Part Zero: I Was About To Publish This And Then I Looked At The Date And Realized What Day It Is Today
first off, today marks one year since the escalation of violence in palestine by the occupying israeli state. i'm fucking sick and tired of seeing people say "ohhhh the News is so bad, i just avoid it :(" or "dont burn yourself out uwu you're just one person!" so i'm here to say: you do have an obligation to at least do something as small as boost a palestinian's gofundme or tell someone to knock it off when they try to bothsides a genocide. hot new challenge, every time you go to go vaguely complain about ~the state of the world~, shut up and go donate to Crips 4 Esims or support a family like cohost alum Val K Wise is doing instead. or pick up a fundraiser off of gazafunds dot com! the first time i heard about anti-zionist organizing was when i learned about people opposing canada manufacturing and selling weapons to israel when i was in middle school, but i didn't have the context for why canada was doing this and i assumed it was general anti-war organizing. i wish this wasn't the circumstance, but it's illuminating to learn the context behind it.
Part The First: The Death of Cohost And My Return To Bloging
i'm having a problem where i keep finding someone's blog, adding them to the rss reader, looking at their links page, seeing a bunch more blogs, opening them and add them to the rss reader, see blogs on their links page, and so on and so forth. realistically, i am not going to keep all of these in my reader indefinitely -- i will prune some once they show up a couple times and i realize i'm consistently thinking "god, this jerkoff again? i don't wanna read whatever this is". so i'm going to make my obligatory cohost post-chost eulogy post while i de-stress from rss for a bit.
i've said it before, and i'll say it again, but as much as i loved cohost, i really do not relate to what a lot of people are saying about it.
cohost was not an untouchable paragon away from twitter and tumblr for me the way a lot of people seemed to feel about it in their own retrospectives. it was, legit, just a Fourth Website. what i'm going to miss most is the connections i made on there and that it encouraged me to come out of my shell a bit and become ever-so-slightly more of a computer-toucher, both for good and for ill. i think "that site wasn't gonna last and you need to stop blowing up at people who are more cynical than you about it" and "that site meant a lot to me and i really enjoyed my time there and i want people to take their experiences there and build on them going forward" can and should co-exist. in fact i think you kinda gotta accept that people are, in a less-than-polite fashion, going to nitpick and bring up big, fundimental issues with things you like and are important to you, and even embrace it sometimes. i use tumblr and twitter, i'm not exempt from "you use a website that sucks", and i don't get defensive when people point it out.
don't let my dour tone fool you, cohost was a net positive in my life. i just love being a cynical vibe-killer and contrarian, and seeing all the sugary "cohost saved my life uwu" tributes awakens something moldy and noxious in my shrivelled little heart. i gained an appreciation for writing brief-but-evocative alt text on my images, and one of the discussions on the site introduced me to the essay "Against Access" by John Lee Clarke about how, sometimes, people don't want your damn "accommodations" to be let into the world of the status quo. i met a lot of new people, and through osmosis i learned a little bit about Computer Touching -- enough to be comfortable running a commandline download of my cohost page. there were some issues with how cohost handled cropping images, but they didn't get crunched to hell like they would if i uploaded them on tumblr or twitter. i wouldn't have returned to blogging, however briefly i do so, without cohost. i probably would have just let this site moulder and eventually fall to bitrot, which is sad to think about. also, even though i call it Just a Fourth Website, i do enjoy that it encouraged me to think about being more intentional with how i use the internet and social media and screentime, even if i'm terminally incapable of following through on it. i wish cohost encouraged me to touch grass, but my screentime pre-cohost, during-cohost, and post-cohost are all pretty much the same -- too much. also i REALLY love how content warnings worked on cohost and i basically used them as an extension of tumblr readmore culture, where you would put more personal or distressing posts under a "read more" cut, so they would be opt-in posts for people who didn't want to be blasted in the face with yet another one of your mental breakdowns. apparently this is "mastodon culture" and something the staff wanted to get away from but too bad, i used the CW feature frivilously and for things that weren't necessarily "triggering" topics.
i'm also going to miss the nsfw culture there. it was the first place i ever felt comfortable enough to publicly engage with my own sexuality -- not in the bisexuality sense, but in the being a sexual person sense. i won't get into details since this is not an 18+ website (...yet?), but it was exciting and freeing to be able to learn how to be flirty and sexual at people and have them respond in kind. it's a shame that payment processors are so hostile to nsfw content. regardless of whether it's because of "puritanism" or "excesive chargebacks", i think it's bad that websites and apps and people are cut off from collecting money to survive because the methods of surviving they partake in include sex, which, even if it's not a part of individual people's lives, is a part of pretty much every society. it feels very bad that i am having this part of myself suddenly taken away. of course though, because this is a post about hedging my positive feelings about the site, it's not all roses to me. i have my qualms with how some of the TOS/community guidelines were handled -- in another never-posted draft, i implored people to put their trust in staff, because for some reason all the usual cohost proselytizers turned on staff and kept claiming that they would fall victim to the "slippery slope" of banning publicly being a sexual gay or trans person via the entry point of... banning all intentionally-titilating depictions of pedophilia, incest, or sexual assault. baffling.
i've seen rumblings of a "website league" being set up. it seems to be running on the premise of "we're mastodon but better because we talk about decisions before making them, nobody's allowed to have a global feed (which the cohost staff disliked about their website), and by default we have more letters than the average fedi instance". i'm not really interested in joining it, because i've decided that if i do join the fediverse then i'm going to do so with a self-hosted one-person (me) instance and i currently don't have the capability to run one myself. also, it feels weird to me that a bunch of people were extoling the virtues of The Personal Website and are now jumping to creating... a new feed-based social media site. not that i'm one to judge, i made a bluesky page to keep up with the nsfw chosties i followed, but there's a weird disconnect between what i expected to be a brand new, innovative way to follow people's personal websites even if the changes to them didn't follow a clean, posting-forward update (something closer to how neocities shows you a website updated) only to see that it's Mastodon 2: It'll Be Good Because It's Ex-Cohosties Running It.
