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reader of my blog, i want to talk about blogs

Reading Time: < 1 minute

I want to talk about blogs! I want to make more blogs (including ephemeral, temporary ones) and publish something low-stakes and start a blog ring with everyone who joins in.

This is my corner of the internet — but I would like to learn about yours.

Some things to cover…

Why you should blog (do most of you who read this also have your own blogs?)
Ways to blog (platforms you can use)
- (and how to make your blog small, secure, gated, anonymous, etc. in the way you’d like)
- + starting a commonplace blog with your friends, each as individual authors or sharing one login
Making 88×31 buttons and adding each other to a web ring (and what web rings are!)
A bit on RSS, if interested
Time to make a blog post and silent commenting on each other’s posts

what is keeping you from making a blog. what would you like to learn about blogs?

alternatively, if you already have a blog you can just use the time to customize your blog or write.. :~)

when should i host it? what should we write about? how would you like to gather?

November 12, 2022 3 Comments

Things I want to do

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Particularly things you can help me with:

1. A communal town on the internet. It is public except for a few pages, focused on collaborative generation of common goods by my friends and loved ones. Inspired by tiddlytown, but most spaces are general resources and goods. Together, we might maintain a little barn where you can get adoptables (circa 2000s web), a gift shop, a bulletin board, and a house that you can teepee.

In it, first, a library that is a collection of commonplace books: recipe books, photo books, journals (maybe some personal) etc. with several authors, inconsistently published (whenever we feel like it). My friends and I aggregating knowledge through context-specific blogs in the form of a library you can read.

(I have other thoughts about blogs like notebooks with more quirks in this tweet. This might take place elsewhere.)

2. WW(W) or Website Website (Website) is the title for my studio and research practice around websites. Aside from being the space for my writing and experiments about website, I want to foster community around it – perhaps through a mailing list or forum.

Experiments that I do here will be collaborative in nature.

The first prompt I’ll release is a website where every page is a room that can stand by itself. The index is a big grid of rooms, laid out like a blueprint/floor plan. Each page is named like a location in space. There might be several levels, or it might be in one giant blueprint. You might enter a dining room where you engage in a Javascript popup conversation with a waiter who does not know what water is. In another room, you will find a bug that is shaking. What is the point of this? I’m not sure, but there might be one. This is a bit similar to the communal town, so I might combine the two.
In relation to Brian Eno’s Music for Airports… what would Music for Browsing look like? An ambient album released only through Chrome/Firefox extension made for browsing the internet.
A series of interviews about people’s websites. We have lots of artist and musician interviews. Why not interviews about someone and the websites they’ve made?
A series of website tours.

3. With Kalo, an email delivery service with pigeons and fish. More coming soon.

4. A physical ambient radio (I touch on ambient radio later) with Maybe that you can lug around. Instead of music, it broadcasts ambient sounds from other people who have the radio. Maybe they’re at a cafe, at the beach, at the park, in class, in their bedroom, or their dog is barking really loud. You can add friends’ radio stations and create Clubhouse/Twitter Spaces like “call stations” where you can just pop in and out of each other’s space, like a casual Discord call.

It would need some form of noise cancellation and trigger to start working, I guess.

5. I want to design a new audio player (and maybe cheap field recorder). I’m imagining something that can take a USB C flash drive (or whatever DJs carry around), no media other than audio. Great scrubbing, some sort of playlist feature, EQ adjustments, way to flag audio, maybe a way to record audio. I’m interested in doing this as a challenge at designing not only interfaces, but hardware with unique mechanics. If we design speculative systems, why not also design the bodies that contain them?

6. Publication on alternate computing & networking histories and internet culture outside of the US. An archive and journal.

I suppose this would talk a lot about memes, but I’m interesting in crafting a local history of the internet. I think an interesting archive that could accompany this is the hyperlocal websites that existed back in the 2000s (or now!), like the site for a small business, local non-profit, or the blogs of people who lived at that time and wrote about the life around them. When I think of this, I think of all the lives that were lived in the internet cafes I frequented: the unique networks, relationships, and spaces that digital networking offered us. Weird subcultures, etiquette, and practices that emerged in specific spaces. A glossary, memorial, and tribute of some sort; a recounting of personal narratives.

