You are currently reading the first sentence to begin an update in the modern Monday Update era wherein I don’t really know where I’m going to go with it. Each of the past two weekends, I had fairly good understandings of what I was going to write about come Monday morning, but this morning, I’m very tired (did not sleep well last night) and the one topic I want to definitely write about, the two CONCACAF Gold Cup matches I attended last week, I’m saving for their own sort of standalone piece/post. So, here goes. At this point, at the end of this paragraph, you as the reader and I as the writer have a much closer understanding regarding what’s to come next than you normally have.
I did not notice this, but reflexively over the past weeks I have seen these updates as a sort of pseudo-milestone marker regarding the last time I logged in to use Twitter. Perhaps one day I’ll actually go into the details of the incident that forced me to accept that I had to just fully eliminate the site from my usage but for the moment it’s both too raw and too embarrassing to discuss. Anyway, with this third edition of the New Monday Update (typing it like that makes me think about bringing out a Coca-Cola-style Monday Update Classic where I go way into depth on video games I spent a half hour playing at any point in the prior week) I have now been off of Twitter for three weeks, and I suppose I’ll spend some time writing about that.
Every now and then I have these strange pangs of fond memories from using Twitter back in the early 2010s. I was big into that “Weird Twitter” scene, where people would just tweet like funny one-liners. That whole scene had its own culture, its own weird rules and mores and dance steps that users needed to follow, but I can remember just being excited to look at it every day, to pull up the original Mobile Tweetdeck on my old LG Android smartphone and look through the funny jokes people told and the way they’d “blow up” each others’ profiles. I think I genuinely enjoyed it back then. A few weeks ago I was going through my old Tumblr from high school and found reblogs I’d made of “Twitter: The Comic”, which I remember loving back then. I guess my point is that there was a point where I found comfort, fun, excitement on Twitter, and I think the residual memories of that were part of what kept me on there for as long as I was. The emotions that I’ve felt using Twitter since… well, like the better part of going on four or five years, were like obligation and mindless addiction.
There was this understanding that I would miss out on something significant if I wasn’t following what was going on, and that it would somehow put me on a back foot socially or otherwise. I would be under-informed, ignorant about what was really going on. Three weeks in, I’ve missed out on every significant Twitter event for the past three weeks, and I really do not feel like I’ve missed out on anything significant that I didn’t pick up from reading the couple of news sites I look at. Maybe there’s something specific that I missed out on but for every actually important event or incident or whatever that makes its way around that site’s culture there’s like a hundred clusters of bizarre masturbatory infighting within and between the site’s subcommunities.
It seems important when you’re in the thick of it, like when you’re reading and posting actively every day. That’s one of the most significant reasons why Twitter has been as successful as it has despite providing such a disdained product over the past few years, that the site itself and the culture it has produced has been very effective at convincing users that it’s important for them not just to use the site, but to be active participants. I could write a book about every little way that Twitter manipulates its users into believing this, some of which came from the design of the site (the development of tweet-threads, the expansion to 280 characters, the devolution of the “Trending” tab from legitimately showing what phrases and hashtags were being used into just an algorithmic river of things that will get your attention specifically, the fact that certain people get a little icon to show that they matter more than regular users) and some of which comes from the culture that developed on it (this is too much to get into in a parenthetical and there was a tumblr post that covered it in-depth that I swear I reblogged at one point a few months ago but I can’t find now).
Importance, of course, is something socially defined. I’ve cried about MLS Playoff game losses. Many people would consider that to be something not important enough to warrant crying about. But I do think that the definition of what’s culturally important on Twitter is more contained just to Twitter I think many users of the site believe it to be. I’ve now missed out on three weeks now of Twitter “main characters” and morality plays and frankly I have not genuinely missed out on anything of significance that I wouldn’t have found with more clarity by reading a few news sites.
