» postgarf :: mark «

mark 2024-10-07

:: fixer-uppers ::

so i haven't really been doing a whole lot since i've gotten vicerally un-chosted, other than setting up other social medias. one in particular is Website League, which seems like the next-step in Posting for now, but ultimately it does have a slight ring of emptiness in it's halls, but it has several of my friends so overall that's okay for me. nothing too bad. i like it.

but another thing i noticed fairly recently was that MY WHOLE SPACEHEY WAS FUCKED. like SUPER MEGA DOUBLE DONKEY FUCKED bascially the theme i was using was using discord as a prop to host all the shit it needed and THAT has been dead for a WHILE as a filehost and im honestly surprised i hadn't noticed for a while. like wowza!

but anyways, yeah my spacehey is up and operational again so have fun with that! you get to have some banger tunes play and the background snow upon you in glorious 18p. good stuff.

ciao for now, adiaux, kaj havu bonan nokton~

mark 2024-09-26

:: decisions ::

i was thinking about adding some changing elements to this site to keep track of people that see it, but i feel like one of the big things that cohost has taught me is that, adding a numerical value to attention is overall a detrimental thing. nobody will know how many views this page has gotten, and that's fine, because as long as someone is reading these words and refreshing the page in spite of that lacking numerical value, it will stay alive nonetheless. yes that means that websites die when you stop looking at them. so ALWAYS KEEP THAT TAB OPEN BAYBEE

<jk>

but seriously though. go through your bookmarks to keep that shit alive. sometimes are harder than others but just try to keep it fun, ykyk

mark 2024-09-23

:: finishing up ::

ok so, i think i've finally gotten this place more or less where i want it, as a little bit of preservation of my existence on the Net, with my links and so on, so yeah! if you want your button on my buttons page or vice versa, PLEASE feel free to reach out even if you normally don't talk to people. it's cool, we cool. i don't want to lose anyone if i can help it.

another thing, i just wanted to say how thankful i am to everybody i met on cohost; my last real place that i felt at home was a place much like this, just a comfy environment with a lot of cozy people in it, that shut down overnight kind of like this but much smaller and MUCH quicker (literally overnight), but i am very glad to have gotten to experience a real honest-to-goodness social platform that let me get out of my shell a little bit and allowed me to experiment with a variety of tools and just a whole bucket of «classic internet stuff».

i have read different people across multiple sites say things along the lines of "well, you don't actually want forums again, social media is a lot better now than it was, the dot-com bubble happened for a reason!", but i just want to say a quick rebuttal to, not necessarily the *point* or the *message* of that, but more so the sentiment. before everything finally goes lights out.

the main factor that separates us now in the 2020s from the "Participatory" Web 2.0 era is the free-range radical capital that was in basically every startup willing to accept the money. to be unnecessarily romantic, the Internet was evolving as an open channel of community and communication between individuals, unlimited by their physical constraints in meat-space, their social standing, how much money they made, how old they were (and so on), built atop the path laid out by the Old Web of BBSes and newsgroups, able to collaborate in this incredible rhizomatic collage of networks that let anyone find community anywhere. that isn't to say there weren't some Big Problems and Unidealities in this picture (ranging from the natural rot of "wait… how *do* we make money?" to social problems, often manifesting as a "boys club" or an evident lacking in diversity of race, religion, nationality, and more, or outright hostility, flame-wars and harassment campaigns between communities), which are big reasons why that dot-com bubble did burst and built up to the reality that they couldn't just keep endlessly expanding into this infinite ethereal on-line space, but it was nonetheless a future, you know? it was definitely, measurably something of a political, cultural, international, technological revolution, where you could look at this unprecedented vision for the future and think "this is something i want to grow and succeed, this is something i wish to add to! it might not be perfect right now, but i know with enough time and effort, we as a whole can make life better than before"! in the in-betweens of a Pandora's Vox of ISP/BBSes owning and using your words as a form of "spectacle", and the modern age of the Other 3 Websites where your voice becomes "content", where you are expected to make a spectacle of yourself to be monetized directly with advertisements; there was a time where you weren't directly made into some kind of product, where your existence didn't necessarily benefit anyone (at least financially, where at the top ISPs cared more about the platforms themselves, and the platforms hadn't reached the "actually making money" part of the equation yet).

