I'm sorry for your loss. I know you said you did not know her well, but death, especially at that age, has a way of messing with us and making us think more about what we want out of life, who to spend it with, how we wish to be remembered. I wish you well on the dating front!
thank you -- even though i didn't know her personally, in a way, i felt like i did. we were both active on the forum and read/replied to each others posts often. i'm sad it won't happen ever again. and you're right, it has me reflecting.
love this! I was going to comment something similiar — part of my attraction to the slow web is that I don't have to focus on what would get maximum views if I don't want to. Good writing should always keep audience and context top-of-mind, but at the heart of great writing is authentic self-expression. That's the sort of stuff that sticks with people, as opposed to something they "like", scroll past and forget.
thanks for this, i find myself struggling wrt this a lot. i *know* that i would be more satisfied with my writing if i spent more time revising, and yet it feels hard to justify when there's so many other things to write about. i can imagine people getting really excited about a big famous writer revisiting and reediting their older work, but when i mention reediting some of my own posts i feel like "who cares?"
Really interesting thoughts! I have a master's in English and I heard throughout my education that writing is never finished, it's abandonded. You can fine-tune and edit to no end, so often you just have to put it out there. But the great thing about the internet is that you can go back and update. Of course that raises a lot of questions, which you explore here.
Also, to your point about albums, Charli XCX's BRAT remix album was described by her as a direct challenge to the idea that existing music can't be further developed.
interesting, I might try out some of your phone organisation style! I did a totally phone and computer-free 24 hours recently that I similarly found useful/illuminating. don't think I'll be repeating that too often, but I do find myself turning off the internet on my phone a lot now for similar reasons
i'm sure you already know! but i just wanted to leave the note! openai seems to be ignoring it for example: https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-anthropic-ai-ignore-rule-scraping-web-contect-robotstxt
Yeah it is very unfortunate that they will not follow it. I know this doesn't apply to neocities, but for people that host their own sites I recently heard cloudflare released a feature to block AI bots.
Absolutely, all the robots file does is state that you do not consent - whether companies listen to that (often, they don't) is another matter. I think it's worth doing, but I didn't mean to create a false sense of security.
new essay: https://sorbier.neocities.org/essays/webcurating.html
This touched on something I have also grown tired of, the public-facing aspect of online friendship, which has become a kind of performance. Great essay.