^=- up -=^

but when the world needed him most, he vanished

hi, so im an asshole. ive replied to a few of the emails that have dripped through in the past two and a half years of inactivity, but not all of them. there were a surprising number. i guess people were reading my dumb blog after all lol. im sorry to anyone whose email wasnt replied to. im an asshole.

i am not dead

first of all, im not dead. i cant believe i unironically left my last post on here "i have symptomatic covid" for two and a half years. not good folks. i never had symptoms besides smell/taste being gone. i didnt get long covid or anything. my smell and taste returned in a week or two. everything was fine.

i dont know why i stopped posting. of course i had already stopped posting to some extent before that. i graduated undergrad in 2021 and in the fall of my senior year i posted exactly one thing, and it was a little baby post about elections. i dont know if this will be relatable to anyone, but theres this thing where someone texts you, you forget to respond, and by the time youve realized it, it would be weird to reply now. happens to me, at least. well, if i had to compare my feelings toward this blog to any describable feeling it would be that.

i probably would have started posting again that summer but things were chaotic. i took a gap year during which time i was still working retail. there were certainly some good stories in the vein of my earlier posts to put there. but that wasnt how it went. i think i felt guilty for mostly abandoning this blog for like 9 months by that point, and the way i dealt with that was to continue abandoning it for a year and three months. that makes sense.

since the fall of 2022, ive been in law school. there were certainly fun things to post about from that, but there was no time, really. im going to write a brief post at some point about the mechanisms of how law school takes over your whole life. last semester i got three As, two A-s, and alcohol poisoning. you might be thinking, "he had time to drink but not to post 'im alive' on his gemini blog?" and the answer is honestly probably no, right, and yet theres this insidious way it feels necessary. this is part of what that post will be. ive been on summer break now for about a month. its astonishing how much psychic damage i suffered emergency braking from a persistent state of maximal stress to no obligations whatsoever. i was having law school dreams for two weeks until i started my summer job. that takes a lot of my time now.

but for some reason today i felt like posting.

i stand by every post ive made

secondly, i dont want anyone to think i stopped posting bc i no longer agree with anything i posted in particular, or i devolved into some kind of liberal. i didnt. i have the same politics as back then, with very little difference. i stand by all my previous posts in substance if not in form. a lot of it is derangedly sloppy writing, probably in part because i was so consistently drunk back then, and probably in part because i was a few years younger, and probably in part because that's what ive got to offer.

what im gonna do with this space

finally, i dont know what im gonna do with this space. for quite a while, i was using it to tell random stories of retail bullshit in the covid apocalypse. this was interspersed with random commie political content. obviously i can still do commie political content, but, as im not a retail worker anymore, i cant do that part. and unfortunately i cant directly transition from "stories from my retail job" to "stories from my legal job" because of confidentiality, though i kinda wish i could.

i already alluded to a law school post. there will likely be a few of those, or maybe ill condense them. i dont know.

i also had a thought that i might edit a few of the letterboxd reviews ive written that are substantial in content and political in nature and put them here. i have very long and complex opinions on quite a few movies that fit with what i was doing in this space to some extent. off the top of my head, movies that might qualify are the batman, which i think is a well made but deeply evil centrist movie, and native son, which i think is one of the most fascinatingly bad movies ever made, despite the critical response being mixed-to-positive. my thoughts on how s craig zahler's filmography is deeply good despite his intent being to create literal fascist propaganda might fit in too. there are others that arent at the forefront of my mind rn.

i might also write some long-form-ish stuff organizing my ideas on ... twitter drama. or i guess more accurately organizing my thoughts on the discussions underlying twitter drama. it might be fitting that this blog, previously used for retail stories and commie meanderings from the irl apocalypse, become used for stories and commie meanderings from the web apocalypse, particularly since its being posted on gemini, as opposed to the web. twitter is an abbatoir that only really functions as a random argument generator, but the char limit makes it a completely worthless medium for discussing those arguments.

an example would be the euphoritori thing from last week: there's such a demonic intermixture of complicated arguments going on there that you cant actually discuss it on twitter without creating a giant thread, and ive seen enough people try to create giant threads to know that if you do that it creates this nightmare fractal of replies and duplicated work and it just sorta doesnt work, leaving aside the fact that trying to do so is for losers. i would much rather take an entire drama as a jumping-off point for a longer-form discussion of the ideas that are at play. (i do want to say that i think twitter having a character limit is necessary, and it would be a worse website without it, and it's already very bad). for those wondering, being a communist i come down on the "nazis are bad" side of the euphoritori drama, perhaps this is a hot take.

using this blog to discuss leftist twitter drama *now* of all times is particularly fitting, because the last time i really posted was in the lead-up to the 2020 election, and, with the euphoritori drama, we have officially entered the 2024 election. unsurprisingly, socdems are employing all of the same arguments theyve employed the last 100+ years. now we can sit high above, in the leftist geminisphere, observing the hijinks of the leftist web, and watching the development of these arguments from birth to death at the very moment of the 2024 victor's inauguration, at which point they will lie dormant again until 2026. terminally online? yes! but potentially fun? definitely! and really, as i said, these arguments have been had for *ages*. in 1967, hal draper wrote a long twitter post called "Who’s going to be the lesser-evil in 1968?", responding to the same arguments we see from sock emoji twitter users in 2024. nothing changes.

the first of these posts will likely be about the euphoritori thing and the surrounding questions regarding racism, rehabilitation, forgiveness, contrition, and, of course, electoralism, because, as i said, it sorta started the lefist electoralism debate of this election cycle, which i expect to play a big role in this blog going forward. edit: maybe later i cant make myself do it now

cya soon

so we have all of that to look forward to, and more, if i dont fail you all again. im sure fewer people are reading now, but this is something im interested in! im having faith that being on solderpunk's "50 gemini sites" page will give me a boost here, though no doubt a lot of those are dead now and people wont click through the whole list to commie.space to see im back :(

so make sure you tell other gemini nerds you know that im so back. i dont even know if gemini is dead now.

godspeed children