Hello again friends. Don’t have much of a topic for this conversation. That’s okay.
I keep staring at the corner of my room. There’s a chair folded up with some closet light cast upon it. Through the slits.
In fact, this entire room has a dark peach glow when you venture past the closet. Due to some bookshelf Christmas lights, mixed color set – red, pink, yellow and specks of blue-greens. It serves as the main light source along with a trusty companion: a salt lamp.
Peach indeed.
Does your bookshelf fill to the brim with things you’ll casually forget? There’s a good bit of things both in the closet and the bookshelf that could be reconsidered. That could be better off retired.
Family memorabilia. Does it mean anything to you?
In the Banjo Kazooie main menu, they had save files be sections of the main character’s house. One particular “save file spot” was a commentary on the viewer: an N64. Your save file could be the hooked-up N64 console. An N64 rendered eternally. A virtual world persisting its real origins.
When developers implement these save functions, they’re only thinking in that eternal moment. That, along with checking off another requisite for a functional game of course. But it’s quite likely those developers never thought about what it means to have a save file 20 seasons later. Whether the game should still work 20 seasons later. Maybe they could render some cobwebs after the 10th.
In the same manner – even though some may share a trendy article about building websites which last – most won’t consider these long season sessions.
That is, today, we could both venture on over to the Usenet archive. Right now we can read the federated notes of our neticessors. But I don’t – do you? Well, I did once. And it all read the same.
Today we could look at imageboard archives spanning some long seasons. Recommendations, album reviews. The same slew of worries from our timid-and-brooding colleagues: should I do this or that, listen here or there, dress this way and how, and where to find love near?
There are video games in my closet that will, most certainly, never be played again. At least the physical cartridge or disk. Who knows when will be the last person to visit Banjo Kazooie. Still, as the outer rots, so the bits shift within. Our rendered N64 will be swallowed in noise with enough of a long season. Nothing will remain.
One could contort all of these thoughts into a platitude like, “invest only in things which’ll last” or “be weary of the trends swallowing you too” but I don’t mean for it to be that way at all. There is no advice I want to force on you. They’re just ideas.
Right now I’ve grayscale both on my phone and on this computer. It’s nice. It’s what prompted me to think about the colors in this room. Give it a try if you want.
After more server researching, I’ve settled on my provider and will spin something up when it sincerely makes sense. That is, it’s somehow fun I suppose.
One idea I had was a daily board like https://bus-stop.net except that posters can vote on the rules. So, someone can propose a rule that one must always use proper punctuation, for example.
Another idea for server use was to create an “External Neocities Auth” service. This would allow one to use their neocities credentials outside of neocities for other services. So, for example, using this auth service, one could use a https://discourse.org instance. Or, for example, there could be a web extension which loads in comments onto each website if desired.
The funny bit I run into with any idea is the potential consequences of interacting with others. So, in the case of the forum, or the daily board, there’s still a price of moderation attached.
Another idea I had was to make something like LeechBlock except it has streaks and you can share those streaks with people if you want. I think seeing your streak before visiting a site you blocked would be a great motivator. Disabling the add-on makes you lose all streaks. This idea does seem like people would want it or use it. It’s a shame though since I can’t figure out a way to monetize it – because that’d be my main motivation since it sounds a little complex and would require learning how to create web extensions.
If you have any ideas you would like to see implemented, let me know and we can see if we’d both find it amusing enough. One idea I came across was creating a “Tomorrow Web” as a tongue-in-cheek toward the YesterWeb, credit to suboptimalism. It sounds amusing, but I’m not sure what ideology one should push under that flag. Should those of the tomorrow web hope the web as we know it destroys itself? Evolves itself? It seems like a vacuous statement. It seems like the bird loving its cage. It seems like the trick of the “web” is the same eternal haze however you want to appraise it.
I guess I’m starkly against any forum, imageboard, anything similar, because it’s not solving anything at all. So it’s unlikely I’ll create the board or the auth service unless the auth service has a good reason to exist (a service extension to neocities that fulfills a need/is amusing enough).
When it comes to building things, the general advice is to build things you would want to see. The trouble I have is how little desire I have for any new website, application, anything. Maybe because that requires goals. Or maybe because I intimately know that the last thing you need is new technology.