monday 3.31.25

it's odd to me that this year is a quarter of the way done. things are moving faster than usual, but i felt like this in march of last year and by the end of the year it had been a decade.

today i heard the word "germane" for the first time, which i recognized as a word and not the name Jermaine only because of its context in the latest Irish audiobook i've been listening to -- i don't mean to have listened to so many Irish audiobooks but i think it might be the fourth or fifth this year. anyway, germane is a word that essentially means more relevant than relevance. relevancy is germane to itself. or something like that.

so i finished my latest Irish audiobook which is maybe my least favorite of the lot so far, and i also finished (moments ago) the cruel prince by holly black. it was slow going to get into it but i knew, or had an inkling of remembering, that jude and cardan have some sort of entanglement. indeed they did, and the book ended with even more tension and animosity than where it began, which was quite impressive, and i'm looking forward to seeing what holly black does in the wicked king. i'm honestly only italicizing titles of books to pretend like i know html coding. but hey, this website looks pretty cute! women in stem, am i right?

welcome :) 3.29.25

I am a girl with upwards of 97 hobbies, a few of which are cornerstones of my personality and life and well-being, and for some reason I have on occasion found myself making a new instagram account to share them, and I always find myself later deleting said instagram account because that is simply too much effort. I think Putting Stuff Places on the internet is a wholly neutral activity in terms of the topics discussed in the above post, but I read it, I thought about it, I texted my friend Kyrie (hi Kyrie!) and here is a non-exhaustive list of things that are on my mind about the internet right now.

everything is profitable

on many levels this is good! yay! I love the people I follow who ostensibly started posting stuff they liked and then now are able to be business owners or cookbook authors or simply girlies with style and make a living income off of that. however, boy howdy does this make commodification of our interests that much easier.

if I had a dollar for every time I thought “here’s a thing I know how to do, maybe if I post it on the internet I could get blessed by the cold and uncaring algorithm gods and suddenly have fifty million dollars,” I might have enough to buy an iced latte. it feels like a sort of given right now, like if you’re posting content in a niche and you DON’T on some level expect to get a little cash in return, why even bother sharing? cynical, and I don’t like it. let’s do something for nothing sometimes.

everything is one-dimensional and niches reign supreme

I want to know every dimension of the people I know and care about, and the internet wants everyone to have exactly one dimension in order to project the profitability and longevity of each and every individual hobby. new hobby? no views, get fucked. but I want to see your new hobby!

complete and perfect or gtfo

it’s evil to expect ourselves to be masters at things before we have begun doing them. this is something I am trying desperately to retroactively unlearn for the kids that I nanny, who already are slightly averse to Trying and Not Being Perfect Right Now. they’re not big fans of a learning curve or confusing instructions.

different but somewhat related is our expectation of a Polished Self, which has long since been debunked by many famous rich people posting a ~real~ moment and talking about how social media doesn’t show everything (something in my discontinued Twitter-having brain wants to mention John Legend’s wife but I have no more context than that). despite celebrities admitting to photoshopping themselves and etc etc so on and so forth, whatever happened to just being weird and regular and present on main? what if I want to make a youtube channel but don’t know how to edit? what if I want to write a substack but don’t feel like rereading my drafts? raw, unfiltered, honey!

the necessity of being witnessed

in a real way, I love when people don’t see me doing stuff. the linked post above informed me of indieweb, where people make their own tiny weird websites for whatever the fuck they want, like a digitized journal made digital not for public accessibility, but for self-access and for love of a different medium. it reminds me of the horse game I played religiously as a tween, logging on daily to interact with my British friend whose real name I never knew (hello CloudRocks if you’re out there) who had a tumblr account dedicated to a specific rugby player (don’t remember who, sorry).

anyway, it reminded me of that game because each user had their own little bio that could be edited with the most rudimentary of HTML codes, and the way your bio was edited said a lot about you. this was such a silly, special little way of sharing my otherwise anonymized personality online, even though it existed for the eyes of very few people, and most often myself. other users made bios listing the pixelated horses that they were selling or in search of; I don’t remember most of mine, just that I was an Artsy Bio Maker and once had a monologue that until right now I could have sworn was a monologue from a Daft Punk song but must not be because it’s not from Giorgio by Moroder and I can’t find another Daft Punk song with a monologue.

(by the way, have you ever looked up Daft Punk lyrics? extremely silly.)

okay, point being, I like the idea of an archive for me and for whatever Neopet enthusiast stumbles across it by accident. my tenth grade computer teacher, the spitting image of Kung Fu Panda’s Master Oogway, would be so proud of me for considering reentering the world of Khan Academy HTML coding classes.

i am also an internet enthusiast in many ways. things I like about it include: all the people showing other people how to do stuff, Anna-Laura comics, Buffy the Vampire Slayer accessibility, seeing my friends do anything, that indieweb exists, the quantity of web pages dedicated to documenting Daft Punk lyrics, pictures of birds, a place to organize my thoughts.

test post 3.29.25

i exist and so on and so forth

soon this will be a blog