LAN





10/17/23 i wish i could exist outside of time. The concept of living in a year is embarassing because a year always has its own personality but it's never exactly the personality you want. Any one moment is itself but my sense of self is scattered across different times, what kind of person would have a personality that agrees just with the things that are current? It's natural to prefer a sense of self that trancends time. The concept of a year is embarassing because I'm lumped in with the rest of the year, what i write is just a part of 2023, what an embarassing thing to be a part of, as i would feel to some extent in any year.
2/21/24 now that i'm familiar with hegel and spengler i feel like i have so much clearer an understanding of the geist. its interesting to see both nostalgia and the gedankenwelt at once, unatainable worlds passing out of existence and leaving you with weird memories of worlds that dont exist and at the same time not feeling like you ever freely get to decide who you are at the present moment but rather decide who you can be within the geist you are given. its just hard to get over the fact that even aside from my lack of free will to effect the outside world, i cant even choose how i get to experience things internally, and as such not even be able to fully empathize with my own past emotions. And i understand items and the physical world in genreal now as semiotics subconsciously shaping the geist



8/26/23 i think the real beauty of an aesthetic isnt in the thing itself but how it enchants the outside world. and in return it becomes a different thing itself from with it's weird contrasts to the outside world. like the aesthetic of things designed after nature. its not about the bag that looks like a leaf on it's own it's about walking around with it and feeling it's aesthetic enchant the natural features of your environment, it's about the way the world feels different when you wear it.

Or the aesthetic of an old bike poster, the emotional quality of the old italian or french poster for bicycles is evoking an entire aesthetic, not evoking about the design of the bike or poster itself, but of an emotion where the aesthetic of the bike is an enchantment of an older world in which it exists. it's about biking- in an old town which was designed with a very different set of aesthetics in mind, which is enchanted with a new aesthetic as contrasted by a new thing. riding your bike through the old country.

Like what is it about an old computer. the design itself? or how it enchanted the outside world as a seperate place, and how the outside world made it a special thing. even if youre not at a LAN party, existing in a world where they're a new thing that's happening around you reflects a new aesthetic on the outside world, buzzing with a sense of potential or coexistence of emotions. Entering an exciting technological age. The way a friday night is buzzing with the potential of what you could be doing, or buzzing with the coexistence of a social and cultural energy being acted out around you even when you dont see it.

seeing the computer on the desk, you get the feeling you're about to enter a strange and vivid dream.



your computer used to be brimming with energy and possibility, it used to have a fuzzy glow and it used to be warm like flesh, like the heat of a crowded house or club two hours into a party, radiating energy even as you just walked past it, and in that fiday-night heat the air was brimming with posiblity- but it's not there anymore. And when you went outside you used to see the soft fuzzy glow of technology everywhere, everything was different when you were just about to live in the future. That is no longer there either.

when people talk about the nostalgia of something like the DS it's not about just the physical design they miss, you could easily replicate the superficial aspects, it's about being in the backseat of the car with the new thing, the outside world is contrasted and changed. the car is a new place, because now you have a DS.

Nostalgia easily reveals that what is evoked by an aesthetic is a reflection of a place, and that the aesthetic of a place is changed or enchanted by a thing. You can still watch whatever movie you want, but is your movie enchanting the outside world of a blockbuster store? Is the environment of the store enchanting the aesthetic of your movie?


The psychology of a party(10/17 addition)

The need to move around furniture and prop up plastic tables and bring the kitchen chairs into the TV room etc. for a house party actually furthers the overall experience of the party because the spacial disruption creates a sort of enchantment and a layer of ritual which designates a house as a "party space" which is distinct from real life, or at least from "normal life". We can drink at many different times, and many places, we can meet friends many time and places, we can meet many at once, but when are we actually having a "party"? The psychology of a party is the coexperience of a spacial disruption, you and your friends experience some distinct place together, outside of the world. Decorations have the same effect, but even if you're not intending to decorate a space just the act of changing it in some significant way is psychologically the same

I think that the idea of mutual aesthetic enchantment, what makes life interesting, is the same as the psychology of a party, the ideal life in my mind is one where you get to experience the aesthetics of your environment in a way that reflects the psychology of a party.


Driving my friends for an hour in the fog and rain one weekend to the nearest city felt in some way the same as "party pscyhology"- a ritual feeling of setting out together into that unknown dreamlike road, the constant and unreal feeling of disruption of normal life that came from the here and now of that short-sighted road, a co-experience of spacial disruption, the unknown world passing around us. The fact we were sharing music and were on our way to get food together reinforced the collective or co-experience aspect of the psyche.
the pillow fort is a form of ritual spacial disruption

Originally, the virtual world was also a coexperience outside space, you sat in the backseat of your parents car, but disrupted normal life with a new space; the tiny world inside your phone which only your friends knew about. At least it worked that way before the phone became inescapable and needed for every boring moment of normal life.

Is there anything more nostalgic than a party? is it any wonder that nostalgia and partying converge on feeling of being young, of childlike wonder or of adolescent instability. Between those three states of mind, the feeling of a party, the feeling of youth, and the feeling of nostalgia, there's not much in life that feels better.

