~*~ 2025 ✝ 01 ✝ 20 ~*~
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time, as we know it, is essentially a large, gay, majora's mask clock integer number, constantly ticking forwards homosexually.
whether it is recognized or not, it independently perpetuates its existence by way of its own function. there has always been time, & there always will be. i don't care what anybody else says about this, because they'd just be gay for even arguing with me about the gay science of time in the first place.
with that out of the way, is it currently 20250120024212 on the gay majoras mask integer number known to humanity as "time". the number does not go up like a normal number, because it is a calendar & clock made of numbers. the function of a clock allows you to keep in sync with the cycles of the world in much the same way as a calendar, but on a different scale. they are just weird counting devices that tells humans how far they are from their next boiled egg, or how long it has been since they or their ancestors were born, & also when the crops & taxes & such will happen.
i don't mean to write as if i am a nasally voiced british sounding nerd guy, but when i have things to say about time, & i feel they are the facts, that is probably going to happen outside of my control. i'm not sure if it is because i am trying to sound sure of myself, or if it is because i doubt these things internally & want to use the writing as a means of confirming whether or not i truly am at peace with my internal monologue - but one thing is for certain, it sure does come out sounding gay & annoying.
at these times, i feel like my brain is itchy somewhat. i always reflect on the time at the moment i write, because i feel that there is a great significance to each single moment of time. i dictate that the second i start writing is important. some of my stuff is only marked by the day, because it is somewhat rare for me to write a miscellaneous, freestyle text entry more than once per day.
the blog section of this website is an attempt to collate various scrawlings of text that i have written prior to its creation. a lot of them, if not all of them, were hammered out into the text editor of whatever computer i was using at the time, & then saved into its respective downloads folder (which would be full of miscellanea) under a datecode or short filename. after this, when the folder became too full & its structures were deemed inscrutable to me, they were thrown into a bigger, even more compoundingly miscellaneous collection of multiple downloads folders, each containing an abundance of media, including but not limited to my own arbitrary scrawlings.
sometimes they come from emotional upheavals, other times they prevent them. sometimes i just want to write because i think it would be fun to do so, or because i have a particular idea or frame of mind that i would like to capture. this is very much one of those episodes - i'm just trying to document where my efforts are at in the struggle between myself & the will to write. at the moment, i can see that if i don't go back & exhume the total corpse of my past writings, i wouldn't be recognizing the fullest potential of my own vision of what their collation may achieve. i want to be able to meaningfully reflect on myself in writing with forwards momentum into the future, so i should complete the task of organizing my previous writings whilst they are still small in number & whilst the experience of writing them is still reachable to my memory. i feel like without such efforts to consciously sustain consistency within a body of expression, my current habits of squirrelling away the writing into an increasingly self-obfuscating storage system make it so that the purpose of trying to write a blog is lost. that is why every time i find a text for assimilation into this website, i can untangle it from the mess of my own filesystem, giving me hope that one day i can do this for every file on the computer, eventually finishing the completely impossible task of organizing the totally splattered mess of internet media data that has piped its way into my house over internet protocol version four.
as for why i want to do that, i'm not entirely sure. i would say that especially compared to the years of about 2012 to 2018, my rate of downloading arbitrary data has slowed down marginally, at least somewhat. it is ever increasingly easier to become a rabidly passive consumer of meaningless things, & the thought of that bores me more than playing solitaire, quite literally. i do think that it is possible for me to spend time picking through the volumes one page at a time & eventually reach the bottom of the pile, & i also know that it is possible to optimise the speed at which i recognize each individual component of the mass as a separate form of its own. ultimately, becoming able to reach a fully saturated understanding of whatever material is dredged up to the surface of my present awareness is the primary goal of saving an individual piece of media for later, but the problem of overconsumption immediately begins to arise in the sheer breadth of exposure that comes with the territory of talking to the entire world's media archives over internet protocol version four. i have always believed that there is not much reason to go out looking for new pieces of media, because much like the individual numbers that make up a datecode, the media itself is often just a single article presented by its medium, which is often made up of its own articles of media. albums contain songs, & songs contain individual strucutures that are found in other songs, but no two songs are the same. therefore, an abundance of albums is the overabundance of unique songs. whether or not this is novel or interesting to its listener/viewer/reader is highly subject to the individual - perhaps this is the dreaded problem of 'media literacy', a term which by itself seems to call forth the bemoaning of the present generation's infatuation with an oversaturated, regurgitated industrial media complex.
