in the manifesto for this site ("slop"), i wrote that this site was meant to be a place that i could publish my dumb bullshit. the only stipulation was that i couldn't publish anything bad, but "unfinished is different from bad."
that helped me turn around a bunch of essays and dumb jokes very quickly, but after april 27, i've been having lots of trouble writing. my university actually pointed snipers at us for helping set up a tent in that meadow in april. i don't know—it sort of forced me into a different relationship to work. deadlines aren't really as stressful as watching the state police arrest your friends, so it's sort of difficult to move back into a normal pace of production, either for normal life or my little bullshit.
i've tried, don't get me wrong, and as a result i have a bunch of projects that are hovering at about 65% complete. one is about 95%, but it has a social element i need to complete first. any essay idea is nothing more than scraps or rants that fold in on themselves until they aren't worth bothering with.
i'm terrified of becoming a "dead blog." it would be mortifying, and worse because i know that someone is reading this now, which is horrible because it means you may already think this is a dead blog. maybe it's already died! oh no!
what sucks about an 65% complete project is that it's not legible. i can't do anything with 65%. thats not even in "scrappy" territory. it's really confusing to publish.
here let me show you. this is a draft for an analysis of the 2020 movie Tenet:
The fundmental premise of Tenet, like procedural generation, is that the present (the moment on screen) is hierarchically more valuable than the future or the past. As the asset or the protagonist move, so does the world. In this sense, even as movement is the driver of time, it is hyper-individualized within a neoliberal system. The ever-availability of products (broadly defined) appears to bend the market to the will of the individual consumer, even as the precise opposite is true. The individual produces their own time, (Beyonce has the same 24 hours in the day that you do) and can account for it through their consumption. Slowing down? Consume less, or better yet, consume differently. Cut out streaming services or social media, or download a meditation app. Time moves around your present mode of being. There is no past or future that exists within this relationship to the dominance of the present.
what am i supposed to do with this? it's worse because i still think its a nifty point, but it makes very little sense.
anyways
right now, i have about 35 ideas for jokes and essays and projects. this is every single one of them:
1: add "last updated" comment to edited pages
2: website open from 9-5
3: caddy file server apache style
4: css for receipt page for cheap websites
5: photo dump page
6: this page but in cgi/php or something
7: a page that constantly updates linking a tweet or something to a stock price. really journalism coded. "apples stock is (down/up) x points"
8: moodboard. maybe a fork of tldraw but an infinite canvas for photos
9: fake store 🛍. everything is just out of stock
10: finally publish the stupid payphone archive on its own site
11: a page that decays live
12: a quiz
13: something with the at protocol
14: fishy.loan crypto scam joke
15: free lunch project where i only eat free lunches for a month and document it
16: a page that grows organically. pixel art?
17: audio recordings of museum space
18: a series of images. handwritten, alt text using textarea element? take up whole page
19: elevator pitch (voice memos but i'm in an elevator)
20: icon showcase for my dumb macos icons
21: webring. bother some friends?
22: social security number checker joke
23: 4 pixel ai model joke: "world's smallest ai". this has been done for real since i came up with it
24: ted lasso watch through but it only shows my camera and i don't laugh at any joke, but i do laugh at the wrong times (i tested this with the trailer and went insane)
25: infinite sit com cold opens (ai slop probably. maybe a way to gamble using this)
26: portable website on a tiny raspberry pi zero i'm not using and i hide it somewhere
27: essay on linda farley
28: essay on thumb-rat dough-rock
29: essay on e/acc (dissertation prep)
30: essay on [redacted dissertation chapter]
31: essay on captcha photos: "remedial captcha studies"
32: essay on my nice first gen ipad mini
33: essay on stupid indie web blogs all writing the same 6 posts about arch linux
34: essay on the most connected block on are.na (it's this one, by the way)
35: essay on the 1968 ballantine hall lock-in (ballantine's day)
36: essay on instagram infographics and social media praxis (for igwc internal use)
37: essay on johann joachim winckelmann, anime girls, and "retvrn" statue avis
38: essay in defense of brainrot