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September 2025

Created: 2025-09-30 (07:04:24)
Status: completed

Advance warning that there were no website updates this month! So this entry will be a shorter one about my adventures offline. The marginalia are taking over.

Marginalia

Spring is here!

I do have a few updates on the go, in various stages of draft, some that likely only need a little tidying up. What is there to say? I got lazy.

I spent the month lying in the grass, eating chocolate and reading Eve Babitz. Or on the cold and rainy days, listening to music and more often than not dozing off until early evening.

My favourite cafe has begun hosting evening life drawing sessions. I remember the bad old days, growing up in this city, desperate to practice my figurative skills and having the only thing available being structured courses that required a membership with the artists’ guild. The fact I can now bicycle down the mountain into town, spend a couple hours drawing without someone leaning over my shoulder to point out my mistakes, and have a gin and tonic at the same time, is nothing short of miraculous to me.

One of the ramen places nearby has set up a vending machine which dispenses Pokémon cards (and energy drinks to capture that demographic overlap). I stop by to look into it on the way home from work, and sometimes, if it has been a rough day, or late at night if the life drawing went well, will feed in five dollars and collect a booster pack.

A scattering of Pokémon cards

I have no plans to play the card game. I just love looking at the illustrations! There is a diversity to them that is totally absent from the games and official renders. The pokémon look like actual critters and not just… plastic merchandise. My favourites, so far, include trubbish resting in its dumpster, totodile gliding through the shallows and swoobat hanging in the canopy of an apple groves.

Around the grounds

The corollary to all this participation in the early spring unfolding of my city, is a lot less time online. It has been… a relief. I’ve been feeling pretty ambiguous about maintaining an online presence lately. The web is a lot more than just the mainstream social media sites, sure, but it is hard not to feel as though all the fun is being drained out of the place.

Aside from the way people who create adult content (however loosely defined) are being shut out of places to share and sell their work, aside from looming, poorly thought out age verification policies, aside from the greasy film of AI-content that now coats everything, actually just being online in itself feels like something between a hollow substitute for human connection and an actively risky move, depending on where you live and what you do for a living.

All the same, just dipping out seems like the wrong move. I think of Borges at the end of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius withdrawing from society to translate an obscure author, even as the world around him is radically and terrifyingly remade. The internet has become our terible, terrible commons, but withdrawing feels like ceding ground we should not just give up.

As best we can, it is likely better to keep on yelling at money, to show solidarity with sex workers and adult creators who are the unwilling pilot cases for policies that go on to affect everyone else, to irritating the absolute stuffing out of social media platforms that set intentionally ambiguous content rules, and to supporting alternative web ecosystems.

But also… where possible… maybe it’s not so bad to get off the internet for a bit too.

Trubbish on a successful evening

References

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