Moving House →

Someone recently gave me a piece of advice regarding savings and bad jobs: always have enough in the bank so that you can, at a moment’s notice, walk into your terrible job and say “fuck you, I quit.” It’s not a recommendation to actually take that action, of course, only that you have enough money to do it if things become absolutely dire.

With that in mind, uh, Tumblr: fuck you, I quit, and I’m moving this site to Squarespace.

I started using Tumblr in 2008. I’ve been using this platform for seven years. That’s nearly a third of my life. You know the concept of brand loyalty? That’s what that is. Tumblr has gone from bad to worse to throwing the baby out with the bathwater, then throwing out the bathtub for good measure, because why the hell not, you’ve just thrown out your own offspring so you might as well commit to this terrible course of action.

Um.

This is all to say that I don’t like it here anymore. So much of this site is now geared toward something I’ll vaguely call “creators”, but I’m not including authors, or artists, or filmmakers in that description. It’s more suited for people creating glitch art, or GIFs of TV shows, or glorified Pinterest boards - which are all fine, but they are not me. I can count the number of people I follow who still keep straight-up blogs on this site on one hand, and god bless them, but this platform doesn’t belong to them.

I have 1,399 followers on here. My most popular post in the last month got 4 notes. There’s something hollow in seeing that disparity. I’d rather have a tiny but honest audience than a large level of casual disinterest.

All that said, posts will continue to appear here on Tumblr, if that’s your preferred method of consumption - they’ll look a little different, coming as they do from the new site, but there’s no harm in syndicating things here for those who might want to read it. Links to old posts, though, will point to the new site (where everything’s archived), and some extraneous stuff will go away.

The main thing is that I get to say goodbye to decisions like hiding blog controls from users, and awful boxed advertising, and recommendations for blogs that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. It feels great. I hope you check in every now and then.

Five Years

I saw someone write that in five years’ time people will look at the state of the internet today and see it as ridiculous - an over-saturated hive of squabbling, hatred and chaos, where the substance is buried under seventy thousand layers of hysteria and bullshit (I’m paraphrasing).

I think that’s probably a little optimistic. When people make comments like that, it’s usually with some hidden knowledge that change is on the way, and there’s no reason why it would be. If anything, things are getting more chaotic. Pornhub isn’t just Pornhub, it’s the Pornhub network, with over a dozen different affiliated sites with next to no grounding principles. Anyone can set up a Tumblr account in about twenty seconds. Think about that for a second. There was a time when access to the internet was kind of age-restricted; if not by your parents then by the sites themselves. Eleven-year-olds masquerading as thirteen-year-olds were caught out (sometimes, at least). There are at least two people on this website violating the Tumblr terms of service because of their age. On my old blog, there were at least fifty.

Not that it’s just age. There are people my age who take having a blog as read. It’s not seen as adding to the noise anymore. Blogging becomes a so-called community that operates almost entirely outward. We say that blogs are personal records, that we’re just baring our soul and finding common ground along the way, but there’s an awareness of audience that comes with putting your thoughts on the internet. My best friend accuses me of coming across as inauthentic online, and while that’s not true, this isn’t (exactly) the way that I talk. For one, I slip into an American accent a lot and make dumb jokes. I’m not quite as depressing, and not every conversation I have is a stab at glib social commentary.

To say that we’ll look back and say that this was just the internet’s adolescence is odd, though. Sure - on the one hand, the constantly-connected people in their teens and twenties are going to grow up and hopefully mature a little, while still using the internet to a similar degree; there’s a distinct lack of loud, proud, middle-aged people speaking their minds at the moment. But then again, there will always be kids. There are people turning 13 this year who never saw the 20th century, and that terrifies me. I can barely remember a life without a computer as it is, and we got our first when I was eleven.