7. Close.events: a seasonal selection of software, writing, games, interactive fiction websites, etc. about digital intimacy.

I made a website for it that is now vastly outdated.

8. Maybe is a press that I am building out (especially once I have things in my apartment again). Specifically the Ambient Release focused on ‘conscious listening’ and ’embodiment’.

An ambient radio station. Shows are mundane conversations, commutes, coffee shop chatter, parks, etc. — the sounds of friends and the people around us. I ran a test for this.
An ambient cafe. A picnic and nice cafe drinks focused on listening to the environment around us.
An ambient listening party. Gathering at a strange spot to listen to the natural environment. We might even stream it.
An ambient dinner party. A sensory dining experience (but I hate the stuff where your senses are actually deprived) where we have nice scented take-home menus. I DJ an ambient mix throughout.
A collection of amateur field recordings.
A workshop about how to field record.
A workshop about listening.
A mystery cassette exchange.
To the maybe.press philosophy, any other series of engagements/prompts/art that might rise from this.

9. A rave.

10. To revive Girls.ph, ideally in newsletter form and the loose IG stories we were doing. I think there is value in documenting what my friends and I had loved as communities seem to gather around us — it’s creating a space for ourselves in the world. Only good things have arisen from being vocal about what mattered to us. It naturally draws the right people in.

11. Finish my ambient EP.

12. Lots of talks with Developh.

13. My paracosm wiki has been an on-off effort for the past decade and I want to publish it and create frameworks around them. It currently lives on a private TiddlyWiki instance, but I want to share it someday.

14. I’m working on compiling entries from this blog and others in an artist’s book. I’ve been loosely working on it for months but probably won’t be serious about it until someone really motivates me to do it or I secure some type of funding/deal for it. I don’t think it’s interesting because of the writing, but because of the content and context — and because I’ll design the shit out of it. One day, we’ll look back at the blogs of this era with a particular kind of fondness and sensibility for what it was like to grow up under the conditions I did.

On what already exists

Updating engine.lol and formally publishing it on itch.io, and doing more work around it. I love the tool but have been a bit paralyzed, haha.
I’m working on an idle-ish incremental browser-based gardening game that I teased a bit through Instagram. This will be the next big thing I release.

On the larger-scale

My long-term goal is to turn Developh into a community space in Manila. I want to create a library and community center that holds classes and events and small exhibitions, with a nice press and studio space to host residencies and the like.

I want to be the type of person that always creates communal spaces. From my new apartment in San Francisco to everything else in life I create: once I’m settled, this is 100% an invitation to come over and peruse my books and collections so we can sit down and learn from each other, and I can cook you a meal.

I want my whole life to be about creating spaces where people can create, so they can create the spaces they need and the people they love need, and so on and so forth. I want to constantly create worlds.

If you are interested in any of these ideas

I want to talk. hotemogirlfriend at gmail, DM me on Twitter, or 4752091571 ( I can only text if you have iMessage because my carrier sucks, try other methods if you’re not Apple please, sorry ! )

Last updated: 10/1/2022

Initially published: 10/1/2022

October 2, 2022 2 Comments

The future is a tiny internet

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Being written in public and expanded on.

There’s no shortage of talk on how audio is the prevailing future of the web. Clubhouse especially is bringing rise to this future, but so is Roadtrip, Capiche, DialUp, and even Omegle. We have long sought to use the limitless internet, unbounded by geography, to transmit ourselves and being long and far––for work, play, sex, attention, and the sake of longing.

Facetime and calls bind one generation, and I can’t help but feel like I’m an internet native boxed to another end. It was hard for me to feel safe in many spaces and I was accessing the internet late at night where I was desperate to distance myself but explore the world in hushed tones. Instead of raucous laughter over tangled earphones or the love of displaying myself all over an iPad, the internet felt most intimate to me when I was with people over long drabbles of text and chatlogs now irretrievable. I communicated and built culture around trends in text, because Americanizing myself in voice was difficult and the internet as a place of escape made me dread hearing myself. I was utterly unconfident, more of a lurker, and treaded amongst many communities at once –– only seen if I wanted to be.

