🍵 newisms

Date: Sunday, June 1, 2025

Day One

Whatever this is might not be what I think it will be.

Welcome to my Commonplace Blog. I'll share my front page introduction here again, in case it changes by the time you read this.

Alex's Newisms (or Alex's New Isms) In what is either the worst or the most ineffectual decision of my life, I'm aspiring to write here daily. I've been an Online Poster for my entire life, as is common these days, but lately I've been posting online less. It feels like the options are to either contribute to public discourse and sacrifice my own dignity to Content, or to never post at all, and to live in peace. However, I don't want to give up my dignity OR my voice, so I will be posting here instead, to an audience of whoever ends up here.
This blog's approach is inspired by many things, but there are two inspirations that I want to share with you right now: Cory Doctorow's 2021 blog post entitled "The Memex Method" The present "indie web renaissance" or "small web movement" that has rose to prominence in response to the deleterious effects of large social media companies on society.
That said, I also think that I was probably at my Wordsthinkingest during a phase in my life when I wrote 10k words daily just to feel I had achieved something. Since then, I feel like my brain has become both more chaotic and less capable of stringing together coherent thoughts. Part of this is social media, of course, but another part of it has been brain fog lasting since I got Covid for the first time. Reading and writing dedicatedly has helped with that a lot, as well as humbling myself to be social and speak my mind even when I feel my wits will fail me.
The inspiration for the name itself is something that I aspire to: not newism in a tech-optimism type way, but in the sense that I must believe in the human capability to create new ideas and in doing so strike upon better ideas. The impetus for choosing "new ideas" as my guiding light is twofold: first is that all that people do (good and bad) is inspired by somebody who had the idea and spoke it, and second is that I believe people in American culture feel heavily discouraged from having and sharing their own original thoughts (...even though they are encouraged and empowered to speak loudly). I don't believe cringe CAN die, but I think the urge to cringe at oneself must be overcome, and killed if possible.
I am a paranoid coward, so I must attempt to be bold.

-- The front page introduction, 2025 05 31

It's genuinely crazy that this year is only half over. It's been a long one already. In many ways it's been one of the worst years of my life. In some other ways, it's been the best year since 2020. I think that this year is a year of problemtunities, in a similar way to 2020.

A lot of people say that their 2020 went by fast, but 2020 was a crystalline eternity for me, utterly novel in its distress and joy. I saved up for a Big Life Change with Big Plans and carried it all out successfully despite and in the midst of rapidly changing circumstances and a shifting resource landscape. I spent a lot of time reading political texts and sickening myself with anger and anxiety, and then distracting myself from that anger and anxiety with a lot of self-inflicted manual labor. I lost things I didn't know I had to lose and gained things I didn't know I had to gain. I had arguments with my sister that I regret to this day that were essentially about whether her child's development or my health was more important. I didn't recognize that at the time, but I'm glad she got her way, seeing as her son's generation has been so deeply developmentally affected by that period of isolation. And I didn't catch Covid til nearly 2 years later anyway. I felt (almost wished) that it was the end of this world, but worried more that we'd fail to sieze the moment and make it the beginning of a new world.

The years SINCE 2020 have whizzed by, eventfully but not enrichingly. I have done my best in many ways to improve myself, but I think I should have been attempting to improve the world around me instead. I don't regret improving my relationship with myself, and I don't regret withholding the sort of primordial cloud of hot gas that comprises those personal developments, but I think that people with far less worthwhile thoughts have aired every last one out and made a world that is much worse for it, and for the hesitation of those who do have worthwhile thoughts. I know the worthwhileness of thoughts comes in part from thinking before speaking, but I also think that people who know they're probably good enough but who are nervous they're wrong about that could do to be less nervous about speaking their mind. That includes me, I guess. I think that, in the years since 2020, I have receded into myself to an extent that is not unique in society but that I find regrettable, both in myself and in others.

I could speak on the value of human imagination now, but I want to save the broad artsy creativity talk for the venue which I have designated for that purpose. Today I begin by writing about writing.

