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Matt:

This is a lesson that I need to force myself to learn or at least learn again. It’s okay to be uncomfortable with new situations and experiences, it isn’t okay to avoid them completely. I need to do new things and go new places. I’m a bit of a hermit, and that isn’t good for my physical or mental health.

Kami:

I think another thing that helps out a lot are routines. When it comes to my day-to-day, I really appreciate them. I'm a very forgetful person, so knowing that something will always happen on the same day no matter what just kind of makes things easier for me. Whenever I have a one-off appointment scheduled in like, the middle of the day its usually the only thing that I can think about.

I’ve talked a lot here about habits and routines, sometimes probably without even using those terms. It’s something that’s probably implicit in much of what I’ve written about navigating the world as an autistic adult. One of my most explicit attempts at the question probably comes in my discussion of robust defaults, a phrasing I sort of suggested might help counter the ways in which habits and routines can be pathologized as if they’re somehow inherently problematic. It’s an idea I lifted from Derek Kedziora.

A default is just how you do things, unless you have some reason not to do it that way. There’s no shame, no failure if you don’t pick the default option. That said, it’s worth monitoring and seeing if you need to reset the default or make a conscious change.

Whether you call them routines, habits, or defaults, the central idea is one of self-regulation. Kami also talks about headphones and music as other ways in which she can “quiet things down”, and you don’t have to armchair diagnose anyone as autistic for making use of self-regulatory tools because everyone actually makes use of routines, habits, and defaults.

Late in the second season of Twin Peaks, Dale Cooper, having been placed on leave from the FBI, arrives with real estate agent Irene Littlehorse at a somewhat disheveled bungalow that she didn’t intend to show him as he looked for a local place to call home.

“Well, it's still standing,” says Littlehorse somewhat apologetically, “almost by force of habit.”

“A little habit,” Cooper replies (much in the way you imagine David Lynch might), “can provide a strong foundation.”

This is what our self-regulatory defaults, habits, and routines are all about. Such tools and the comfort they provide are not about closing oneself off from new experiences or unexpected changes, but about providing a physiological and psychological home base of sorts from which you might derive the strength and capacity to attempt the new or handle the unexpected.

To be completely honest, I started out not knowing exactly how the other Irene Littlehorse quote would factor in here. It’s just something I remembered from the same scene, as she describes how the property got the name Dead Dog Farm.

Coming across a dead dog, for most people anyway, would be both new and unexpected. Having a strong foundation built upon habits is a way of exercising as much anticipatory control as possible so that resources might possibly be available should the need for compensatory control arise (and in a world of continuous bombardment the need for compensatory control is almost certainly guaranteed).

If I can reach for a way to make the story of Dead Dog Farm make sense here, perhaps the empathy of that “pure heart” actually comes from having within oneself and one’s own life a strong foundation you’ve built in order to securely stand in a world you can’t always control. The robust defaults of habit and routine are not somehow acts of antisociality but instead arguably the prerequisites if you hope to develop a true capacity for social concern and outward attention.

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Today, in response to Ezra Klein’s defense of having claimed that Kirk had been practicing politics “the right way” (a centrist, liberal whitewashing of Kirk’s profound nazism simply because he used words rather than guns)—especially in the newer context of hosting Ben Shapiro on his podcast—T. Ferox went a step further in diagnosing the problem of the elite.

Klein is the latest example of the fact of how easily class (both cultural and wealth) solidarity can override ideology. Klein identifies with Kirk more than he identifies with the readers and critics that have excoriated him for whitewashing Kirk's bigotry. Kirk is real to him in a way we aren't.

Emphasis mine, because that last line is so deflationary—by which I mean it correctly identifies something I’d rather not be true and almost would rather not have to concede. I’m easily right there with everything else but then that last bit just insists I go further and recognize a deeper truth.

Charlie Kirk was wrong when he infamously disdained empathy, but the ways in which the elite in the wake of his death have shown that they primarily believe empathy is only for people they consider to be like themselves ironically makes him in this case, or particular analysis, situationally right. Research has suggested the idea that people are more likely to feel empathy for people they consider to be like themselves, and in effect what Willett and Ferox are pointing out is that the elite see their fellow elites as people in a way they simply do not see the rabble as people.

