I like my website (redux), or, Getting A Little More Analog With It

Recently I posted this on Substack, the first post on the platform I've willingly made in a long time. If you haven't read it yet, go do that and come back. I think my point is pretty simple and straightforward: it's nice to have your own personal website, free of the constraints of any sort of predetermined structure besides the way HTML, CSS, and JavaScript work.

The post, though, felt like more of a sort of declaration than a fully fleshed-out blog post, per se. There's a lot more I've been thinking about... the initial piece didn't capture nearly all of my thoughts on the subject, so, bored and a little too mentally amped, I've decided to go deeper on here, my actual blog.

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Some background... 

After I finished undergrad, didn't get into the MFA I'd've killed for, and unwillingly relocated back to California, I was thrust into what I often very dismissively refer to as my "failson years" (no job, bad brain, social isolation in the suburbs...). The one thing that kept me from completely losing it was my newfound discovery of the concept of website-as-toy, of DIY-ing my own space online. Spurred on by artists and thinkers such as Allison Parrish, Laurel Schwulst, and Everest Pipkin, I slowly taught myself to code not as a professional goal but as an exploration into how I could play with ideas I'd been ruminating over in a completely new way. A new set of tools, if you will. I began with HTML and CSS and, craving more interactivity with my work, eventually force-fed myself a bunch of JavaScript tutorials (shoutout FreeCodeCamp, dear god). For a while I was really having fun.

When did I lose the juice? I suppose when it did become a professional goal. I didn't listen to a single person who told me that oftentimes coding is fun until you do it professionally – sure, I thought dismissively, maybe for you. Well, I'm not actually built that different, and for a long time I couldn't bring myself to even breathe in the direction of a code editor outside of work, associating writing code with the stress of falling behind on deadlines and worrying I was going to disappoint my coworkers. I no longer saw it as a medium, just a source of anxiety. It really made me sad.

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It's hard to pinpoint any one thing that brought me back, and I do think it happened over the span of quite a lot of time and because of no singular reason. Shuffling up my career certainly helped – going from software engineer to distressingly aimless unemployed layabout to MLIS student has radically changed and broadened what skills and technologies I spend my time on.¹

My social media habits also reoriented massively, both by force and by visceral need. Like I said in my Substack post, I'm not gone from every single form of social media and probably never will be, but I deleted my guilty-pleasure semi-anonymous Twitter recently as a last-ditch attempt to stanch the doomscrolling that was very notably affecting my mental health.² Instagram has lost its sheen beyond keeping up with friends and occasional events, and I've never had the patience for short-form video content, which is probably a blessing of sorts, so no TikTok or Insta reels for me. 

So what?, I'm sure you're thinking. Understandable. I suppose what I really should go into is what I'm desperately attempting to replace my scroll-time with. I do like to read and go for long walks and work on my writing a fair amount. I'm trying to figure out how the fuck to relearn to draw. Real analogue shit. But I do still like online! I love the internet! Enter my website. Enter coding stuff because I can again. Enter reading more long-form pieces. Enter making new Wikipedia and Are.na accounts. Enter actually learning stuff and exploring and having fun. Enter not wanting to blow my brains out barely two minutes after opening my phone, at least most of the time, I hope.

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Like I mentioned in my Substack post, I've also really gotten into curating a "digital garden" – I realize that sounds kind of ~tender, but, you know what, sure. I'd rather have a gentle and peaceful time online at this point. The subreddit (of course there's a goddamn subreddit) defines digital gardens as "personal wikis, digital spaces of notes & thoughts." (I initially thought a personal wiki was a wiki about yourself and had the most self-involved idea on the planet for a minute.) 

My personal site is certainly my "main" digital garden, and I do tend to it like one, adding links to stuff I think is cool and updating my little "news" section, yes, but also I've discovered the fun of making pages that aren't accessible by any links on the site. I wrote out my whole life story, but you have to ask me for the URL if you want it. There's some invisible short fiction on there, and a couple of maps I coded in Python. It's fun to have little online hidden trap doors, easter eggs, whatever you want to call it.³

I've also really enjoyed my foray back into Are.na – I'm already hoarding PDFs the way I did back in my aaaaaarg days, diving into weird philosophies and forms of technology that have me scratching my head, and there are so many charts. I love charts. I've also recently made a new Wikipedia account and have been saving my favorite wormhole articles.⁴ In high school I used to call this form of exploration "doing the internet" – and, sure, it's different now from the tail end of the Geocities sites and individual forums sixteen-year-old Will would lurk, but it's not totally gone. You just have to put a bit more work into looking under rocks, peeling back the veil.