On the Practice of Writing Daily

I love procrastinating making an actual thing by focusing on making the website first. Sooner or later, I'll have to learn that the HTML and CSS are not the most important part of any online project. I haven't gotten to that lesson yet, though. Do you like the design? I'm trying not to think too hard about future proofing it, because I will just keep working on the design if I allow myself.

I'm using wordcounter.net to make sure that I'm hitting my goals. I haven't really set my goal yet, though. I used to write daily when I was in college, and I had various inspirations to decide what word count I should aspire to each day. I have never actually written a novel, but National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, was all the rage throughout the 2010s. I'm a nonfiction writer, I GUESS, but no one could stop me from writing along in private. I picked up on it late, though, finding interest in 2018. The goal of NaNoWriMo was to write 50,000 words in 30 days, which totals out to about 1,667 words a day. If you want to save your weekends, you can write 2,333 words a day instead. I have never successfully completed this goal, at least not intentionally. However, I write often and muchly. Not well, not cohesively, but often, and muchly.

I have what I would describe as an inconsolable number of web presences. I know that doesn't make sense on its face, but, taken in whole, I would compare my online footprint to someone that like Nexpo or some other internet mysteries Youtuber would've covered. Not that I've ever gone like full YAYVIDEOGAMES ensalada de palabras... for too long. I try to clean up, you know. Get rid of logins and accounts I don't use anymore, delete things that don't serve any purpose anymore, but it's hard for Me The Housekeeper to keep up with Me The Messmaker. Still, I try to have decent hygiene. I know my agent or spy or whatever the meme is these days is probably thoroughly entertained by me, but happily it seems the full scope of my activity will die with my fading memories.

Anyway, if I focus, I'm sure I'll impress myself. And if I don't focus, I'll still likely express myself. It's inevitable, with me.

Another writing inspiration I chose in the past was during my Hamilton phase. (I won't ask for mercy from your judgement. I like musicals, rap, and revwar history. It's not my fault everybody else liked the musical that was made in a lab for me. Especially since most certainly didn't like it as good and smartly as I liked it. My brain is huge and my heart is strong.) If Hamilton did indeed write 51 of The Federalist Papers over the course of 6 months, as the musical claims (which to be fair is contrary to what statistical analysis of the unattributed papers suggested last i checked), that's only a few hundred words a day. At the time I did this, I settled on 650. Looking up the stats now, I find it interesting that people seem to overestimate the word count of a typical essay within The Federalist Papers. The number 2,000 comes up a lot. Meanwhile, a statistical analysis of The Federalist Papers suggests that the length of a typical paper is 500 to 1000 words. An eager beaver (though late to the party) on Medium declared just 3 years ago that "The song ‘Non-stop’ immortalises the specific contribution of Alexader [sic] Hamilton", and then went on to misremember this specific immortalized contribution, stating, "..if Hamilton can write 85 essays in 6 months, I can write one article this week." Here's a link to the Medium article, wherein the author demands of himself to write 45 articles on productive organizational leadership. I won't claim that any of my own writing is of higher quality, but I think that the productivity-poisoned mindset that leads one to give themselves a Hamilton Challenge comes across both in what the author says and how he says it. I'm sure I probably preferred the exaggerated numbers back when I did my own Hamilton-inspired challenge, preferring quantity over quality as well.

Of course, I want my desired total to be more forgiving than both of these past challenges, given that in the past I hardly kept up with them. I do have to write other things daily as well too-- plans, posts, newsletters, emails, and more private journaling. These things would cut into my capability to write to my max here. At the same time, I've also written to higher arbitrary goals, such as surpassing 4k a day for a few caffeine-supplied weeks in college. I wonder if I ought to aim for more quality than quantity. This is a no-name blog, and it's meant to be a digital commonplace book to some extent as well. Is quality equal to self-criticism? Or will quality emerge from quantity over a period of time?

