. This adds specialized buttons for info and warning boxes (you'll need to add this CSS to your site for them to style correctly). It also includes a rating button that quickly inserts stars (★★★☆☆) into your book, movie, or restaurant reviews.
To use this toolbar, simply add the code below to Dashboard > Settings > Footer content in your Bear Blog.
<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/flschr/bearblog-plugins@main/bear/markdown-toolbar_basic.js"></script>
And the really cool thing is, this works in any web browser, whether you’re on a notebook, tablet, or smartphone.
This plugin currently serves all my needs perfectly. However, if you have ideas for features or want to contribute, I'd love to hear from you! Feel free to catch me on Mastodon.