💾 Archived View for ashley.cities.yesterweb.org › gemlog › 2024-05-03-spectacle.gmi captured on 2024-05-10 at 10:39:04. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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if you're reading this, it's prolly because I submitted this post to antenna. up until this point I have more or less intentionally not linked this capsule anywhere. I'm not entirely sure why I even write this stuff honestly. I'm not even entirely sure why I am about to call a bunch of attention upon myself, no less with a capsule this full of Very Questionable Content.
why do I write? some up in them capsules said they make art to make friends.
my writing could hardly be called art, but I don't think I write to make friends. writing about my latest mental health escapades sounds like a terrible way to make friends at any rate. and yet here I am. I guess I do want to hear people's thoughts about this post? I dunno.
hi, I am ashley, armchair extraordinaire and failed ASCII artist. welcome to my gemlog.
I wrote this in my head when I nearly stepped on a snail.
that has nothing to do with the rest of the post but I thought you'd like to know.
hi kids!!!
today we're going to talk about my favorite subject: not me, for once!
right, so we all know about the spectacle. big flashing screens every which way you look, billboards across the board, buy this, buy that, here's some tips for straining pasta, here's how to build a bomb.
today I want to talk about the *other* spectacle. perhaps a bit of a stretch to call it a spectacle, since you're never supposed to see it directly in its totality; yet it feels to me just as spectacular in some manner.
the spectacle of spam; semantic padding; bits that exist strictly for spectacular reasons. we've all been there -- cool super niche wiki unmaintained since 2012, but still paying for server costs; registrations open to anyone with minimal precautions taken against automated requests. we click on the "random page" link to get a feel for it and... just a bunch of markov text that continually repeats a few keywords and conveniently backlinks some car ad or something. sigh. click on it a few more times. same song and dance. SEO sludge exists to be easy to find by crawlers, but hard to find by humans. such obscure wikis provide exactly that. spam spam, lovely spam!
it has happened on geminispace too, interestingly enough. you may have noticed gemlog.blue's spam problem, entirely unatended. obviously that's because one posts to gemlog.blue using a web interface, which spammers do target. still though. spam spam, wonderful spam.
it's depressing really. also completely harmless? I mean besides using bandwidth that the spammers paid for anyway, and aside from externalities that would have gone unacounted for regardless of how that bandwidth was used... it simply exists. it doesn't do much. it is nearly purposeless. I mean, showing your car a few places higher when someone googles "buy car"? it's simply absurd, anyone can recognize that. and yet it still exists. it exists because of its uselessness, not in spite of it.
it feels like satire. like some sort of avantgarde performance art or something. like something you would expect to find spray painted on the walls of an abandoned building, among gang names and crudely drawn dicks. a cynical metaphor for nihilism.
and then of course you have the other other spectacle. the one I witnessed as a kid, with dad and BR; a washing machine discarded in the middle of the woods. not on the side of the road, but a decent way away. someone purposefully schlepped a goddamn washing fucking machine to a random ass bend in a forest road, unloaded it, and through some arcane method that remains completely mysterious to me, moved it a further 50 something meters, for the sole purpose of concealing their misdeed. and they didn't even achieve that, we found it by just taking the same path they took to get it there! it's not like they just threw it and it rolled its way downhill; there were, you know, trees kinda in the way. granted that was a long time ago and I may be misremembering some details but come the fuck on.
look I can understand how a human, in all their flawed complexity, would choose to discard an empty can out of the window of a car out of sheer convenience, even if it's obviously wrong and filthy. but what in the name of the flying spaghetti monster, the deep space kraken, and Brian the Messiah, was the washing machine person hoping to accomplish? surely proper disposal would not have been any harder than what they chose to do. and yet they chose to do it anyway.
why any of this even exists in the first place is honestly entirely beyond me. are we all just 8 billion morons drowning ourselves in our own filth, both digital and physical? I sure hope not >.<
usually I like to end my posts on a more hopeful note but I honestly can't come up with a way to do that that doesn't sound forced and cheesy and annoying and just fuck off already.
so uhh. we are all going to die, let's just be nice to each other please.
stay safe and take care folks.