The website of onusonus!

Introduction

After days of Googling, I finally managed to make buttons on one side of the screen do things on the other side of the screen. I know I should probably hide or remove those extra buttons that just say content, but with the journal section of my website up and running, I suspect I'll be filling them up pretty soon.

As for why I decided to do this, well, the answer is a little long winded, but since you're here already, I thought I may as well explain.

I have always wanted a few things no commercial website has ever been able to give me. Deviantart was pretty good for galleries, and I presume it still is, though I'll admit it's been a long time, but the community was a cesspit and the journal and writing sections were awful. Tumblr and blogger have everything separated into dated posts you have scroll down to find, which is fine for writing, but it wasn't what I wanted for my other content, and I've found the scroll-down style could sometimes impede navigation, too. Twitter's character limit was a turnoff, and facebook's sucking need for every aspect of your real life was distasteful right from the start, so I never got into it.

So on and so forth, none of the prefab websites had exactly what I wanted, or in the way I wanted it, so when I saw a tumblr post suggesting making your own website as a solution, I decided, on utter whim, to do exactly that.

Much like the stay at home father who decides home renovation would make a great "weekend project," I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted, no idea of how to do it, and no plans to hold back. The end result probably looks a lot like a busted out wall with naked studs showing between the plaster, but it's mine, and there's a certain warmth in that, something mine, I don't think I've ever really felt before. I think I like it.

There's another reason I've done this, too, and it's related to my own personality and the way social media seems designed to sort of...shove people's thoughts into each other's faces, and how those thoughts are monetized, if not with actual money, then with the social rewards of likes, reblogs, and hearts.

I don't like bothering people. One of the biggest revalations I had as a kid was that just talking about what you liked could be construed as offense, annoying people for talking too much, or too long, or maybe just the wrong thing. It wasn't something I understood, then.

One of the conclusions I came to, after getting a little older and thinking about it, was that everyone had a right to talk, just as they had a right to not talk, just as everyone had a right to listen, just as everyone had a right to walk away from what they don't want to hear.

Whether it's wise turn away like that is one thing, but you shouldn't obligate people, either. Neither you nor I hold any right to the ears of the anyone. Their time and attention is their own.

And yet at the same time, everyone wants someone to listen. Usually with sympathy, but even hate is good enough for some.

This is a section for ramblings on the internet, sequestered away from all my other stuff, the fiction and art most would undoubtedly find more relevant. There is no algorithm pushing it your face, no update log or 'latest' forcing you to scroll past it, no stress on my end over comments, likes, or clicks, nothing.

If you are here, it is because you found my website, clicked this page, and chose to read. I have made, to the best of my ability, an attempt at compromise. A place to put my thoughts, public, but not obtrusively so, something people can come to visit if they want.

Thank you for coming, it is my hope that you enjoy your stay.

Hobbies vs. Standards

One of the things I've started to consider is an individuals obligation to be knowledgeable about the things they enjoy.

In theory, it seems that we are under no obligation to know that much about our hobbies. We do them for fun, after all, so why not learn however much or as little as we want?

In practice, however, there are some limitations to that.

The first, and most obvious example that springs to mind are hobbies that are dangerous without some level of knowledge or skill: Mountaineering, technical diving, aviation and car racing all spring to mind. Not knowing what you're doing can result in thousands in damages at best, and at worst, you and the people around you will die.

Slightly less clear are those hobbies which pose no danger. While I suppose you could stab yourself if you sharpened it well enough, the idea that a person should have a moral obligation to learn as much as he can about graphite sketching is a bit harder to pose.

No, what I mean is that when your hobby does nothing but entertain you, when it poses no practical risk to anyone or anything, beyond perhaps, some consumption of your time. With hobbies like that, how knowledgeable should we be?

The question arose for me thinking back to an Encyclopedia Dramatica thread back in the day, dedicated to bad deviant art postings, as well as an old how-to-draw webcomic guide that suggested that anyone who did not have a good grasp of drawing shouldn't draw webcomics. Their logic was that the act of making and posting your art in public inherently implied that you believed your work was good, and that you, as the artist, had some obligation to live up to that.