all of this, because it was so individualized and people could express themselves so limitlessly, with so many options to congregate around and form sects and communities through. and in a way, a portion of that has remained valid in the current internet (it's not like it necessarily definitionally doesn't exist anymore!*) but it is through these platforms like twitter and facebook and google and so on that we have found ourselves shuffled into these containers to be packaged away, made into brands of ourselves, forced to play games that don't make any sense that you can't fully understand, compelled to compete in some grand skinner box of «global domination» and fighting for people's attention to pay the bills, to make yourself into something which generates revenue for forces beyond your direct control or influence. it's like, FUCK. THAT is what's wrong. it's not that the current space for the web is any less accessible (because it CERTAINLY is more accessible now that it ever has been) but it's just that, in turn, as the hours and days pass, the world grows more and more centralized and sterilized, and instead of seeing the money made with our faces and our voices and our hands being moved around the ring, it all seems to go straight upward. the rhizomatous web grows more into a tree and then into a trunk that just gets bigger and bigger.

cohost, for me at least, brought back that vision in an interesting way. not in a "capitalist realist" way, where we keep reiterating the tomorrows we inherited from the past, re-presented to us as these ghastly aestheticized spectres that seem to haunt us indefinitely, where "Ready Player One" becomes the basis of a world built upon memories built upon memories built upon memories, but instead in a novel way... where i was given tools from the past, that i was vaguely familiar with, and asked to build up from there. where *everyone* built up from there, to create art and music and entertainment for the sake of it! for the love of having this canvas to do whatever one desired, and people genuinely believed in the future of this weird and quirky and novel thing. instead of having to compress your words to an arbitrary limit and giving your thought that time-dilated twinge of being not being able to say what you mean, i was given a place to actually write and read and learn. somewhere i genuinely appreciated and, frankly, loved, in the way you love a library or a gallery or a museum. it was a place that constantly allowed for reinterpretation of what was normal, because there wasn't really a "normal" expected way to post. short posts, long posts, easy posts, highly detailed posts that rattle my brain as to their creation, art posts, blank posts, audio, shares, just so much variety in the medium itself! without even mentioning the people that used the site or the way this digital space was architected, there was genuinely so much hope in my heart for the future, because it existed, and because i was able to be a part of this, and contribute to it.

this is all to say, i am so incredibly thankful that cohost could ever exist, as the 4th website, just for a little while, so me and my fellow posters could make history as one of the last True Websites. with html, with css, with real, sincere, honest, amazing people. thank you, assc., and thank you everyone who went to this weird little place.

mark 2024-09-18

(moving this over here because it was on the homepage)

as of [2024-9-18], i think i'm gonna try to move to dreamwidth. but here's the rest of the prior post:

it was my main social media website and it's impending closure has led me to quite a sad place. may it live on in our hearts, on our sleeves, and in our minds with all the lessons learned from everyone involved.

mark 2024-9-15

so i think i've mostly finished my website; i'm probably gonna be posting on that dreamwidth website a bit more! i find it really interesting. gonna see what i can do about that on mobile and so on, but for me, it seems nice with rich text formatting and html stuff and external embeds; not "ideal" but nothing truly is, is it heh,,

mark 2024-09-10

yeah i'm straight up not having a very good time rn tbh. the vibes are rancid. i feel like i'm getting evicted and i have to move in 20 days. horrible. i love cohost, it's basically my home, but i guess my home is no longer. 20 days. october 1st. oughhhg. ouiuguhhghghjhh. no more bake sales, no more anything. damn.