I really like your website's look, it's really pretty and I really liked your blog on fandom spaces as well :)
Hi. Read your blog about coding. I always thought of HTML/CSS being like a pantry of ingredients that can be mixed and matched to create any kind of dish the creator wants. "Code stealing" never really bothered me because it's like another person adding mustard to their own burger because they liked it in your burger, but their burger is still unique to them even if they share a similar ingredient to yours. (Just hit me after writing this, the "americans trying to explain anything: imagine a burger" meme. FML. IDC I'm sending it anyway.)
Thanks for sending it anyway. It's not exactly the same analogy, but some people use the idea of recipes to compare it to computer programs: if you can share the steps to make a meal, why can't you share the steps (instructions) that a computer follows for a certain task?
It's good to see you back! I remember sending that same AIR screenshot to a bunch of my friends back when I played it, lol
Gay.
I read your analysis of Frutiger Aero and enjoyed it! I don't think you are overanalyzing it in the slightest! I also like your conclusion that it is a political movement that is encouraging people to resist the aesthetic agenda of big tech itself (like couple years ago apple always being super minimalist). And, I super agree with your conclusion, that the movement turning itself into something "not political" even though it clearly is, allows it to be commodified. It looses its teeth. Again, apple is a great example. The recent Mac Nano now has colors in like neon green which I think is them co-opting this aesthetic's resurgence. However, many people also really critique aesthetics more broadly. It is often super hard to make aesthetics into something that cannot be separated from a political agenda. Almost always you can appropriate aesthetics by copying and pasting. Anyways! I am happy to know about your site and blog. I look forward to keeping up reading as you post. Stay pink, Aidia
Thanks! I don't think it's a political movement, though, and that was a point I was trying to make! It's deeply political, yet not a movement: I mentioned it in a paragraph.
Your blog posts give me a lot to think about. I recently read your ones on the recent nostalgia for frutiger aero & about Love Hina's (and your teenage self's) rose-colored glasses for college. With the Frutiger Aero one, I think you gave a perspective that's hard to argue with, but then again I personally believe anything can be political under the right light. I don't idealize the way the 2000s were politically because I was a bit of a doomer as a teenager. But I do miss how the blatant disregard for consumers wasn't as obvious which I see as a political reason because I define politics as stuff relating to society at large. As for the Love Hina post, I can kinda relate. Not because I watched Love Hina, but because I'm kinda college drop out who struggled in school but had this idealized view of college in my head.
Thank you, Lakes. I feel uneasy every time I need to type the word "politics.", be aware. For example, "everything is political" is an idea that I agree with, but I don't find it practical at all, and I see it mostly as a rhetoric resource to "win a debate" and feel morally satisfied without actually presenting an argument. So what I'm referring to in the article is the willingness to make a change, or at least to be actually vocal about a discomfort. They're already expressing themselves, they're so close! But not only they don't go further. They even belittle their own fandom. Some of them *do* stuff about all this they complain about, but it's mostly personal and shy projects. Also, as it was implied in my blog entry... my thoughts are driven by my frustration of what groups like the free software movement couldn't achieve. I am basically saying "hey kids, my generation didn't put it right... you do it, you fulfill my own wishes" Can't they see this is the land of confusion? (I'm paraphrasing a Genesis song)
hi, just read your blog on Frutiger Aero, found myself to agree on quite a lot of views on it, especially most of people being into it to be very negative about the current state of tech, as well as the nature of it being political by itself from everything that it represents, an era where things didn't look as big. I was technically around when it was a big thing, with Windows 7 being a daily drive for me and all, point is, while i was around for that, strangely enough I don't feel that much nostalgia for it, which always makes me think of a couple things. something i'd like to add with Frutiger Aero is that i noticed that a lot of people into it tend to be people who weren't around at the time Vista or 7 were the current Windows versions, getting into tech around the time 10 was the current version. a lot of the sentiments about it from these people read like they are feeling nostalgia for an era in which they were never part of. -there's a word for that, being anemoia.- the whole rewrite of the past feels like it's a game of broken telephone, someone hearing about someone else's experience with that time, with that someone relaying said experience to someone else, to the point that the common perspective is one shared amongst people who really weren't there. like people looking into what they grew up with, looking at the past and thinking it looked so much better than what they have currently. that type of anemoia being something i deeply felt about other topics such as old cartoons. great read, really made me think.
