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  • Bangin’ Tapes

    Why do I love records and tapes so much?

    Because the crackle of a dirty record warms me in the same way a wool blanket in front a fire does? Is it because in the digital silent gaps between songs, when I become keenly aware of my tinnitus and the deep dread of both being alive and the crushing thought of my own death?

    Von Dutch by Charli XCX. Sweet reprieve, best not to dwell.

    Is it because my distracted brain can’t stay focused for more than 20 minutes without having to jump to a new task and flipping the record takes just enough effort to scratch that itch?

    Is it because everything in the world feels like it’s asking me to be anywhere but where I am and pay attention to anything other that what’s in front of me?

    Because we figured out how to monetize every fucking moment of every fucking day.

    Or are tapes just really cute and that makes they get some likes on the gram?

    I have this terrible habit of needing everything in my life to have a deep and Important ™ meaning. Like I am on this sysphisian quest to just be alive and a without a reason for all this struggle I feel truly fucked. Loving tapes can’t just be because, i dunno, they are cool. It has to mean something.

    Or else why would I insist on the headache.

    Ever since I was a kid, I’ve felt like there was a cannonball sized hole missing in the center of my gut. Like behind my ribcage and gut is just a hollow void of wanting. A black hole sucking every positive affirmation or CBT workbook I throw at it. (Ironically, digesting Zoloft has helped significantly).

    Sometimes feeling like if I have a purpose, a meaning, it makes the hole feel a little smaller. Or at least directs it’s hunger at something other than my wellbeing for a while.

    Hilarious to me that I can give that much meaning to a lo-fi beat tape to chill to. But I do.

    I think your early 30s are about realizing progress isn’t always progress and maybe the kids should get off your lawn.

    A joke, but … the kids are not doing okay and definitely not touching grass (I also cannot afford a lawn to this is a moot point and bad analogy), and it has nothing to do with my metaphorical lawn. Like misogyny isn’t going to end if MRA podcast hosts just listed to a few slowed down golden-age beats with with a Ghibli quotes thrown in for good measure.

    Maybe if they just really listened to J-Dilla, though. Like felt it, man.

    I am constantly searching for way to feel soft enough for a good cathartic cry. I watched the first three seasons of This is Us for exactly this reason. I cried hard and alone. I might never be able to live in a cabin napping next to a crackling fire, but sometimes I can trick my body into thinking I am in the euphoric afterglow of felt-body loss.

    That’s what records and tapes do to me. In their softness I begin to escape inward, towards softness. Towards tenderness. Towards myself.

    On social media, I quickly leave my body, I leave the literal fucking concept of time, and find myself both rewatching my own stories and hating myself. Holy hell, there is such a need to be seen.

    Listening to tapes and records is the opposite.

    Lost in time? Time to flip the record.

    Left your body for a digital-liminal-ghost-self comprised of stress-sweat, auto-correct, and a lack of impulse control? Your gonna have use your hands for something useful and flip the cassette to side B.

  • some days i feel like i’m still stuck at the character creation screen.

  • no interest in being a main character, but happy to join you as a wild, and a little unhinged, wacky npc for a side quest.

  • unfucking the internet #10: hide yo shit.

    I’ve really been going through it lately. The internet has got me all sorts of fucked up on the inside. Like completely disembowelled clutching my intestines as an apex predator catches a wiff, type of fucked up on the inside.

    It kills me to watch what’s happening to the internet. The internet been there for since I was coding my first lines of CSS on Myspace, passive aggressively kicking friends out of my top 8. The internet honestly saved my relationship as we moved into non-monogamy (Thank you Dan Savage and Ester Perel). The internet has allowed me to keep up a connection with life long best friends I would die for who may have, very likely, faded into the history of my life without it.

    I have been betrayed by the internet. Revenge, it seems, is a dish best served cold, slow, and over time. Served so slow I could barely feel the the knife until I was scrambling to stuff my guts back behind my rib cage and notice I was suffering from blood loss.

    That’s all pretty melodramatic, but fuck. This aren’t so good out here in internet land anymore. I mean we * just * kept crypto at bay and deflated web3, now AI is here to tell us whatever we want to hear.

    Look, AI is kinda cool, I get that. Like super cool and super powerful, but that’s kinda the problem. It’s super powerful and at the same time super dumb. If a teenager asks it to create n00dz of their classmate, it’s too fucking stupid to say “That’s a terrible idea and I will not be creating child pornography”, it just does it (I know, I know, there are “safe guards”, but when those “safe guards” are creating nazi POCs, I am gonna say we don’t have em).

    Also, if those safe guards are not universally followed, all it takes a little extra effort to get the same result. So major points against AI. This is seriously pandora’s pornography box, we can’t close it now. We just have to deal with the mess. Porn has been at the cutting edge of tech, but these are uncharted territories.