I feel like I’ve missed something - on the one hand, being online has brought me my fiancé, the potential to share books with people around the world, and to connect with people who have like-minded interests, but at the same time it’s brought a great deal of anxiety, depression and fear of missing out. I think I have barely enough knowledge of a life before all of this to figure out how to see being online as only a facet of my life, rather than just taking it for granted as wired into my psychology, but I know plenty of people my age who don’t, and a lot more only a year younger than me who definitely don’t.

That brings risks with it - the chief one being that when you feel anxiety related to sitting in front of a screen, because you don’t see the screen you ignore that it might be part of the problem. The presence of hate from anonymous individuals in your life is taken as read, utterly inescapable; I’ve encountered at least three people (all of whom I like) who, upon receiving unwanted anonymous attention, found it almost incomprehensible that they could just remove that anonymous attention with a couple of clicks.

It wasn’t that they didn’t know how; it was more to do with setting limits to that access. If you put a lock on your front door, after all, it keeps the smiling philanthropists out as well as the murderers. In real life, that’s a trade-off we accept because we don’t really like getting murdered. Online, where you’re only really likely to suffer hurt feelings, it’s (apparently) much harder to do.

The internet is a wide open space, with no limits unless we set them ourselves. In this browser, I have extensions like Tumblr Savior, which blocks any blog posts that talk about stuff that repulses me, Shut Up, which removes the vast majority of comments sections, a standard ad-blocker and an extension that changes “I have all the feels” to “Ａ  ｓｗａｒｍ  ｏｆ  ｌｏｃｕｓｔｓ  ｉｓ  ｉｎ  ｍｙ  ｔｈｒｏａｔ”. Aside from that last one (which, for practical reasons, I only enable when I’m in a silly mood), they’re all because I need to set limits to my online experience to feel good about myself.

There’s this campaign in schools and colleges at the moment regarding internet safety, and it’s laughable how out of date it is. In the series of comics that come with the campaign, a girl is told “DON’T DO IT!” when she says she’s going to meet someone she met in a chat room - essentially, a concept that Tumblr actively promotes with its meetups and the reason I met Arden (and also others). Another person is advised to “report it” when they’re bullied online. Which is fucking stupid. There are no rules against bullying on the internet. We should be educating kids not to act irresponsibly or hatefully online in the first place, but there’s none of that. There are too many adults behaving irresponsibly or hatefully for kids to know better.

I’d say that we’re going to end up forging stronger boundaries between so-called communities online, but even there I’m not so sure - there will always be people who find it hard to negotiate boundaries on the internet (I’m definitely one of them, which is why lately I’ve been keeping out of using it socially almost altogether). There’s an awkward cycle of renegotiation, maybe, that I can’t see us breaking out of, and rather than it just being part of everyday life it’s going to become an irreplaceable part of everyday life. I’m just glad I got in at a time when I could - at my worst - tune it all out.

What I wrote about the election

Four years ago, I wrote “I’m surprised” in response to Barack Obama’s victory in the presidential election. That was it. His victory speech, a set of ellipses, and “I’m surprised” underneath. No insight, nothing. I’m sure I had an opinion - I had only been blogging properly (ha!) for a few months, but I still had opinions on lofty things like politics, philosophy and how to fuck up your emotional development (mostly the latter). But I didn’t express it. Four years ago, I’m not sure it was normal to do so. Tumblr was still in its infancy - Twitter had been around for a bit longer, but hadn’t really taken off. I know that blogs, and LiveJournals, and fucking Xanga had been around for a lot longer, but - hm. They’re not the same.

I had a LiveJournal, back in 2004, and it was… miserably dull. I wrote about myself. A lot. About websites I was making (or failing to make). About my friends, and people who I thought at the time were friends. There was stuff in there about school, and about music, and not much that really betrayed any insight. And that was normal. This was back when we had Myspace, a solipsistic nightmare in itself, where you poured more time into customizing your profile to give your cursor a trail of glitter than actually, you know, talking to people.

LiveJournal and Myspace also predated the massive, pervasive use of the phrase “social media”, because… they weren’t that social. Sure - there was connection there, but the emphasis was on soliloquy and not dialogue.

