[01] after 2 years... hello smol.pub!!

(apologies in advance! i tend to ramble a lot!)

hello, hello, hello!!

it's funny how i've had an account here for a good 2 or so years already, but only decided that now's the time to actually do something on it. well... these things are better late than never, i guess!

who i am in specific isn't so important. maybe one day i'll dedicate a blog to properly introduce myself—but you have to understand that introductions, in general, are a bit hard for me! i'm a 20-something year old person from the philippines. on the younger side, maybe? just in time to be barely within the target demographic for algorithm-driven "brainrot" platforms, for sure haha.

that said, identity is so hard for me to pin down. i was barely given the privilege to form one of my own when i was younger, so i'm in the process to try and figure out the things i like and don't like. if you make any references to any widely popular media around me, please understand that i'll sometimes give a polite laugh and go "haha, i haven't seen that yet. sorry! please tell me more!"

i guess which is one of the reasons why i'm here now.

so how DID i get here...?

i'll assume that i'm like everyone else here: extremely tired with the state of the corporate internet. sometime around 2022, after a nasty breakup and a weird downwards spiral (this is embarrassing when i type it out like this!!), i decided to become... an internet hermit! completely shut off from social media, dedicated to making a space for myself to grow by myself. i remember another good friend of mine has spoken very openly about their own neocities website and the indie web. from there, another sort of spiral began.

while i was confident in my web design skills, i unfortunately lost all my coding skills and left them in junior high... so it's no surprise that my drive for neocities only lasted so long. probably a week... then i moved onto forums! lurking around melonland¹ was super fun. i didn't have it in me to make an account, because the thought of human interaction intimidates me... sometimes i think i'm not smart enough for any in-depth conversations. but it was nice seeing all sorts of topics surface around—and just the novelty of a forum in this day and age made me so happy!! i was perfectly content watching from the sidelines.

i'm pretty sure it was there when i heard someone mention smol.pub in passing, not remembering what the conversation was exactly about. checked it out, and found it to be something that part of me really needed at the time. a comforting number of people on the "feed", an emphasis on minimalism with an option to still customize your blog to your liking with css if you so wish, no algorithm... none of those likes, comments, following feeds—it really resonated with me! how lovely, i thought! so i signed up, waited a good while for my registration to go through...

and then...

i completely forgot about it!

well, i made it as far as to create my own home page. i had a small blurb written, a draft of a post all figured out with some test pages. not that it was any great, and revisiting it now feels a little cringe-worthy. but that's just growing up, isn't it? except it's only been 2 or so years. but 2 years can pass by quickly with lots of happenings! for starters, i found a lovely partner in that span of time :) they're my everything.

i guess what i'm saying, life got better! i'm so glad. i've had a very small circle of friends who use social media, so i admit that i can't get myself to fully give up on it cold turkey. i'm on twitter, and i have a tumblr i occasionally check. discord is there for some online connections, while facebook messenger i still begrudgingly use for real life contacts (blehhh). and with my age, i unsurprisingly grew up with the internet! i participated a lot in fandom, in roleplaying, in fanfiction, in shipping—all that fun stuff!! i still do!! while i don't associate with any huge fandom communities anymore, i still like some cringe in my life!!

but!!

in the last year or so, i've had a growing fascination with the current state of the internet and the fast, mindless consumerism around various art forms in modern times. a lot of factors contribute to this, and this definitely won't be the last time i speak on it. for the sake of brevity though:

everything is too fast.

everything is too darn FAST!! my brain shuts down and needs time to breathe in the middle of conversations, but nowadays people expect instant texts back thanks to convenience. when a new series comes out, its usually released in one go... and so people binge watch it in a day, livepost their reactions while they speed through every episode, all to avoid FOMO... and then they move on from it as quickly as it aired!!