i believe that no matter how basic the piece of media or how "illiterate" the consumer may be, if the individual organically is interested in a particular piece of media, the instinctual desire to authentically experience (or reexperience) the initial contact with the new concepts introduced by that particular work to the individual should illustrate that no artistic pursuit is ever endeavoured upon without there being another individual (the artist, director, author, craftsman, performer) & their medium (whether commercial or indie, mainstream or obscure, pop music or graffiti) standing inbetween their idea & its actualization. over the course of its creation from inception to production, whatever cultural subtext or context the art exists within defines the limits of the work's ability to be experienced.
because of that, it becomes inevitable that anything that is beloved enough to the individual to be kept & cherished as a piece of media (a book, a photo, an album, a DVD, a netflix subscription) becomes valuable, & that the current systems & the status quo will try to somehow sell the experience, or reexperience, as a piece of media. under the current systems, especially under the marketing of music online, art is far more likely to be found in some archive of media that is already owned by a financial or institutional interest. quite often, genres of music that are allowed to exist on publically frequented sites like youtube (which as far as human entertainment goes serves the current role of the "watering hole", as in a big, publically accessible reservoir/library of media) can be explored (& backed up) for free as long as they are left alone by the increasingly numerous & often automated regulatory interests that govern what media can be consumed by an individual for free.
i believe that essentially, even if somebody is totally media-illiterate, if they have the capacity, they will eventually happen to form a sincere, earnest & meaningful connection with a piece of media that causes them to somehow desire to "keep" or sustain that work's integrity, which sets them up for the inevitable sales opportunity that is interpreted as by marketing & distribution companies such as labels & studios. because it is the nature of the very same market who sells them this means to which they can reexperience their meaningful connection with the media to create artificial scarcity, it also sets the consumer up to have their access to that media somehow revoked - if not by something as simple as an expiring subscription, then by some kind of technological means of gatekeeping, such as the death of VCR tapes, the scratching of CDs & DVDs, or the physical destruction or misplacement of books. it is very common for gamers to bemoan the loss of the CRT, if not for the nostalgic experience, but because of the CRT's necessity when using older systems. this is a kind of chicken or egg problem.
it then makes clear that there really is no way to "own" a piece of media, despite how many ways there are to reproduce an image, sound, colour, texture, tone or otherwise reproduce an experience. as obsessive as i may be when i appoint myself the role of an archival librarian in justifying my stupid internet larp existence, i am treading the same water as anybody else trying to extrapolate meaning from having lived through a media-rich existence marked by an inane collection of experientially bespoke connections to media. in a world where media is increasingly & artificially made more scarce by the same market that supports its own creation & perpetuation, it is inevitable that simply by the passage of enough time, someone will definitely need to navigate their way through some kind of marked change in the means of accessing their media. fans of the cartoon "daria" may know that the licensed music that was used in for the show's scene transitions is different between the initial TV run, VHS release, DVD release & eventually netflix rerelease. this doesn't change the writing or any of the components of the show that were produced by its creative teams, but markedly changes the material subtextually, in a way that seems to deter fans of the show from being able to appreciate the archived rendition in the same way they experienced it when first watching the show. because the medium is culturally idiosyncratic with the media itself, the show is an example of how the act of archiving media quickly becomes an excercise with more in common with collecting baseball cards than simply watching what is currently on television - a stark contrast between media experienced passively as a transient experience & media as the monolithic cultural touchstone, unchallenged by time, constantly ticking forwards homosexually.
