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Wednesday March 2, 2022 — Taipei, Taiwan
New moon, new reflection.I previously did these posts on the first of every month, but I decided to take advantage of the end of January lining up with the new moon to switch over to a lunar cadence, which feels more connected to reality. This past month has been a strange little whirlwind — I’ve felt relatively ungrounded. I lost a lot of my habits over the lunar new year, and have been slowly building them back.
Perhaps the biggest theme has been trying to explore different ways to exist on the internet:
- I started using are.na again, which I’ve been enjoying. I think are.na has a lot of problems, but it’s been fun on the whole. I’ve been enjoying cultivating my from the screenshots folder channel, I decided to put the wesleypill reading list which I’d been working on for a while online, and it’s been useful for brainstorming a new social medium.
- I made a website to go at wesleyac.com, which is fun, since it feels easier to put random things up on the internet. There’s a little scavenger hunt there if you can find it, and I have some other pages that I’ve only soft-launched so far but plan to share more widely soon.
- I started trying to use Tumblr. I haven’t figured out quite how to use it yet, but it seems good overall.
- I made a Twitter alt exclusively for shitposting, which has been lots of fun. I think irony-poisoned shitposting is perhaps the only thing Twitter is truly good for.
- I’ve been hanging out on a BBS that someone started a couple months ago, which has been fun. It’s super janky, but it feels small and private and cute, which is nice.
I also got a reasonable amount of writing done:
- A 6 part series on SNES development
- A couple small technical posts: USB reset on Linux and some minify/gzip adventures
- Some thoughts about cryptocurrencies. I was pretty happy with this when I wrote it, but became less so afterwards. I still agree with most of what I wrote in it, but I think the challenge is that I wasn’t totally sure who my audience was. I have a coherent way of thinking about cryptocurrency, but the best way to explain it to anarchist techies is very different from the best way to explain it to normies is very different from the best way to explain it to crypto “leftists”, etc. I really don’t want to write more about this, though, so I probably won’t try to fix it up.
- Neurodiversity, just a quick piece on a use of language that annoyed me. I could write a million posts like this, and I usually try to refrain, but this one felt particularly important.
- How Websites Die, on a investigation I did into defunct blogging platforms, and some thoughts I had on permeance on the web.
- Tech, Industry, on my path through the tech industry, and where to go from here. I’m quite happy with this one, although it was a little more personal mythologizing than I’m generally comfortable with.
Other than writing, I’ve spent most of this month working, being distracted by the state of the world, or climbing. It’s been pretty nice to get back to climbing — I’m at the stage now where I’m getting a new V3 basically every time I go to the gym, which, for me, is the sweet spot of sucking so much that it’s really easy and satisfying to grow.
That does mean that I haven’t done much reading. I started Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching, which has been very good, but I haven’t gotten very far yet.
In terms of other media, I watched Tuca & Bertie, which was really good. I’ve generally felt that TV is largely a waste of time,Not to imply that wasting time is bad. but finding The Midnight Gospel, BoJack Horseman, and Tuca & Bertie recently has definitely changed my view on that somewhat.
