It is, quite frankly, bullshit that I can’t (easily) link a blog post and a social media post without first making both of them and then coming back to edit the post. I’m sure there’s some sort of algorithm to figure out what the post link will be in theory when this is posted, but also, it’s just a bit demoralizing isn’t it?
Do you ever feel like you're the one insane? Not just that you cannot be understood, but that understanding itself is impossible on some fundamental level? No matter how you try, something is never going to give?
There’s a blog post I stumbled across, I think from Austin Walker reblogging it1, by Autumn Wright, in response to a post on BlueSky by Chris Franklin (Errant Signal) about discourse surrounding the release of Mixtape insofar as “discourse” on mainstream social media is in certain aspects impossible. I spent the latter half of that afternoon jumping around to related blog posts and other things that different people in the chain had written. It was fun!
¹—Tumblr and similar styles of reblogging accomplish this explicitly, so we’re borrowing that. The reblog is both the share and the add, the addition and the tag. The only thing is it not is the comment, there. Having an easily accessible network graph and having propagation of a post and sharing it reach that is nice! It also makes it possible to retrace to a post sometimes without having the exact one on hand, because searching Tumblr is actually impossible.2
Blogs as a main method of communication let us put things in context of other things explicitly, as part of the flow of the text. It's a hypertext, and it's something that feels necessary for talking about anything in any capacity. But everything is so isolated. How do you even begin to talk about the process for making something, without linking to a bunch of things? It is the bunch of things exactly as much as it is entirely itself!
Another possible title for this post is “I find it hard to really engage with accounts that never reblog anything from someone else.” There’s an isolation to that that sits very closely with professional artist, that is understandably something that people arrive at from a lot of time and effort spent on avoiding the throng of social media users who have less sense about conversation skills than a parodic misunderstanding in a rom-com and less filter than a giant metal fan, but even then… what are you connected to?
Like, seriously. What makes you tick, what else do you like, what do you think is cool or worth sharing.
Living in self-defined isolation is miserable.
How are people able to go on without showing connection to other things, without talking about things online outside of profession—I know that there is interiority, that there are places that people talk that isn't a social media profile or the platforms that I prefer, but still the specific form of a-connection digs at me.
I want to know.
science is an expression of a protocol that runs in our brain all the time, especially every night. It is also directly informed by childhood family summer trips (1 week at a time) to relatives in Louisiana, and the isolation engendered by lacking ways to connect, lacking contexts, lacking anything at all to define oneself.
There's an afterword of sorts on the itch page with some more on that.
But it’s so very impossible to communicate, and it’s so very impossible to understand and be understood it seems unless someone else in dialog has already uncorked their way of thinking about thinking. Some people would even rather leave a place entirely than come to an understanding at all.
Don't you want to know???
At the same time, Omniscience is both impossible, and unhealthy. Sin is a poor framework for reality, even as it makes for a fun literary tool and shorthand, but that aspect, the idea that knowledge and learning is harmful, is not entirely misplaced. If all you do is learn, without applying; if all you do is intake, without expressing; if all you do is consume, without connecting, then the balance is distorted. And at the same time, if you cut yourself off from learning, from consumption, what will you use to connect?
I lacked a means to connect for a long time, finding a way to intake without necessarily consuming. Thoughts about things still take a long time to coalesce, for various reasons, and are not even solidified in any real sense until spoken or written in many cases. It's a blessing then that I've made connections despite the confusion, that I've gotten here.
Someone I watch the videos of occasionally—ThaRixer—put out a video this morning titled “How to Actually Get Good at Speedrunning”. I don’t like this video. I don’t know if that means I consider it a bad video.
The one thing that will always consistently piss me off is when someone repeatedly, persistently, brazenly enters a conversation and refuses to engage with it.
I only have so much patience for misunderstanding.
And yet, to attempt to be understood, to express things, is to reckon with that failure, knowing that a lot of people will probably not "get it".
It's disorienting.
It’s largely filled with practicable advice about speedrunning, from hand health and habits to how to pick what to focus on. It also has a line about “iPad babies” with the usual derision associated there, a segment on how everyone is addicted to their phones,
If you’re deep in the mud, nobody’s gonna pull you out of it but you.
It’s also a rather prescriptive way of looking at learning, and doesn’t engage with any real depth in how someone learns something, why certain types of practice are fun, what aspects appeal to different people, it’s growth-oriented without talking about half of the framework for growth. It’s missing something. It’s missing the connections that people make about learning in general by positing that it’s best to focus on one (or few) games while also saying that people pick games to run based on what they find appealing. It’s number-one oriented, the-best-at-something oriented, instead of talking about mastery in a broader sense. I wonder if the line about needing to visualize a run in your head takes into account aphantasia, and how represented that is in speedrunning. It’s got good ideas, and bad ideas, but is it still helpful? And at the very least, doesn’t it prompt some thoughts about it?
There will always be the urge to overqualify why things need to, or were chosen to, exist as they do in things that we make.
I am trying my best to ignore that, here.
It’s a little unfortunate that blogging isn’t as popular compared to Reaction Content videos and streams. There’s at least the want (from an audience, and an algorithm) to observe connections and dialog being made, but nearly any video that would fall under that classification isn’t made with the idea that anyone will respond to it as a continued dialog, be it comments or other videos. Sometimes that does happen, and it’s usually far more interesting to me.
Maybe the reason leaning into the style and idea of incomprehensibility, losing the inhibitions against being misunderstood, is because it at least shows an easy in for others to ask questions, to connect, to start talking.
Maybe it's something else.
Maybe it's both of those.
Footnotes
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we’ve gone back and forth 27 times and counting on what sort of term makes the most sense to use for platform-agnostic “sharing a post without quoting it”—ᵃ ↩
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This is also a large reason we avoid “repost”, and “reskeet” outside of humor, but “blogging” is the ideal way to post for us so it is helpful to have that as the default way of thinking about how the web works and how we interact with it. ᵇ ↩