3-Month Anniversary: Happy Birthday, Website!

Notre-Dame de Grâce, by Guy Rose. Impressionist painting of the chapel in the French commune of Honfleur. Autumn. The tilted light spills onto the floor in front of the chapel, with blue roofs, and lights up thre trees in gold and orange.
2020.08.30, by Ansel
Filed under Station affairs

I was originally going to tag this “Site affairs”, but then Tolly suggested we call it Station affairs. Isn’t that cute?

It’s been three months since we got this site up and running. It was originally supposed to be… just a place for me to post my horror reviews. And maybe for Tolly to share whatever pornography he drew every seventh blue moon. “Why put them on the same site?” That… question never occurred to us, actually.

So now it’s been three months. And the site’s grown so much since then. Aside from it being nice to easily reference old journal entries—though not everything is or will ever be on here—we feel like we’ve been able to grow too, as a result of the website. Tolly and I have a little journal addiction. We have journals for everything: a bullet journal for accounting, another for creative projects and monthly reviews and paintings, a notebook, diary, memo pads, smaller ideal journals, a journal full of quotes from the people around us, Giovanni’s cookbook, in blue and white stripes with lemons… One journal couldn’t keep everything we wanted to put in it, we tried that with our first bullet journal. And before that, Tolly had a “Memex”—a personal TiddlyWiki where he kept all sorts of notes on things that he’d read, everything from the debacle that was SimCity 2013 to whale tubercles to the political history of Mozambique. He even transcribed entire books onto there. So he could reference them easily… There weren’t ebook releases available for those titles, and frankly, he was such a miser he’d have refused to purchase them, anyway. (He borrowed library books and transcribed them to save money.)

When it comes to platforms like Facebook or Twitter, you’re very limited by the type of content you can share. Sure, you can post videos, link to almost anything (political censorship notwithstanding), but you can’t actually build things like shrines to your favorite TV shows or a wardrobe inventory. (Though I’m more into Lolita fashion than Tolly is, he was very excited by Seraphinelle on NeoCities and wanted to make a wardrobe of his own. He did. Sure, there’s Instagram, and arguably Pinterest, but those sites are built from the start as a never-ending feed of new content. Sponsored links, that sort of thing. This might be news to some people, but social media was never meant to be personal. It was meant to connect you (and your friends) to things that advertisers want.

With a personal website you control the links. You get to decide whatever internal and external content is displayed, how it’s displayed, and in what context it’s displayed. And to a certain extent—the user gets to decide what content they view and interact with, too. Don’t want to see what kind of porn I like? Then don’t click on the links to the porn I like. You can content yourself with my horror reviews—or my two sentence complaints about my abusive ex-wife, that’s up to you, I have no say in what you choose to see. I can’t force you to do anything.

So now we have a website that seems to be almost a microcosm of everything the Internet can be—a wardrobe, a cookbook, a blog, a notebook, a random assortment of music we like to share, a personal poetry collection, an art gallery. There’s so much we can do with the site and I can’t wait to see what everyone else does with it. I’m personally content with horror reviews… But maybe I won’t limit myself to that. Maybe I’ll… review ducks. Who knows.

Any kind of box you want—that’s what creative freedom is.

Also, Twitter suspended Tolly’s account for a tweet he made months ago in which he complained about my ex-wife inciting a thirteen-year-old girl against me? Apparently Twitter thinks he’s the one promoting abuse. What the fuck?

[Yumeka] And yet they don’t ban my porn account full of nothing but violent sexual torture fantasies… Interesting.

[Iseul] I have never seen someone get off to starving another person to death before

[Ansel] Get the hell out of my blog post

[Julia] It’s like the opposite of vore. Is there an equivalent—