~*~ 2026 | 05 | 15 ~*~
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four website update in a row! look at me go. i am locomotive.
i think the pink text is still too small for most normal people, & i can't get the new changes to show up on my phone yet, but i think the site looks a bit more readable now in a wide desktop window at least. it seems like the only reason i screwed it up in the past was because i didn't realise my good old epic space.jpg background was 300dpi. this lead me to do some very confused mathematics & get the text padding numbers wrong. ahh, the follies & challenges of fake computer pixels. surely there is no greater pleasure a young person can know than manipulating them using a keyboard. it is like being stuck in a safe & having to brute force guess the lock combination to get out, except instead of freedom you find that you are just in another, more expensive safe, with a longer code. i am so glad i do not do it for work anymore. posting updates to my own website like this allows me to feel in a way that the entire internet may as well just be my LAN, which is something i have ruminated upon since i was about 14 or so, being an internet-teen. i might have been that age or so when i received a terabyte hard drive for the first time in my life as a gift, & filled it up with a bunch of torrented anime & video game ROMs. doing that basically made me feel like a real frontier pirate. all of a sudden most of the world's entertainment media was in my bedroom, & not only could i access what ever i had wanted to beforehand, i could also navigate new realms of hip internet crap, guided by forums & internet communities.
this was of course transformative to my understanding of what sort of entertainment & art was out there, but not in a way where i found myself exposed to a large mass of resources of any particularly elucidating quality. most of the stuff out there is rubbish, just like any fictional or entertainment industry. the keyword there i believe is industry, because i don't think everything would normally be pulp if it wasn't created by & for profit. being exposed to all of the world's media all at once wasn't a magical trick or something exclusive to me by my computer know-how, & even if it may have been at an earlier point, eventually you get to the bottom of a very short list of things that are actually compelling by their own merits, & it instead becomes a game of picking favourites or settling for whatever the best-effort attempt is at an idea you might already have a predilection towards. it is by that same kind of idolatry that i was able to plaster interests as shallow & consumerist as video games & anime up at the very top of my personality, choosing to wear it like a badge even though i have never really had anything but distaste & criticism for either forms of entertainment. this comes accross in my appreciation of metafictional rather than fictional works, where i enjoy the authorial sardonicism & self-acknowledging nature of the works as entertainment fiction - it is indeed something which is & should be deemed ridiculous, & suspending my disbelief for somebody to sell me their cartoon demands far too much seriousness & rules. adopting a niche form of entertainment to either silently or vocally helm your personality with is the very stuff of delusions. i recall one of my first exposures to fanaticism in general, sitting with my cousin showing me the band "nirvana" when i was like 7 or 8 years old. i thought the band was cool enough, i liked the songs & the words, & i hadn't really heard music that sounded like that yet, so it was a novel fascination as far as i was concerned. i bought a CD of theirs in 2002 with my mother's money & have the band's logo on this hoodie i seem to have lost that i've sewn many many patches into. i generally understand the band in a culturally relative sense, & it has a symbolic, sentimental value to me in that it reminds me of my cousin. despite this, i was still quite struck at just how deliberately enamoured with that same language of branded symbolism my cousin became. she seemed to be so convinced that the songs were deliberately written by kurt cobain addressing her personally. there was an added, performative layer of engagement she had with the media that i didn't - she was being what people would call "parasocial" nowadays, simply by letting herself get lost in the fantasy that the sexy man's voice on the other side of the CD really understood how she felt & what she had been through. it made me slightly envious, in a way, & i knew at the time that i got a glimpse into something that i would really want to understand the resounding social effects of as my life continued, so i think i've always had a good radar for people getting into cultish, image-focused things like that. being aware of it certainly did not immunize me to its effects growing up, & since then i've seen a lot more than just my cousin innocently getting into a sappy band. in a lot of ways, i think this is why my criticism of entertainment as escapism tends to point towards the industrial relation between the industry & consumer. there is a direct market relation between me, my cousin, kurt cobain & his band members, the teams of executives that managed & distributed their records, & the lady i handed the $20 note my mother handed me so i could purchase the CD in 2002. there is a less direct market relationship between the people at the factories that spun the thread i used to sew my nirvana patch to my hoodie, the people who sold me the hoodie at k mart, & the people at the factories who purchase pre-spun thread to be made into embroidered band logo patches.
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at this point i have gotten up for a while to go crumb & freeze a bunch of handmade chicken cutlets. miraculously, almost as if by summoning it by blogging about it, i found my patch hoodie exactly where i'd left it - on the least used chair of my kitchen table. it always floats around that area, because i sit at the kitchen table to hand sew more patches onto it, & a lot of the iron-on ones tend to have their glue go unsticky, so it's always just in there for maintenance anyway. i like that it's a piece of me but i'm terrified of losing it, now that i lost another precious thing (a pencilcase that my mother gave me when i'd run away from home - it was full of medicine, toiletries, personal grooming tools, kind of like a portable medicine cabinet. it also contained some sentimental items from friends + relationships long past,) whilst out gallivanting in public with the internet friend who visited me from overseas. it's one thing when i lose something replacable, but losing stuff that i've customised or have a long & personal history with always sucks far worse. i feel the same way about fucking up my previous car, which had a lot of personal touches on it. it's like losing a handmade accessory - it gives me a kind of 2nd-hand sense of shame to go along with the loss, & makes me feel disfigured, like getting a special handmade earring or piercing ripped out & lost down a drain. it makes me feel vain & silly, but also sentimental & romantic. i think i have always been an emotional sap like this, falling in love with things & people, & things through people, & people through things. objects & subjects, clearly delineated. i think that's why i'm extremely choosey about what i dip my toes into, both socially & entertainment wise.
i think it is pretty telling how quickly people have gotten used to the ever-changing & extremely bourgeois world of contemporary art & entertainment. just making a film is normally so expensive to begin with, & then only becomes more expensive. it's incredibly weird to me that people can't control their exposure to it, i think cinema in particular is something that is explored by people out of a somewhat base curiosity humans have towards seeing images, in particular imaginary ones. in cinematography as a photographic art form, there's a tendency towards composition because without deliberate obfuscation, most of the figures on screen will be predefined, & as such need to be arranged into either a still or moving image. it is only once the camera can't be told apart from an artist's paintbrush that the difficulty in shooting a scene gets smoothed over by endearingly termed "special effects". suspension of disbelief is quite literally painted over the captured image. somehow, even amongst all this complexity, consumerism makes the experience trivial, & competition between studios puts an exponent on this.
anyway, in conclusion, i wonder how much of the status quo distraction-fixation phenomenon of modern mediaspectacle is native to the human condition. perhaps it is a side-effect of complexities in storytelling - i feel like it's a question that would be quickly written off by people looking to give a standardised, academic answer comprised of the modern indexes used to categorize & label all human folklore/stories, but i think what i am trying to examine is something a bit more detached & central to the role storytelling itself takes within societies. i have touched on this before, & i will definitely touch on it again, especially when i finally get started on bigger, more formalized writing efforts i've planned about it.
:) :) :) thank u for reading see u next time :) :) :)
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