Many of us who have looked into the Frutiger Aero fandom have noticed many of them are kids born after or during the last years of "the" aesthetic, yeah. Of course maybe they did experience it later. I personally kept playing MS-DOS well into the 2000s because it was (almost) everything that my weak Windows PC could run. But that's not probably what's happening here. In any case, I wonder if it's really that important? I think they should be aware that they're nostalgic for something that didn't exist for them (or even for anybody, in the way some of these younger folks idealize it.) That's important for sure. And I think many of them *are* aware. It just bothers me it's a trend that exists mostly to look at pretty things and complain about the present without doing much about it. Many of them have been exposed to alternative ideas, and that's cool, but the "politically-aware Frutiger Aero" could be so much more. Many of them are in their early 20s already.
I found this place through the Frutiger Aero Archive Forum, it's really nice here appearance. I noticed you're using animeshot avatar from You're Under Arrest. I strongly agree with your views on social media. Although I've been using Mastodon and anothers recently, I feel uneasy. I basically just use it like Pixiv or microforums. In comparison the China social networks may be bad worse. Cyberbullying is rampant. This is why I don't has China social IDs publicly. The rules there are stricter. However, in China has a golden age web era in the 90-2000s. YUA was also introduced in a dubbed version at that time. My mom's generation 70-80s watched it. I once found an HTM archive of a developer born in 1979 on a oldies Shareware CD-ROM, this CD released year 2001. Not sure you know what is IndieWeb standards, because I watched got a updates page and microblog here. Maybe that Neocities features, hmm..I haven't used it. If you want, you can send back Webmentions to my blog webspace - v1sta.xyz - It's also modify designed as Frutiger Aero styles.
Thank you! People rarely comment on my site's looks, but I don't mind because I put effort on its content more than anything else. And people appreciate it. I don't know anything about the Chinese internet, but from what you're saying it seems it's been suffering the same consequences as any other part of the mainstream internet. I've only watched the You're Under Arrest OVA, but I'm willing to start the TV series eventually and watch the movie as well. The characters were lovely. I don't think the show aired where I live when I was a kid, so my appreciation ❤️ developed recently. I don't know what the IndieWeb standards are, but if someone wants to access my content, then I'm already offering my website pages and my RSS feeds. I don't want to "publish my content here and share it elsewhere" (elsewhere being mainstream platforms) and I don't know if I like the idea of webmentions. It sounds like something created to have metrics, and I hate metrics. Numbers on the internet are evil, because people take them too seriously. I would still maintain my blog even if I thought no one was visiting it. Anyway, thanks for your comment. Your site looks nice, I wish I could read Chinese.
Read your "Old animanga fan yells at cloud" blogpost and it resonated with me, even though I never got into fandom spaces until the start of the decade (okay I did post in some gaming forums but I was generally in my own sphere otherwise). It's genuinely infuriating that most online discussion spaces that aren't politics oriented must be siloed into one of the two political personalities you described, and any discussion taking place must be put in the respective political lens. Sure, anticapitalist politics are far less hateful than gooning neofacist larpers, but at the end of the day a lot of these spaces stop being centered on the topic at hand and it becomes yet another political circlejerk, possibly centered around ecelebs. I'd also lump in sexuality as well, but that point almost always ends up being a casus belli for neofacist gooners to colonize and take over the space. Personally I do think platforms like Twitter/TikTok contributed a lot to this, the moment people started to associate online websites with ecelebs/personalities versus topics is where things began to fall apart. But I do think there will be an eventual return to topic oriented discussion as major social media platforms continue shitting the bed and drama seekers wall themselves off in fragmented Fediverse instances where they can whine about irrelevant ecelebs all day long. Hopefully actual gatekeeping (not elitism) makes a return too so prospective ecelebs and agendaposters get weeded out. Anyways, dunno where I went with this, but I wanted to let you know that I did like your blogpost.
