Oops I Re-Did My Stylesheet Again

2024-04-09 // 757 words // 4 minute read

Having no archive and habitually erasing all the evidence anwyays, it might not be obvious that I’m the kind of person who redesigns their website every 6 months to a year. I’ve had a personal website since middle school in one form or another - Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, then in college hand-crafted, deeply amateur HTML. We’re way past the ship of Theseus at this point, past sports car getting rebuilt in the garage; it’s some kind of mania.

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I know Marvel Discourse is considered indescribably lame, but I’m watching Captain America: Civil War (2016) because I got it on 4k for very little, and there’s a lot to say about these early Russo brothers films! The techno-thriller vibes, the nasty and up-close fight and stunt choreography, the centering of two deeply flawed men as the protagonists/id/ego of all superheroes in general. It’s both really damn good and already so Of Its Time already (oh gods it’s almost ten years old ugh). A fun fact and perhaps an early barometer of how this flavor was getting stale even at the time: Finding Dory made $26 million more in the box office and became the highest grossing movie of the year instead.

// 2024-04-06

Similar to making your phone grayscale, stripping out the colors and fluff from important interfaces can be a great way to figure out what you really need and expose the bullshit for what it is. Enter 68k.news: Headlines From the Future, one of my favorite low-tech websites. It’s literally Google News but stripped of all its styling and images, for good and bad: every news item still gets multiple sources, but those sources are frequently corporate dogshit. Still, it’s better than visiting those sites directly and it can help fight the echo chamber a little bit, all while not destroying your browsing experience with many-megabyte pages filled with ads, videos, and flashy elements that distract you from trying to understand anything that’s going on.

// 2024-04-01

I deleted my Reddit account a few months ago now, but I can’t stop going on Reddit. I check r/all like a fool, and I check r/popular like a sheep; what’s missing from both is most of the good stuff on Reddit, meaning the smaller communities you joined for in the first place. So I’m glad I learned about the beautifully basic functionality of a multireddit – it’s just a long URL with the subs you want, such as “reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards+comics+headphones”, etc. Make a bookmark and you’re done, you have your own slice of Reddit. Will this feature probably get killed due to newly found obligations to shareholders? Probably! Until then, it’s a brilliant hack to enjoy life with more control over the algorithms.

// 2024-04-01

Perfect Days (2023) is an instant favorite for me and I’m glad I got to see it a cinema over the weekend. The appreciation of beautiful, simple things –especially nature, even in a megalopolis; the thoughtful and considerate design of Tokyo’s public restrooms and other communal resources; the minimalist, utilitarian fashion; the warmth and tactile nature of physical media; remembering that every day can be a perfect day, if you think about it the right way.

// 2024-03-31

Dopamine Was Never Enough

2024-03-28 // 1116 words // 6 minute read

In the latest issue of The Convival Society, L.M. Sacasas responds to Ted Gioia’s essay “The State of the Culture, 2024”, and they both have interesting thoughts on distraction and technology use. I like both and also disagree with them, and I wanted to get some thoughts down. Let’s take a look at the source essay first. Gioia, in his frank style, makes the argument that distraction is subsuming all other forms of culture, and that the peddlers of said distraction are a “dopamine cartel”, solely focused on creating users who are addicted to the low-quality content on their platforms.

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I’ve been trying to keep my phone away from the bed for years, but I’ve been blocked by the dumbest, should-be-simplest functionality: alarms. Standard alarm clocks are totally inflexible; my Fitbit has a Smart Wake functionality, but it’s centered around the time you set for the alarm. Only the horribly named, very Android-core Sleep as Android has what I would consider the correct way to do things: You tell the app when you’re going to sleep and it sets an alarm, monitors your sleep state, then gently wakes you within a 30 minute window of the alarm. The problem? You have to keep your phone next to you, under your pillow, all night long. Everyone else is doing it wrong and it’s driving me batty.

// 2024-03-18

I’ll probably write a proper post about this at some point, but in “launching” yet another new design for my site (hopefully this one will stick, I actually built it for content, now I just need to make content!) I looked at tons of inspiration. Here’s some of it: the Own Your Website newsletter by Matthias Ott, Dead Simple Sites by Arcade Labs, “100 things you can do on your personal website” by James Coffee, and of course my dear friend nathan wentworth’s personal site. The breakthrough came, however, from remembering the perfection that is Indexhibit, which I obviously took tons of inspiration from.

// 2024-03-17

// 2024-03-14

// 2024-03-06