That's key to the experiences that we value enough to feel nostalgia for, and part of the feeling we associate most strongly with being young; you and your friends together disrupting your way out of normal life.

Here's how culture makes life great, it's the tool used in the act of disrupting the world around you to experience something, the american culture of halloween may be my favorite, but in every moment of life it's about things you make up to ritualize every little experience you can, and to experience those experiences collectively.



8/15/23 everyone who criticizes you for “just being nostalgic” actually also only likes things from the past, and the people who don’t are either lying or happen to really have bad taste.
it gives the impression that maybe....... it isnt always delusional to be nostalgic?



honest nostalgia still has one flaw which is that even being transported to the past, it's always in a state of becoming the thing that ruined it. it's always becoming less itself. 2010 was in the state of becoming 2011 becoming 2012 becoming 2013 until present day. it was all in a state of not being itself anymore

(9/10addition) see nietzsche's eternal recurrence and living heavily- saying yes to one thing is saying yes to everything, everything that led up to it and everything that it is itself leading up to, liking one thing means accepting it is the reason for the things which are not itself.





the missed aesthetics for example, are just about always the first step in creating the aesthetics that are hated. the early 2000's aesthetics of sleek technology that is missed, and the culture they came from- which reflects the feeling of the aesthetic, is in fact a step along the way to creating the universal corporate minimalsim. the old aesthetic is in fact the first step in erasing itself


(addition)...not to say bad in and of itself


8/14/23 it feels ignorant to assume somthing i lived through was completely unique in history but has there ever been any micro moment in history with a more rich niche of a cultural scene and world of emotions you could only experience in the moment than there was in the time just after the 2008 crash but before the 2016 campaigns?

#the late sixties were crazy i guess tbf #but the dawn of high-tech culture had drugs too, if that's what's so special

#but also lan parties and an even bigger mainstream electronic music revolution #every technology and software was so completely new #it felt more like the future then than it does today. or at least the current day feels like the future in a regressive way #drugs and culture war are familiar in history. but the weird emotions around tech and the aesthetic of the new millenium are completely unique and never really been replicated #for a good while the frontier of tech and nerd culture and electronic stuff was moving so much faster than it could be exploited and ruined

unheard of boom in video games. personal computers in general. explosion of electronic music tech, every song was still about partying. gci in movies and shit was crazy. social media and even the concept of a smartphone was completely new. even bluetooth was sort of cutting edge. novel inventions everywhere. golden age of devices. DS was selling. early VR. so much opened up internationally, tons of anime weeb stuff exploded in popularity faster than companies could pick up on it. it was all so extremely new that texting someone for too long was considered addiction. despite being surrounded by new stuff, the world was so offline that by using the internet you could really "plug in" and be in an entirely different world. the internet used to be a different place from the real world. i was like a preteen but the whole world felt like a college party up until 2015 because of just how young everything was, it was all in the hands of the fun-loving college students with their world full of new tech

2016, for one thing, put the cultural moment (back?) into the hands of either the rancid old political career cunts to make into new battlegrounds or into the hands of soulless media-factory corporations. party over, go back to nothingness.

(8/16/23 addition) that really is exactly it, the cultural moment was college-aged as the campus was the frontier of the tech society. Thats why, despite it's superficiality and irresponsibility and immaturity and consumerism and awkward social-political problems, it was so much better and so energetic and full of anticipation and simply so unique compared to what came after.
8/30/23 the youthfulness of society is worth tragedy, youth is worth it's insecurity
we would not be young if we were not insecure


8/10/23 even though i had ability for internet access since elementary school i think i was the last person to actually make an account for any social media. it was weird. theres a sort of numbing to the loneliness on social media. you *are* less alone in some way, it's not all a lie. but for a good few years i knew the feeling of real loneliness.
not just a feeling of loneliness of feeling people are distant or one sided, but of true loneliness in the universe. anyone already in some way knows the sort of emptyness of things, but you really truely are numbbed to it by inescapably constant doses to sate a need for interaction.


when the internet is quiet and you have no impulses to distract you, there is something that goes far far deeper into the human emotions. to still be on a one-sided internet in that state is strange. it was even so much stranger in the years of being a kid when there is such a strangeness and mystery to everything. you're in this unimagineable vast wealth of things when you access the internet, and theres something uncanny about being so completely outside of all interaction. to use the internet completely unaware of it. its sort of like a walk through a city at night which is uncannily empty and so completely real. it's when you're completely outside humanity when you get the weird feeling of how it all really is. the exploration of pristeen abandond buildings, the 4am office, the waiting room for a late hospital stay, only nobody is ever there, you might compare it to a "liminal" feeling. you're immersed in this overwhelming world of humanity through technology and are just completely without humanity itself. and you see the real way it all is. the unimaginable life spent in all things in every strange detail and in this industrial scale of world that is so empty and quiet. it's like passing through highway in the night. you arent really in the middle of nowhere when youre driving. it's only without a car that any point becomes really truly nowhere, out in the dark. When you break down or stop for gas. a billion things unasked for are all moving parts in an overwhelming machine that will run itself without the will of humans. this industrial world is like a cosmic force as it builds itself in inevitability, there is only the outside observing of it. the strange assurance of power of every emotion in being alone in everything



