💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2022 › 12-12.gmi captured on 2024-08-31 at 12:34:28. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-05-26)
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This is an alias. A new one. Decades ago it was never about real names, whether on the early internet or what came before, that online world of text and ANSI art, X-Modem, low bauds. But something shifted. The internet, and particularly social media, started demanding names. I then became [redacted]. But something's shifted again. Years ago, someone who shouldn't have found me, found me. I've carried that with me for two decades. So here we are again. The land of invented names. Call me winter.
I'm taking some steps in geminispace because the web's becoming untenable to me. It used to be a place of creation, of real expression. You stumbled upon websites, met people, made your own spaces. Then social media brought the world online, our day-to-day framed by anxiety, light, engagement. What did I do creatively between 2006 and 2020? Quite a bit. How much of it was driven by the medium? Essentially none.
I'm cagey about how much I want to reveal here because years ago, someone found my web presence and asked me to take certain things down. Probably expected when you use your real name, but I hadn't used my full name. Just my first. How did they find me? This has bothered me a long, long time. Every time I post something I find myself watching over my shoulder. My Twitter account's my real name; likewise Facebook (though inactive); LinkedIn; Instagram...
Twenty four years ago I started oversharing my life online. I entered into a beautiful subculture of mostly girls, but also a few boys, chatting online and writing down their days. Creating sites and journals and generally engaging with a sort of frenetic energy that's gone from the trough-fed web. I want to get back to the essence of those times, the weird interplay of openness and mundanity, of deep vulnerability. I'm hoping an alias is a start to that. My anonymous email creating deniability. Why 'winter'? Because I've never called myself that before. If you see yourself in this, maybe you do. If you think you know who I am, no you don't.
2022 has been a hard year for me. Friends dying. My mother in emergency. I'd by lying if I said my gemspace efforts weren't also an attempt to make light in darkness. This may well become a place viewed by no one, an unheard transmission, and that's fine. I'm used to silence, to radio static. Everything's got to start somewhere. Something's got to change. Not knowing where to start, I'll start here.