Ariana Grande is the only artist I’ve become a “fan” of as an adult. Quoted, because I’m not really a hardcore fan of any artist and I’m open to disappointment. Morrissey played a big part in me having this mindset. Hopefully, the other two artists I’ve been a fan of since I was a teenager, Kylie Minogue and Madonna, don’t end up supporting right-wing parties on national television like he did.

In Ariana, besides her musical talent, I appreciate gestures like when she wrote an Instagram post on Halloween 2020 encouraging her fans to put on a costume, take a picture, and stay home like she did. Many others, including my celebrity crush The Weeknd, didn’t resist the need to celebrate it with other people in the middle of a pandemic, and went to parties full of non-masked celebrities and masked waiters.

Ariana’s eternal sunshine has been my comfort album this past year. It’s full of feminine energy. Her voice sounds better than ever and her enunciation on this album is perfect, probably due to training for the musical movie Wicked around the same time she recorded it. My Spanish ears can understand everything without checking the lyrics this time. All the tracks have an Adult Contemporary Chart feeling, with R&B and soft dance music.

It has been re-released this weekend under the name eternal sunshine deluxe: brighter days ahead, including 6 new songs. This album was already a safe place for me to go on bad days, and the “better days ahead” title puts an emphasis on it. I was happy to see the new tracks are not live versions or remixes, except for an extended version of the intro. They’re completely new songs, worth being included, and they add so much to the album.

I started dating at sixteen, around a month after I got internet at home, and thanks to it. As a gay introverted teenager with no queer classmates, there weren’t many chances for me to meet new love interests the same ways my straight friends did.

My love life and my internet life started around the same time and have often been intertwined. It took some time until people I was dating had an online presence beyond email and MSN Messenger. I don’t recall any of them being a blogger or even having a MySpace, but it got to a point in the late 2000s when everyone had Facebook, and after that, Instagram.

Depending on how relationships end and how you take the breakup, running across each other on the street can go in different ways. I try to end things in a way in which I won’t be nervous or annoyed if I see the other person again. And when it happens, if you don’t talk beyond a greeting and continue to walk by, it’s likely you won’t learn anything new about their lives.

These last few years, you can “run across someone” on the internet. Sometimes it’s by chance, sometimes by following a path you know is going to end with finding an internet profile you shouldn’t have seen. I won’t blame me or anyone for doing so. Sometimes we do things we know are going to hurt us, like smoking or eating unhealthy too often. But we can learn to treat ourselves better and change that behaviour.

Then, time passes by, and the day comes when you’re given an update on their lives by mutual friends or by a common internet place, and the feeling could be described as a “non feeling”. A surprising lack of interest, and realizing their business is not your business anymore. One step closer to inner peace.

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.