And now we have this weird, uncomfortable, in-between phase where we’re still effectively doing the same things but everything, everything is telling us to join the conversation. Get your fucking opinion out there, because you have to teach people. You, a fourteen-year-old girl in Texas, have this ineffable wisdom on the sock choice of Justin Bieber that merits not one, not two, but one hundred and forty characters! You, Ivy-League-educated fraternity boy! You have an opinion on the death of Andrew Breitbart, don’t you? Twentysomething men of England! Please, please tell me about how fit that bird was that you saw at a club in Liverpool last night while you were hammered out of your skull on ketamine! The world needs to know your opinions!

I think - and maybe I’m being overly cynical, or maybe I had a little too much whisky - that what we have is this situation where people expect an audience, but they haven’t developed the responsibility to deal with one. Your LJ or Myspace could be irresponsible and immature because no-one cared, but now, that fourteen-year-old girl is getting death threats for daring to touch on the subject of Biebs’s feet, the grieving kids of a terrible bigot might be stumbling across the words of a (clearly very educated) young man who expresses his grinning satisfaction that their Dad is dead, and where there might have been crucial moments of self-reflection that previously tempered the mob mentality that constitutes “laddish” behaviour, now people just pull to refresh and see half a dozen like-minded thugs agreeing with them.

And - and - it’s fucking pervasive. This isn’t something that’s just online. I honestly think that politics has become more divided because we widened the pool on who deserves to have a say - and while it was far from perfect before, now there are no checks and boundaries besides mass popularity. Twitter does not have an editorial board. Tumblr’s attitude towards social policy is to make a GIF. People appear on TV as experts, when all they actually did was find a conservative Christian publisher prepared to produce a short print run of bilious bullshit they made up in their garage. We pay attention to the hysterical ones - on both sides - because they grab your attention. They drive up ratings. They sell products. They’re short, snappy, and for the most part full of shit. I’m guilty of buying into this. I follow The Atlantic on Tumblr, and for the most part I’ve only ever clicked the meaningless little red heart next to quotes of three lines or less.

Whoever won yesterday, at whatever level, moderation lost.

I’m going to end with a link. It’s this. I don’t want to explain it, but that people like that exist at least gives me a glimmer of hope.

Just a quick one, as I’m on a roll today and I don’t really want to slow down - Tumblr released a long-overdue update to their app today, and it more than meets expectations. There are a few curious decisions (a deliberate exclusion of the fan mail feature), but by and large it’s more than welcome. It looks stunning, and it runs a lot faster than its clunky predecessor. If you don’t already have it, you can get it here.

Clearing Out

I am in the process of negotiating a bit of a lifestyle shift. If all goes swimmingly, over the next few months I should be going from a jobless undergraduate with crazy sleeping patterns and a total lack of focus, to a Married Man - which, in this instance, means someone with a) a job, b) a more focused approach when it comes to getting shit done, and c) a person to love and cherish and stuff and yeah and you get the idea.

While the latter is very nice (and if you want to help that happen, you can always shimmy on over here), the other two are important. The first, because at this point in my life it more or less facilitates everything else (including the third part), but also the second because for the first time in my life, apart from employment, I don’t have to do anything.

This deserves elaboration. I was a kid who always cared about getting his homework done. This didn’t mean that I always did it first - just that when I didn’t, it had a habit of hanging over me. As time went by, and study became more independent, the importance of the homework increased, to the point where I spent three years doing a degree that more or less relied on home study.

You might be seeing where this is going. Anyone who’s ever done an arts degree knows that the limits you set to your study are largely arbitrary. There is always more homework. I can say that I’ll read papers A, B and C today, but the fact that D, E, F all the way down to AAAAAZ remain unread gets me a little stressed out. It’s why I haven’t been writing as much, or at all, in recent months/years - there has always been the big scary spectre of More Homework hanging over me.

