I’ve been working on another website lately. It’s called The MANual, and it originally started out as a guide for a friend, but it’s become one of my favourite personal projects as of late. I’ve even been tempted to write more about myself… As proud as I am of the work I put into it, the content itself has forced me to look and think closely about myself. Certain unpleasant truths that I have to deal with. I don’t regret anything… I’m just not happy that my hand was dealt with such cards.

I don’t know how I ended up on Reddit again, but there we go, I ended up on Reddit again. I think what’s happening is that, after I finish job searching on my phone, I just automatically drift to something else for “lighter reading”… and that’s Reddit. Then I find something really interesting, and I get frustrated that my AppBlock has just shut it off in the middle of my reading it, so I disable the AppBlock, and… …forget to re-enable it.

I’ve just gone ahead and uninstalled it from my phone. I don’t use Reddit to really keep up with Twin Cities goings-on anymore, I can go outside or check Facebook or Instagram for that. I am going to miss the r/titanfolk memes and commiserations at the tip of my fingers, but convenience isn’t always a good thing.

Life is progressing somewhat slowly. I should be grateful for that; I have this opportunity to enjoy things while I’m still in-between jobs, I can’t just spend all my time on Reddit. (I’ve actually been doing better about not wasting time on Reddit, according to AppBlock’s statistics.) But I’m sick of it. I don’t want to waste any more of my time on this.

It’s funny. It’s been what, five days, since I’ve last written anything… I did so much… …I didn’t feel the need to write about them. I guess I’ve just been too busy just, living? I’m unemployed and yet I feel busier than ever,, ha… …Maybe now, I can really be in the moment. Things have changed, I’m not so compulsively checking things anymore. Today I’m going to mount the new kitchen shelves; I already put up the new produce baskets the other night; got myself a cute green 3-tiered shelf, too, slim thing, I keep baking supplies and other grains and similar staples on it. Oh, and cans of beer and root beer. You can never have too much Udofot.

Life is good, and I’m not nearly as stressed. I’ve just become more demanding on myself—and that’s good, that’s really, good. I genuinely think I need that.

I don’t regret being like this, for Ant, but maybe one day…

« On average, the amount of time people spent with friends in-person decreased from 30 hours a month in 2003 to 10 hours a month in 2020, according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s advisory on the epidemic of loneliness. That decline was especially marked for people aged 15 to 24. »

OH MY G-D HOW MANY HOURS A MONTH DO I SPEND IN-PERSON WITH FRIENDS IT’S AT LEAST 30 RIGHT

—TIME Magazine. Why Gen Z is drinking less. 2025 January 1.

I want people to be honest and principled, but maybe that’s too much to ask. I don’t really feel “at home” on the Internet anymore.

The Internet has just made everything a lot faster. Too fast, there isn’t time to digest anything. To look over and question and ask if what you’re seeing and what you’re even being told makes sense, and who benefits from the story that you’re being told. I kind of wanna get away from everything. I miss the days when “the Internet”, for me, just meant playing games on Postopia, looking at art on DeviantArt, and reading way too much Wikipedia articles and discussion pages. The whole thing now just feels like an information battlefield where even the most innocuous of publications are just fights for clout.

It’s starting to come to me now, what I wanted to write about, as tired as I am (it’s just before 1 AM now)... So, John Oliver and his Last Week Tonight crew did an episode on AI slop, and its flooding of the Internet with misinformation, and sometimes active disinformation. It’s not just the wannabe-viral crap that concerns me. Because you’ve never needed AI to lie to people, you can just use lies told by real people, omission of inconvenient facts… Just because it comes out of a real person’s mouth, doesn’t mean it’s real. It sucks to look at the state of the world now, and I bet you don’t even have to go that far—you can see it in your personal lives.

I’ve finally got my new blog up an’ ready. It’s strange. I wanted to start this up for the longest time, for at least half a year now, but now that it’s up… I don’t know what to do with it. I mean, my first entry. Earlier I had all these thoughts about what I wanted to write down; maybe I took too long and I’m just too tired to think, now. Swam, chatted with neighbours in the jacuzzi, prepared the Crock-Pot, bathed… I don’t know if I want this to ever “devolve” into just a daily log of what I did on a day-to-day basis. That’s not what I want.