The fact that I still remember that stupid guide, nearly two full decades later, probably says a lot about the impression it made on me. It was the first time I had ever encountered the suggestion that "because I enjoy it" was not reason enough to share my art. Between that long ago article, the Encyclopedia Dramatica art thread, which provided a rather practical example of what happened when people thought your art wasn't good enough to post, I began to consider whether or not there was some kind of standard out there, one I was obligated to live up to, somehow, whether I wanted to or not.

I also kept encountering this persistent notion that trying to improve yourself and learn more about whatever your hobby might be was how you proved that you really enjoyed it. A way way to show that you weren't just some poser, a pretend artist/reader/writer/what-have-you whose enjoyment of the thing was too shallow to properly count among the real hobbyists, the ones who cared.

I'm of two minds of how this mindset influenced me across the years. On one hand, this was my first introduction to the idea that standards of beauty or worthiness might be objective, that there was some greater standard, one that all art could be judged by, at least to a degree, according to some universal standard that existed beyond that of any one observer. It pushed me to try and live up to this, whatever this was.

And in retrospect, my teenage years did feature a pretty aggressive upward slope in quality. I jumped from repetitious scrawls around nine to ten, to starting to draw from different angles and increase my subject matter from eleven to thirteen, discovered line weight and started thinking about pen and ink techniques not long after, I think around fourteen? And from fifteen onward, just kept going up.

At the age of twenty, I gave myself wrist damage, to the point where I forced to write with my off hand at times, because my main hand hurt too badly to use.

By this point, I was holding myself to some crazy standards, doing stuff like painting over the same line in acrylic over and over again, trying to fix invisible wobbles and make perfect arcs, or going nuts over projects that failed to live up to the standards I had set up for myself, and vaguely presumed, somehow, everyone held. I made at least one person cry because I told them their terrible, no effort flower was a terrible, no effort flower. Saying this did not seem to substantively improve any aspect of their work.

During this period, I put up almost nothing online, and never shared anything I did outside of friends and family, because even after all those years of time and effort, I still didn't think I was good enough. Whatever standard was out there, I hadn't lived up to it. I felt like I would disappoint not only myself, but the world, if I did not.

In retrospect, however, after loosing a lot of the joy that used to go into my drawing and being forced to slow down after what I did to my wrist, I think the precepts in that old how-to for webcomics were more than a little misguided. I also began to realize that a lot of the online mockery around artist focused less on what they drew and more on how they acted. Artists who demanded praise for their work, artists who were excessively sensitive to criticism, artists whose egos so vastly outweighed the quality of their actual output that it became impossible not to laugh.

The bad art was not the main attraction. In a lot of ways, it never had been.

As for the business of "proving" myself fit as a real artists, well, maybe that's necessary in the professional sphere. Standards have their place, as does a community's right to self regulate, but trying to extend that mindset to everyone who does something similar to what they do, whether they want to interact with them or not, is pushing it a little too far, I've found, nine times out of ten.

The trick, I think lies in self-understanding and humility. You need to acknowledge that you're not serious about whatever it is you're doing, that it's just a past time, and because of that, you'll probably never be as good or as capable as the ones who put in the effort to be skilled at that thing for real. Accept that you cannot please everyone, acknowledge that if you put up your work in public, not everyone who sees it will like it, and may even mock you for it.

If you can bear that, I think, there's nothing truly wrong with making a bad webcomic, a shitty website, or writing dumb stories. There's so much stress in the world, it seems, on ourselves and each other, I feel like there should be times and places where releasing any expectation of quality and just having fun should be okay. Something that's a pleasure, not a pressure, Something you can do whether you're good at it or not.

Something like a hobby, I guess.

Website Woes

I really can't make Javascript work. The closest I've come is the simple what-have-you I somehow managed to get going with this page here, and even then, I chalk it up to sheer coincidence that it functions at all. It's just not intuitive for me.

That, and I don't know what I'm doing. Which makes things harder as a matter of course, of course.

In other news, I am sick. It took years, but I have finally come down with Covid. The first day I had it, I couldn't eat anything but the blandest and softest of foods, and that was during the moments I could properly stay awake at all. Even still, I wasn't as bad as the others in my family, who had it worse.