in this way, i believe "media literacy" quickly becomes a social darwinist's term for separating oneself from the masses who still simply consume whatever is on tv (aka netflix) - those who have not yet taken it upon themselves to instead turn their attention towards the more self-conscious task of trawling through the monolithic cultural mega-touchstone that is media at large. i suggest that perhaps they have not yet been sufficiently traumatized by media, or the loss of media - perhaps they are not experientially gullible enough to be lead towards the act of consuming media as anything complicated enough to be specific, perhaps they don't care to specify what they look for because they are simply ignorant, unaware of what lies beneath the surface. whatever it is, i believe if they do enjoy something authentically, the passage of time itself is all that is necessary for them to eventually become as alienated as anybody else. if they want to get their beloved album, movie, book, show or webcomic back, eventually they will have to defect against the current systems & be forced to try to make some kind of conscious effort to preserve media. it is specifically the creation of new media that seeks not to be timeless & monolithic, but rather increasingly self-destroying that are the most dangerous. the more dominant forms of media such as video games & streaming services are the most to blame for creating this wasteland of impermanent, meaningless media. the word "predatory" is often used to describe both the marketing efforts made by subcription based streaming video services, as well as the entire market of subscription services that have come out of the service-based, post-product economy. i believe it is these uninitiated, "media illiterate" people who are the "prey" in this case, but it's very easy to simply not care for the very specific & comparatively expensive media available from such services in much the same way that it is very easy to tune out of anything so all-consuming that it demands to be only relevant by virtue of being at the forefront of the current most economical way to distribute media. often times, in a gay, ironic twist, computer literacy gleaned from basic media piracy acts as a gateway to the world of free media beyond the illusive foritifications set out by globohomo, which has lead to an increased number of consumers who are able to save themselves from being retards that have to follow the bouncing ball to keep up. this is where streaming services, video games & i'm sure many other predatory markets resort to tactics of coercion - even the astute media pirate may occasionally have no choice but to shell out to a streaming service, perhaps an independent creator who funds themselves through a middleman service, but this too begets its own self-destruction, insured by both the monopoly held by the media's filehost & the private interest taking the role of the middleman. this is where once again, financial systems that regulate the creation of art stand inbetween the creator & the audience, creating a very alienating lockstep.
the status quo's zeal for being served media in this highly transactional way is not excluded from the ritualistic delirium that punctuates every other aspect of social reality under the current systems. it is not impossible to create a good piece of media under these systems, but it is impossible to prevent the systems from being a hindrance to the creation of all media.
the high availability of cheap, economic access to novelty media is a newly-borne landscape of consequences descendent from the hyperindustrialization of telecommunications. following the print, radio & television generations, we are now seeing what kind of new consumers will be formed by the current means available to the information age. in most areas of industrialized entertainment, i consider myself a non-contender, but one of my primary interests remains to be video games. it is very obvious to me, in much the same way that an amazon kindle is not actually any kind of guarantee as to the archival future of text & print media, that the kind of games that are built to satisfy the currently hyperfinancialized market are ones that serve as extreme manipulators of their playerbases, through the same lens that the creator of any game can be seen to be the architect of an illusion. this places games in their own category of addiction potential, & allows them to be similarly coercive in the way subscription streaming services offer exclusive, limited access to a phenomenalized entertainment experience as a service, until it is revoked or replaced, often by its own sequel, or patch or dlc. the injection of money required to compete with the established trading names in any entertainment industry remains to be the cheif catch-22 in preventing any real advancement beyond these limitations, & ensures that even if indies or new names come into success, it is only ever by following the same controlled & phenomenalized conventions that put money into the hands of thier regulators in the first place.
anyway, that's enough for one inane & dense blog post about things nobody cares about. i wanted to write more, characterising the new consumer created under these kinds of markets as an addict, deliberating over their complicity, but i feel i've said what i was trying to say well enough (albeit badly). in the future, i'd like to write more personally about my own travails in exploring media & reflect on the relationship i've had with it at large.
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