Part The Second: What The Fuck Have I Been Up To?
not much. or like, stuff HAS happened, but it's either deeply depressing or closely resembles things i've already talked about in previous blog posts. content warning for suicide and general "wow why hasn't anybody called a wellness check on this person"-type posting. also now it's the next day (oct 6th) from when i wrote the bulk of the above (oct 5th) and i'm not sober (stout with earl grey and lemon zest, surprisingly good considering i normally don't like beer) while writing these so if you're getting insane tone whiplash then that's why.
in classic cohost fashion, i am going to make you click to read most of this. the tl;dr is that nothing positive happened and my life is not meaningfully different than it was when i last posted.
i was unemployed the summer of 2023, which is the first summer i had been unemployed for in 5 years. i don't remember a lot except helping take care of my dying grandmother and being very depressed that i was seeing more and more people unmasking. autumn of 2023 was the first year in my life i didn't have anything going on. i also don't remember a lot from that period.
my grandmother died that december, because she got sick from one of her outings because nobody put a mask on her and nobody around her masked, because "that's just the way the world is now". barely anybody at her funeral masked, and to my memory i was the only white person who wore any sort of mask at all, despite the halfhearted attempt to "encourage" masking with a bin of blue medical masks at the front of the funeral home. the "white" part is relevant here because a not-insignificant amount of attendees were the family of her life partner and my (non-blood-related, hence me being white) grandfather, a jamacian man. did you know white people were LESS likely to support covid mitigation measures, including masking, once they learned that people of colour had worse outcomes for covid than them? i truly despise that public health messaging has to account for this kind of thing.
i got covid in january of 2024. after i tearfully begged my parents to continue masking, considering what had happened to my grandmother, they both "agreed" -- except they just continued to not mask, and then my dad gave me covid because he went unmasked to his covid vaccine appointment and spent several hours at the library there. i got him to admit that he "should" be masking but that he still won't, just because he doesn't want to. i think that was the last straw in my trust in my parents, and i became truly disillusioned with the idea of having them in my life in the long term. my covid infection sucked, i had sharp chest pains for months, and i never saw a doctor about them because why would i? he would just tell me "it's just the way the world is now" and then try to force me to go on lorazepam again on the assumption that my continued avoidance of covid and insistence that people should continue masking is disordered.
in may, an artist i looked up to killed themself, and i ended up becoming the main point of contact about it online despite the fact that we rarely spoke one-to-one. they posted their suicide note on their blog, which then continued to post on a queue for two months (that link is not a link to their suicide note, it is a link to a relevant page of drop-out). a week and a half after they posted their note, i recieved an anonymous message pointing me to their obituary, which said they had been buried the day after their suicide note published. based on the posts on their blog, there was, at most, 3ish days between their death and their burial. i don't know how typical this is -- my grandmother was cremated and like i said, i don't remember a lot from that period of time -- but this feels like a rushed timeline to me. like, maybe their parents didn't want to deal with them anymore, being openly queer and having posted about recieiving homophobic and transphobic comments from family. i hate the sentence "thank you for letting me know" now.
i got a job for a summer. it was an office admin job at a summer camp, because i wanted to transition into a career that wouldn't kill my body the way it has at more physical jobs. art school was a mistake, i'm pretty confident in saying that now. i'm still an artist, but as my second year of living with my parents post-graduation looms, i'm acutely aware of the fact that i lack the mental grit to make a living off of it, at least right now, so i'm prioritising getting a job that will let me move out and only minimally wreck my body. however, in the "post-covid" world where people will gleefully get themselves and others sick because it's "just the way the world is now" and then balk at you for taking basic precautions to not get sick, i'm becoming more and more cynical about being able to get a job that won't mandate me sacrificing my health for them.
in september cohost announced it was shutting down. you already know my thoughts on that.
...which brings us to october. i'm still jobhunting, although shamefully i put it on the backburner for the last 3 weeks of september while i scrambled to get my digital ducks in a row in the wake of cohost's shutdown, since i have the time to do so. i suppose the beatings will now continue until my morale improves and i become employed again. truthfully, i am not a longposter. i said in my first neoblog post that pretty much any sort of longform wriitng about my life eventually morphs into something resembling a suicide note, and it's very clear from this post, nay, this blog that i have an incredibly difficult time being even neutral about things, let alone positive. i DO have an incredible amount of links saved from my bookmarks on raindrop.io, many of them unread articles. maybe i'll also do a links roundup post as i read through them. i've sunk a couple hours into using raindrop as a bookmark/read-later manager but omnivore also keeps cropping up in my raindrop-related searches, and the sunk cost fallacy calls my name with its siren song. i've also been considering looking into something (obsidian?) that will let me write in a rich text editor and then export as html for these blogs so i don't have to journal in an html editor of all software. this shit doesn't even have spellcheck!