this is a fun coincidence. in my last graphic design project (which involved republishing texts of our choosing) i actually used the first reading as one of the excerpts for my publication, specifically the “website as plant” and “website as garden” section. now that i’m a working college student with little time to play around or even think about the idea of playing like i used to, making amateur little websites has been the closest feeling i can get to being back in my backyard making small houses out of sticks and leaves. i think that my website is like a loosely patched-together bag, with each of its pages making up the many second-hand charms scattered across it. i find the novelty of the patched-together “old web” (or just handmade web since i was not an active part of that time) far more intriguing and endearing than the shiny, manufactured plastic bag that is social media and would much rather bare my soul to the former, much more comforting space.
on another note the birds are cool as fuck i like them. i should add talking guys to my website sometime.
i think my favorite piece of technology is the piano. i like the piano. while not the same, the feeling of coding isn’t too far off; they’re both great outlets for expression.
the idea of creating a more ‘handmade' web takes away the pressure of perfectly clean, polished sites that the modern web often expects from people. personally, i am the type of person who both enjoys and prefers to have a heavy hand in the things i make, so i kinda hate creating using templates/little of my own input. i both often find the clunkier, more textured feel of websites made from scratch far more endearing and personable and feel like i can play around and experiment far more in this format despite the label of “old” being slapped onto this style of web. people sometimes use old to refer to things that are arbitrary, overly restrictive, and not moving in a progressive direction, but i feel like the “new” web fits more into this category than the old one does.
on another note, fishes and flying things was fun to look through (due to the presence of fishes and flying things) and felt like something an amateur like myself could recreate. i also liked gorge; i really want to become more familiar with timing and intervals in javascript and how the whole process of having things show up randomly is done.
the amount of ads i see whenever i simply try to click on a website or read an article is gonna turn me into the joker one day i swear to god. it practically kills the user experience; they always cover whatever i’m trying to read and cause the website to reload or crash a bajillion times. by comparison, the small web feels comfortably silent. when viewing handmade websites, i feel like i can simply take in the content without distractions or external stimuli. i tend to view personal websites on neocities mostly, but i kinda wanna try going through the wayback machine sometime to rediscover what websites looked like back when i was a kid or before i even existed. i liked looking through the example the author provided of the personal ascii art archive since i’m a big ascii art guy.
i was overwhelmed in a good way when the reading started. i first attempted to read the article by clicked each of the pop-ups as they showed up, but i was unable to catch up with everything fast enough and just read through each article individually while ignoring all of the notifications.
the section on social media serialization immediately made me think of how instagram always feels like it’s trying to play catch-up with other sites given how many new and dumb features/ui changes it keeps making these days. i remember when instagram stories first became a thing; everyone was talking about how dumb it was that they were trying to copy snapchat’s whole deal. fast forward however many years later, and now they have this “instagram maps” feature that makes no sense (i immediately turned it off lol).
also, i really like the design of the website. the color choices paired with the gradients are really nice.
fear of the unknown sucks; it’s very easy and far more comfortable to not question anything or imagine the prospect of a different world at all! (sarcastic)
i think that while a lot of people are good at pointing out what a problem is and what kind of end goal they want to achieve, we have a lot less people who are able to lay out a means to/process for achieving said end goal (like a prologue and an epilogue with no chapters in between). similarly to how the cloud is treated as some kind of mystic/supernatural force rather than a physical machine, the idea of a more utopian society is often perceived as a completely inaccessible and lofty idea far removed from reality (which I can imagine is how the ruling class hopes people keep thinking).
on another note, my roommates bought a window sill herb-growing kit recently. my parents used grow rosemary in our front yard when i was a kid without needing to exert much effort (to my knowledge at least), and maybe when i have more time to look into it/after i graduate (fingers crossed), i’ll be able to grow some of my own ingredients without needing to try too hard. this would be a huge win for me if it ends up saving money in the long run; i’m a pretty cheap guy.
this article reminds me of how much i miss playing catch. these days, i rarely go out/interact with any space that doesn’t involve a monetary transaction of some sort (going out to eat or going shopping being the most obvious examples). occasionally, i will get ads for “adult playgrounds“ or interactive spaces in general that are marketed towards adults that always cost upwards of twenty dollars to get in. that aspect of them always pisses me off; i don’t want to give someone twenty dollars in order to play. there’s an art museum in my home town that’s free admission; my friends and i used to go and admire its exhibitions for hours when i was in high school. the only place i can think of that i regularly go to for free anymore would be my school’s library, but rarely have i ever just wandered through its shelves and spent genuine time with the books there. i should really go to a park again, or just play in the snow sometime now that the semester’s over.