In retrospect, a two tiered selection of buttons controlling an alphabetized selection of all my favorite quotes, poetry, and lines was probably too ambitious, though I do think I came close to making it work.

While I ended up deciding to delete that particular page outright, it did give me a head start on doing something more simple for my page on original outlines and worldbuilding. While I'm no fan of radio buttons, they're an easy way to make only one option selectable at a time, which was something I really wanted for that section of the site.

It's not perfect, but it works well enough that I'll probably copy it wholesale for the fanfiction version of that page. I've got pretty high hopes that the ability to select between different different stories and view the meat (outlines) side by side with the potatoes (world and character) of my works will make my life a lot easier, long term.

The inability to find any prefab version of something like this was a big drive to keep going with my website, in fact. I've wanted a way to look at certain parts of my story in a side-by-side, easy to compare, neatly sorted style of view for years now, so much so that when I realized it was possible to build for myself, I was elated.

After this, I should be very close to completely finished the set up for all my intended web pages. Everything else is just a case of copying or modifying a version of something I already have.

EDIT 8/26/22: After discovering that making each radio button show two different divs in two different places was a little beyond my skillset, I ended up reconfiguring a little. One day, I really will have to learn to code for real, I think, if I ever want to make exactly the web page I have in my head.

Ah well, this works well enough as is.

It's been a while since I've written another journal entry, which is a pity, since this is actually one of my favorite parts of the site.

I stumbled across a novelty countdown app and discovered, to my dismay, I had less than 96 days left until the end of the year. It makes me think of how easy it is to slip, and how little the world cares that you did nothing with the chances it gave you.

Time moves, and we do not, pebbles worn to sand by the rush of an almighty river, tossed and turned only by the will of our own stony violations, themselves utterly feeble beneath the flow.

Small wonder we lose so much. So disinclined to motion, so predisposed to sink, by the time we realize the extent of the erosion, there's nothing left to grasp but our regrets.

I've been having horrible nightmares, recently, about losing my loved ones. The dull, awful kind, stripped of symbology and utterly real, to the point where I wake up confused as to whether they're alive, or if I'm still grieving.

They're fine, for now, but I really should call, I think, the next day I get off. Or at the very least, talk to someone who isn't the internet about what's going on. I don't think this is good for me.

Man, that was a downer kind of passage, wasn't it? I really don't want to end it there.

Happily, there are some other things to talk about.

For starters, the job I got recently turned out not to be all go all the time. During that downtime, they don't seem to mind if I draw. I doubt I'll be making anything worth posting with any frequency, but a chance to get going again in even the smallest of capacities is a wonderful thing.

I finished Ray Bradbury's The Martians, and liked it so much I put a quote from it on the landing page of the site. Honestly, I wish someone told me that The Martians was A) funny, because there are some genuine laugh out loud moments in that book, and B) a total dystopia. By this point in the future, all fiction deemed inappropriate has been burned, all references to those fictions are banned, and all expression is regulated by government men and wealthy citizens whose positions on the right committees give them pull. They control earth completely, but do not control mars, not yet.

Watching an entire building get brought down on those fuckers was a treat, made only a little bitter by knowing how very possible that kind of world has become.

I'm slowly pecking away at making a table of contents for my world building sections. They ended up being pretty finicky to make, in part thanks to the sheer amount of stuff. On top of that, I somehow managed to break my own formatting by forgetting the ending slash on one of my <i> tags, which took me an embarrassingly long time to find and fix.

I'm still of two minds as to whether or not I want to replace my HTML tables in the art section of my site. On one hand, using flexbox or CSS tables would probably make my code a lot easier to look at and modify, but on the other hand, the current setup works fine, and I'm honestly a little afraid of breaking it.

I am very happy with the revised landing page, though, which does use flexbox in place of HTML tables, as well as a bit of a buff and polish to the page as a whole.

Chronologies and Footprints

Oof, it’s been a bit since I’ve posted, mostly thanks to a combination of IRL affairs and spreading myself too thin across projects. Juggling real life with self-study with for-fun projects is a bit of a trick, and circumstances may shake out so that I’ll have to figure out some money-making side gig on top of that here soon.