I need to get off of the Twitter topic. I might just need to quarantine any Twitter discussion to its own thing, like maybe I’ll write a short ebook thing about it, but my experience with the site both fascinates me and scares me. Last year I started fixating on this idea of what I feel is a ‘net negative’ effect that Twitter specifically but most social media generally and frankly the internet as a whole in many ways has had on my life. (Net Negative could be the ebook title. It could be a little play on words as well because of how “Net” can stand for “Internet”) There were so many genuinely positive things that came out of it, I’ve met real friends and had good times and found interesting artists and musicians and movements that have been beneficial. Simultaneously I was taking note of the negative aspects, the harms the years of unfiltered internet exposure had caused me, and I tried to ignore them, sort of proverbially stacking them up in the corner of the room and looking the other way. Recently that stack has started to feel rather high, and rather heavy, and I want to deal with it now rather than let it get to the point where it topples over and crushes me like a sort of digital Homer Collyer.
If Twitter had stayed like it was in 2012 back when I was scrolling through Tweetdeck every morning, back when it was the 140 characters and the actual trending topics and the chronological timeline, would things have turned out differently? Maybe, maybe not. My personality tends to get me addicted to things like that anyway. But I don’t think it had to have the effect that it did. I’ve gone on too long about this.
This is the second week now that I’ve wanted to touch on PRONOUN’s recent EP release “OMG I MADE IT”. I missed it last week because I spent so much time on sports. I don’t want to get too far into it at least personally but I felt some catharsis listening to this record. I feel like I’ll be very specific with regards to which pieces of pandemic-inspired art I want to engage with in the coming years. I don’t want to fully push away the idea of it, but I know that I do sort of instinctively turn away from COVID narratives and works. Partially because the memories are so intensely negative, but also partially because the memories are so intensely my own. I think that everybody took something different away, each in ways that were hurtful. One thing that I will say, though, is that this is the first piece of music I’ve listened to that has reflected what I went through. In particular the chorus to the second track “I’M RIGHT BACK IN IT” was very affecting -
Somebody ask me how I'm doing well I can't complain
It's just existing in itself is driving me insane
Leave for a couple weeks and say things'll be different thеn
I'm right back in it
I get the sense that she went through something similar to me. I can remember this period (in particular during the first two months of the year) where I felt like I was completely about to lose myself mentally, but this feeling had become so constant that it became something I couldn’t even really find the words to describe anymore. All I really held on to was the fact that I was still confined to my corporeal form and that there was a theoretical, feasible, better future ahead of me. I am glad to have seen a piece of music put that into words. I think that a lot of people went through something similar to me, and I do think that I’d like to hear how they personally interpreted it, to see the art they made about it, hear the music they made about it, et cetera.
I really only played three games in all of the past week - I played Escape From Life Inc. on the Switch last Wednesday, I did a brief speedrun of Thrasher: Skate and Destroy for PlayStation last night (Current PB is 30:50, which is like twenty minutes behind the world record but also I’m not going to put my life behind in pursuit of getting a world record in Thrasher: Skate and Destroy for PlayStation), and the game that I want to talk about is a game called GolfTopia.
I really, really have been behind on video games in 2021 in a way that I really, really was not in 2020. I probably played more new video games in 2020 than I did at any point in my life, and I have played fewer new video games this year than I have at least since like 2013. GolfTopia is one of the few video games released this year that I’ve put significant time into. It’s a golf course construction and management simulator. I know that this probably does not sound exhilarating to many people but that is right up my alley. I completed my first eighteen-hole course over the weekend, shown below:
I can’t really wax poetic about it but there’s something nice to build this course, see the visitors using it, see what they like about it, see what they dislike about it and do what you can to remedy it, and I think there’s a good sense of accomplishment looking out over my island and my eighteen hole course. There’s also a somewhat simple but still enjoyable function where you can actually play the course yourself.
It reminds me a bit of the old RollerCoaster and Zoo Tycoon games. I imagine it’d remind me of SimGolf, if I had ever played SimGolf. If you’re a person who thinks they could enjoy a golf course management simulator like this, then you probably will, and if this sort of thing isn’t for you typically, it’s probably not going to become your thing. But I fit into that first category and I like GolfTopia plenty.
We shall end here. I was on vacation for much of the last week (as the header photo to this post will show), so I didn’t make much. I’m planning tomorrow to write something substantial about the two soccer matches I attended over the last week, but I don’t know where it’ll go! See you soon!