A bit of a vent post about the internet

September 19th 2024

Everyone is writing about the end of Cohost and their interaction with social media and the internet so why not I jump on the bandwagon a bit.

This may be a tad negative and unkind to myself but god damn.

I'm so sick of the internet. God I'm so addicted to the internet. To my computer in general. I wish I could just cut the cord and live in the woods (if there was a world where mosquitos and blackflies didn't exist).

Real talk? Cohost not having numbers didn't do shit.

The only thing it changed was I didn't instinctively judge someone when clicking on their profile and seeing their amount of follows like twitter has trained me and everyone else to do. Don't lie, it jumpstarts your expectations and changes how you go on to investigate their account. I hate that. I hate that it trained me to do that. But Cohost didn't invent Not showing follower numbers, but I appreciate it didn't have them. That's something I missed about tumblr after all.

But for me, on social media, the issue isn't the numbers under the content. I don't care if my art gets 10 retweets and 100 likes or if it gets 100000000 retweets. The number being bigger is always cool, but the number being low never caused me any illness like it did others, ya know? Numbers are numbers.

But it still gave me notifications. It still had a lil orange number on my screen that said (1) or (24) or whatever. That's the LET'S GO GAMBLING of social media. It didn't matter WHO gave me the number, but I'd click it as soon as I saw it none the less. Just to see, just to clear it off my fucking screen.

Could I disable certain kinds of notifications? Sure! I did at one point. I just ended up turning them back on, because I have brain disease, as we all do. If cohost had it so you could choose to publicly show your follower #s at the top of the screen you'd probably turn it off, but some people would leave it on, and you'd judge them automatically, right? If the option to electrocute yourself lightly is there eventually people press the button out of boredom. I enabled notifcations out of boredom. What's a lil shock afterall?

So yes. You couldn't count your numbers accurately, but they still existed. You had vibes and mental metrics for how Numbers your post was doing. Your following was doing. It was a lighter form of torture but I was still being tortured, ya know?

I hate the internet.

Sometimes I wonder, should I just go back to 4chan? Having a numberless, anonymous existence is nice afterall. You can have conflict and it won't end up in someone's folder of Times You Were a Bad Person and there are Now Enough That You Should Kill Yourself being posted online 10 years later.

But I peek in and it's just slop as it always was, but Worse. Because it got Worse every summer and now it's been like 12 years since I've bothered with it so that means it's at least 12x worse now. I should spend less time consuming slop on the internet and read some fucking books or something anyways, so I'm not going back there lol.

It's all slop! Every platform! Tumblr still has people actually blogging and talking long form about cool things I'm interested in, but if you don't curate it properly you fall into slop! Pointless! A pointless existence is all that exist s on social media!!

"Damn TIFF just quit the internet" I can't! I WORK here! I make my living off the internet! I have a fucked brain and a slightly fucked body and years of retail trauma and I'm not fucking going back my dude! You want me to spend 10 years building an online business just to say fuck it and try to beg for a job at the local grocery store where I'll be spit on by customers? I would genuinely rather Kill Myself.

This wouldn't be so bad if my brain just worked good and I could crank out 6-10 hour work days like I used to. I feel I hit 4 hours and I'm out of steam out of mental energy out of everything. I hate it here bro. I'm crushed under stress and the economy and the rental market has a sword over my head waiting for the day it can kill me. Ugh. Even if I got a full time retail gig I wouldn't be making enough money to live. I'd be able to separate "Me time" and "Work time" though. That division is so nice. A reason to be out of my apartment a few times a week would be nice. I wish I had a widdle studio I could go to to work or draw or whatever but alas. Instead I sit here wracked with guilt that I'm not working or I'm not drawing or being productive that I haven't given enough blood today to validate my existence.

Ok moving on from that.

I prefer putting effort into the internet, and I hope people genuinely put more time into making their own sites.

My favorite thing is that I've muscle memoried my favorite webcomics and can go to them, knowing they updated when they should of updated. I don't have to keep an eye on social media to see them, they just exist, on their own sites, and have for like 20 years or whatever at this point. Some people use RSS feeds for this, not me, I just raw dog it I guess. I miss Homestuck, it was the skinnerbox of webcomics. Sometimes it'd update like 10x a day, sometimes it would be once a week, sometimes youd be like whew that sure was 12 posts he's done for now, and return 2 hours later to see he started posting MORE. You'd alert your buds! It was a good time.

I wish more artists had sites.

A big reason why I want my own site is because I'm just impressed with Funamusea's. I love that there's just a huge section of her site dedicated to her OCs where you can see like 100+ of her character art laid out. It's so cool. I wish I was an artist.

She's probably the artist I keep up to date on the most not for any deep love and respect, but because she has a cool website I can go to where I can check her blog and see if there's any doodles or whatever she did recently. It's a space that isn't Social Media I can go. I want more of that for artists I care about!!

I want my site to be a place people can go like once a week to see if I'm still alive. Still creating.

But I create less and less, so do I even have a place online? It's hard to justify my existence when I'm not making stuff. I don't have a game that you'll love forever even if I die. I don't have writing you can keep revisiting. I have like, a couple eyecatch illustrations and boring photos of commissions I've done. I don't feel there's much to me. The me that people see is paper thin. I can't express myself well, and I express myself even worse to not at all with art.

fumu fumu

If I write more on that I will shrimply stress myself out though lmao. I hope I can create something I'll be remembered by if I die someday.