journal: july
weather: humidly hot with intermittent thunderstorms rolling down from the lakes. temperatures wrapped up with a high of 34.9 & a low of 12. it's been really good weather for mosquitos, which means the cats have had a lot of free enrichment every time one of the assassin bugs eating most of them has taken a wrong turn and buzzed inside. they've eaten at least two (and a moth) in front of me.
faves: widow's bay (tv), charlie sheen reaches out to the feds (song), kum koon garden (pan fried style chow mein), our wars have ended (podcast), judging the acting choices in the game of thrones audiobooks (pirated), setting up my traveler's notebook (peter pauper), watching [xyz singing like rent was due] compilations for theater and kpop and voting on how evicted they are, i-dle performing villain and wife at lollapalooza (youtube video).
complaints: i've accepted that i'm not going to wake up in the next few days and suddenly be in the exact right headspace to post a journal entry. so you get me as i am, and i'll just try to do better next month at saying anything interesting. this month has been one that i've really filled with coding instead of writing, and it's a struggle to feel like that was worth it when i'm still re-tooling and fiddling with my css.
friends: A. has been a massive inspiration for me over the last few months of my coding journey and i've been having so much fun working more firmly on a theme than i would have without his influence. i wish i could show you guys the bts stuff i'm privy to not just because i want to brag about me and star being represented by lace/hornet pixels because it's just... insanely cool. the closest way i can describe it is by telling you to imagine those green matrix-style oldweb layouts but as a throwback to brutalist architecture blueprints instead.
this month we've been really trapped inside the house by all of the work we have booked for repairs. a lot of this was less urgent when we bought the house than it turned out to be but i'm trying to be optimistic about it. yes it's stressful and evil and making me crazy and emptying our savings and eating up government grants... but we managed to get most of it booked for before the turn of the decade, we didn't lose anything we'd have to die on the cross arguing with the insurance company over replacing, and we don't live in any of the towns or parts of winnipeg that are still flooded / without power. each of those individually could have been my thirteenth reason and we managed to dodge getting hit by them (knock on wood) even if the prior twelve are still kicking me up and down the street like a can.
i suppose what's been on my mind most has been the idea of internet anonymity and how the current models we have for that fall short for me. i'm famously someone with horrendous internet hygiene and have in fact doxxed myself multiple times during my career as a netizen, so it feels almost silly for my biggest criticism to be how easy it is for your netsona to become just your real self. but part of the reason i've found it so easy to post my big stupid tweenage head and address (read: my mummy's address) was because there was no real barrier to doing so or consequence that wouldn't already be at risk of happening to me for as long as i was unwilling to post when i was awake and use the spellings and language i grew up speaking and successfully pass as an alien hijacking someone else's constantly-randomizing ip address. back when it was easier to find information about my cptsd from my main carrd i had some kind of a byf or index page that repeated that same idea: the deeply personal and private information that i share in this publicly is stuff that i already confide in my friends, and that is the only grouping of people who have the power to use that information to hurt me. giving it to a stranger is a net zero risk when they can't utilize it in any more triggering a fashion than some chump on xitter threatening to rape me. (and, as the recipient of a lot of different people's obsessive dislike, it also really helps to alleviate the paranoia that comes when someone leaks your priv on average once a year by removing the need to play cute with me to get these facts.)
i find myself making - or dreaming of making - accounts for specific things. for writing, or nsfw, or fanfic i just have clogging up my google docs, or reviewing music, or art, or. etc etc. it has, to me, a certain amount of kayfabe required to run an "anonymous" account the way i wish i was able to. i get jealous of artists i see on skeb who have a pixiv and maybe a twitter, urls like wwwww__09 and 0_x204, nothing else but the thing they made the account for. i think it's something that i'm always going to struggle with for as long as i try to be online, because i get something out of being online that people capable of running those accounts don't need or really want. i don't know how to just present the product and leave. i ramble even as i convince myself that everything i have to say is almost too obvious to mention. but there's a version of me in the corner of my eye who can compartmentalize well enough to just be a keysmash and an icon that doesn't have to look good and whatever i make in whatever form it takes. you can't pepe silvia real world or vulnerable information out of what she says because she doesn't say anything. she doesn't have an inbox, or read her comments. she makes things because she loves them on their own merit and for their own sake. what she gets out of having it on a blog instead of burning in a journal in her back yard... i don't know. if i knew that, i could learn how to be her.
i've been having a lot of fun on neocities, in part because there is less of an expectation for you to be serve-able right out of the gate. i feel like i'm oversharing so much and managing to say so little, because i am. it's not as easy to sink into the pattern of lots of sound very little substance the way it has been for me on sites like twitter and tumblr where you can be online all day rt and rb-ing and never say anything of your own. inversely it's been far easier for me to work on things here than it has been in line app and on nekomais where i feel like any monologues about my life or interests that are worth the time it takes to type would be better off as public entries. i'm not quite sure if this is the solution to all of my ills, but i am at least scoring it on a different metric than anywhere else i've ever tried. it's a better type of anonymity, where it falls to me to disclose what i want and hide what i must and which actually had the ability to stand up to the sheer volume of disjointed absolutely nothing i can quickfire out around me like a meteor belt.