7/14/23 most internet art was cool at first but it ever increasingly just feels like the artists are all somehow making art not as creators but consumers, trying pathetically to connect the dots between their borrowed personality traits. personality which the algorithm feeds to millions of other consumers homogenously. there is no creation, just mixing the sludge


in a gratingly frustrating irony, pictures of the uncanny, silent, empty, spaces, the photos that capture a pause at an odd moment, the foggy city street, the 3am at a gas station, none of these photos are allowed to invoke what they actually are, what they’re meant to be. a sort of surreal dreamlike feeling. instead they can now only invoke the clamoring consumerist masses of social media looking to aestheticize and turn everything into content and hoard it and distort it in a craving for attention. the quiet and surreal dream is gone. only the algorithm remains. everything is noisy. a cultural pollution fills everything

8/25/23 before they invented smartphones every empty room was liminal and it was so common of a thing that you didnt even need a word for it


7/8/23 You will never be able to say what you want to say again. The words don’t exist anymore. All meaning is stolen



6/8/23 do you ever feel like you're missing out on types of conversations people don't have anymore?


5/26/23 I'm constantly mourning the loss of something so nameless and vauge and obscure and easily forgotten and thoroughly erased from existence that i have to fight to even prove to myself and others that it once existed. It's an uphill struggle to reveal even a hint of what was lost. This cluster of emotions, some experience, some idea, some all encompassing worldview on its own, some entire way of being, that's gone forever. It's a time and a place that no longer exists. It's a person who can no longer exist, a kind of person who can no longer even be *imagined*. All of these things are so lost that they can't even be imagined.


5/9/23 its likely that nobody ever again is going to experience getting a family computer and inviting a friend over to browse the internet together for the first time



5/8/23 The average person who is obsessed with recapturing the feeling of the old web played the biggest role in destroying it while they were actually there #Lain avatars who only use twitter and other People who give off that vibe#They literally need to shut the fuck up#I want it to be like that again too. What’s wrong with you. Absolutely no self awareness. Your brain is nothing but posts



Somehow, the time after 9/11 and the time during the 2008 recession represents in some weird way the peak of American society. There are very few ways in which life actually got better in the past ten years, if any at all #2002 to 2013 was the absolute peak in culture at least as far as an internet user is concerned.#Anything good that’s been made since then is just an attempt to imitate or recapture it#But people are too retarded to bring it back#They make it like a fucking trend like oh let’s bring back old internet!#By making it a trend you’re literally dooming it from the beginning to fail because that’s such a fucking new web thing to do#You’re just fucking consumers#bringing back old internet by making it a trend is like trying to pass a bill called the “destroy the government” bill.#like bro are you fucking retarded are you that much of a fucking consumer peabrain ipadbaby shitwit#Twitter is not gonna just up and start being the old web. You can’t just post old web aesthetics you need to change the internet#You need to use it fucking differently you need to change as a person are you seriously so dense you don’t realize that?

It’s obvious that history isn’t a story about how good always wins. Out of all the wars fought in history, out of all the ideologies and cultures, there was something better, out of all those seemingly horrific enemies, someone was right. Likely many were. At some point there was a fight for the fate of everything, not just a fight but an age of fighting, a conflict of a generation, and it looked the same as every other time in history that people were so self-centered as to think they were fighting the most important fight, that they were on the brink of history's end, but this time it was true. A last chance to save the world before all hope was gone. And that battle was lost. something archaic, something barbaric or something foreign. Something we can only see as pseudoscience or myth. Something fanatical or zealous from our perspective. Something we can no longer see as sane, was right. Something good was lost forever. Perhaps a thousand times over in history, good did not prevail.

We live in a world that is the culmination of a long history where good does not always win, and doesn’t even win most of the time. We live in a world where much that is lost is lost forever. To these lost worlds people called home, this moment now is the real post-apocalypse, it is their real dystopia.





3/10/23
I like when I find really old blogs that actually have a good sample of a variety of internet culture. usually to 2007-2012. People only remember the internet for what was the .1% most viral content. but that isn’t actually what it was like most of the time, unless you were really annoying and had zero taste exept for the biggest bandwagon. Imagine if someone assumed what the internet was like for you now, using only the most popular viral content. Anyway, it’s just amazing how much content was just, not extremely artificially processed and curated. Not every image needed a caption to explain what was interesting, you don’t need narration for every video. The very idea of seeing a stream of content that included literally everything was enough. Aesthetic photos included a lot of regular stuff. A lot of posts were regular art, posted as it was, no special grouping of aesthetics. There didn’t need to be a gimmick to everything to get attention. Absolutely insane to see so clearly the change that has occurred in a geneation of internet usage



9/20/23 memories are important. they can be a problem but we have to remember things right. what would we be -or would any of this be, without memories?



music6