#27

It's very strange, making posts to Blogger. I mean, even using a Google service is strange. I only do it because I make use of an Amazon service, namely, their publishing service, through which one may easily obtain digital copies of my books, and said service may be linked to a blogging service. This streamlining seemed like fair business dealings to me: like a little corn salesman, it is only fitting that I peddle my wares by front-facing free samples, the most old-school of cold sells, in hopes of snagging the odd, hopefully loyal stranger whose taste buds seek the nourishment I provide, and are willing to pay for something to take home and enjoy in their own way.

I myself am just such a queer wanderer; the type of person who hopes to stumble upon something like GweenBrick, reads it with deep enjoyment, and thinks it is important. I am proud to share a shitty platform with such works. Remember geocities? Remember Ulli?

The fossil known as Blogger, though. Man. I tried to let the new, rebranded Google Ads do its thing on Factually Pointless; do you see ads? I don't know. I don't think it worked. But it won't confirm or deny, and refuses to allow for further inputs.

Encouraged to create and link to a Google+ (Google Plus?) profile, I have done so, yet trying to explore Google+ defies analogy.

Well, that's not quite true. Navigating the haunted asshole that is Google+ is in fact nostalgic to me, simultaneously evoking 2003-era forums and websites upon which assorted clips of video pornography could be had for free, in layout and in navigation. But that's...wrong, isn't it, for something purportedly meant to be one of those services that link people together in a savvy, utile way in this day and age, wherein social media's sigil is burnt into the very heavens by the dark power of the heartless sorcerers that helm its throbbing temples?

Whatever their game, for something that seems to be designed to hold its own in the bowels of that black and bloodstained pit, Google+ doesn't seem to me to be engaged in any sort of competitive thrust. I think that's deceptive, though, and I believe Gweenbrick and stuff like it, such as my own stupid homebrew trash is a big part of why--because homebrew trash needs a low-key home, a place that isn't in a shitty neighborhood, doesn't look like a punk house, smell like a punk house, or advertise itself as a punk house, but where punk shows happen; where actually nobody lives there and it's just a framework for a basement where punk shows happen in front of twenty people at a time. To underline the point, scroll down far enough, and Google+ is in fact one of those old porn websites.

Go on! Search "writing", for example, in Google+, then scroll down for a minute or so, make the auto-load work. If you're the right age, you'll feel like an old frontiersman, long hemmed in by city walls, cresting an untamed horizon once again.

This evokes a crude, hardscrabble quality that lingers about the space, which the internet has by and large lost--giving way to the polish and presentation of the well-lit avenues and great plazas where the worldwide throngs gather, the circuses spout gore, and fake bread spews in half-chewed sprays of crumb from every mouth.

Once upon a time, websites were hideous affairs, tough to decipher, much of the most interesting data presented as merely a single front page with a jaypeg of a solid block of text. Practically nobody went to them, and the people who made them were hedge wizards. Now even your cousin Larry has a nice crisp header, pop-up videos, meticulously farmed content, and a soft paywall. He was able to set it all up in twenty minutes from his phone.

I remember this one guy that talked about how he got into fucking dolphins. I'm talking about swimming into the shallows of the bay to service the males with his hands to "shotgun blast" completion (long before this factoid enjoyed a high vogue) and let the females milk his johnson with their "prehensile, rippling vaginal walls, which created almost a suction as they powerfully massaged." I'm paraphrasing, but accurately, I think, as the pale yellow of his website, the careful distribution of his paragraphs, and his even, clinical tone have burned themselves into my memory.

As far as I know, while Twitter and Facebook may try to get you to try and pay a robot for sex, they mostly take the trouble to filter out virus-laden porn-pots with nipples right in the trap-frame. In Google+, all the edges may be crisp and feature no black lines, the text may not be trapped within and partially cut by unsightly table-frames or random bullet-points, but it manages to remind me of extremely rough, gigantic music files straining through your speakers as patches of comic sans shakily load around a broken image.

And it feels good. Like the sort of place where people aren't watching you too close so they can be the first to ram their yells down your throat and shame you into a wearied subjugation. Like a place where some weird, broken, unsalable shit can thrive, without a pressure economy and an aesthetics of competitive performance, be it by chaos trolls or by purity trolls, and simply be there for the weird, broken, unsalable people to find it, to make their lonely paths seem less so. I grew up turning over the web's logs to note the fungal ecology and watch the insect life crawl. It's good to contribute to such an ecosystem, when the woods have changed so much, and gone so sterile.

That's worth something ineffable to me, sad and pathetic as it is for the chumps in charge of making something that exists in 2018. I doff my cap to the team, and hope whatever changes may come, the floorboards may stay loose, and the grit remain wherever it can. I like a bit of broken drywall, some mysteriously stained carpet, and naked black cables strung along a wall. I like the low disintegrated, the tattered, the merely serviceable.

Am I using Netscape Navigator? Or are maggots eating my eyes in my fucking grave? Either way, I'm comfortable.

*

Okay, peace out everybody. I have to go figure out how to listen to the new Li'l Wayne album without paying for it or signing up for any services. I used to be capable when it came to these matters! Alas, things creep up on one, and the cool, edgy, thieving parts of the brain calcify with age before anything else. But at least I don't buy records.

My age group got conned into purchasing records somehow--records--and the players with which to scratch them with needles. We, who once scoffed at the costly, dust-collecting husks our forebears endured, those ancient and derelict compact discs. We, whose hacked iPods groaned with the weight of effortless discographies.

Our parents were the last suckers, we boasted to one another--even before the Cloud.

It's a different world, we said.


--JL