ネットっていうのはね、必要な情報を得る ためと、有料音楽配信のためだけにあるの

if you’re reading this, you survived the internet for another year and made it to the housekeeping post disguised as a retrospective. the ticking bomb that is cohost meant I finally got around to porting most posts worth anything back to this site. cohost has since said they are staying up indefinitely to allow archive team to burn through their scrape, and while I was fairly sure nothing was ever going to be totally lost on a service with monotonic post IDs and mostly static HTML, it’s worth treating this site as a repository and not letting anything even mildly interesting fall through the cracks. signal log now looks more representative of what I’ve always wanted to achieve what that category. there’s now a blogroll that I’m slowly growing as I remember to comb through inoreader. feed templates were less of a hassle to hash out than I feared, so we now also have category feeds and a dedicated feed for VOCALOG. turn it into a newsletter if you want to make adachi rei cry. she’s programmed to kill the newsletter.

porting over posts made it very obvious that cohost’s demise had a pretty dramatic impact on my regular writing last year. you probably will have noticed that my sweet post about tari tari showed up in your feed reader after it was ported, as it was still one of my ten most recent posts. cohost will probably be the closest brush I’ll have with the teenagers that used to type out cell phone novels on T9, as most of my midform and shortform posts there were made tapping out markdown syntax, or using screenshots from my phone as a direct springboard. when the rot was starting to show around june, I stopped putting as much stock into it, and my energy really didn’t end up translating here with the same gusto. most of my writing beyond this point has shown only in the longform, and that is probably most attributable to needing to be at a workstation to actually edit and publish with jekyll. VOCALOG is still a forming thought here, but it does represent where some of that ambition has gone. as a broader ambition for this site, I want to give more space back to idle explorations and curiosities that don’t fall into extensive research, and that might involve a technical solution like setting up an email address that would make it possible to ingest posts from any device.

there are, still, other factors that I expect will spill over. my landlord is selling my apartment, and I’ve had the threat of not knowing when I’ll be asked to pack things up looming over me for the past six months. my job continues to demand more of me, with the fear that the rug could be pulled out from me at any time as we miss projections every quarter, assuaged only by empty words from hedge fund stooges. there was another slate of regime-change elections around the world that means we all hang in a precarious balance of not knowing. the specter of brexit has returned to haunt us. as someone that already does poorly with regulating their anxiety, having friends and everyone else waiting alongside you for the other shoe to drop, many even further down maslow’s hierarchy, only exacerbates it.

it is also often better not knowing. one thing cohost undoubtedly got right was stripping metrics out, and even as I am conscious that the numbers are more made up than ever on bluesky, forgetting how badly that can affect the psychology of posting is a lesson that has been hard learned again. bluesky is supposedly an escape valve for a more principled shortform, but even as I tempered any enthusiasm in my post picking it apart a few months ago, it feels like it has mostly reaffirmed the negatives of large platforms rather than any of the positives that come with them. the same algorithmic draws are not being tamed, the same mistakes on moderation and audience presentation are being recycled, and yet the benefits that come with a useful mass adoption that circulates a variety of subcultures sort of rests below the cusp of a critical mass. redirecting whatever energy makes me want to mutter there back into spaces where thoughts are less disposable, scrolled off idly with the pull to refresh slot lever, without worrying about whether they are fully formed, is a paralysis of convenient choice that I’d like to break free from this year.

to those still reading, subscribed or just passing through, thank you for finding your way here or following along this year. if you are still a lost child, watch the smash-hit anime ave mujica that begins airing tomorrow. the new year doesn’t start until I’ve had my cup of sakiko suffering.