Our current social tools make this kind of ghastly lurking a lot less possible––and I get it, it’s undesirable. On Discord, I have to go Invisible, but my name still treads in every community I’m in. On Twitter, it’s maintaining private lists and reading through them instead of following people. Reddit and 4chan are still the best places where I can maintain this behavior since you only are seen when you truly want to be (though they are the hardest to monetize). While ghostly, they are still the most tight-knit communities that exist. The cultures, trends, and inner knowledge present within a subreddit easily rival the sense of community in smaller Discord groups. It manages to feel “tiny” and welcoming, even if numerically it’s far more than that. While there’s sections like RPAN that allow for unfiltered livestreaming, new user subreddits that let you broadcast every single thing you feel, it’s still one of the truest spaces there is that product people are frantically trying to unbundle.

Peach’s usage of “magic words” presents new modes of interaction

Most Discord servers and subreddits don’t require a voice for you to be embedded in the culture. Your voice and sound is a sacred thing, easily identifiable––something I struggle with when meeting up with people. I know, it’s ideal for meetings and quickly getting rid of the tension and miscues from text––but there’s something special and comforting with instead navigating relationships and cultivating them through text.

No photo description available. — Garena Talk was a SKype/Discord-like client for League, used by clans and friends

I played League of Legends for years with the same circle of friends, never really speaking to them in voice. We would get together without fail every single night, even more in the weekends, literally playing 12+ hours straight for around five years. Some of my closest friends in the world are people I’ve never heard. Out of timezones and hecticness, my best friends are people who I share voice conversations with (and we went to the same middle-high school together) that only comprise a tiny sliver of all our conversations––the rest happen in online logs. Mentoring and teaching people, I also come to understand how advice through text is more meaningful and permanent (things I desire, even if the internet exists to resist them) than spoken words. Disconnect and connectivity make it harder to speak to people I love back home, but the words we exchange through text are never any less real. I like to think that I also exist more as a person to be known in the written form, never heard or seen by the vast majority of people who will know me. I dig that idea.

Cocoon - A private app for the most important people in your life | Product Hunt — Cocoon is a messaging app that focuses on private groups

So here’s a case for tiny, intimate internet spaces. “Tiny” does not have to exist in numbers, it can also exist in cultures. Little forums and groups tucked away and servicing friend circles and niche interests, virtual avatars that act as extensions of ourselves without the labor of presence, the ability to weave between circles with many pseudonyms (as done on archiveofourown), concentrated updates and dialogues that prioritize safety, immediacy, and privacy.
Letting people craft and segment their identities to fit different online spaces essentially mirrors what we do in our real life bubbles. Decentralizing identity and anonymizing ourselves is a powerful thing.

As younger generations become increasingly onlineTM, we’ll see the needs for spaces like these to safeguard the experience of internet exploration. Where we explore our identities, touch on global issues, and uncover global frames of knowledge––we do so in chat, learned cultures, and soft conversations––not radio and the out loud.

Houses Prop Pack | garrysmods.org — Putting together messy 3D worlds with friends on GMod as a quintessential Steam kiddie experience

It’s easy to read social media as a place where young people are constantly vying for social capital, but the class of people who perform for an audience is a small fragment compared to the hundreds of people who dwell, watch, and later depart to go to their own spaces –– if they have any. And even if safety and privacy aren’t immediate, obvious needs for the masses wistfully surfing the internet today––is it a cruel thing to want to offer this as we approach a decade of retracted deference to our data?

…

Things are obviously a lot different now. I’m unafraid to stream games live (and annoy my friends in doing so), have my face plastered across dozens of loosely interlinked social networks, and am one of the most easily investigable yet completely boring people you may find on the internet. There’s simply a case to be made for spaces where we can cradle ourselves in, carving out universes and spaces and shared languages through text and image and memes and all the glory of the infinite mediums we have at hand… these days, I know I am all for it, as I have been built by it.

January 31, 2021 1 Comment