💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 5-15.gmi captured on 2024-06-16 at 12:31:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

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Day Off

My partner needed to get to work a little earlier today. Something in that caused me to wake up, let the dogs out as usual, get our breakfast going - and then I looked over at the clock. 6:10? Must be running out of batteries. I go get a AA from the basement, replace it in the clock, look over at the stove to see what the actual time is. 6:12 now. Oops.

Snapped out of my early morning autopilot, I got my wife to work, and have now started a fairly rare day off. Since I changed jobs a couple years ago, I haven't felt the need to take time off in the same way as before (happier!). But I moved my music lesson to 1 today. I've just finished straining a few jars of cold brew coffee. I've made myself an iced coffee with lots of ice and a dash of milk. I'm going to read for an hour or two, get a shepherd's pie in the oven for lunch, get an hour or two of practicing in beforehand.

The rest of the day: work on a guitar piece a bit for my lesson tomorrow, and work on some composition. I've been playing around with MuseScore 4 and the MuseSounds package for a project. I've actually done a fair amount of composition the last couple of months. I'm trying to bang out, on average, a piece a week? I figure this might let me get a release out later this year, or next year. We'll see. It's been strange and uncomfortable and glorious expanding my creative energies to something I'm mostly unfamiliar with. I haven't done music theory since I was in high school band. This was, you understand, a long time ago now. I've never really done composition. And yet, I listen to what I've been writing, and I think it's good. At the very least, it's not embarrassing.

Part of me's been wanting to slow down, divide my energy, find time for everything. But for the last little while I've been riding the energy of the New Thing, and have been just going at it, to the detriment of my writing and practicing. I don't really feel bad about it? I've always been happy if I'm doing something creative and not, you know, watching TV or aimlessly scrolling Reddit or social media.

Speaking of the latter, I finally admitted to myself that cohost hasn't been what I was looking for, isn't what I'm looking for, will never be what I'm looking for. When I joined in the fall of 2022, I saw enormous potential in a space that straddled the line between Tumblr and LiveJournal, and which offered a potential return to long form writing, something I've desperately missed in the decades since the ascent of the core social media platforms. Sadly, it never quite got there. cohost is fiercely anticapitalist, queer, and protective of marginalized users, which is great, but which also manifests in the core problem of the platform: there's interesting stuff going on there, but it's nearly impossible to find.

So a few weeks ago I said what I felt like was my goodbyes in a longer post about the importance of backing up your posts, and I've checked in once or twice since then. No comments. And while I understand a lot of writing online is just putting it out there and trusting it might find the right person, one day, eventually, cohost's design means that I don't even know if that's actually true. Full text search being not a thing there, you have to tag with hashtags, and hope for the best. In a year and a half there, I never really felt like I fit in. I'm going to mourn this platform long after it eventually goes. There's a part of me that still believes that the beating heart of the internet is people making things and putting them online for other people to find. As far as social media goes, this could've been a return to that transitional period, where people were still interested in creating. "Posting" has always been a dim simulacrum, whether it's at 140, 280, or 500 characters.

I think that's why I've enjoyed Gemini so much since I started writing here: yes, it's imperfect. Yes, gemtext is restrictive. But people are making things and there's a joy in search and discovery.

I've finished my iced coffee. Time to sit down with my book.

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