people are encouraged to consume, consume, consume very quickly!! and then move, move, move onto the next big thing without ever thinking of the last thing ever again :( or more deeply, for a fact. when they're asked how they feel about a certain piece of media, they often don't even remember 90% of it. or they fail to describe how it made them feel. i would know, i had (maybe even HAVE, still) the same problem!! it's part of the reason why having my identity—my very own *voice*—is still a struggle to me!!

i could go on and on about this, on how art is slowly being devalued by consumerism. and i'm not saying EVERYONE should abandon whatever is entertaining and go back to reading deep, classical literature and watch films in black and white. no, no, no... there's this really lovely video² on youtube about media literacy. youtuber zoe bee describes that art doesn't have to be "logic dispensers" all the time. who cares if you watch skibidi toilet and unironically enjoy it. any form of art (or "media") will ALWAYS drive some sort of emotion out of you. and that i think people need to let themselves sit down and feel it. describe it. if they want to, they can analyze the deeper aspects of it—while it's not a requirement, sometimes it adds to the enjoyment and sentimentality of art.

videos of these sort always pop up on my youtube feed. until one day, i found a video on digital gardening.

gardener? i hardly know her!

right, so this video on digital gardening and thoughtful media consumption.³ i thought it was a fascinating concept! i had already tried to explore my thoughts on media through my tumblr blog since the start of this year, starting it up as a diary of sorts. but i don't know, something about the post layout just didn't seem right... a digital garden, however, is a brilliant way to keep all ideas linked! in her video, anna howard discusses how a digital garden is like a huge map that you create from your very own ideas. a digital garden is your personal wikipedia and a "second brain". a repository for information that have value to you.

she, and a majority of other people who do this practice, use a note-taking tool called obsidian. but i found that to be too intimidating for me. pass!

so i tried to look for alternatives. maybe i can play with tags on tumblr to keep everything linked? but there's a tendency to have to scroll down for so long to find a particular entry... neocities was also an option i considered, BUT it didn't seem mobile friendly. and i STILL didn't know how to code, nor had enough time in my hands to. a concept similar to a digutal gardening is the "commonplace book", but my arms tend to hurt a lot thanks to how much i write and babble. arm can't keep up with my brain. i looked at reddit, i looked at how other people do their digital gardens...

then i found this person's beautifully fascinating mess of a garden!

i say that very endearingly, because it gave me such a huge inspiration not to make things look very perfect. in fact, the webmaster in question seemed to do it all on a phone! and it made me realize that it was okay if things looked unorganized—while maybe it removes the "linked ideas" aspect of a digital garden, it still oozes a lot of personality! and then!! and then i realize that such simple organization, the lack of fancy formatting, the minimalism of it all... it was very familiar!! i knew a comfortable place like that!!

so, it clicked and led me straight back to here. funny how that works!

making my own ugly, messy garden.

thank you for reading this far. i'm glad my thoughts can be of some interest to you :) this garden will have tons of them! i'll use this as a personal journal, a media diary, a quote collection... a personal notebook to learn new things with. a list of things? there are no rules in my garden, but i operate on a principal of sentimentality. anything i feel connected to, i most likely will talk about here. i'll look at art, think "what do i want to remember from this?" things that could be as simple as a feeling, a happy memory. it doesn't have to be knowledge. i'll share it here. i'm thinking of linking all these thoughts together in an index page that i'll make. that way i'll see how some of my ideas relate to one another! this is the system commonplace books usually adopt, that i'll borrow for myself.

... hopefully! i don't know how i'll organize things, but i'll figure it out along the way!!

i admit it's all mostly self-indulgent :) sometimes what i post could be, in fact, a bit cringey!! sometimes they won't make sense to anyone BUT me, and sometimes they'll be about dumb interests. childish ones, maybe. one of these days you will definitely see me babble about this gacha game i really love. listen my brain doesn't have the capacity to be sophisticated all the time, i'm sorryyy... but really, this is for myself! and quite frankly, as long as i'm enjoying what i do, enjoying the things i learn about the world... then i think i am doing right!!

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