On the Fish in the Sea
Published by foreverliketh.is on 2nd May 2024
Message in a bottle
Como Tu Decías / Like You Used To Say
Old man battles with giant blue marlin from his canoe. Made famous from Hemmingway’s Old man and the sea by Carey Chen via Pixels.
This page was last modified: May 3rd, 2024
This post is part of…
IndieWeb Carnival: A project helping motivate people to write more on their personal websites. This month’s host is Aaron Leonard / RisingThumb, and the topic was “Good Enough” - the Drop in Quality’s Siren call [#1 & #2]
Agora Road Travelogue - May: A project attempting to encourage individuals to both write and exercise ownership over their content.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about relationships. Probably cause I’ve been seeing this girl. But it ain’t just “romance” I’ve been contemplatin’: family, friends, coworkers, internet folk, the whole kebab, really. But dating (& marriage) is a good jumping-off point for where I wanna take things today.
Courtship is a pretty high-stakes affair. I mean, we shouldn’t be hard on ourselves for our families, right? We sure as hell didn’t pick ’em after all; and alternatives are practically non-existent as a kid. No, family’s just the hand we were dealt. But our lovers? Those are (mostly) on us, yo.
Commitment comes with many a penalty: risk, sacrifice, rigidity; just to name a few. It ain’t a trade to take lightly; I certainly don’t… We want to get it right, we NEED to get it right: The ideal match… And now, more than ever, there’s no shortage of potential partners. “The world is our oyster”, traveler. Naturally then, is it not our fault when we fail to find its pearl?
Or at least, that’s one story I imagine the Online “Dating” Market, $3.15 billion in 2024, is selling people. Jesus Christ, HOW btw?! Their profit literally DEPENDS on keeping their customers utilizing the service! Isn’t that more obvious than a pyramid scheme??? But, yea: ♫ Just keep swiping. Just keep swiping. Just keep swiping, swiping, swiping. ♫
Veritasium recently posted a (unsurprisingly) great video on the 37% rule / marriage problem / optimal stopping. Can’t recommend it enough. Though, I’d say that’s the absolute maximum (if not a bit over) amount of logic, math and, most certainly, “tech”, that I’d inject into the endeavor. Also, I like to pretend that, if it weren’t for “muh industrial society”, I wouldn’t need this sh*t spelled out for me via a got dam YouTube video. Lol, as my guest, you’re welcome to that cope if you need it too, visitor.
Anyways, do you see where we’re going yet? There IS NO PEARL for us to find. The world ISN’T our oyster. WE’RE THE OYSTERS! We fugging MAKE the pearls. You and I could spend 20 lifetimes swiping our 400 fingers away and I GUARANTEE YOU the best we’ll ever get is Mrs. Krabs! It’s in the commitment, the penalties, the risks, the sacrifices… where the treasure we seek is formed.
And that holds true for more than just our love quests, stranger. Acquaintances and friends, family (if you’re lucky), coworkers (careful with those). But also: Our hometowns, our cultures, our histories. When we treat these things as replaceable, rejecting others for benign opinions or trivialities, selling-out our lands and customs for modern opportunities / conveniences / values / homogeny, we betray ourselves. It’s behavior no different than that of our corporate overlords.
So beware, prospective sailor. Despite what our current age would have us believe, its ‘unparalleled choice’ isn’t a life raft; it’s an anchor—a manufactured hindrance, chaining our ships to harbor. It preys on our own fears of the voyage to come, taunting us with assurances that exist solely on the shore, tempting us to turn back at the first sign of discomfort. But overcome we must, for it is only in the ocean’s profundity where our incomparable bonds can be forged to their rightful depths.
Contributors: Ernest Hemingway –> The Old Man and the Sea [#1 & #2] | Message in a bottle | Tommy Torres –> Mar Adentro –> El Playlist de Anoche | John Bowlby –> Attachment theory | William Shakespeare –> The Merry Wives of Windsor [#1 & #2] | Jason Mraz –> Love Is a Four Letter Word | Timeline of online dating –> Online dating –> Plenty of Fish –> Match Group –> Greg Rosalsky | Finding Nemo | Franz Thomas Bruss –> Derek Muller –> Veritasium –> What The Ultimate Study On Happiness Reveals –> What Game Theory Reveals About Life, The Universe, and Everything | Ted Kaczynski –> sizeof.cat | Stephen Hillenburg –> SpongeBob SquarePants –> Mr. Krabs / Clancy Brown –> Pearl Krabs / Lori Alan | Lorde –> Melodrama | Hans Christian Andersen –> The Little Mermaid –> The Little Mermaid (1989 film) –> Alan Menken + Howard Ashman + Samuel E. Wright –> Under the Sea [#1 & #2] –> Kiss the Girl [#1 & #2] | George R. R. Martin –> A Song of Ice and Fire –> Game of Thrones –> Fire & Blood –> House of the Dragon –> Matt Smith –> Daemon Targaryen | Kintsugi
Syndication: 32-Bit Cafe | Agora Road | basement community | IndieNews | Mastodon
Email: hi@foreverliketh.is
FastCommentsUI(document.getElementById('fastcomments-widget'), { tenantId: 'OEwiTifVq6' });Published by foreverliketh.is on 2nd May 2024
Message in a bottle
Como Tu Decías / Like You Used To Say
toddler’s standing in front of beige concrete stair by Jukan Tateisi on Unsplash
This page was last modified: March 25th, 2024
This post is part of…
IndieWeb Carnival: A project helping motivate people to write more on their personal websites. This month’s host is basement community, and the topic was ‘Accessibility in the Personal Web’.
