Notes On Platforms, Art, and Leaving New York

I never use this thing. I keep it up because it's not expensive, and because I still broadly believe in the idea of a more minimal internet, but I have absolutely not kept up with the world of Gemini. I don't even really know how much of it still exists. I know this site - this capsule, I suppose - doesn't work on some newer Gemini browsers. And admittedly, that's probably not getting fixed.

And therein lies the contradiction at the heart of minimal protocols like this one: once you get away from all the flashy nonsense on the web, you start wondering how much more you can do without. If you used the old web, maybe you had a site, maybe you posted on forums, but it was rare to feel the need to announce every thought and opinion to the world, and the people who did were rightly considered insufferable. We at least understood that we probably shouldn't be filtering our worldviews through the same machine that we got our porn from. Once you remember how that felt - or possibly experience it for the first time - it's hard to go back. The tendency seems to be to take it further. This curious old-web revival is like a nicotine patch for people who want to quit posting.

Meanwhile in real life, I finally stopped believing in New York and moved back to Pittsburgh, because apparently everything is an allegory for everything. I'd had the vague idea of that move bouncing around in my head for the last few years, occasionally rising to the level of conscious thought, but it was working on this site/capsule that really made me take it seriously. I was living in Pittsburgh when I put together my first "real" domain-and-all website back in college. I'm old and this was a long time ago - 2002! - so the site was necessarily simple, mostly typed out by hand in Notepad on a genuinely shitty Windows 98 machine, and uploaded via an FTP client. I used nested tables to make it look nice, and I chose a local company to host it because the girl I was dating knew people who worked there. All terribly nostalgic, I know.

So naturally, the act of typing out my thoughts in an old-fashioned text editor (Vim this time), accompanied by simple markup and uploaded via a janky script, reminded me of those days. But it was more than that; once that initial memory had been pried loose, I started remembering more, and in oddly precise detail. Wanting to listen to old music, I could write off as a midlife crisis. But the light on certain afternoons somehow reminded me of the light coming through the windows of my disgusting college apartment while I worked on the old site; some combination of cloud patterns, window grime, and the imperceptible change in the Earth's precession that occurs over twenty years.

I was a much worse artist back then. Art was just a hobby; the dream was to be a writer. I tried for years, and never finished a story. I moved to New York, not to write, not to paint, but to give up on that dream once and for all and become a responsible normie. I failed so completely at that that I ended up becoming an artist anyway. I never finished a story, but I've finished well over 100 canvases in just the last few years. Maybe 40 I'm actually proud of, but the point stands.

There's more rain and less natural light in Pittsburgh, which I knew going in. My new apartment is tiny and unimpressive, and I'm sleeping on a makeshift bedroll on the floor. None of this bothers me because this time, I at least know what kind of art I'm good at.

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