Like how pizza you make tastes better than professionally made, even if your own pizza is objectively dogshit.

I don't particularly care about food - reheated pizza is fine by me most of the time - but I do care about information. Information I've cultivated myself, and added value to myself, is something valuable.

Following the pizza example, none of this is truly independent. A pizza you made from scratch isn't actually made from scratch - you presumably didn't grow the wheat, or evolve the cows - and so it is with information you've cultivated. But it's good to exercise more conscious control of what's passing through you.

There's an old saw that the Golden Age of Science Fiction is "fourteen." Perhaps something like that is true. But like much of the crowd here on Neocities, I think that bigger changes in the economic organization of the web have greatly accelerated this. I have little to say on this that others haven't said better.

In an ideal world, everyone would own their own means of communication. In a slightly less ideal world, they would all own it collectively through the state or some other institution. We've been continually headed towards an especially bad alternative, which is centralization of the means of communication in private hands.

What's so sad is that we're not having the commons enclosed by the traditional goon squads but by very mild preferences for convenience.

Also, per the image to the side...

To the extent possible under law in my country, I've waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to everything here. Upload it to Kindle and sell it, submit it for English homework, give me attribution or not (I actually prefer that you don't tbh), I don't care! Remix it, reappropriate it, turn it into something cooler than before.

I'd rather be naked in front of a small group of like-minded weirdos than actual and potential employers, outrage machines, or people just looking for a victim.

I've felt this way for a long time, but I think it was the Couch Guy thing that sent me over the edge. Some people get some wildly disporportionate public assault based, at least, on some kind of real misstep - a microaggression, or simply being unthinkingly obnoxious at the wrong moment. Couch Guy and his girlfriend did nothing except... exist, in the presence of the internet.

Perhaps the Couch Guy saga should make me into even more of an IRL hermit than I already am; perhaps it should convince me there's simply nothing to be done. Either way, I feel the need to minimize my interaction with the kind of thing the internet has become.

• Is this all just that oldest of mistakes, a bucket of aesthetics mislabelled "politics?" And for that oldest of mistakes in aesthetics, simple nostalgia?
• Neocities looks way more benevolent than Zuck et al., but aren't I just still signing up to live in someone else's apartment? Don't the public follower counts lend the architecture of the place to become the same old skinner box?
• Don't I love to jump into projects and abandon them?