32bit.cafe Community Code Jam #3: In celebration of its one-year anniversary, the 32bit.cafe is accepting submissions on the topic of ‘what has creating a website done for you?’.
Agora Road Travelogue - Mar: A project attempting to encourage individuals to both write and exercise ownership over their content.
Finally, this post is Part 3 in my series on: The Personal Web [#1 & #2]
Whether your desire to make a personal website comes from exploration and inspiration, or innate motivation, eventually, rubber’s gonna have to meet the road. Unfortunately, when you finally do commit to the endeavour, you’re gonna be forced to make A LOT of decisions. Decisions surrounding questions you (possibly) didn’t even know existed, and each one with a cacophony of potential answers.
Monsters such as analysis paralysis, perfectionism and regret can rear their ugly heads and overwhelm us in these kinds of situations. Make us wish we had tools like spice, or maybe a time machine, to fight them with. Anything to ward off feelings of frustration, anxiety or failure.
But, in the time I’ve spent creating this website, I’ve been reminded, again and again, of the wisdom in facing those very fears head-on. Of the beauty in trying, and stumbling, and falling and getting back up. Of the value in embracing adversity, in wearing your inadequacies earnestly and learning from them.
Not to say that you have to figure everything out by yourself! Here are some strategies that I think are general enough to serve you as well as they’ve served me:
- Give yourself deadlines.
Whether you’re researching a question that’s got WAY too many answers, or trying to push out a blog post, having a time limit can do wonders for that ‘Just Do It’ energy.
- Find a role-model.
Or 2, or 3! A “mentor” doesn’t even have to be the person themself, it could just be their site. Webmasters L-O-V-E to talk about how they built their site, or, at the very least, they usually provide a way to contact them.
- Forest for the trees.
There’s A TON to learn in web development. So much, that sometimes I feel it’s too easy to get stuck in the weeds. For example: Topics like accessibility, while meaning well, can sometimes be too much for a budding webkeeper to handle. It’s valuable to remember that: There’s nothing less accessible than your site not existing in the first place.
~ ~ ~
While I wish creating a personal website was easier, the experience is a journey, NOT a destination. A website that is loved will never be finished. There’s fulfillment in the challenging, in doing ’things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard’.
Or, as a friend of mine might put it: ‘Suffer the pains, not the chains’.
Contributors: Taoism | Rumi | Tarzan of the Apes [#1 & #2] –> Tarzan (1999 film) –> Phil Collins –> Son of Man (song) [#1 & #2] | Barry Schwartz –> The Paradox of Choice | Frank Herbert –> Dune | Devon Avery –> One-Minute Time Machine | David Bayles & Ted Orland –> Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking | The Jungle Book [#1 & #2] –> The Jungle Book (1967 film) –> Louis Prima –> I Wan’na Be Like You (The Monkey Song) | Nike –> Just Do It –> Shia LaBeouf | John F. Kennedy –> We choose to go to the Moon | Theodore Roosevelt –> Citizenship in a Republic / The Man in the Arena | Aaron Leonard
Syndication: 32-Bit Cafe | Agora Road | basement community
Email: hi@foreverliketh.is
FastCommentsUI(document.getElementById('fastcomments-widget'), { tenantId: 'OEwiTifVq6' });Published by foreverliketh.is on 25th March 2024
A webmaster in time you'll be
The Paradox of Choice
A nightlight / neon lamp in the form of Lain Iwakura, main protagonist of the anime: Serial Experiments Lain. A book about Charles Darwin, and his scientific theory of evolution, the word ‘LOVE’, and a model of the Eiffel Tower, are all featured in the background. Found on AliExpress.