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Being "online" for me often felt like work solely because I let quite a lot of my emotional validation hinge on whether I was getting (positive) attention on social media and, as such, put immense amounts of effort into posting things people would like. People loved a self-denigrating shitpost and didn't give much of a shit about a link to something interesting I'd found, so, fuck it. The former, again. Brute-forcing my way away from that hasn't been easy or fun – in fact it's felt a bit isolating – but now if I find something cool I can just put it on my personal site or save it on Are.na or yammer about it on here or whatever with no expectation of people paying attention.⁵ In fact, if one person a month looks at my website, that's fine. I just hope they enjoy their time browsing it. 

Reading this post over, I kind of found myself thinking, "wow, this is just really rambly bullshit about myself." Then I remember that I am literally posting on blogspot dot com, emphasis on blog. If there is one thing I would really like to work on about myself as time passes, it's my pervasive fear that every creative endeavor I undertake, every expression of myself is somehow being done "wrong," despite always following that up immediately with "what the hell does wrong even entail, Willem?". And a part of this involves reorienting the way I spend my time on the internet, curating my own online space, continuing to have fun working on little projects, exploring and developing new interests in things I come across – rather than, you know, scrolling myself into a bitter insanity.

Will I keep it up? I really, really hope so. As long as I can keep from getting sucked into that everlasting vortex of "bad feelings -> go on social media to numb self -> worse feelings", I think I'll be fine. And I'll keep adding stuff to my website, maybe make it into a labyrinth of sorts. Just do not let me fucking log back onto Twitter.

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¹I was too depressed during my period of unemployment to make or learn just about anything, which admittedly still kind of annoys me. I do know Python and R now, though.

²Blah blah doomscrolling is bad, we all know. I don't really have anything groundbreaking to say about it, just that it was doing a number on me. 

³You can email me if you'd like to see any of these, but kindly don't share them if you do. 

⁴I have been lax on saving. Currently, in order: Georges Perec, metro station (not the band), suicide (also not the band), Novaya Zemlya effect, Bear Island (Svalbard). 

⁵It kind of feels like quitting smoking – I miss nicotine insanely but I do also feel far, far better without it.

Species of sequences of spaces of pages of books

I like books. That is obvious. If you know me you're thinking "water is wet" after reading that first sentence. I strongly prefer a physical book over anything on a screen, though shorter-form papers or essays I'll download and save in a Zotero folder so that I can highlight and annotate things in it. I don't like writing in paper books.

I have been thinking about books a lot, not what's in them but what makes a book a book, the physicality, the layout, the material, the design of the thing, the way it expresses its content, its existence in physical space. I have also been thinking about words, not in a strictly linguistic sense – I'm not going to pretend I know jack shit about linguistics – but rather as shapes, forms that take up space on a page or surface. Not every book has words in it, of course, but right now I'm thinking about the ones that do...

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What the hell is a book anyway

Per the Oxford Dictionary:

"A written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers."

Per Wikipedia: "A structured presentation of recorded information, primarily verbal and graphical, through a medium."

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When I was studying design in undergrad I found myself particularly taken not just by typography – I'll define that as individually, intentionally designed glyphs – but by the practice of putting entire words on a page or a screen or a wall or a sign or wherever a word can go. This interest coalesced into something a bit more concrete when a teacher of mine handed me Species of Spaces and Other Pieces by Georges Perec, the beginning of which explores the concept of page-as-space, not just a repository for words:

"Before, there was nothing, or almost nothing; afterwards, there isn't much, a few signs, but which are enough for there to be a top and a bottom, a beginning and an end, a right and a left, a recto and a verso." (p.10) And then: "This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page." (p. 13) I think it's interesting that Perec uses the word "signs" as representation for what takes up a page; he doesn't really elaborate, and I'll take it to mean (maybe incorrectly but I'm trying) the shape itself of the word rather than a word pertaining to a specific meaning. His cascading set of glyphs in the first image that spell out "horizontal" – which has more weight, the definition and contextual usage of the word or the way in which it's laid out on the page?

Ulises Carrión conveyed his thoughts on what artists' books (or, as he called them, bookworks) can be in his manifesto entitled The New Art of Making Books. The very first sentence is funnily similar to the title of Species of Spaces: "A book is a sequence of spaces." Carrión was particularly interested in the concept of structure; he later says that "every word exists as an element of a structure - a phrase, a novel, a telegram", and that "space exists outside of subjectivity. If two subjects communicate in the space, then space is an element of this communication." (emphasis mine...)

