Do not subscribe to me

Way back in the wayback, when i could afford a cheap, used Macbook Pro, before they started using Intel chips, I had a website. Blogs were the rage, and we all used services like Blogger.com or LiveJournal or whatever. I had coded my website and uploaded the silly things that I had to share. Then there was something called delicio.us which showed up and we started sharing links with each other. Total strangers subscribing to total strangers’ list of links. I went through a phase or two where I subsribed to everybody and the people that they subscribed to, and in turn got a fair number of subscribers myself. Then came the twitter machine. It was beautifully hilarious and the reason I added SMS to my mobile phone account. I don’t know if we can still post tweets there using text message, but that was amazingly absurdist fun and also terrible for my battery.

We have had the whole social media explosion and implosion and regurgitation cycle a few times since Friendster. I have set up and taken down and set up numerous different personal websites with “clever” urls. I have accumulated a storage of data on at least six different hard drives of various sizes, and done all sorts of things in this area. But one thing I have never really done, is gather a large amount of followers. This is fine. Honestly, I don’t know if I could handle whatever pressure such a group of people would exert upon me. I have a discord channel which is completely empty. I think that there are two people in there who are not my immediate family, and it would be scary if I woke up one morning and found hundreds of people talking in one of those channels about whatever it is that people talk about.

See, I am on the outside perimeter of things. I really get uncomfortable in crowds. Unless I have a strongly stated purpose. I lived in NYC for a long time and hated going through Times Square for this reason. If I had to catch the train, I got in the first entrance I could find before the actual square. If I had to work in Times Square, I was cool and calm and knew what I was doing there. So this analogy works in online communities as well. Occasionally, I drop something somewhere but most of the time I avoid even looking into these areas. Because the babble of hundreds of people talking through each others conversations is scary.

Substack was very insistent that I install their app on my phone. And now there are heaps of notifications from the few people I do subscribe to, and this is not something that I want in my life. At this point, I feel that the phone is a tether and not a freedom. So that app will probably disappear off my device.

I am familiar enough to know that consistently writing in the same place is what the experts say is the secret to developing a large following, but I don’t actually know if that is what I want to do here. See, I have a website that is not getting enough attention from me as it is. If I am writing thoughts on substack every day, then the opportunity cost to my website is that might be another day that I do not post over there. And even that, I have no fucking clue what the hell it is that I am doing in these spaces anyways.

I am a creator. I make music, I write silly, absurd things. I am working on a novel and because I do not know how to write a novel, I am writing four of them at the same time. And what is really happening with this writing is that I am really just trying to understand this world I have been inventing in the back of my head for the past seven years. For six months, I have been using quite a number of worldbuilding tools I found online, to come up with the tens of thousands of details for this world, so that I can present little slivers to a group of people who fit around my table and play D&D. Yet my brain likes to scurry into all sorts of weird directions, finding nooks and crannies of strange information, twisting it around and trying to fit it into the the narrative that I am attempting to spin.

I am not going to teach you anything if you read my substack. I am not going to teach you anything if you go to my website. And any entertainment values is dubious at best. I am just trying to keep living. I am just trying to keep my brain engaged with something, anything, that it finds interesting. Some of this is an escape from the gloom of reality. Some of this is me just being that weird kid. And some of this is me letting myself just be out of control, somewhere because elsewhere, in present life, I am buttoned up and restrained and refuse to let myself out of a box, a tiny circle with only three friends.

So please, do not subscribe to me, because I have no idea when I will write here again. It could be tomorrow, or next week or next month before I do more. I honestly have no idea, and quite frankly do not want to have any idea because for all my struggle to have a Personal Data System that helps me keep track of projects, my favorite thing to do with the PDS is to ignore it once I am done setting it up.