💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~mathpunk › 10-19_CAPSULE_CONTENTS › 11_JOURNAL › 11.2023.06.18_EXP… captured on 2023-07-22 at 17:24:29. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Something I like about the internet is the many avenues it offers for experimentation: experimenting with your identity, experimenting with the way you present yourself, experimenting with thoughts and ideas, coding, design, writing, whatever you'd like to experiment with. You could try new things, try on new ideas or identities or even new names without fully committing to them. It's honestly a damn shame that facebook and google plus normalized going by your full legal name online, for a whole variety of reasons. Not that you can't experiment while going by your legal name, but the fact that large portions of the internet don't think there's anything weird about making legal names MANDATORY reflects a change in the general culture that I think is hostile to experimentation.
That's not really what I'm here to talk about, though. I'm here to talk about some ideas I have for experiments I may undertake, some on this capsule, some elsewhere.
The Johnny Decimal system is a system for organizing and numbering folders and files so that no file is nested in more than three folders, and each item is assigned a decimal ID number so it can be easily found and easily referenced. You can read about it in detail here:
=> https://johnnydecimal.com The Johnny Decimal System
By the name, you might guess that it's similar to the Dewey Decimal System. It's kind of like that, but it can be applied to websites, computer files, projects, etc. I really, really like this idea, and since I was already in the process of reorganzing my entire file system, it struck me. Before going through all the effort of applying it to all my files, though, I want to experiment with it on something a little smaller, with less committment, in case I either don't like it or don't understand it as well as I think I do and commit some kind of critical error that destroys my entire organizational system.
The problem is that I still have back injury problems. I can't really sit at the computer for longer than it takes to write a gemlog, and even then that's pushing it sometimes. This project will have to be undertaken very slowly, and resultingly, some or all of this capsule will experience link breakage, disorganization, and general fuckery while I work on it.
I have a wide variety of different interests, and some of them are more offline than online (hiking, for example). I'm probably gonna join the fediverse soon (which is a decision that I will probably write a whole other post about), and an idea I've had for a while is to have one account under the name MATHPUNK and another under my IRL name, and keep them both entirely separate. I haven't been able to find any local instances for the area I live in, so then I thought: why stop at those two? Some of my interests are artistic (see: weird music that expresses weird emotions I can't put into words), and if I'm railing on about bringing back experimentation with identity online, why not just be a whole different person when I'm making music from the person I am when I'm coding or hiking or sewing?
If I'm being totally honest, the main draw I have to this is that I'm grieving the death of my grandfather still, and losing him has altered my own sense of identity in ways I'm still figuring out. I don't want to shit up people's timelines with sadposting and just being generally confused about who I am and what I want out of life, so I think it might actually be a good idea to have spaces specifically for that (this capsule is one of them).
I've been as gemini and gopher exclusive as possible for a little while now. I quit all corporate social media, including youtube, and I actively tried to reduce my reliance on web search engines (see experiment #4). The fediverse is what drew me back in, and even then, I didn't initially intend to ever join, just to lurk. I've discovered some cool spaces, as well as helpful tools like Invidious that have helped me slowly dip my toes back in the water, and I've decided I'm not going to completely give up on the world wide web, even though I do prefer gemini and gopher.
However, I don't just want to Consume Content. I want to create! I have two websites as of right now: my tilde site, and a neocities site. I don't know if I can find a use for both of them, or even one of them, but hell, I'll try. I prefer the way gemini hands control of presentation to the client; I actually think that's a much better way to do it than the web. That being said, I miss handwritten personal websites, and so I'm gonna go ahead and make my own! Hopefully it will look like shit in all the right ways. I expect this to be an even longer process than experiment 1 because HTML and CSS are a lot more complicated than gemtext.
I'm also going to join the fediverse, as discussed in experiment 2, but that's mostly because my wife is already there, and I'm working to try to convince my friends to leave corporate social media. I can't convince them to just quit, but if I'm already on fedi, I can convince them to join me in a place that's better.
This is an idea that's been rattling around in my head for about a month now. Web search engines suck, and are only gonna get worse, and all that in exchange for massive amounts of spying and disguised ads that are quite literally dangerous. Of course, there are better options out there (see link below), but at this point I'm interested in trying this just to challenge myself: go completely cold turkey on any and all web search engines for a week. That means no google, no duckduckgo, no bing, no nothing. I'm allowed to search gemini and gopher, but other than that, if I want information I have to go to the library.
=> https://search.marginalia.nu
I've sort of tried this, but never really stuck to it. Having the idea in the back of my head has been good for me, though! I'm currently taking a math class with course content that wasn't written very well. Typos happen, but it's clear this material was speed written and then never proofread. Often the answer keys provide answers to completely different questions than the ones listed, or the examples are just plain incorrect. There are so many typos that it's sometimes difficult to figure out what the hell is even being said. So far I've been getting through it with the sheer power of my google-fu and the help of my personal trainer who is also better at math than me apparently, but that's proved unsatisfactory. The other day I found a big, thick book at the library that covers the same subject I'm currently studying, and so I'm relying on that book instead of google or duckduckgo. Hopefully it will go much better now.
Note to my personal trainer who will probably read this post: it's not that you haven't been helpful, you really have! It's just that having this book AND you to rely on makes this less stressful for both of us than if my only resource is just you.
I know that the owner of a capsule is called a pilot, but I quite like the term "Webmistress," and so I might call myself that, even on gemini. I'll stop if I find that it confuses people.
Typically, these posts are written on-the-fly. I do one quick round of proofreading before finalizing them. I don't really plan my journal entries out in advance, and resultingly, I look back on my own writing negatively very often. I've talked about that before, and I once said I would try not to delete things, but I think I'm going to delete things. I'll keep a local archive of all my deleted posts, so I can un-delete them if ever I want.