When I was learning a new instrument as an adult for the first time, I think I was a quanity rehearser more than a quality rehearser. No longer a child, I failed to find the same innate delight in my early strides as I had with instruments I learned earlier on. I began to hate the sound of my own playing, so rather than listening to myself and practicing only until I ceased to be productive, I just kept playing over and over, getting worse and worse over a practice session, until my hands hurt. I'd been told that perfect practice makes perfect performance, but I wasn't perfect, so how could I practice perfection? The phrase "perfect practice makes perfect performance" is fucking stupid, like a lot of other things I learned from certain music teachers of mine, but I attempted to make the most of whatever I was told as a kid. Of course, the original phrase, "practice makes perfect", sufficed on its own. In fact, it's far better for individual practice. The deviation from the original phrase was intended to keep my ensemble of young musicians locked in during the 12-hour weekend rehearsals or the 4 hour rehearsals that somehow felt worse after a full school day. Those practice hours, both when I was young and when I was older, certainly did add up to something. But there was a lot of time that I think would have been better spent if it had been spread out into smaller practice sessions.

All this is to say, practice in high quantity can make up for a lack of quality attention to the art being practiced, but only to an extent. I'm not a believer in the idea that human productivity tops out at 3 hours of work, but I do think that 5 hours of shit work isn't better than 30 minutes of well-thought-out work. But in the end, I think I am a "5 hours of shit work" kind of person.

I love refined things. Not that I have refined tastes-- I just like things that have been refined. I love highly designed products produced by massive teams. I love commercial spaces that have been designed with the flow of the experience in mind. I love big spectacles, I love performances that took half a year to perfect, and I love foods made carefully with a well-tested recipe. I love tailored things. I love things that are built up beyond what I could achieve on my own, and I love things that are stripped down beyond what an individual human might have the self-control to do.

The things I make are not refined, and the more I try to refine them, the worse they get. My hand is heavy. Whenever I read my own writing and attempt to edit it down, it becomes twice as long. I am never satisfied that people will simply understand what I mean if I neglect to include more and more interjections and explanations, but once explanations are added I am certain that people will not understand what I've written for how overwrought it is. How many posts have I tried to make on social media that ought to be 1 sentence, that ought to be 60 seconds, that ought to be a single image, only for those posts to balloon to paragraphs, hours, and dozens of images?

I dread to think that deep down I have the skillset of a podcaster, a text generating program (be it AI or a markov chain generator), or some other form of bloviator. I look at my friends and I see they have the minds of writers, translators, optimizers, editors, engineers. I have a mind that is full of noise and wind and garbage. I don't know if it can be fixed by writing more carefully, but also do not know if I will ever learn to write more carefully. I do know that my mind is a little more bearable to exist within when I release its noise, wind, and garbage out upon the page in a great shart. It's up to you whether you want to keep reading my blog, knowing that that's the purpose it'll likely serve, even if I set out to do something better than that.

I'd apologize for bringing up Hamilton in my very first post, but it's been about 10 years since it began to gain real fame-and-infamy (since it began to become infamed?), and I look back on those 10 years since then with no small amount of judgement for myself. I had gotten it into my head around that time that the way to success is sheer ambition and diligence, regardless of what tools you hack at it with. I couldn't hack it, though. I've pursued a number of different exploits-- all of which in retrospect appear to be unsuccessful, mildly successful, or just sort of forgotten. I've gained capabilities and experiences, I've pursued my curiosity, and I've done things I hadn't imagined I'd do... but I also haven't done the things I did imagine I'd do, so I fail to be satisfied. What's more, my bank account is in a sorry state. I find myself at the end of the last 10 year sprint towards my aspirations, and I think that I've failed it.

My life is not over, but it must begin again. So lately I have been taking stock of what I have within myself after all this time.

Navelgazing on Irrelevant Aspects of Selfhood

I still like rap, musicals, and revwar history I suppose. I have tried a number of values systems on for size, against the wishes of my heart. I just don't presume that I've got it all right on an instinctual level. In some ways, it seem these days that to be human is to be biased, but to be a humble and worthwhile human is to attempt to overcome those biases. So I have attempted! I don't find myself satisfied in my original prejudices, quite the contrary on some issues, but I find myself much the same person as I was when I started. I think that it's disappointing, having seen myself as a subpar person all along and not finding any way within myself to escape my fallible character.

