Introduction

I was interested in computers when I was little. I started playing games on them, and then I started tearing them apart in the cramped, overheated attic of my parent’s garage where we kept the Christmas decorations and my Hot Wheels tracks. The old ones, I took apart irreparably. Hammers, and other devices of destruction to get open hard drives with screwheads of shapes and sizes I had never seen. Eventually, I bought my own. It was my great uncle’s old machine, and I bought it at a garage sale and had to have my dad help me break into it with a Spotmau password recovery disk he probably got on eBay. For years after that, on that same machine, I learned to install hardware, write scripts, build websites, mod games, look up things I wasn’t supposed to see, and steal things I wasn’t able to buy. It was years after that before I would have another computer to call my own. There weren’t programs for me to do this in school, and I didn’t like school much anyway, even when I excelled. It would be the free youth Game Programming courses in between years of highschool (where I would meet one of my best friends) and my college-in-highschool “Intro to Object Oriented Programming” course that actually convinced me I could do this for real. Until I was hit in the face with those, it was always a hobby; I would be a mechanical engineer, or structural, or something else more “real” I figured. Software engineering (if I can call it that, in good conscience) would become very real for me very quickly, though. A full-time job before I graduated college. A B.S. in computer science only two years after highschool. Suddenly I am a professional with five years of experience, a constant big-fish-little-pond feeling, and an oddly spacious old apartment barely across town from my parents. I have no more social media. I often long to live without a smart phone or a personal computer. It’s not practical, really, but it’s nice sometimes still to fantasize, even as I work to decrease my own entrapment in delusions like that and settle with the constant fluctuations in sensation that make up my self.

Right now, I’m choosing to build something that does not feel bad to me; I want do build something I might like using, and even be interested in sharing. I (perhaps vainly or foolishly) want a level of anonymity that allows me to be honest without the present fears of social alienation, shame for oversharing, professional repercussions, etc. overwhelming me and causing me to meter my words or actions, but I still want some semblance of recognition, I think. Even with all the learning I put into how little of a self there really is, I still seem to want to form an identity with my professional and creative work and hold it up, and say “This is me!” and have it make sense to someone who might look at it. I don’t believe that’s a unique desire at all; I think it’s the motivating desire of a lot of what goes on the internet. I think it’s tangled in a whole web of expectations of one on themself and of those to whom they might exhibit themself in that way. I think most people engaging on most platforms are conscious of all of that at some level. I think folks like the ones building sites in the yesterweb¹ circle and the little group of folks I’ve read posts from on schlaugh are especially considering how the modes of sharing information have changed both the information and the sharing, and are making conscious decisions to investigate alternatives. This sort of consideration is part of living an examined life for anyone who has a digital presence. After some time without social media, and a more recent period without much of my typical digital social engagement (I stopped lurking on Discord for somewhere nearing two hours each day) this site is the next stage of my examination.