What’s been crystalized for me by the Kirk shooting and its fawning response is that the cultural and economic class solidarity of the elite firmly rests upon this deep lack of empathy for those who comprise the rabble. What’s deflationary about this for me is that it places people like Ezra Klein beyond our reach. There’s a part of me that would like to believe that centrist liberals somehow are persuadable, even if it would take a tremendous amount of effort. The problem with that contention is that the effort would be entirely one-sided. People like Klein simply have no motivation to move past their elite status, and no interest in understanding that this class allegiance is a real and actual harm to the rabble whose interests even centrist liberals like himself will claim to have in mind and take to heart.

You can’t, though, platform as “civil” the violent and bigoted fantasies of people like Kirk and Shapiro just because they use words rather than guns to communicate and then at one and the same time claim to be working in the interests of the rabble. You can’t defend someone who said Jewish money was ruining America, that Black woman don’t have the brain power to be taken seriously, that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake, that we should distrust the qualifications of Black pilots, that George Floyd was a “scumbag”, and that men should deal with trans people the way they did back in the 1950s—and then claim to be anything other than a class apologist who is willing to sell out the rabble in order to maintain your own class status.

David Brooks this past weekend admitted on air that he had friends texting him to say that Charlie Kirk’s murder was “our George Floyd”—a stunningly open act of public confession to class allegiance on his part. You judge someone by the company they keep, and if the company you keep includes Charlie Kirk and those like him and those who like him, this would seem to be telling the rabble all they need to know about where not to look to find solidarity for themselves.

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Which introduction means here I am again blogging about other bloggers blogging about blogging. I’ll take them in the order in which I came across them.

Robert:

Just because we can’t feel the company doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Just because people don’t upvote, share, or comment on our posts doesn’t mean we don’t have a grateful audience. We may not hear the applause, but that doesn’t mean no one’s watching.

Leon:

And what of the blog, the platform closest to the barebones of the web, unmediated by billionaire-owned companies? In a sense blogs enjoy the perverse benefit of being unconnected by default. RSS allows subscription and notification, but doesn’t provide the means to amplify. However, there’s always the threat that a compromising post is found by people who wish you harm, especially when linking is fundamental to the practice of self-publishing online. What does a web and blogosphere that mitigates this risk even look like?

Seth:

Everyone can put text on a screen in 2025, but not everyone can write. And if you can write, you’ve got options. From a blog post, to an email, to a text message – so much of it comes from the years blogging, of publishing on the web.

Frills:

It leaves me finding other outlets to be creative, so that I'm not coding 24/7. For a while, I was sitting with the self-inflicted guilt of this. I felt I was abandoning the Indie Web space, a place that had given me energy in times gone by. But I have since worked through that: it's a hobby, not an obligation. People have still come and gone, and left messages in my guestbook to leave their mark (thank you!). That's the joy of this space, it doesn't disappear, like a post on a Facebook timeline, it persists, and will still be there when I feel the spark again to pick it back up.

Watts:

It’s as much of an age-old question as anything of the internet age is, but I think about it every few years. Slapping up a web page full of personal thoughts in 1999 didn’t carry the same weight that it does in 2024; employers, even ones literally in the internet space, didn’t necessarily do a web search on your name to see what came up.

Stephanie:

As tempting as it would be to simply reminisce about the early internet and vent about what it has become, nostalgia is seldom productive. The thought “what are you going to do about it?” kept popping into my head while skimming through the comments on the aforementioned Reddit post. What I’m going to do about it is dust off that part of my brain that was once devoted to regular blogging and document my attempts to reestablish a healthier relationship with the internet.

Cassie:

There is joy and value in expressing ourselves how we are, not how some bullshit external rules tell us how to be — because there is always one culture or mode of expression that is valued by the people making the AI, and those who exist outside of that hegemony are treated as wrong and in need of revision. I don’t want to sound like an elementary schooler who never learned to use a comma and therefore simply avoids them. I want to experience the beautiful, unique minds of the bloggers I follow. I want authenticity, not the yassified, sanitized version of you. I will continue to cling to my strung-out sentences.

Sebastian:

This is the essence of blogging. This diversity. Sometimes surprising. Unpredictable associations, insights, comparisons, or observations. A touch of madness in everyday life that can entertain, surprise, and show how different we are, and yet in this diversity we love to provide ourselves with pleasant experiences and spend time together.

