a couple weeks ago, a post from the cyberdeck subreddit popped up in my rss reader showing off a retro-computer terminal themed social website called cyberspace.online. it touted a web 1.0 vibes social media with no ai, no video, no algorithm, no ads, no crypto, etc etc. which sounded good to my ears since i complain about all those things regularly on here. of course, i've heard that story before and have been disappointed many times when it turns out to be just empty marketing tactics. but it caught me while i was procrastinating from life so i made an account (there weren't many users yet, i was user #27.) i had to waive my rule of not joining any feed-based sites that don't provide bare minimum profile rss feeds. if you've been reading this blog for a while, you know i'm very tired of walled gardens and closed ecosystems. see my recent linux and hardware posts. even this very homepage was born out of the desire to exist on the open web instead of closed systems (and it's why i try to stick to using open standards like basic html, css, js, rss, openpgp, etc to make everything here.) i don't enjoy feeling like all the time and energy i'm expending online is trapped in and limited to one specific closed place that i have no real control over. one recent egregious example for me was another platform i was on for many years that semi-abruptly turned from a nice place for talking to internet-building people to now a full-on crypto casino. it's like if a local nightclub that brought in good bands and a cool clientele slowly kept adding slot machines by the bathroom area until the machines spilled out into the main space and the noise of slot machines drowned out all the music/conversation and only the only people left in the place were gambling addicts, grifters, and in-denial nostalgists (╥_╥) sigh, another profile with years of posts and connections in the trash heap. in hindsight, i should seen the red flags since that platform never offered native rss support (⌒_⌒;) anyways, back to cyberspace. cyberspace is made by someone that goes by the name _genghis_khan_ and, as the faq explains, is more of an art project than a commercial project at this point. i've been enjoying it. i love that it's terminal themed and text-focused. other things in this genre include itter.sh, a real terminal based social feed that you ssh into. i'm also @elle on there but i don't use it. again, no rss. there is also tuitter which is currently in closed beta. but cyberspace being a regular browser based platform that is just styled to look like tui makes it easier for the average user to get into it (so maybe it's more like the text-based subreply but styled for cyberpunks.) it has markdown and the codeblock formatting is handy for drawing ascii art. if you couldn't tell by a lot of the parts of my homepage, i love ascii art and kaomojis (cyberspace has limited image posting but i prefer not to use it.) it doesn't have likes or up/downvotes, or really any of the annoying dopamine-inducing clout metrics of mainstream unhealthy social media. it does have follower counts, which i could do without. there are chat rooms called circ and direct messages called c-mail. you can also navigate it with just your keyboard ^-^ it doesn't have fancy things like federation/decentralization, portable social graph, or even encryption (i assume khan can read everything everyone writes in the feed, notes, circ, and c-mail.) some things are a bit buggy and there are some weird superficial quirks. for example, why does an anti-ai platform have a giant ai generated cyberdolphin as the hero image on the support page (๑>ᴗ<๑) i know many artists who would be immediately turned off by that and write the whole thing off. whenever i see pure ai slop imagery like that on something like a newsletter these days, it's an automatic skip because it's kind of become a universal signal for low effort. of course, there's no way to stop users from posting ai junk in the feed but i feel like the platform itself should avoid that stuff in order to set the example. besides, the site design is so beautiful with just the text, it's a shame to pollute it that way. the ui/ux of the site is very simple but in a nice way that's more about just talking to people. like on the old internet where you would wander into random chat rooms and see what was going on. it's a calm oasis in a very chaotic and overstimulating time on the web. because of the design and ethos behind it, it has attracted a particular type of person looking to escape the current social hellscape we live in. i've been meeting some interesting and fun people on there! is this sustainable as it grows? i don't know. i feel like i'm already seeing more of the familiar signs of the bad internet discourse creeping in now that it's reached 3000+ accounts. i've been an early user of a bunch of social platforms and communities that always ended up crashing out and dying from growth. maybe that's the natural progression of these things ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ given my experiences, i also expect that as the user count grows, khan will be receiving more and more inquiries from sleazy vcs and companies looking to capitalize. the centralized nature of the platform makes it vulnerable which is why modern platforms are trying all sorts of "can't be evil" decentralization mechanisms or just being fully open source. currently, cyberspace is supported by user donations but the cost of scaling could get so out of control that it's just less headache for khan to take on funding partners or even cash out and exit. remember the slow motion heartbreak of david karp selling tumblr? on the $1.1 billion sale to yahoo, he loudly proclaimed "we're not turning purple," suggesting that tumblr would not be changed by yahoo. well, a palette swap was the least of tumblr's worries as we're still watching it suffer indignity after indignity to this day in its zombie form. hopefully the delete account button will be built before this happens to cyberspace (⌒_⌒;) in the meantime, i'll try to enjoy the fun days while they last. i still maintain that the real web 1.0 experience is simply just having a personal homepage and an email address. --- my field trip to cyberspace took up a lot of time the past couple weeks! since i've been avoiding social in general a lot lately, diving back into it via cyberspace brought up a lot of bubbling thoughts about these kinds of social spaces, as evidenced by the wall of text above (*~*) so, for homepage updates, i didn't make any major changes this time around. mainly just some tidying and small additions: * cleaned up some messy html * updated the time machine with some more recent snapshots * added some more blogging friends to the blogroll feed

