I've yet to actually use this as a journal — the truth of the matter is that I've been *trained out* of journalling in public over the years. I remember being too forthcoming my entire life, realnaming my entries from the fifth grade onward on these overengineered Wordpress installations, and wondering why I was alienating people around me. I remember being so candid in all territories online that I was easy to surveil and ostracise; for the most part, I hang out in caves online, talking in small crowds.

I find myself gravitating toward the ephemera of about a generation above me these days; I got into Megatokyo *recently*, and after joining their Discord, I was reminded of being a child myself. Everyone's habits, patterns of conversation, general worldview was just early 2000s still, with some updates for the memes that have come and gone since. I feel like I have spent the last four years trying to construct "higher-trust environments," "decentralised clubhouses," homes for a million new communities, the true utopian commune dream, and I am not sure I believe in it anymore. I think the internet may have always been smaller than I thought. I think that there may not have ever been an army of amazing, intelligent writers. I think that the idea that the computer would open the floodgates to an unlimited discourse at the quality it was at in 1992 was a reflection of Enlightenment ideals, and the platform corporatism of the 2010s, establishing itself as an arm of the post-1945 oligarchy, has shown that we no lo
nger believe in those ideals.

The quality of a network can only go down.

This is why people have been constructing gatekeeping mechanisms since 1993; shibboleths appear for this year's crowd before it disperses; subcultures migrate between peoples and technologies; all is in constant interchange, trying to mediate its purity, maintain its psychic cartography.

In this way the "old ways" are both a sort of counter-signal and a way of reforming one's pattern of interaction. At first this year I tried Tumblr. It was better than the microblogs, but still not quite at the pace I wanted. Tumblr still speaks in pictures, it is already pure idea; microblogs are also pure idea, it all takes unformed thought slime and smears it, trying to optimise the leverage of participating in the idea machine by letting the core of the idea take place.

A lot of the alpha in startup spaces is in claiming to have maintained a "high quality network" for whatever moment is important. Everyone is trading by grades of meat while not being wholly aware that the meat is even graded.

Wasn't I supposed to be writing about my life?

I'm restless; having been laid off, I've already established some work for the new year, but I'm spending this month as a vacation. I read all of *Fate/stay night* relatively quickly. I'm working out once a day, though I seem to have made myself bleed a little by doing so, and I'm hoping it doesn't stick around or get worse. I am trying to be efficient with what I play and read before I leave for Edmonton on the 12th; I can't take hardcovers with me for two months, only one gaming device, and my work laptop, so I'm trying to play what I can only play here, read what I can only read here, but I don't necessarily *want* to be experiencing those works right now, so I feel like a prisoner of my own enforced efficiency. 

I am constantly doing this. I reroute my day around parallelising my chores, ensuring my hobbies might also make me money or establish my reputation, structure what's read so that each subsequent read makes sense or plays well together with other things. But picking something up of its own merits, in a vacuum, working off pure whimsy? It doesn't happen.

It's this rigid efficiency that I think marks the 2020s-me from the 2000s-me. I do not know if it is universal. To me, it's the difference between needing a reward system Halo Infinite vs. the appeal of playing Halo 2 for no reason whatsoever. It's the idea of classic Team Fortress 2 being 45 minute matches with open mic where nothing is to be gained from the experience. I think the collapse of what is essentially work-reward systems into play has imprinted an idea that even recreation *can* be optimal, that you can use the part of your mind that wants to manage and leverage gains over others *all the time*, and now I can't just do something for its own sake. It must be recorded in some sort of watch journal, some other CRUD app that has a social network attached. And yet, and yet — if I *do* let go, if I *do* just like something for its own merit, I feel the grip of mortality on my shoulder; I feel like I haven't achieved enough, that I have to go further, I have to get back to self-perfection or it might
 be revealed that I'm actually nobody.

So how can I have both? I've been trying to regain my attention span by falling back to long-form writing; at the same time, I feel like the aspect of my cognition that writes—that is introverted intuitive, if you're into MBTI—has to be restarted whenever I'm working for extended periods. I become so good at optimisation that I need to relearn *experience*, or even how to describe a model of other people's agency.

I feel as though in being used as an instrument, I'm also in a daze remembering that it used to be different, and that I need to solve this puzzle before it gets more different than even this...