|
|
|
|
|
October 25th 2025
I spent the past week working and playing Minecraft. Sold yarn at a small crochet convention and spent the duration of it staring into the hotel carpet for hours until I had reimagined the hotel carpet as the cover of an 80s sci-fi novel. Boredom is valuable because it helps you appreciate excitement when it comes naturally.
Here are some things that I enjoyed this week.
|
|
October 19th 2025
I feel I've been coming across as an alarmist when I've talked about my perspective on social media. Hey, friend. It's chill if you post on your own close friends story. My meditations on how I interact with social media are my own. Asking everyone to forgo social media right this second is like asking everyone to immediately stop consuming animal products. Internet veganism.
I've been thinking about the desire for connection more than usual. Tried to find books on isolation today at the library, visited The Syllabus Project, found a Syllabus for Taking An Internet Walk, and found a recommendation for Tools for Convivality by Ivan Illich in the footnotes. Checked that sucker out! Am reading it! I'm only a chapter in, but I'm already excited by the arguments proposed by Illich. He claims there is a natural scale to the way humanity relates to its tools (social programs and technologies.) He says, "when an enterprise grows beyond a certain point on the scale, it first frustrates the end for which it was originally designed, and then rapidly becomes a threat to society itself." I see the symptoms of this proposed phenomenon in social media, for sure. Instagram gained 1 million users its 2 month birthday (according to Wikipedia) and had over a billion users as of 2021 (according to this Congressional hearing.) How do you manage a product so it meets its intended end -- in this case, interconnection and self-expression -- for one billion people and in so short an amount of time? The answer seems to be: you don't. You keep marketing it that way and capitalize off the attention of your users. He also makes a point in the first chapter that "while evidence shows that more of the same leads to utter defeat, nothing less than more and more seems worthwhile in a society infected by the growth mania." "Growth mania," he says, is a symptom of a society that is "dominated by industry." Not a bad description of American society in 2025 for a book written in 1973! I think social media has helped to instill in me (and a lot of the creators I know) a sense of growth mania. I feel compelled to say more and more and more and do more and more and more, or face isolation. I've quickly learned that this mindset is a blight on my own creativity and personhood. Enjoying Minecraft in the evenings, plum Soon Hari, knitting by the river, coding at Realms, animal print and cool air. |
|
October 13th 2025
I got the chance to speak with Sabrina Sutherland at a Twin Peaks cast meet-and-greet. I asked if she had heard of I Saw The TV Glow (A24s one good movie.) She said she hadn't and would add it to her watchlist. Jane Schoenbrun said this about the return, by the motherfucking way:
The way that the sort of filmic warmth of the original is replaced by this digital dread, the way the plotting is sort of now dancing between these realities that never quite congeal, I think of [‘Twin Peaks: The Return’] as a genuinely revolutionary work and certainly one of the most important works in my life.That's insane! I have hope that Sabrina was just humoring me and had secretly seen it. Regardless, it felt good to connect two things that I loved. |
|
October 12th 2025
Hot springs! Hot water trickled down the mountainside and shushed and shushed against our little pool. It's all dancing droplets and audiovisual static. I laid down and wrapped my aching body in hot water. The granite cradled me and it was so, so nice.
|
|
October 11th 2025
Dried worms on the sidewalk bent into a shepherds crook.
|
|
October 10th 2025
If you make a brand new YouTube account, type "CAPTURE YYYYMMDD" in the search bar -- with YYYYMMDD replaced with the date of your choice (i.e. 20250910,) -- and then sort the results by upload date, you will be shown webcam footage that was uploaded straight to YouTube without a title. The footage is often raw, often benign, often desperate and often honest. Shoutout to both my good friend blink pristine for inspiring me with his dedication to finding the deepest cuts and to KVN AUST for compiling keyphrases in this document (and to everyone who contributed.)