Sophie:

I write the content on this website for people, not robots. I’m sharing my opinions and experiences so that you might identify with them and learn from them. I’m writing about things I care about because I like sharing and I like teaching. I spend hours writing these posts and AI spends seconds summarising them.

Ava:

The containerization of many aspects of ours is widespread on the web. Separate social media accounts or blogs for any interest or purpose or influencers pandering to a very specific niche. It's difficult to find people to follow online that don't do this, because the algorithmic pressure rewards this behavior. Embrace that you stand out being more authentic and human online, existing outside of these algorithms. It means you're someone that is relatable and has many different facets to explore, instead of being a brandsafe, one-sided image of a person.

Ratika:

Usually anniversary posts are accompanied by looking back on what things have been like and any lessons learned. But I don’t have anything interesting to share. I have enjoyed writing here, and I know that I will keep coming back, as I’ve done several times, after thinking that I was done with blogging.

Apis:

Occasionally I’ll look through the posts again, give them a reread, and sometimes I even feel inclined to finish one. Every time I try this, though, I find myself trying to rewrite large chunks of the post. I’ll rewrite this or that sentence. I’ll move this paragraph over here. No, that’s not the right sentiment for that section, let’s rephrase that. By the time I’ve run out of steam, I still have a draft on my hands, but now it looks a little different. Now I’ve left myself an echo of an echo.

I’m especially stuck on, in one case, and struck by, in the other, two things in particular from all of this.

First, the thing I’m stuck on is Seth’s post is a response to something on the Substack of someone who’d just joined Andreessen Horowitz, and it takes as its title a subheading it found there: “Blogging is a trade.” I dislike this intensely, especially since it comes in the context of a quote wherein the Substacker in question says, “Winning, for bloggers, means writing the reference take on a good topic.”

This is not winning for bloggers, at least not writ large, although it’s almost certainly winning for the subset of bloggers who aren’t bloggers but in fact and instead are content marketers.

To be clear: this is also winning for some subset of actual bloggers, too, since there are plenty of, say, personal bloggers who write about, say, technology and would be perfectly happy to find that something they’ve blogged is considered a go-to reference point. It’s just that, for me, the blogging that’s actually interesting is the blogging that very much is not a trade and very much an avocation or hobby. It might also very much be part of who one considers themselves to be, but a trade? I’ll pass.

(Yes, I understand the weirdness of saying that as someone who spent three years in the early- to mid-90s doing stand-alone journalism by blog, but then that never became in any sense financially self-sustaining, so even that, in the end, wasn’t much of a trade.)

Second, the thing I’m struck by is the post from Cassie in which she’s detailing a series of reactions to the ways in which WordPress’s new LLM assistant wants to rewrite people’s writing. This thing where she says she wants to “experience the beautiful, unique minds of the bloggers I follow” rather than “the yassified, sanitized version of you” to me is the direct antithesis to this idea of blogging as a trade.

Cassie’s thoughts here are so important—and no one who has been reading me over time is surprised I say that—I’m going to quote a few more of them here.

[I]t is our unique writing styles — the structures we use and gravitate toward and the decisions we make to conform to or break those structures — that make us individuals.

(Pair with the irony that LLMs’ penchant for using em dashes is risking the loss of useful punctuation in things written by actual people.)

Blogging, as we’ve discussed of late, is romantic. It is, as Kevin Lawver once suggested it be, the great empathy engine of the web—where, as Winnie Lim once implored us, we can be whole persons. LLMs like WordPress’ do what they do, Cassie suggests, “at the cost of original voice”. I’d almost argue, and I guess maybe I am arguing, that if you’re suppressing original voice, you aren’t even blogging.

“Voice,” as Christopher Locke once said, “is what happens when you shitcan the coverup.”

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As the article details, researchers landed on the term “gender detachment” to describe a phenomenon wherein subjects “were essentially articulating […] a lack of gender identity”. My aborted pronoun hack in essence was me thinking aloud about the fact that I simply don’t think a lot about myself in terms of gender, although my homepage dutifully designates me as a cisgender, straight, and male, which I imagine is certainly true.

In this particular research, most of those identified as “gender detached” also happened to be asexual. I am not, although I am celibate (and what I’ve termed “sexually agnostic”) and aromantic, the latter of which especially I wish I’d known a long time ago as it would have saved me a lot of headaches.