things have been pretty rough lately. my dad continues to get worse. every time i think it can't possibly get much worse than this, it gets much worse (╥_╥) things he could still sort of do a few months ago like dressing himself or using the bathroom are totally gone now. he's perpetually in a confused and frightened state because he doesn't know where he is or who anyone is or what he's doing. my mom also had another surgery last week because of her osteoperosis so it's been extra hectic at home while she recovers. negative thoughts and feelings are probably creeping into my mind more than usual as i haven't had much sleep for the past couple weeks. i am not doing very well on my 2025 goals! at least i've somewhat achieved the goal that those goals were supposed to help with, which is staying off social ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ that just happened naturally because i no longer have the time or energy to spend in those online spaces. so maybe having to constantly clean up messes and accidents around the house all day is actually a good thing? --- as a result of having very limited time, i've only been able to do low hanging fruit projects around this homepage. this week, i've been fleshing out my /uses page more. if you've been following along with this blog, you'll know i've become more of a linux person lately and this has changed my computing set up a lot! (see last several posts for reasoning and other details.) i can't decide how much detail i should include with each item. some uses pages explain why they use each thing and some are just lists. i'm not sure which i prefer. but even the lists without context still paint a portrait of the user through the connections being made with their specific selections (sometimes) and that's why i personally like looking at them. in this update, i mainly just added links to many of the things i use and also made a simple indicator system for things that are on the way out or things that i'm uncertain about. i'm considering adding a sentence or two to explain why i use each thing. is anyone even interested in that? i have no idea. i think most uses pages are just for computer stuff but while i was looking around for ideas, i saw some people also include other things as well, like analog tools and furniture. i like how localghost included her skincare/makeup products ^-^ i was tempted to add that to mine too. but i don't want to fall into the trap of doing inventory of everything i have. i already went through that phase once in my life (๑>ᴗ<๑) i think i'll keep it limited to things related to my computer life for now. at least until i'm happy with how the technology section is presented. --- i've been continuing to de-apple my life and playing with my framework and linux. one big project i've been putting off is reformatting my external ssd so that it works with linux. currently it's formatted in apple's proprietary apfs format(encrypted) which i guess is another way to keep people locked in their ecosystem ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ before i do that i also have another big project which is to export and reorganize my photo library outside of apple's photos app. this is probably a much bigger project as i have hundreds of thousands of photos because i used to be obsessive about photography. it's a daunting task. but i think it'll feel so good to not have my photos chained to one platform! i'm also still learning neovim. i'm basically picking things up as i go. this week, i learned how to use iabbrev so i can set automatic text replacements for my most-used kaomojis. i also learned how to tab multiple lines of text using the triangle brackets (⌒_⌒;) it's very different from what i'm used to with text editors but also quite fun. it feels like i'm playing with an alien computer. --- since i've been hyping up framework a lot lately, i should mention the backlash it's been getting the past few days and my feelings of disappointment with them. i had just read my friend paul's blog post about companies trying to both-sides things to avoid moral responsiblity (his post was in response to a different backlash last week with the bluesky ceo.) i share paul's opinion that this doesn't work at all because it only gives cover and credibility to bad faith actors which allows their toxic narratives to spread and harm people. but the day after reading paul's post, framework caught a bad case of both-sideism (╥_╥) users called out the company on the framework forum for promoting and financially supporting omarchy and hyprland which are both led by controversial people, particularly omarchy's dhh who holds horrendous views about immigrants, minorities, trans people, and probably lots of other stuff i'm not even aware of. hyprland's creator/maintainer, vaxry, also has a trail of bad discord posts and questionable blog posts, though it seems like he's cooled down recently? unlike dhh, he's quite young so i hope his brain has had some time to develop more and he has not joined the permanently aggrieved tech narcissists club. framework's ceo, nirav, responded by saying he wanted framework to be a neutral big tent company focused on open source adoption. while this sounds nice on paper, it doesn't really work in reality. this whole thing seems to be pushing people out of the tent. people who turned to framework because they were tired of giving their money to spineless big tech companies who present bigoted facists with gold gifts, who take down community support apps like iceblock. look at all the people on the framework forum understandably saying they're canceling their orders and no longer recommending framework to friends. the whole thing is sad because i think framework's mission of repairable upgradeable computing is great and healthier than what we have now. but that mission is sabotaged if people start suspecting that your judgment is too poor to lead such a mission or, worse, you'll be sending gold gifts to facists too once your company has the profited enough from its users. am i going to smash my framework computer now? no, i still like it even if i agree all the criticisms are valid and i'm disappointed. nirav's response so far was a misstep but hopefully they can still course correct. he was smart to log off after his initial response rather than to continue to post through it and dig a deeper hole and then start banning people like the bluesky situation. to framework's credit, they've left all the complaint posts up while diligently removing the expected racist and transphobic posts that this topic attracted. i hope they don't disappoint me even more but given the world now, disappointment seems to be the default mode these days so i'm braced for it. look, i'm still using many of my apple products even after all my complaints about them (⌒_⌒;) i'm using hyprland for the time being though maybe i'll check out niri or something else soon. with open source software, i have somewhat less worry about my money going to bad causes because it's free. i went through a period of time when i was trying so hard to be ethical in all aspects of my life. it got to the point where i was sewing my own clothes and making my own skincare products. but then you start thinking about where the raw materials came from because i didn't grow the cotton or press the oils myself. it's like the saying goes: there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. this is the unfortunate imperfect reality we're forced to exist in. all you can really do is pick the option of least harm and i think framework is still doing better than other options out there. not me looking up youtube tutorials for how to make a cpu because the american government owns part of intel now (￢_￢;) --- i finished watching season 3 of alice in borderland and it was disappointing. season 1 and 2 were already a complete story anyways so this just felt like a netflix cash grab that added nothing. the worst part is probably how it ended like the ending of squid game where it seems to be the soft launch for an american remake so netflix can keep milking money out of the ip. i'm tired, boss.