Tamrielic

Today, I was on a phone call with a friend as I was browsing a store. I came across a section with decorative letters for sale, arranged in six columns, and someone had decided to arrange some of them to spell two words: an infamous surname and a slur. Let’s say, as a prank.

I told my friend, and my first instinct was to take a picture of the letters and send it to him. I decided not to do it and just tell him what I saw: “someone has arranged the letters to spell the surname of that German dictator, and they’ve also spelt the n-word, with a hard R.” I rearranged the letters until they were gibberish and moved on with our conversation.

I did something similar recently when I saw a transphobic poster at a bus stop, disguised as a Women’s Day message. I had to resist the urge to take a picture of it, even if it was to react against it. Seeing stuff like this ruins parts of my day, and I shouldn’t feed the troll or pass its message. It might ruin someone else’s.

I’ll try to reinforce this habit. Today, I’m choosing to share something nice I photographed earlier: this ladybug that joined me while I was visiting an exhibition at the Photography Biennial.

After organizing my MP3 and Flac collection, I decided to do the same with my physical music on their shelves. I spent Sunday sorting my CDs in alphabetical order by artist, and chronological order within each artist. This morning, I’ve spent some hours scanning my CDs and the few vinyls I own with the Discogs app, in a task that has felt a bit like working in a mass production factory. Scan bar code > Choose the right edition > Add to collection, for a total of 452 times. While I get rid of the dizziness, I’ll leave the link below for anyone curious to browse the collection.

pompomkarl on Discogs

(Reminder that it takes one or two minutes to take a picture for your blog post and there’s no need to generate anything you-know-which-way.)

I have doubts about rejoining a microblogging site after leaving Twitter, testing the waters of Bluesky and Mastodon, and leaving them too. Twitter – I’m sure its current owner is fine with deadnaming – is out of the question. It got much worse after the CEO change in 2022, but it was already frustrating to me before that. I had enjoyed it when it was a place to have public conversations with internet friends and live-tweet reality TV.

But as it happened with Instagram, I ended up forced to see content from people I had no interest in, just because they were viral. And on Twitter, viral usually means triggering. Besides the discovery tab, even the people I followed would quote whatever far-right politician was rage-baiting, and giving them a “gotcha” answer. The intentions were good, but the result was me having to read the original tweet, and usually feeling worse than I did 10 seconds earlier.

I don’t have a Bluesky account right now, but browsing the main feed without logging in reminds me why I left. Even though most of it looks very Twitter 2010s, with news and dad jokes, 1 in 20 posts in the general feed are shirtless, sometimes trouserless, sometimes everythingless guys. It’s a content that has become very popular on Bluesky Spain, with captions like “just woke up” or “brushing my teeth” next to a nude photo. I even checked in a private tab and also on a library computer to be sure that it wasn’t just my browser cookies or IP outing me as a gay man, and showing me this content because of that. But no, that content is suggested to an immaculate computer even before creating an account.

When I had an account on Bluesky, and since most of my friends and acquaintances are also interested in men among other amusements, some of them tended to interact with these accounts, and I ended up seeing the original posts in my feed. And being exposed to 50 ripped guys a day is not the best for my self-esteem. Not being on Instagram, Twitter, or Bluesky, has removed my exposure to this kind of content and, after some time, I feel better about my own looks. The people I compare myself to (and I know that I shouldn’t, but that’s a topic for another day) are the people I see on the street, where I see every body type.

Out of the social networks I ever had an account on, Mastodon is the one I’ve used the least. I made an account on a Catalan server. I don’t speak it, but I like exposing myself to Catalan and learning some words and phrases. I did write some toots and learned new words by looking them up in online dictionaries. On Mastodon, just like on Bluesky and Twitter, I was exposed to triggering quotes from far-right politicians, via well-meaning people reacting to news.

I’m very interested in politics, but sometimes the news get overwhelming, and I can turn pessimistic. In those moments, I allow myself to take a break from the news for a couple of weeks, which is easier with no social media. I’m under the impression that Mastodon can feel like a bubble if I only check the local toots from a certain server, and right now, I could benefit from that. Maybe just focusing on LGBT+ issues, art and technology.

I think I can benefit from Bluesky and Mastodon if I set them up so that they only show me posts from certain accounts. Seeing sketches and digital art motivates me to draw more and, right now, I don’t have a lot of that influence around me. I’ll give it some thought, inform myself on how to personalize the Bluesky and Mastodon experiences, and probably rejoin. If I don’t like it, I can do as I’ve done dozens (dozens!) of times these past 15-20 years and just delete my social media again.

During the summer, I sometimes play videos of rain sounds. Partly because of my tinnitus, partly for a need to relax. Videos titled “Heavy Rain and Thunder Sounds for Sleeping” would sometimes trick me, and I’d wake up from a nap a bit confused during the first 5 seconds, as if it really were raining outside.

When last autumn arrived, I worried a bit after the first two mornings of rain because, for the first time, I felt desensitised to it. Better said, I was so focused in other matters that I couldn’t stop my monkey mind enough to focus on the rain and enjoy the sound.

It’s been raining since March started, and this is the weekend where that mental block seems to have disappeared. Thanks to conversations with besties, sudden realisations with my therapist, and healthier habits, I feel lighter and with a less cluttered brain. Just a while ago, I realised how cosy I’ve felt the past two nights with the sound of the rain. I’m in bed and it’s expected to rain all night, and the anticipation is making me smile already.

Ironically, when I seem less active on the internet, it’s usually when I’m spending more time on it. These past few weeks, I’ve kept on learning CSS and HTML, practicing with Visual Studio Code and learning about hosting. Small things, like how to make a link look pretty so that it points to /now instead of /now.html. Turning this blog into a site completely coded by me would be an overwhelming task, given I’m not a web developer (probably even if I was), but what I can do is combine both things and make some slash pages that are completely coded by me, and not by WordPress.

I’ve also been thinking about how to write my future blog entries. It’s tricky because I want to find a common ground between “being real”, journaling about my thoughts and some experiences, and keeping everyone’s business private, including my own. I haven’t shared names or personal details about anyone except for my own name, face, and the country I live in. But I have temporarily set some previous entries as private, until I figure out the best way to edit them, just to be 100% sure I’m respecting everyone’s privacy.