It’s not urgent, at least not right now, but it’s one of the things that’s been weighing down my brain.

On other, more interesting topics, I’ve been pecking away at the website, just on an offline version rather than live. That’s right, I discovered the download site button! It makes it a lot easier to copy webpages and tinker with the format, and I’ve got an updated navigation footer and a slightly altered homepage set up and ready to go.

I’ll probably still play around with the live site, because honestly, it’s just plain fun, but the big, finicky pages especially really benefit from being handled offline.

Thinking of big, finicky pages, I’m still cleaning up the HTML in my rough draft/outline sections. I love Apache Openoffice, don’t get me wrong, and I’m 100% sure there’s some logical reason why it exports into markup soup, but it’s a pain to look at and even more of a pain to add to, which is what I need to do if I want to make those enormous lists easy to navigate.

Once again, I am vaguely away that I’m making my life harder than it needs to be. These things don’t need to all be one page any more than they need to be in separate scrollboxes, I just kind of like them that way.

If the sheer amount of text does eventually make the page awful to use/update, I probably will change things around.

I’ve also been thinking about styling the buttons in my rambles section here into something spiffy, as well as potentially removing the dates on the buttons with titles or something.

Dates are great, especially for entries in mostly chronological order, which this very much is, but also an invitation, for me at least, to skip over everything but the latest entries in a series.

There’s the all-pervasive nature of how things are dated on the internet, too. Everything, it seems, is on a timeline. This was posted in that place, at this time exactly, right here. Even when platforms like Twitter try to change the order of the post, the sense of temporality remains. Dates are inescapable, to the point where a post’s relative distance to the here and now becomes part of how we appreciate the work.

Everything dies, and someday, hopefully a long time from now, this site will, too. The data will decay, the servers will wink out, every external drive with a copy of these words will crack their cases and decay. Present becomes past, the wax of wasted hours burned down by time.

The aftermath of this is sad enough, I think, when we aren’t stamping every drip down the wick and framing every whisp of smoke in a portrait of days. Prioritizing the moment things were over what they are now is not, I think, how I want my site to be.

Ordering them by year is fine, but I’m definitely switching the dates on the buttons out here soon.

I’m also considering building a favorite book list/review page, as well as maybe an “in progress” page for my art? The idea would be to take the occasional screenshot of something I make, then upload it to the site, more as a self-motivation thing for myself, really.

I’m sort of whiffling between that and an art version of the book list and review, a sort of collection of all my favorite artists throughout the years.

I’m also playing with the idea of spending a little time each day to learn about something, and then writing about it here, a sort of way to encourage my own sense of curiosity why also giving me an excuse to upload something to the site.

Two Thousand Two-hundred and Twenty Two

So, I have these big fancy essays lined up, with deep thoughts and everything, but it looks like neither of them are going to be coming out until sometime after 2023. It's frustrating, being such an inefficient person, but fixing that is a whole process in and of itself.

My family celebrated Christmas early, a day or two ago, and it was pretty good. We’ve always had this philosophy of taking it easy on the holidays, usually buying a snack spread and munching through the holiday as we visit. This year was no different, and having everyone together again was great. I even managed a little over an hour of footage of my grandparents, mostly grandmother, just kind of talking. They’re both well over eighty, so it’s hard not to want to record the good times while the good times remain.

Coming up next for the site, I have a few things cooking:

A new web page filled with short reviews and a summary of stuff I have read before. This is taking far longer than I wanted partly because of how many things I decided to put in it before uploading (I decided to make something meaty in terms of content), and partly because I had the bright idea to archive everything that had an online component, rather than just providing a simple link. The amount of stuff I read that ended up vanishing is depressing, and I don’t want any theoretical future readers to be the same sort of bummed.
A new Danny Phantom fanfiction, mostly as a vehicle for my cringe, star themed poetry. It’s on the second draft, and I try not to go farther than three or four drafts, total, just to force myself to publish somewhere below the threshold of never. My multi-chapter work, Where you belong, is stalled in part because I have difficulty avoiding this draft—delete—draft cycle. Happily, that’s not the case for this one, and I think I’m on the downhill slope for online publication here soon.
An essay on Lithopedians, a really neat phenomenon wherein a fetus gets calcified inside the mother, where it stays, sometimes for years. I stumbled into this long sidetrack over whether or not the first ectopic birth was really discovered by Albucasis, and, small spoilers here—The answer is “maybe, but only maybe, and not for sure”. The relevant text is vague enough that proper credit should probably be given to a less ambiguous medical account, IMO.
Something pretentious on the nature of everyday addictions like coffee, video games, and soda. Stuff we think of as normal to be a little hooked on to some degree. This one is not well thought out.
A long promised and long delayed part two of an art piece I promised for some one nearly a year ago. I feel awful about how long its taking, but am having real difficulty working through it. Art block is a bitch, and I am forcing myself to work on it in 30 minuet segments every few days in an effort to see it through. My sole consolation is that I took no money and said from the start that I could be astonishingly slow. Still, It would be nice to get it done.
A stupid destresser piece, also Danny Phantom themed, on what Fentonworks might look like if it was the late 19th century. Line is bad, mistakes everywhere, and in traditional media, which means I’m using my usual favorites of extremely permanent and highly un-erasable ink. I am currently in the process of coloring, while also trying to persuade myself that it’s okay to upload even if I make even more mistakes later on. Having a personal website helps a lot in this respect.

I’ve started to pace through modules on the Odin Project, a programming thing that’s supposed to teach know-nothings how to code. My impressions so far are more or less this:

The command line is cool, the incredible number of ways you can use it to delete everything and/or break your computer is really not.

Discord is still a big purple data silo and the fact that I have to use it to talk to the same strangers who introduced themselves by informing me on how not to be a "help vampire" isn't an encouraging way to get me to use it.

Perhaps most prominently, I really, really wish they had slapped some warning labels on how Linux can play badly with certain types of hardware in a place I could see. Realtek wifi chips just vanish from the OS’s view, and after spending some time at it, the best solution is to either buy a Linux friendly WiFi plugin, which I need to do later, or just hook your phone’s wifi to your computer via USB, which I’m doing now.

A lot of advice online involves command line prompts and disabling fast boot and all that jazz, but when it comes down to it, I really am just a normie who got sick of Windows and it’s creepy desire to take pictures of my face. Forcing a WiFi chip basically specialized for Microsoft to interface with something else is above my skill set, and if something else works, well, I’ll take it.

Still wish someone at the Odin Project had made a nice big list of common incompatible hardware that someone with a home laptop may need to watch out for, though not having to resort to third party software just to delete a web browser is nice. No denying that.

Cheers for the holidays, and farewell to 2022. Hard to believe I’ll be needing to make a new section for 2023 in my journal already.

Small Dragons

If you scatter fermented berries on the ground, the birds that eat them will get drunk. I’ve heard there are some people out there, mean kids and immature adults, that like to watch them flail.

I know at least a few people who drink habitually, never enough to cause problems, but always in a way that makes it clear that its a lifestyle. I've met a lot of people who act the same way in regards to candy, caffeine, and soda. Coke or coffee cups at least once a day, snack bars and popcorn in the afternoon as a matter of course.

Never too much, but always more than enough, you know what I mean?

For many others, including myself, I think, the internet is the same kind of thing. It’s fun, it’s something I want to put time into, but not as much, or as often, as I actually end up spending. My plans to go outside, walk in parks, hang out in libraries and old bookshops and talk to the patrons there about my favorite works somehow ends up getting shoved aside for more internet.

Habit’s a hell of a thing, especially when there’s an addictive component underlying the routine.

In small quantities, none of these things, even alcohol, are really all that bad. If anything, forgoing anything fun out of a never-ending sense of obligation or fear is as sure a way to ruin your life as succumbing to your fix. But there’s another side to this, I think, somewhere beyond a controlled habit, but stuck in a place below any obvious sense of destruction. The little vices, the bad habits, the small addictions so normalized that it’s hard to see them as a problem at all.