I mean, I've found plenty of ways to escape the reality of myself, I guess, or to be ripped away from myself. I've found ways to abandon my own goodness in an effort to pursue rightness in the eyes of other parties-- some fully external, and some which I've internalized. I've really torn myself apart to try to pick out the bad pieces, but when you're torn apart, the bad pieces are trying to pick out the good pieces too, to put it binarily. The process was not binary, since dissociating from only ONE self would be far too efficient for somebody like me. This is where the internet mystery aspect of my oeuvre comes into play. I've had a number of breakdowns and break-aparts and self-remakings. I do have more clarity at this end of it, but I don't find myself any simpler or any more complex. I find myself more revealed, uncomfortably and pleasantly and terribly, but not simpler.

Maybe it'd be easier if I could look back on the past 10 years and say, "over this number of years, I pretended to be this many personas online." It'd certainly be simpler. However, unpleasantly, there's really only so many of us, and it's just the same fights over and over again. There is a book called ぼくが13人の人生を生きるには身体がたりない。: 解離性同一性障害の非日常な日常, which I think about the title of a lot. I can rarely afford to import foreign books, but I read just the title of this book and think, yeah. My body is not enough. So maybe writing it out makes more room for everything I have the displeasure to be.

Something I encounter within myself at this time is the fact that part of me is very private, while part of me still holds the belief that the world benefits from my honesty. I think that something I've learned is that people cannot seem to process enough information at once to make good use of honesty, and that at a certain point "honesty" can easily become just a pretty word for unnecessarily inflicting oneself upon others for one's own satisfaction. I have always aspired to be truthful, but the complication with my truth is that there are several of them, all conflicting. Therefore, it can be hard to place my own real intent and thoughts. I suppose this is why I am easily a quantity writer over a quality writer. The high council of my internal panel of critics are not just disembodied voices of self-doubt, but they are equally fledged alternative visions of myself, each seemingly with their own realized system of logic. Trying to disentangle which voice is the true voice has become a waste of time in my eyes. The truth is that they're all within me, and they all have different attitudes towards themselves and towards one another, and we all can come to some sort of begrudging concensus. So the truth becomes whatever bare facts we can agree on, and whatever is most comprehensible to express to the external observer.

I do not envy the "out" systems of multiplicity social media. Unwisely, I have attempted to explore that aspect of myself in the ways that are socially approved in those circles, and it has caused a wide number of problems, and has also completely failed to live up to the reality that all parts of a person are still parts of a person, and they are still a person. People are terribly, wonderfully, woefullly complex, and I would think that people who tell everybody there's 20 guys living in their brain would be able to hold space for that complexity in others. However, they seem to have an even more oversimplified idea of what an individual "personality" can be. They also seem to assume that all personal attributes must serve a clear function. I'm sure they serve many unclear functions, but good branding isn't required to be a person, nor is it required to be a personality (to use antiquated terminology-- I know the current terminology, I'm just a contrarian dick who self-styles with several servings of brute-forced normalcy). The limitation in expresssion isn't shared by everybody in those spaces (shoutout to documense), but it is common enough to convince me that being A Guy With Guys is not a defining trait I want to put right in my bio.

What I've been really looking for, in the various thoughtstorms leading me to making this blog, has been a guiding awareness of my own personal values and desires. I have also been looking for ideas within myself for what a future might look like-- basically any future. I've been looking for ideas. I've been looking for the things that have been much maligned by my inner critic-- instinct, motivation, inspiration. I mean, for a long time I had to scrape by dopamineless, with a variety of unmedicated but incredibly medicatable mental illnesses, and so I subscribed to the notion that motivation and inspiration were unreliable and therefore worthless, and the only thing I could rely upon was diligence and blind commitment to daily labor in some direction. My friends used to say I was monk-like in my resistance to skinner boxes and dark patterns, but what I was was an ungreased machine grinding gears upon gears. Whatever purpose I set my mind to, the gears ground all the same. Now that I find myself with exploitable brain chemicals, life is enjoyable and yet I fail to be that much more effective at achieving my goals. It figures that the moment I have a molecule to spare, the technology for capturing people in dopamine traps has been perfected. And so I must rise to the challenge of resisting the delectable spread of distractions that give me the illusion of motivation and inspiration. I must reject the part of me that is formed by the internet, and by the abuses of people who benefitted from me distrusting myself, and I must uncover what makes me go-- not just in my gut, but in my bones.

Epigenesis