The Original, Uncropped, Higher Quality Image is available in: Blue, Cyan, Green [jpg & webp], Purple, Red, Yellow [jpg & webp] & White
This page was last modified: March 14th, 2024
This post is part of…
IndieWeb Carnival: A project helping motivate people to write more on their personal websites. This month’s host is Manuel Moreale, and the topic was ‘Digital Relationships’.
Lainchan Web Festival: A project trying to foster a more active, independent web community. This month’s host (and founder) is newdigitalera.org, and the topic was ‘Nature’.
Agora Road Travelogue - Feb: A project attempting to encourage individuals to both write and exercise ownership over their content.
Tales of Agora Road - Ezine #4: A digital publication created by, and representative of, the Agora Road forum.
Finally, this post was heavily inspired by suragu and his post: suragu posmoderno. It’s written in Spanish, but you can read it in (Google Translated) English here.
In Spanish, we have the saying: ‘Amor de lejos, amor de pendejos’. In English it’d be, roughly: ‘Love from afar, love for idiots’. Like the proverb, I won’t be bothering to define love today. For the sake of discussion though, let’s roll with the idea that love is present, in some way, throughout the typical trifecta of:
Co-workers / Acquaintances <–> Friends <–> Family.
Ergo: Abuelita doesn’t approve of far-off friends, and she sure as hell ain’t commending you for having a long-distance lover.
I don’t hear the adage as much as I used to anymore. I suspect its perceived value has been slowly eroding away; not that it was ever intended to be dogma. Though, lol, Gran Gran did enjoy having the highest likelihood of getting to say ‘I told you so’. But, ha! She couldn’t forsee the future! We sure got one over on her in the end… Right?
Meemaw, for all her faults, be spitting straight fax, yo. Unfortunately, her wisdom is up against a formidable force, an adversary capable of warping humanity’s sense of spacetime.
the meaning of ‘far away’ begins to blur. And detractors proclaim Nana’s perception of proximity as “primitive”. Because their new lord has bestowed upon them a “more accurate” understanding.
The deity has no shortage of such “gifts” either. Each one individually, and cumulatively, granting all manner of “celestial power”. How could anyone blame us faithful for our worship? We’ve become “almighty”:
Carrying “omniscience” in our pockets, manifesting fantasies as “reality”, larping as Frankensteins! We converse as phantoms, the diluted remnants of intimacy’s essence, and yet still, somehow, retain the gall to call that a “relationship”.
Clearly, we’ve deemed Nature as “inadequate”. God’s labour as “insufficient”. And that, where He “falters”, the imitator “provides”: Synthesized light, fueled by the unrelenting, subatomic dissection of the apple. A sad substitute for the Sun’s sanctuary. But we’d trade ANYTHING to keep away the dark. ANYTHING for “salvation”.
For the absence of hardship, uncertainty, unknowns, loss, loneliness, hate, heartbreak, struggles, pain, death. Indeed, a “perfect world” knows not of night…
And so, we sooner play at divine architects, at semi-gods, than attempt to live humbly, boldly, gracefully, (w)holy, as men.
Contributors: Simon & Garfunkel –> The Sounds of Silence [#1 & #2] | Serial Experiments Lain [#1, #2 & #3] –> Lainchan –> Yukinu –> Lainring + sizeof.cat –> CozyBroz –> CozyNet IRC –> suragu –> suragu posmoderno [spa & eng] + Lil Pump –> Don Omar –> King of Kings –> Salió el Sol [#1 & #2] | Charles Darwin –> On the Origin of Species | Gilbert Ryle –> Ghost in the machine | Andrei | Albert Einstein –> special theory of relativity | The Voyager Program –> Carl Sagan –> Pale Blue Dot [#1 & #2] | The Bible [#1 & #2] + Aaron Leonard –> Book of Genesis [#1 & #2] –> Garden of Eden –> Tree of the knowledge of good and evil –> Forbidden fruit –> John Milton –> Paradise Lost [#1 & #2] | Homer –> The Odyssey [#1 & #2] –> Odysseus –> Astyanax –> Jorge Rivera-Herrans / Epic: The Musical | Prometheus –> Mary Shelley –> Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus [#1 & #2] –> Victor Frankenstein –> Frankenstein’s monster | Avocado Animations –> Velma Meets the Original Velma | Rush (band) –> 2112 (album) –> 2112 (song) [#1 & #2]
Syndication: 32-Bit Cafe | Agora Road | basement community
Email: hi@foreverliketh.is
FastCommentsUI(document.getElementById('fastcomments-widget'), { tenantId: 'OEwiTifVq6' });Published by foreverliketh.is on 29th February 2024
Ghost in the Machine
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