I'm writing this at 3 am, after finally figuring out the last technical detail in designing this site. I have spent a dumb amount of time working on this––teaching myself how to code from scratch, figuring out HTML and CSS, then JavaScript, then static site generators, and then just figuring out how to make it work (all of which, to be clear, I still only understand enough to get by)––and while I'm not sure if I'll always keep this post up, right now it feels really gratifying to just reflect on why I've done all this.
I'm a poster at heart. The only way I can think through an idea is through conversation with others, and posting allows me to do that. But I can't post honestly on social media. I am constrained by content moderation, sure, but more immediately, I'm constrained socially. I've never been a shitposter or had a burner account because I don't believe these provide any real anonymity––one can always be doxxed––nor have I found an "online community" (gay) that I can commit to. So I post as myself, and my audience includes everyone from my normie tech-bro cousin to random mutuals from high school.
But this does not speak to the real issue, because it's easy to just ignore these outliers and focus on talking to your friends. The real constraint is self-imposed, and originates from the self-consciousness of talking to all of your friends at once. I love my friends and believe I am particularly blessed in having so many people I am so close to. I can be authentic in a one-on-one conversation with any one of them, but groups, famously, create dynamics. These dynamics are more easily overcome IRL when you can look in the faces of your interlocutors and be reminded of their individuality, but no such mechanism exists online. Instead, you're speaking to the amalgamated mass of all the people you care about, which is intimidating and makes it hard to be honest (I'm thinking too much about what other people will think). You can't see the faces of the crowd when you're up on stage. So, I usually don't post, and instead just get taken along by the algorithm. Again, I love my friends, and I love what they say online, but the algorithm is not a conversation.
With this website, I hope simply to be authentic, and let whatever group I find cohere naturally, without any pre-defined bounds or norms. I hope I can use this as a forum to communicate with my friends, to begin (and continue) conversations, as well as a means to create new friends. Hopefully I can use this to escape the algorithm as well.
The tension, I am already finding, is in striving for both beauty and honesty. Earlier (or perhaps later), I said (or perhaps will say) that I am not trying, here, to create beauty by writing, but that is not entirely true. I hope to lead a beautiful life (LABL), and I hope that this website can be a small, but beautiful, part of that life. I have spent so long designing (and, first, learning to design) this site because I had a vision in my mind that I needed to see manifest in the world. Writing, the act of populating this website, for me, can be animated by the same kind of vision, but it is much more disjointed. While the vision I have for this website is obvious to me, what I want to write is often not, and I discover it in the process. This format allows me to indulge in that process. The greatest strength of the internet is that it minimizes the distance between thought and speech, creating no greater intermediary than the click of a button, and this is what animates and sustains every great poster. (And a poster is not a writer.)
I want to make something that will be here as long as I want it to be, where I can post unabashedly, as long as I want, as often as I want, or as short and seldom, where I can ask that you keep the browser only occupying half your screen with a stim video on the side, where I can make it impossible to get past the home page, where I can prioritize two things and two things only: what I'm trying to say and how I'm trying to say it.
And perhaps, in trying to articulate myself, you might find you have something to say in response, in which case I want nothing more than for you to reach out to me at:
