Exterior // Interior
Exterior, day
Interior, night
Fade
Fade
Travel light
This weekend I spent a little time updating my Sit Spot page, a page about literally doing nothing over and over. I upgraded the back/next arrows from the clunky, juvenile ⬅️ and ➡️ to svelte, elegant isosceles triangles to provide a more restrained and cosmopolitan navigation experience. I added datestamps to the image captions, because what’s the point of keeping a record of the same nothing nearly every day if you can’t use it to mark the implacable passage of time? And because adding images was a tedious, highly manual process involving copy/pasting a directory listing into a file and tweaking its formatting by hand, and because I somewhat derangedly made my own fork of a largely defunct static site generator and thus can mess with it however I please, I added some little features to it to alleviate this precise tedium somewhat.
If my web page has a “readership,” it is completely opaque to me — I have no analytics, no comments, nothing telling me I’m not chucking this effort directly into a Null Vortex — and this page in particular is not one that would reward repeat visits. So like. Who will know? Why bother?
My last post asked this question too, and didn’t really have a satisfying answer. It was like: maybe I’m contributing in some minute measure to the much-vaunted (in some circles) “small web?” I guess? But that’s not really why I did the work I did (and it was work) over the weekend. And I want a better answer about what’s motivating me these days. So I’m going to dump some thoughts into a list.
Okay so I read How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell recently so I just sort of had doing nothing on the brain. Updating my web page was not doing nothing doing nothing, but it is doing a kind of nothing in the sense that I understand Odell to mean it: no one is making any money off my web page (notwithstanding the infinitesimal value it’s surely providing to AI scrapers, but I’m trying to be positive for once in my life here) and in its own small way it sits in opposition to the “attention economy” if only because probably no one is paying any attention to it. So there was just kind of fertile psychological ground for doing some like… tilling? I don’t know, I’m not a gardener, but you get what I mean.
Alright. I lied when I said no one is paying attention to my web page. But how do I even know? Well, what happened was someone boosted Katherine Yang’s Mastodon post about her In The Year of a Tree into my timeline and I was like: Hey that looks like my thing! (It’s not my thing really, Katherine started hers first and even if she didn’t I got the idea from a book, but like, this instance of it that I did is mine) And so I replied to it like: Hey I love this! It’s like my thing but better!In the Year of a Tree is, objectively, better. The pictures are better, the presentation is better, the tree changes more interestingly than my evergreens. But I’m actually really happy with mine for what it is, which is a document of time well spent doing nothing. The fixity of the evergreens helps convey the full extent of the nothing I’m doing. The fact that the pictures are kind of shitty makes it more about the repetition and the practice than the aesthetics. I like that In the Year of a Tree has the same ugly rooftop in every picture. It’s aesthetically interesting to have the hard lines against the lush or spindly organics of the tree, but it also conveys a similarly approachable sense of just working with what’s there rather than being too fussy or artsy about it. Letting the tree do the talking.
And she replied like “lovely!” and said enough more specific stuff that I can confidently say that at least one person has paid attention to my web page, at least once.I’m trying not to edit this post a lot but I did write and then delete a mediocre joke about, like, “attention economy, here I come!” before I thought: No, actually, this is a real thing. Having made this little project and put it on my web site did really enable this sweet moment of connection with a total stranger about a similar non-effortful effort we made to observe and appreciate and maybe see a little more or deeply at least different than we might in the attention economy that Jenny Odell would have us resist.
And so but then shortly after that I got an email out of the blue from someone appreciating my Sit Spot page, and I’m kind of reluctant to mention this one but I found their blog and read some of it and sent them an email back about some of the stuff on it and never got a reply, and it was kind of like a different email I got a while back from someone claiming to have been following my (very sporadic and also largely disregarded) music for a long time and expressing appreciation for a particular old song of mine, and I replied enthusiastically and never heard back from them either, and so in both cases I was like: Was this even real? Is someone running a bot that like finds people’s websites and AI-generates nice emails to send them? Because that’s sort of a nice idea but also kind of shitty in execution if the person is looking for an actual connection with a human, and in both cases I felt like kind of a dupe for actually replying in the hopes of getting that, so it’s weird and embarrassing and vulnerable to even include this, but I can’t deny that it did contribute to my wanting to give my web page a little love.
I really haven’t been posting here a lot in, like, the last several years. Part of it is that I always feel like a blog post has to be a big production for whatever reason. Small things I can just throw on Mastodon, which doesn’t generally feel shitty to use, even though it does have that gross attention-economy social-media little engagement dopamine hit thing going on, but at least that does mean that my posts are actually reaching other humans. But it’s all so transient. I can go back and read my feed, and sometimes I do because I think I’m funny, and that’s fine. But my web site feels like an edifice, you know? I’ve been updating it, even if only at a glacial pace at times, for over a decade. It means that at this point I feel like additions to it need to be worthy of inclusion, even though some of my earliest posts are really just unnecessarily verbose Mastodon toots. But so as a whole, I’m proud of it, and I want to make more blog posts to contribute to the edifice, but it always seems like so much work, and do I actually even have anything worth putting that much effort into saying? If I have an idea for a little improvement to a random buried page that I know one or possibly even two people have looked at, even if they don’t look at it again, it’s still a way to kind of keep in touch with my website. Like, hey bud. I know I haven’t done a real post in a while. But I still care about you.
At work I do Professional Software Developer shit. Unit, functional, integration AND end-to-end tests. Minimum Viable Products. “Built on AWS.” Observability. Scalability. I get why it’s all important for trying to do a thing that a lot of people depend on in some way. And it’s kind of interesting, in its own way. But a cursory look at my personal programming projects is enough to see it’s not the scale that I would choose to work at, if I could do whatever I wanted. It doesn’t feel to me like play, which, I mean, fair enough, it’s work, but I did get into this profession in 2013 or whatever because I thought this could be fun. I don’t think what I do for work now is fun, mostly. But hand-coding a website and the tool I use to build it, with no stakes? That’s still fun. Maybe it’s a kind of nostalgia, which I’m deeply suspicious of but susceptible to nonetheless. Or maybe it really is just all about the fact that there’s no pressure, no one asking anything of me, just me taking a thing that’s mine and making it a little better.
Immediate follow-up question, which you may not be asking but which I want to try to answer regardless: why post about it? When I’m so confident that if anyone ever actually reads my site I’ll never know about it?
Well, a couple days after the tweaks I just finished exhaustively cataloguing my motivations for, I came across this wonderful essay about writing and it made me miss writing prose like I write code for my website: not really for anyone (but it’s cool if someone sees it and lets me know somehow), certainly not because anything depends on it, but just… I don’t know, exactly. For some of the reasons articulated in that essay, like:
Writing is a costly signal of caring about something.
Or, perhaps, if I wanted to make this a sort of sequel to my last blog post, over nine months ago, because:
It used to be that our only competitors were made of carbon. Now some of our competitors are made out of silicon. New competition should make us better at competing—this is our chance to be more thoughtful about writing than we’ve ever been before. No system can optimize for everything, so what are our minds optimized for, and how can I double down on that? How can I go even deeper into the territory where the machines fear to tread, territories that I only notice because they’re treacherous for machines?
And what is it that I want to expensively signal that I care about?
What is it I hope to double down on? The word that keeps bobbing to the
surface of my brain, even after I push it down to see if I can make room
for anything else to float up, is interiority: I have it, my
new silicon competitors do not, I want to double down on it, delve
deeper into it, make an effort to account for my own human inclinations
and desires. I don’t know if this is “where the machines fear to tread”
or if I’m being “more thoughtful about writing than… ever before” but it
feels intuitively like a promising direction.Intuition, of course, being another area that is
notoriously treacherous for machines.
I can’t not undermine my own supposed insights or imagine being read by my worst critic, so let me just say: I don’t really think there’s anything revolutionary or groundbreaking about the concept of “journaling in public.” But in 2025 it feels like something worth re-affirming the value of, even if only to myself.