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I am so deeply sorry to say it but all this does in fact have me thinking about the written internet. The New Art of Making Books was written in 1975, 18 years before the internet was available to the public, and I think it would be remiss of me to simply transfer various quotes to the present and equate them to how we use the internet in 2025. That's way too vague, anyways. All the same: page-as-space, words-as-structure, space as an element of communication; or, back to Wikipedia, "a structured presentation of recorded information, primarily verbal and graphical, through a medium." What the hell counts as a "medium", though?

I've decided to get a little obtuse with this. Is a blog or an online newsletter a book? Is a website? Is a forum? I'm thinking about how on all of these each chunk of text is placed selectively on the screen in a systemic form that contextualizes them within the greater space, whether we notice it or not. At design school we were taught, correctly, that placement conveys its own meaning, can manipulate – consider the common phenomenon of headline placement, what's next to it, how big or small it is, where it's located on a series of web pages. Think about the NYT's coverage on Palestine: how many times have you had to click through page after page on the website find a single article on the subject? It is direly obvious that tucking words away like this is a thought-out choice, that where they exist says just as much as the message they themselves actually convey.

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I realize I'm rambling. And, funnily enough, after writing that last sentence, I considered adding "but this is my space to do that." Blog as space! And, yes, mine, to an extent. I can write 

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within the text editor. I can make words bold or italic or struck through or red. I can pick a different visual theme for the blog and fuck with the layout a little. Back we go to page-as-space, back to space as its own form of communication. These words are mine: I thought of them and typed them out in Blogger's built-in post editor – this blog contains, via written text, a specific message I'm trying to convey. I also decided where to put line breaks, italics, links, images, and quotes – I choose what gets emphasized and where the reader's eye, your eye, should move to throughout this post, a message in and of itself. And you, the viewer, decide how much weight to lend to all of these things.

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In undergrad we were tasked with typesetting a predetermined text in codex format (classic pages-and-binding book), making every design decision – fonts, layout, spacing, words per page, leading, kerning, etc – ourselves. I cranked something out overnight that looked nice, but standing in front of everyone during crit the next day I had to acknowledge that at no point had there been any why behind the choices I'd made. I had treated the book not as a space or a structure but as nothing more than a repository for words, with no consideration as to who might pick it up or why. I still think about this a lot.

To circle back to my earlier paragraphs, I don't really know if a website or a blog or a forum counts as a "book." Some people don't even think that audiobooks count (they do) – it seems that "in this day and age" the definition can expand and contract at people's will. And far be it from me to say anything about this authoritatively. Maybe instead of thinking of a book as a form of space or structure I could turn it on its head – structure as book, space as book. Now I've got thoughts going all directions! It's all endless, an ouroboros...

As it stands, I'll close this out; if you've made it this far, thanks, and consider taking a look at Species of Spaces and maybe mulling over how, where, and why you write things in the format that you do. Maybe you will even learn something about yourself. Or not! I don't know!

First post

It's funny, starting a blog in July of 2025. Another one. Sorry!

This is not my first attempt – in the past five or so years there have been just about as many stabs at it – but as I've had more time to write in recent weeks I've wanted to find a way to branch out from the fiction I'm so comfortable with, push past the personal-essay grind I too easily fall into as someone with, as one friend put it, "a lot of lore". I am approaching my second year of a Master's degree, during which I've had to learn how to write like an academic at a freakish pace (my undergrad program, a design degree at an art school, had no formal classes or writing assignments at all), and think that keeping a blog that consists of more than just stories, whether true or made up, might let me explore and loosen the mental ligaments a bit.

I've decided to use Blogger as a platform rather than Substack because the latter gave me terrible performance anxiety and made me feel as if I had to hone in on one specific area of expertise which, beyond the experience of being myself, I lack. (I no longer have any remote desire to "tell my story", which has historically invited unpleasant voyeurs and forms of parasociality into my life.) The writing I did share on my old Substack blog was, to me, treacly and hastily-written, content for content's sake and little more, and I'm not very proud of it. The relative isolation of Blogspot appeals to me for now; rather than feel a push to self-promote that I myself don't like, I hope to have my own little corner of the internet where I can be a little less polished and a little less anxious while still pushing myself to write things that I'm willing to share publicly.

This Georges Perec quote, from The Gnocchi of Autumn or An Answer to a Few Questions Concerning Myself, sums up my thoughts, I think:

"How to set about avoiding, yet again, those games with mirrors within which a 'self-portrait' will be nothing more than the umpteenth reflection of a consciousness that has been well pruned, a knowledge that has been well polished, a prose made docile by the pains I have taken? A portrait of the artist of a clever monkey; can I say 'sincerely' that I'm a clown?"

I love Georges Perec. Maybe I will write about him soon. Lately, though, I have been thinking about existing as meat, and the idea of a "hedonistic reader". Whatever ends up on here, I hope you like it.