How This Blog Works

I’ve been working away at this for close to a full calendar year and I’m happy with how things are going. I’m gonna continue (It’s important to determine this as I’m on the paid-subscription tier with squarespace).

The main purpose of the blog was to show that I have a pulse, so that anyone who cares about me or my work can check in and see that I have still been alive and active, at whatever the most recent blog post was. Hopefully it also gives some clue into my mindset.

As an example:
”oh look! he last posted on 3/12/2025, that means that as of that day he was still alive and typing! It’s possible since that time that he has keeled over and is now a rotting corpse in an office chair with flies buzzing around his head, but that’s a speculative proposition at best and unlikely!… either that or he is deceased and someone has commandeered his online e-estate and is typing in his guise, also unlikely, or he’s been hacked, slightly less unlikely but still unlikely.”

But the internet is an ephemeral beast, and we all have to accept that. There are sites I used to read alot of that are now gone, or can be found only on the wayback machine. There’s stuff that I remember reading somewhere that I can no longer find, or can’t be stuffed retrieving. Convict Creations is an example of this. As was Adam Piggotts old blog. The latter sounds like it just collapsed due to infrastructural overload or something, as he has now moved to substack. Adam himself mentioned one or two other blogs that were just deleted in entirety one day by the user, due to who knows what: boredom, embarrassment, a wholesale change of personality and worldview, legal difficulties, threats, death…

Then there’s the stuff i post, which I actually change my mind about sometimes, and go back and edit. Sometimes it’s just to fix typos, but occassionally its to tweak an image in some way, to add a sentence or two, or to delete stuff i wrote and published but am no longer happy with. So I’ve changed my mind about stuff that I’ve already published.

The PUBLISH button at the top-left corner of the page is this big ominous looking thing. Once you click, your work is PUBLIC, and therefore, usable as evidence against you in a court of law, or the court of public opinion.

But i edit all the time after publishing. Only minor fix-ups, the substance of most of it stays the same. SUBSTANCE being the critical word here. So I’m sure that, taken as a whole, you’ll get the gist (jist?) of what I’m on about.

Probably most significantly, I sometimes chuck in music links of songs I was listening to in the moment of writing, and then decide, days, or weeks, later “actually thats pretty fuckin’ gay or stupid, why did i post that there, and why do i expect anyone to want to care? Unless they want to laugh at my super retro and crappy taste.” (The whole Sammy Hagar article is a monument to my taste). But then i’ll regret THOSE edits and wish I didn’t delete them, as i did the other day. Cos its a lot harder to undo multiple deletes than to undo just one. There’s no history button that i’ve found. This blog is a live organism.

The objects of biggest real-world permanence are all the physical paintings and drawings I have. I don’t think this internet thing will be kicking around for too much longer. Its too hard to maintain, too controversial, to complicated. It’ll probably be left to keel over and die at some point as we all retribalize in the post-apocalypse. Maybe it’ll be allowed to stay up in local pools with very strict and limited parameters around what we can do with it.

Unless people CHOOSE to keep stuff like screenshots and books published by bloggers etc. And who knows, all my precious paintings and drawings may be consumed by fire one day, or callously chucked into the tip, and all that will remain is a screenshot someone took of my site once and saved to their long-discarded phone.

And that’ll be it……

Fun fact:

All the existent paintings by Turner, who was a famous English 19th century landscape watercolourist, are only apparently about a quarter of his total output. The remaining three quarters were depictions of nudes that got chucked into the fire by his prudish widow after he died, or something like that. What’s extraordinary about that story is that if it’s true then it presents a wholesale renovation of another guy’s life and persona by someone very close to him right AFTER he died. What else about history don’t we know that we thought we did? What other people have had their backstory completely scrubbed and edited. Have you ever read about the people who started the big religions by people outside of those religions? Have you ever read about the dictators and tyrants of history? The criminals and extremists? Have you ever tried to put yourself in their shoes? You see what I’m getting at here.

Everything is always moving, and is shifting, and is liable to edits, adjustments, corrections and censorships. If history is to give a stuff about me at all, it’ll be whatever’s left behind after i croak that they’ll bother to keep as a conversation piece and converse about.

The whole notion of publishing is imo pretty out of date now. A court might order you to delete a tweet, but the screenshot will still exist. Dinosaur-media news sites paywall their content, but there are freely available workarounds. Lars Ulrich sued his fans in the year 2000 for downloading Metallica albums. All those albums are now available to stream for free on youtube. People have remixed some of their songs and done fun mashups.

It makes you wonder how recent the defined lines between informal expression and formal publication have been.

“but i didn’t say that!”

“you wrote it!”

“well i changed my mind!”

“that’s defamation y’know. You have defamed me!”

The rule of law is trying to pin down sonic waves we call speech and funny abstract lines we call letters, arranged into sequences we call words. They say this might spread ideas, and some ideas are dangerous, because they threaten the prevailing order, the system.

You as a publisher of work you created can be sure of two things: People don’t like to be censored, and they don’t like to pay for things. While at the same time liking other people to pay for their output and shutting down what they don’t like. If i’m gonna be honest with you i’m not sure if im that different, it’s just that my motivation to act upon these impulses is quite low. It’s just way easier to sit here and ramble for free, collect the dole cheque and leave it at that. I’ll dob someone in whom I don’t like, but proper complaint-letter writing is a pain in the ass and formal litigation is just not economically viable or worth my time.

The only way past this i see is to re-establish a community,

yes that’s right, i said it, a commune!!!

of trust.

A High-Trust Society.

If you can’t re-establish that among the people in your current society then you detach from them and go looking for people whom you can trust. And you can have more than one group imo. A real-life group, an online group. A work group, a fun group, a local neighbourhood group. a prospective investment group etc.

So if you project yourself out there, and ask nicely, hopefully you will achieve the sense of belonging and prosperity you desire.

What else: sometimes, the words come first and then the picture, and sometimes the picture comes first and then the words. Just so you know. This might explain why the article sometimes feels thematically detached from the image. I don’t think many people are even reading this so I don’t care. Maybe if this venture grows in size and appeal i’ll tighten up procedure and stop back-editing but for now ceebs (which is short for cbf for you novices out there, NOT “can’t be bothered” as Brave Ai suggests. I am proud that they source its origin to my blighted hometown however, or Australia. But i reckon it’s Melbourne specifically in origin. I’m claiming it).

Who remembers Suikoden on PS1? That was a fun one.