welcome to remblanc 1.1

going through biko’s digital garden entries as someone who sees their site as something rather close to the personal ideal of running a website in this space, i can’t help but notice how deliberate they were in maintaining their garden as something that is, while at first overwhelming with amount of things to check back on, is, for the most part, very deliberate and thoughtful upon close examination.

things feel right in that place - many notes, thought pieces, even rambles and complaints try to not be dead air there. i am a bit self-conscious myself about what ends up in the status section at this place, but i can’t help but notice the difference in standards, and how we approach things on personal levels. even the most minutae thoughts have form, and with time it’s noticeable that the standards get raised and the nuggets of writing try harder at being more profound.

and i can’t say it’s a bad thing, because it does seem to succeed with that. most of the 202 notes posted there, sans three notes explaining how the format works, carry some meaningful thought nuggets, big and small. the commitment to thoughtfulness feels almost stoic, until you come across that one personal bit that dispels the illusion, representing something addressed at certain life problems and internalities.

this difference in perspectives makes me think quite a bit about where i want to lead myself with this status section.

unlike biko, i think it feels fun for me to throw out a straight-up junk piece from time to time (let’s be honest it’s probably twitter that conditioned me for this), which is why i now have a “silly” tag for statuses that styles things i don’t take particularly seriously in comic sans. i want to play loose and celebrate the silly when that comes up, because silliness is genuinely quite valuable for me, and i want to truly cherish that in my way, the best way i can.

at least i’m sure to say that we are on the same ground philosophically, in that we both treat forging websites as something to do in the way that speaks the most to the self, rather than to anybody else. celebrating that tenet of personal web is something that attracted me to their website in the first place after all.

these are side notes to my previous status, which is a recovered entry from a certain dead personal website.

the means by which i backed this entry up along with many written works from the website (without using internet archive) is going to be quite an interesting story for another day, but i really wanted to shout out the brilliancy of certain design decisions on biko’s site, which i’m awed by the more i explore the wrecks i managed to salvage.

this particular entry was based in the site’s “garden” section. i’m awed by this page because its navigation, informed by pure-html authoring workflow, was ingeniously low-tech, relying purely on id-based linking and plaintext hashtags, which encouraged the users to ctrl+f a given entry or category. the plain-sight visibility of metadata makes the browsing rather joyful even in the face of reference link rot this backup is infested with, and i am very delighted by that.

[the preview below is unstyled/does not represent how it looked originally]

fun fact, every status on this site has an attached id, which i intentionally added for easy cross-referencing for whenever i need to do that. i already showcased it above by linking to the status where i originally mentioned the entry i am talking about, but it is in fact a direct inspiration from biko’s garden that i just didn’t bother to visibly expose for now as it was on that page. i’m thinking of making it even more alike by bringing in the hashtag functionality, which is probably gonna have more of a dynamic flair due to me being able to supercharge it with an SSG.

on 11th of march, 2024, i wrote a response to a remark posted by bikobatanari on why they preferred not to show their age on their site [you can read it here]. since they seemingly left the internet for good a while ago, i figure that as the means of my personal opposition to link rot, i’d republish it for the sake of maintaining a living reference/context to what exactly i was even responding to. i originally left it vague to encourage some thoughtful exploration of biko’s site, but since it’s dead, i don’t think i have any other option to preserve the reference in the first place.

it’s quite an admirable way of looking at one’s age relative to online presence, i’d say. also, now that i think more about it, my original response makes me look even more like a doofus for not fully understanding what they were getting at.

I used to have my age plastered somewhere in my About page a few years back, but I removed it since it doesn’t add anything to my work other than satiating people’s curiosity.

I suppose I removed it as a way to reduce initial judgment and expectations regarding who I am and what I say. My age is not particularly important to the context of my writing anyway.

People can be somewhat quick to judge someone based on their age. It’s a decent heuristic, but there are always some exceptions—I’ve seen teenagers more mature than some 30-year-olds out there. They’re not common, but they do exist (though, given how things are shaping up right now, I think that such a thing will become exceedingly rare—if it’s not already).

If you were to read a large majority of my writings, you’ll inevitably see some hints about where I’m at in life, so you could deduce (or even find) what age range I’m in. Shouldn’t be too hard.

i feel like it is necessary for me to take focus away from my website and to heal up, partly mentally, partly physically.

for quite some time i’d been trying to make myself more productive, set up systems just to be able to do more things more consistently. i finally more-or-less got myself a working idea for such system, and i am kind of proud of myself for actually doing things i want to do now. this past month i feel like i have done more things than i was able to just a month prior, and i should give myself all the credit for coming up with a system that finally works for me without serious hiccups. it is still being constantly iterated upon, and i will probably be sharing it for the productivity nerds out there sometime in the future.

my problem with having a well-oiled productivity system is that working is something i feel like i need to be doing less of. for the past few, idk, years i felt like a constant failure in terms of being able to do things. that put me in a constant mindset where i judged my self-worth by my output, by the work i do. and being able to do work better does not solve the core issue at hand.

to put it simply, i forgot how to rest. everything feels like work now. the time for work is work. the time outside work is the time not spent doing work. even resting in my mind needs to be a productive activity of some kind, while the rest i do have is not something i feel satisfied with. i feel like a drone doing it, and it doesn’t feel refreshing at all to me.

worst thing of all, trying to fix this state also feels like work. and that sucks. it really sucks.

i will still be doing some journaling for 280, as well as maintaining comms and peeping on retrospring along with my guestbook. anything serious is gonna be on hold, though, and i’m sorry for not even properly talking about what i am actually working on.

gtg bye for now.