And yes, I know that some jobs can take over your life, and that the work of the self-employed is never done (I’m not looking to be self-employed), but let’s make it fairly simple - most jobs have discrete hours, that start and end, and their influence doesn’t bleed into your home. Which means no more homework.

That’s huge.

All of a sudden, I have this time that I can devote to anything. Even job hunting has its limits - there are only so many places you can call up, only so many jobs you can apply for. And that means actually taking stock of the so-called leisurely pursuits in my life and moulding them into something that I’d like to see.

I’m going to leave my new approach to writing for a future post - mainly because it’s still stewing over right now - but I’m more interested right now in reading. In part because, despite the strains of having other stuff to read, I’m already starting to read for pleasure again (I just finished Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins - gripping, exciting, wholly enjoyable and also awfully written), but I could do with refining my attitude and what I spend time on.

This brings me to the internet.

I already have a decent approach to Tumblr. I follow 128 blogs, but I make a point of mostly not following people (other than my fiancé) who post more than a couple of times per day (current followers: this is why I am not following you). I have a few friends through here that resist the urge to constantly post, and of course there are one or two exceptions to the rule, but I generally have the ability to sign on in the morning, spend five to ten minutes scrolling through my dashboard, and reach the point where I left off - usually the previous night. This is good. There isn’t the nagging feeling that there’s more - I’ve set a limit, and I stick to it by being extremely careful about the people I decide to follow.

The same couldn’t be said for RSS feeds. After reading Brett Kelly’s post about quitting RSS entirely, I had a think, and came to a few conclusions:

  1. I shouldn’t take a different approach to RSS than to Tumblr.
  2. I still have some things that I want to keep up with.
  3. I have a pretty nice way to do so.

I was following some feeds through Google Reader that churned out dozens of posts per day - Vanity Fair, Slate, Newsweek, Wired and a bunch more. If I left my feeds for more than a day, I’d come back to about 400 unread items and inevitably skim through them all. This sucks. There is a lot of good stuff on the internet, and I was subjecting myself to this constant feeling of not reading enough, even though I’m probably reading more than most.

At the same time, other stuff is suffering. I have a backlog on Instapaper of about 80 articles, and I want to read and enjoy them all. I also have a literal mountain of books to read whose intensity is (thankfully) squashed a little by the fact that they’re on a Kindle. Throw in the 200 or so unwatched movies that I own, the number of high-budget TV series that I own in their entirety but haven’t seen (The Sopranos, Rome, and seasons four and five of The Wire remain entirely untouched), and I have a pretty shitty attitude towards consuming media at the moment.

The only thing where (maybe) I’m doing OK in is playing games. I can spend a lot of time playing games, in part because I’ve spent a lot of my life culturally deprived of them (I only ever had a Game Boy Advance, and this - my first gaming laptop - only appeared last September). Nevertheless, I have about a hundred indie games I’ve never played, and the only games I can conceivably be said to have “completed” are Saints Row: The Third and the first Bioshock. Both excellent games, but there are plenty others that fell victim to a shitty attention span and the fact that my RSS items were mounting up in the background.

So I’ve pared a lot of stuff down. I currently now subscribe to exactly twenty feeds. Only one of these posts with the same frequency as before - the gaming blog Rock, Paper Shotgun. Four post once a month at the most. The rest are largely down to somewhere between once a day and once a week, and that’s comfortable.

I didn’t want to excise the rest from my life - n+1 has some excellent pieces, as do The Morning News and The AV Club - so for the first time in years, I’m actually going to websites and reading them. Browsing the internet, as it were, rather than desperately trying to consume all of it. This all sounds very silly and facile, but let me put it like this - for quite a while, besides Tumblr and Google Reader, I haven’t been engaging with the rest of the internet. Maybe once in a while I’ll click a link from one of those sites, but the enjoyment you can get out of browsing designs like this has been utterly lost on me.

I’m hoping this marks a better trend in terms of approaching reading. I don’t know if it’ll stick, or if it can’t be refined further, but I’m setting myself on the right path.