At any rate, over the decades since the early days of the new millennium, I’ve mostly realized that my natural state tends toward just not caring one way or the other whether or not I had access to sex, and that what access I’d had tended to be because it was quite evidently there before me, and (cue that background radiation of conformity I’ve discussed so often in other contexts) so at such times I simply did what and as other people did.

Anyway, this is about gender, not about sex, so let’s return to the issue at hand.

Mostly, while I somewhat identify with this idea of just not thinking about gender all that much, I think it’s worth questioning how much of that would qualify as so-called “gender detachment” and how much would be the fact that people like me, who presumptively represent one or more of the various identities considered to be normative defaults, simply don’t have to think about these things, because for them they are just a societal given.

(For instance, I also don’t have any particular allegiance to the race identity of “white”, but in the normative social constructs of race and racial privilege, I certainly am precisely that. The fact that I don’t think about it doesn’t mean it isn’t true, and certainly implicates this idea that whomever society deems to be of its default identities simply doesn’t need to think about their identities.)

In the end, I neither have any particular impetus to challenge or question the normative defaults I’ve lived within for just shy of fifty-six years and which my homepage designates as being true, nor really any particular sense of identity surrounding the idea of being “male”.

It’s all something for which I don’t especially have a particular answer, although I did once in passing suggest my gender was “potato”.

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At first, by the look of its contents, you take it to be some sort of radical underground paper from the 1960s—but those dates on the spine. Clearly, this is something else altogether.

It would seem to qualify as a zine: bound together is set of single eight and a half by fourteen sheets, each folded into a simple, four-page booklet. Any given issue at most just two colors. You quickly fall down a rabbit hole of research after discovering that it appears to have been a zine produced by and for workers at the Swan Island shipyards during World War II.

You spend hours at the Oregon Historical Library trying to track down anything you can about what it was, where either came from, or even if anyone still alive today remembers it at all.

You write up your findings late that year, in 2003. You revise them early in 2004. You revise them again in the middle of 2006, and yet again late in 2011. Each time because you’ve come across some small, new thing. It’s more than a decade before you find more, and you revise your findings in the middle of 2023 and again early in 2024.

Shortly afterward, having returned your scanned archive to public availability on the web after more than ten years, along with your written findings, you decide it’s time at last to contact the historical society about donating the originals. Fatigue prevents you from keeping to that commitment for more than a year.

You notice that this month’s IndieWeb Carnival is on “second person birds”, and you wonder what in the world anyone will manage to do with such a surrealist prompt. Previous ones such as “digital relationships”, or “impact”, or “self-expression” seemed easy. Then it comes to you: while the relevance might escape people, you think you know exactly what you should write. You think it will work, but you never know. Will it even matter if no one else can spot your interpretation?

You write up what you can, and then email the historical society librarian saying you’re finally ready. You agree to meet at the library the following Thursday.

That day, you have restless sleep and morning insomnia. You somehow successfully manage your way through your morning routine two hours earlier than usual in order to head out to the appointment.

It’s the twenty-fourth anniversary of an attack that led your country to lurch dramatically to the right and invade a country that had nothing to do with it, and you watch as the shooting death of a nazi the day before is being used to give yet another heavy pull on the Overton window thanks to a cascade of valorizing and lionizing hagiographies from both Republicans and Democrats, leaving you dangerously close to becoming a doomer because you can’t see where we can go from that.

You take the transit trip into downtown Portland, walk the last several blocks. You have to ride up in a small, older model elevator which pokes your claustrophobia, but you meet the librarian you’d been emailing, and give them The Finger. It feels weird to do, after twenty-two years in your care.

Unable to schedule your third Hepatitis B shot until next Wednesday and already downtown, you put off your blood draw and your EKG in favor of heading to the zoo for the first time since May because, as always, the fatigue. You grab The Whole Bowl on the way because it’s your go-to restorative when you need to push through a long day far afield from home. You have to take a shuttle bus part of the way because the light rail tunnel is being renovated, but you’re determined now.

You wander the zoo for as long as you can, before everything begins to feel slow and heavy. You go check out the three new goats, although you don’t yet know who’s who. You haul yourself back up the winding path, catch the shuttle, transfer to the light rail back to North Portland, hop the bus back to St. Johns. You make a quick grocery errand, head home, and take out the bins.

You finish writing this post, push the update, upload it to your blog, then email Sophia a link to your contribution.

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