I go back and forth a lot on the ethics of sharing videos uploaded by people who, clearly, didn't expect me to be watching what they uploaded. Their content is technically public, but it's all a drop of water in an ocean of information that is now way past the point of being consumed in its entirity, ever. There is only a level of privacy when yelling in public if everyone on the planet is yelling at the exact same time. Most of the untitled webcam footage on YouTube contains vulnerable video diaries. Anyways. Found the account of an 8-year-old redheaded boy who likes Ghost Face, likes his right-wing cop dad, likes NEFFEX, and likes recording himself during his online classes. Most of his videos have 1-2 views. This is the best case scenario for any child with a YouTube account. Here's a list of the best video titles he's come up with.
|
|
October 9th 2025
Sometimes I talk with so many people in one day, for so long, with no breaks, that I end the night feeling like someone poured fresh, glossy paint over my brain and let it sit until it hardened. It feels really good and it gives me a spiritual hangover.
|
|
October 8th 2025
I've never heard a Sorry song I couldn't stand. This album release is going to hit me so hard that I'm going to go missing for two weeks.
"Where's Simon? They're missing from behind the yarn shop's front counter. We don't see them knitting at shows anymore." And in two weeks
I'm found wandering in a tattered daze on the streets of NYC, but it's a fashionable and cinematic tattered. Like Helena Bonham Carter in
Fight Club; unfortunately fortunately.
Top artists at the moment: Jockstrap, Sorry, UBOA, Water From Your Eyes and Simon [&] Garfunkel (Bridge Over Troubled Water, exclusively.) In no particular order.
|
|
October 6th 2025
The dissolution of the private and public spheres is really working against me here. It's difficult to know what in my life should be reserved to a close conversation with friends, or reserved to veiled references in art, or reserved to my inner monologue. It's difficult to know what in my life deserves to be broadcast without censorship to everyone I know and don't know.
That's why I used to post on my close friends story and delete the post seconds to hours later, if any long-time Simon viewers are wondering. I got my degree in creative writing with a non-fiction emphasis, and that complicates things further. Memoir is not a raw exposure of one's soul (usually,) it's a carefully edited recollection of events with calculated and timed reveals of emotion. I've been congratulated for my "raw authenticity" in memoir pieces where I intentionally dulled my emotions for the sake of the reader. So what should I share here, besides this extremely important webpage that sparked my interest in 90s-style blogs? Cockroach Carolyn is the hottest bug taxidermist on the Internet. It is a miracle that her artwork survived the burning of GeoCities.com. My personal favorite pieces are Rite of Spring and It's A Girl! Anyways. "What should I share and how should I share it" was what I got my degree in. I still don't know. |
|
October 3rd 2025
In Sun Valley right now with my friend Frosty. Enjoyed the orange and yellow aspen groves and ¢50 sticker machines in small town diners.
|
|
October 1st 2025
In 1977, Susan Sontag wrote in On Photography, "Taking photographs has set up a chronic voyueristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events."
I'm going to take this quote hella out of context to make my point. This is how my social media experience feels, lately. Like I'm maintaining a chronic voyueristic relation with the world which levels the meaning of all events. I know my blog's UI techincally contains images, but comparing that to the barage of images on Instagram's Explore page is like comparing sugar to cocaine. It's like I went into social media for connection and got a vouyeristic desperation to see everything ever, and it made it feel like everything ever meant nothing. Even the little endorphin rushes I would get from finding CoreCore comps and archival footage just felt like prepackaged McDonalds sliced apples. Same with posts from my friends! Same with posts from people from the scene that I admire! Just completely void of their original substance due to their packaging. What the helly I just want to feel more active in the ways I connect with people and more intentional in the way I express myself. Fingers crossed this effort isn't totally isolating and I wind up feeling more inherently purposeful, instead of letting my self-worth be determined by who liked my close friends story and who didn't. Also I hope we're rocking with the fur background. Wanted it to be extra soft and cozy in here |
|
September 30th 2025
 |
|
|