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Cake day: January 24th, 2025

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  • I don’t believe in reincarnation in the sense that I can be born again on this planet as a dog or something. More like whatever makes you “you” was possible in a universe where it probably shouldn’t have been possible. I believe in the Big bounce theory even though a lot of evidence says this is not true, the universe is definitely expanding at an insane rate. I like to think that all matter in the universe eventually comes together in one supermassive black hole and somewhere in that matter soup, another big bang happens. Maybe this time around life doesn’t happen, but maybe after a trillion iterations it does and whatever makes you “you” could happen again. You’d have no memory of it, you’d just be aware of being alive again. If there is just the heat death of the universe and nothing ever happens again then so be it, I was fine before I was born anyway.




  • Existentialism is the branch of philosophy that deals with these problems, I think you would have an interest in it. I struggled with these kind of questions a lot when I was in my 20s (what is the point? Does anything even matter?). I read a lot and hitchhikers guide to the galaxy was the first book that really eased this anxiety for me. There probably is no point in living, it’s fine. Everyone decides on what they are going to do based on their circumstances in life. In the end the universe may not exist again, so what, we were all perfectly fine before it existed and who knows, maybe everything that made your conscious possible will be able to exist again in another universe, you won’t have memories of your past life, at least you shouldn’t have anyway.

    I write a little and one of the first stories I wrote was about a being that created the universe from nothing because it was bored, I made a character narrate later on and his thought process was along the lines of “if you existed in this universe, who’s to say you won’t again in another? Whatever random events lead to life being self aware could happen again. The universe could expand until there is no energy left and then retract until the next big bang does it all again. It may not happen for the next trillion cycles but eventually something could happen again like it is now. Maybe it’s all happened before and we just don’t remember it.”

    So, even if you don’t find a purpose. You are not alone in your journey. It’s part of being human, to have awareness of your own existence but powerless to know as to why you exist. Some people just can’t handle those kind of truths, it scares them stupid and that’s why you get things like hedonism, flip it the other way and you get nihilism. Despair can come from both.

    My own personal thoughts on it are:

    You are alive and you are able to do as you please. You always have a choice. If you make your life a journey of accumulating a larger number than others then so be it, I am happier without playing any number games. I want to see things and meet people and interact with them. I love petting cats and dogs, I love ducks. I enjoy the fact that my tongue evolved enough so that I can enjoy the taste of good food and tasty bourbon. I like to know that I am helping someone or something else not be scared of existing, like if my cat is worried because of a noise, I can soothe her nerves and she doesn’t have to feel fear anymore. I am still able to see the good in humanity even if I don’t have much faith in the world currently. There are problems with society as it currently stands in the west but if everyone can find it in themselves to be honest with each other and help one another out then the world will be somewhere worth living in, no matter how short that time is in the grand scheme of things. One day the sun will explode, will the universe care about some billionaire’s wealth? No. Nor should anyone now, if that’s what they choose then so be it. What really matters is not what you do for yourself but what you do for everything else.

    /schizo rant




  • My guess would be the rise of content and businesses that are kept afloat by ad revenue contributed heavily to the enshitification of the web, but I also feel that sometimes we look back with rose tinted glasses. I am going to ramble a bit as I try to remember the web as I’ve used it through the years.

    Even in the late 90s there were pop up ads, sometimes people would make them horribly annoying with sound and moving windows. While using a noisy 56k modem would bring some nostalgia to some, it was a terrible time to view images. I also downloaded a free cup holder that opened my cd-rom drive.

    Then there were projects such as the million dollar homepage, which sold pixels as ad space, $1 for 1 pixel and 1 million pixels available. Once the web became monetised in this way, it seemed to be the start of the dot com bubble and with that, only the likes of Amazon and eBay seemed to survive out of all the big online retailers at the time. Google became very useful around this time also which made web directories and web rings almost irrelevant. Hence the beginning of the big tech companies real push to monetise the web even more. You could get free web hosting but it was often full of ads and popups.

    Google was once a beacon of hope to me, I thought they were really pushing new kinds of tech for the good of mankind, I was a dumb kid. They saw dollar signs in their eyes from Adsense and never looked back, I also used a little Adsense banner on the side of my website I am ashamed to admit, those days are long gone though. I think I was in college when someone invited me to use gmail (so maybe around 2005) and I remember watching the counter on the side of the login page seeing how much free space they were offering to each account, the number was increasing every second. I think I used Firefox at the time also which was the better alternative to internet explorer 5, which you needed to use html and css “hacks” to get some functionality in. I remember using digg over Reddit, not realising that this was the beginning of the downfall of the internet for me. I hopped over to Reddit with the digg exodus and Reddit seemed to suffer the same sort of fate with people trying to control the content that other people were seeing. Even on digg there was a race to post the latest xkcd comic and all of the people were beaten by a guy that obviously had a script to post it as soon as the image was posted on the original website. Then there was the power user mrbabyman, god knows how much he made from posting. Probably these same guys were getting paid to publish posts on Reddit as well, I think I remember a user called gallowboob doing so.

    I think my opinions vary at times but I solely blame monetisation and ad revenue for the decline in web content. The web is better to use thanks to some of these companies, such as google. Finding new and relevant content is a plus, but it was a double edged sword all along. I believe it’s now in human nature to monetise and control everything though I’m not sure what the solution to that is. Gemini and gopher are nice alternatives but it’s too basic for me, I love that there are no popups though.

    To conclude my ramble and a tl;dr. I blame the pop up ad as the trigger for enshitification.