This is where the manifesto would go, I think. But let’s just have fun instead.
The web has gone to shit. I could post lots of intellectual stuff to try to grasp why.
Convergence of deplatforming and centralization of demonetization and cease and desist and confluence of derealization.
The wired unweirded as post-Harambe normies map a post-narrative territory procedurally generated by a foreign unsupervised language model.
The story goes like this: the industrial revolution and its consequences have been facilitating a society in which a spectre is haunting online - the
spectre is me I love being online and buying new computers that can download more stuff every year I like to post online too.
Online stopped being fun. They gentrified all the hikikomori hangouts and they told me I had to be on board because I’m a faggot, yass #pridemonth🏳️🌈 gives me life, Nestlé’s child labor slaves have two ethnically diverse Disney princess dads, please disable your adblock for the Lesbians who are fuck*ng b*dasses carrying out drone bombings with a Xbox One controller like a proud gamer.
Remember literally anything anyone older than fifteen will have directly experienced? Damn that specific piece of ephemera was good. Webrings. Spacer.gif. Minitel. Not being aware of hormone replacement therapy. MIDI. Geocities. Good shit. We sure should post bad parodies of that past on Twitter.
So. This web-log. This hopeful accumulation of posts (there is but one yet). Let’s make it fun. No preconceptions what it entails or what it is used for. It’s an exercise in courtesy and hospitality. A home, in which there’s no cookies yet, but if you show up at the meatspace one, I’ll cook chocolate chip ones for you.
Might be a twice a day or a thrice a year kinda “blog” affair. Who knows? None of the tech is rigged up yet. Everything is done manually. Even the link to this post on the home page is manual. There’s no real layout for the posts yet, I just copy-pasted bits from the homepage. No stats either, so you better tell me if you’ve read this, cuz I won’t know otherwise. Tabula rasa.
So the tech. Yeah. I hate tech too. It was fun working on it.
Here’s the fancy words, they might mean something to you? If they don’t, they should be fun to read nonetheless, those libraries have funny names.
At its core my development server is a collection of nope.js libraries duct taped together in coffeescript, and three watchers. Nodemon watches the server code, and reloads the whole affair as needed. My code watches the input folder, and feeds it to my Metalsmith chain. Browsersync watches the output, and live-reloads it in the browsers. Metalsmith turns the input into a data structure and manipulates it: parsing Pug layouts and pages, markdown files, and running PostCSS, with the SugarSS syntax. The entire site is written in languages that are terse, with syntactically significant whitespace (Pug, SugarSS, Coffeescript, Markdown), and uses the Tailwind css framework for nasty quick and dirty disregard for separation of concerns. I hate myself.
That’s my tech. Been using bits and pieces of it for a few years. I call it ACOWSM2k (for Aria’s Cool Old-skool Web Sight Maker 2000). Might turn it into a legit thing I support one day maybe.
It is barely functional, it crashes all the time, it leaks memory and takes like 5 seconds from Ctrl-S to page reload, it is not written in idiomatic JS, but it does things I want the exact way I want, instead of asking me to be satisfied with an elegant black text on white background flat design big photos front-end flexbox framework medium like and share on facebook and subscribe made with a heart emoji in a San Francisco coffee shop by some hustling trust fund baizuo normie who doesn’t even watch animé.
Let’s have fun with it. Longform shitposting and effortposting equally valuable. You don’t have to understand what it means when you step into a
house decorated with love rather than an Ikea catalogue. Might post manifesto and/or delete later.
2019-06-20