Caffeine is an easy example. Tea, coffee, and sodas like coke and pepsi are practically cultural institutions. A drug so ubiquitous that I don’t think many people even remember that the primary ingredient is addictive until they miss their dose.

Snacks like cheetos and doritos are specially formulated for maximum engagement—Not just the flavor, but the color, the size, the crunchyness, all of it are designed to make them desirable to human senses and spur our drive to eat. And this is to say nothing of social media, which treats the human attention span as a spendable commodity without regard for the fact that the thing they’re competing for are the moments and the mind of a human life.

Everything from food marts to video game companies will go out of their way to hire psychologists, using their expertise to design products in a way that compels us to respond. If you’ve ever wondered why the sweet treats and dumb magazines are always right next to the register at easy grabbing height, that’s why. It’s also why a lot of free to play/pay to win video games blitz new users with easy money and fast rewards, only making things harder after the player has been cajoled to the point where they're too invested to stop.

What companies want from a person, more than anything, is for them to work as much as possible, spend as much as possible, and watch as much as possible. Their ideal of humanity greatly resembles a kind of ouroboros, I think. A never ending loop of creation and consumption, where what we make is what we eat, and what we eat is what we are.

There’s a personal element to all this, too. The world is hard, and harder still for some more than others. When you don’t have much of life, it is only natural to drift towards the things in it that feel good.

If your social life sucks, maybe, but in World of Warcraft you’ve made it to the top of your guild. You’re mighty and powerful and everyone loves you. Or you have a thousand followers on twitter and there’s at least a few people who retweet and quote your every word. Sure, it takes a lot of time and maybe money out of your day, but when it’s the only thing you’ve really got to look forward to, why stop?

Interestingly, a lot of the more conventional addictions seem to have this social element, too. Bars aren’t just where people go to drink, it’s where they go for drinking buddies. The trans movement seems to have exploded, in part, because it offered a place for people who “don’t fit in,” and posits the claim that once they go through all these drugs and surgeries—Even the ones that are experimental, not FDA approved or even researched much at all, somehow the awkwardness will go away, and they’ll finally belong.

Humans are profoundly social, and anything that caters to or blunts that need will be desirable. I sincerely like the taste and warmth of coffee, but if I didn’t grow up watching my parents and grandparents drink it, I’m not sure if I’d be quite as keen to join them. I love the internet, too. I love the world-wide connectivity and the huge array of interests and fandoms that I never would have been able to share or even know without it. I do not love the push for people to live there 24/7, or how its getting fused more and more with real life. Pair that with how profitable chemical and behavioral addictions can be, and you have a major incentive to normalize a lot of things that probably shouldn't be everywhere you turn.

When it comes to these small addictions, the cheeto bags and the soda and the ten extra pounds you can’t quite bring the effort in to shed, I honestly don’t have an answer. Even more honestly, I’d suspect I’m more caught up in my own vices than most. It feels as much banal as it does anti-human and vaguely cruel, like the whole world is constructed in the image of bad berries scattered out for birds.

I think, if I had to give an answer, I’d say that the line between hobby, stress relief, and unhealthy fixation lies in part on your own perspective. Is what your doing bringing some kind of damage to the life you want to live? And even if its not, I think its worth asking yourself if you’re doing it's really what you want, or if somewhere along the line, it just became routine.

If you’re pissed off with instagram or twitter, but keep posting regardless, or if the bar is a place you go to because you can’t really think of anywhere else to be, more than because you still like going. When fun and relief becomes a guilt or a burden, maybe that's where you're supposed to stop.

On my end, I just keep trying. I can’t say I’m any good at it, but it’s better than nothing, I guess. I try to be honest about why I’m doing the things I do, understand my own compulsions, and try to make myself available to those around me even when I really don’t want to do anything but fixate on the latest thing I’m reading or doing on the net. I made a Neocities, something that requires enough effort that I have to delay the quick dopamine hit that I would otherwise get from social media engagement. I try to judge if I’m hanging out with a person or a group because I enjoy their company, or because I’m lonely and their philosophy encourages some easy way out.

I try, and hope that if I try hard enough, eventually it will help.

Rambles

2022