Thanks for your comment. I'm glad you liked my blog entry. I should say that I don't mind "politics" being present in fandoms (or anything else) but they need to be genuine. Many of the discussed topics I see today look fabricated and out of place to me. I recently mentioned to someone that it feels as if I were watching puppets fighting each other not being able to look at the threads that hold their limbs. My values strongly align with the vague concept "the left." However a big part of "the left" that I see online on mainstream media sometimes finds itself discussing someone else's agenda, typically ignited by media outlets or toxic platforms that have already established what the political perspectives "should be," particularly when it comes to fandoms (see: Stellar Blade discourse, the Ananta fandom, people thinking SJWs are a thing, etc.) I don't want to "weed out" what you call "agendaposters," because those are a symptom, not a main problem. I want the underlying system to be thrown over, to be honest. Check another entry I've written about it if you're interested: https://viciousdelights.neocities.org/blog/nothing-matters-but-fandoms-spaces-are-just-a-detail/ I don't think the Fediverse is a good solution, or at least not now. You mention "fragmented" instances specifically, which I guess it's better, but the Fediverse is a mess for moderation, laws, and the local culture of each instance. I like the idea of decentralization, but I don't like the idea of having everything federated.
Second B)
Jeez man! Don't scare me like that!
Hi! Thanks for the follow. I read some of your blog and I find myself agreeing with much of what you've written about how fandom has changed. It's part of the reason I created my site in the first place, so that maybe more people would be encouraged to create their own spaces and move away from sns which I find very detrimental to the fan experience. Glad to find more people who think similarly. And I love your themes!
I hope I get to see more from you on your website! You're not the first person around here who has told me they agree with me, and that makes me happy because the reality that big social networks present is not one I want to accept, but I need more people to share an alternative reality with. I don't think people will leave big SNS anytime soon, however (if ever in my lifetime.) The "indie www" is very small, but there are enough of us to "survive" here imo. So... don't expect other people to move away from SNS, and enjoy your own space. People don't interact much with me, and I don't interact much with others, yet I've been having a blast since I came here.
I loved the new theme!! I feel your pain, doing the theme switcher manually is such a pain XD
Totally worth it tho 🙏
i saw u followed my webstie hehe ur site is awesome ^_^ i love the liain theme
Thanks for passing by! Right now I'm trying to give my website more visual variety, so I'm writing something to allow switchable themes.
You followed me on Neocities, so I came to stalk you a bit and ended up loving your site :D I saw that you finished The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya - what did you think of it? I recently finished Lucky Star, and it has lots of references to that anime, so it made me curious to watch it.
Hey malune, thanks for passing by! You can find my general impressions in the Suzumiya Haruhi entry, particularly the last paragraph. I rewatched it recently, hence why I added it to my media log, but as it is implied, it wasn't my first time. Other than what I've already said, I think that it's an anime that worked wondefully when it came out because of how the anime community gathered around it, and because of its culture. It was a really good show to watch when you were a teenager in the mid 2000s. Some works remain relevant for a very long time, but I feel that Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu pretty much belongs to its era, so the experience of watching it today won't be the same. I also think that watching it in the order the episodes came out was quite relevant, but I don't think it matters as much today. That being said, it's not a bad anime. You will miss out a big chunk of the experience, but you could still like it a lot. I still love it because of what it was.
I thought I already followed you!! Thank you for all the support (really). I hope you have an amazing new year. Also first here!!!! Can't wait to see you online more often!
I hope to see you online often too! I check your site once a week hoping for updates. Happy new year. Keep up with your amazing art!