    * Note: I am not anti-porn, but i am very much anti-child-porn and anti-non-consensual-porn in any form. “Real” or otherwise.

    Walk around your city, go to any area that has small businesses and look carefully at the art. The rise of AI is here and it’s already taking work from artists.

    I know what your thinking, weren’t those who are using AI just going to use shitty stock photos anyway? Well maybe, but at least a photographer or illustrator somewhere down the line would have gotten SOMETHING for their work.

    Capitalism doesn’t give a shit about artists. Honestly art is super fucking inefficient. Artists have to translate emails like “I think we need more of a boho VIBE” and “can you make it POP more” (The classic) into clear and real changes. AI can do that in seconds. And it’s only getting better at it.

    Right now AI has a sparkle to it. A shine. It’s a little too clean. A little too soft. It has far too many fingers. You can tell, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to tell the difference for much longer. Look at where AI was a year ago, two years ago and think now with the insane amount of wealth being pumped into it, where it will be in 5 more.

    5 years is not that long in the grand scheme of things.

    The thing is. This could be a monumental moment in history. We have all the tech needed to feed and house everyone. We have all the tech needed to stop/slow climate change. AI could be used to create solutions for food distribution and transit improvements.

    We just have to have the guts to do it.

    As people are no longer needed in the labour force and it shrinks, we could be reducing the requirement of labour needed for a (real) living wage. We could redistribute the wealth. Instead we are making a few people literally unfathomable amounts of money in a single life time.

    So the internet’s got me fucked up.

    Or rather capitalists got me fucked up and they are fucking up my internet in the process.

    Honestly just think about it. We have the means, the money, and tech to solve real problems and we are choosing not too.

    So as Google, Reddit, and Microsoft begin to change their privacy policies to use your personal data in their products. Hide yo shit. Pack up. Go elsewhere. Take refuge and don’t get tied to any platform you don’t control. Be ready to leave at a moments notice.

    If those building the tech require our data, our lives, and they refuse to pass on the wealth that is gained from that back to us (or to our governments through taxation), then refuse to give it to them. AI ain’t shit without it. Garbage in, garbage out.

    Or least give less of it. When you can.

    Small changes count too. Don’t use apps controlled by companies with unethical practices as much to start. Weight your options. Remember your time, attention and data is what they are after. At the very least don’t make it too easy for them to get it.

    That fact that AI is being used and trained on data in ways that users never originally consented to is massive rug pull, and the first step is slowing the hose of information we give to them constantly.

    fuck.

  • fuck dropshipping.

  • if you were to take the focus off of AR and VR being rooted in new elements in physical space, i would argue through our dependence on, and use of, apps we are already living in Digital Reality over plain old Reality.

  • free education for all.

  • soft software.

    It’s been over a decade since since I spilled my guts and sorted out my insides, carefully reading the tea leaves of my best intentions, since I watched reruns of the days I didn’t live up to them.

    As I weigh a heavy heart and count the new bruises dealt from the gut punches I often deserved, I wonder if I can still do this. I wonder if my tongue can still untie the knots in my stomach, or have years pulled them too tight to unravel.

    Did I lose the plot, as the years dripped down a shrinking candle, can I still find a punch line? Or has the medicated shades of grey that have begun to line my temple left me a ruin of private YouTube videos no one has seen is years.

    They are grainy and out of focus, like brain fog rolling over memories, they are an echo of who I was, reverberating in 540p off the walls a server farm running hot. A few megabytes behind blinking lights stored next to cries for help disguised as shopping hauls and nostalgic myspace deep dives teaching the basics of html as a coping mechanism for my young suicidal ideation.

    Don’t forget to like and subscribe.

    A janitor plays her keys to the rhythm of a sea dead pixels shimmering against a dark concrete floor like link-in-the-bio-luminescence, grateful for the company’s 401k. Her future lights up like LEDs, she gonna be alright.

    Outback, a technician chain smokes while swiping through smoke shows, softly held by the warm walls next to an unmarked door, a spark glows in his hands, first faint, then burning hot. Tonight’s glowing with potential.

    Just two star-crossed chatbots reciting the best lines from The Days of Our Lives while exchanging love notes in binary.

    The janitor’s phone buzzes as she wipes the dust from the hard drives that hold the shattered glass reflections of the pieces of who were in 2010, cheering us on.

    She’s got a match, but gotta act quickly before it burns out or burns her up. Her dreams stored on these hard drives, and the technician can fix every misconnection, but his own.

    In morse code, my shadow super-likes the tension.

    In caffeine green, spinning discs dance to a new song played off key.

    The technician reformatted my aging hardware, and it seems like I got still got soft software. Even if I lost some blood through the bytes of the last decade, Maybe they were just the refactor I needed.

    As the janitor wipes the dust from my eyes, I realize I just needed some space anyways.