r o t b r a i n

I wanted to record a message for you to help you get settled in on your first night - 14/09/24

My backup headphones broke, so now I've got to listen to the constant barrage of advertisements and true crime stories that comes from the living room TV.
My mom has been watching true crime stuff for as long as I can remember, nearly two whole decades of eating breakfast while hearing about rape and murder... fun!!!
And it doesn't help that these shows can sometimes feel pretty exploitative and trashy, imo.

By the way, the writing is NOT going to get any more cohesive for a while cuz, as I said, I'm purely doing this out of impulse and I'm not too concerned about things being organized. There are no drafts, I'm rawdogging index.html
It may be interesting to tell you how I ended up knowing of the peripheral/small/indie/whatever web.
If I remember correctly, it started when I started using Linux as my daily driver in 2019 (Linux Mint, specifically), I think it was mostly because:

Concerning the latter, although I was concerned about those things and I did change up the sort of software I was using, I was still very much a lurker and didn't really apply these ideas in any significant way in my life. Youtube still takes a significant portion of my life, as much as it did since I was 6 (maybe even earlier).
Much like the protagonist in Disco Elysium, I was using these ideas as a coping mechanism, which only made me socially isolate myself further ("You want me to join your instagram group? I can't cuz instagram is bad", "I can't reach out to my old friends because Discord is actually a very bad, not good, much evil data collection scheme").
By the way, I'm not shitting on these ideas, I still agree with them, however I didn't actually really get them and I did take these things a bit too far, and honestly, I sort of feel like that's still the case nowadays.

I think my main mistake is that I didn't ever really try to connect and make friends with people (online and offline), after all why risk being rejected or coming off as weird and unfunny, when you could watch a youtube video that approximates the feeling of hanging out with people, there's simply no way a youtube video could be directly mean to me (sorry if you have no google account, guess you'll never be a knower).
And this shit still infects me to this day, for example, I really want to be involved with the underground music scene where I live, however I'm kind of afraid of coming off as some weird outsider, which is completely irrational, but knowing it and feeling it are two very different things.
This sucks because I'm pretty certain I'm much more of an extravert than I look.

I should probably set up an e-mail in case someone wants to contact me or sumthin' like that, I don't want this to be me one-sidedly screaming into the void...
Thank you if you actually read through this, btw.

update - 14/09/24

Here's the e-mail: rotbrain@proton.me