2025-08-05 00:00 UTC
Setting up this blog has been a complete pain in my ass, man. Apparently the Zola + Neocities stack is just not intuitive at all despite Zola claiming triviality with regards to deployment. Fucking trivial my ass, straight up. I spent multiple hours pulling my hair out because I couldn't get the config or the templates right. Zola's build command sucks complete donkey dick. I had to change the output like six times because it kept fucking up. I mean, I don't really give a shit now that I've got a somewhat working product, but man setting that shit up sucked. I'm not throwing shade on Zola or Neocities as frameworks, though. The pain of setup was pretty much entirely my fault because with programming, the whole idea is revolved around stepping on your dick a bunch of times until you figure it out. Trial and error is the only way to true understanding. I also refused to entirely vibe code or any of that stuff either. I'd like to know what I'm doing before having an LLM spew out a bunch of code and pushing it. I think the fact that people with basically no development experience pushing out products that are grossly flawed is a huge problem, especially considering how ubiquitous software and technology is in general. I mean, people don't even read the code before pushing it anymore. It fucking sucks.
But I will say, the rise of AI, LLMs, neural networks, and all the other machine learning jargon has been a great way to introduce me to technologies that I otherwise wouldn't have known about or been able to use quickly. Having ChatGPT walk me through setting up my Linux machines and learning basic scripting has been really cool and way more accessible than it was just a few years ago. It's crazy because I remember being glued to my iPhone and racking up dozens of screentime hours per week. I also was glued to mainstream platforms that pride themselves in spying on their userbase. I realized slowly that I was literally being brainwashed. The mass amounts of data collection that Big Tech had on me helped them facilitate so many of my thoughts and actions. Soon enough, it started to feel like every thought I had was algorithmically generated. I felt like I was getting dumber with each swipe of my thumb. But my digital liberation has been a very gradual process. I remember deleting my Facebook account in the middle of 2023 and feeling a lot more liberated. Then in the middle of 2024, I got a dumb phone because I hated how much my iPhone was sending me notifications and trying to keep me on it as much as it could. I could feel the predatory programming more and more each day. It was too much to deal with. But once I had the dumb phone, I felt so much better. I started to understand that I didn't really need my phone for most things and how wasteful having one can be. Nowadays, I use my phone to make calls and send texts, as an alarm, and sometimes as an offline ereader, but that's about it. I had a very simple TTY phone with the tactile number pad for a while and it was a phone primarily marketed to old people, but the performance of the basics was still pretty bad. So with that, I opted to switch over to a Google Pixel with GrapheneOS and that has been a much better choice. I was reticent to go back to a smartphone at first, but after setting up GrapheneOS, it's been a much needed upgrade, especially in the domains of calling and texting. I disabled my internet connection and web browser and whole bunch of other things, too, and I feel fortunate to have the freedom to do that.
It's crazy because a big motivator for these digital paradigm shifts has been motivated by a growing fragility of my mind, especially in the realm of consuming media. After going through episodes of psychosis, I feel so much more sensitive to consuming media in general, particularly film media. I don't really like watching anything anymore because it's just too much of a sensory and cognitive overload for me. These days I pretty much just exclusively use technology to read things and listen to music. I've cut out film media almost completely from my life. I barely even watch YouTube anymore. Most days I'd prefer to either sleep, read, listen to music, or write. That's it. Anything else makes me start to feel overwhelmed, anxious, and paranoid. I am just so much more mentally fragile in general. I mean, if something goes even a little wrong for me, I have a complete meltdown. Not to mention, I hardly ever feel pleasure or joy anymore and I really only seem to feel negative emotions or nothing. On top of that, I am constantly fatigued. I wake up most mornings and just want the day to be over immediately because of how tired and frustrated I am when I wake up. It seems that the only respite for me is sleeping during the day. I feel like I spend more time sleeping than just about anything.
There's just a lot of stuff I'm dissatisfied with in my life. But I also understand that there's always going to be something about my life that I don't like, even if it feels like things are going right for me. I'll always have this feeling of emptiness in me, even if I do become the person I want to be or feel like I should be. I don't know why humans have that emptiness. It doesn't seem fair. It just feels like life has been rigged from the start. Even though I lament a lot in my entries, it gives me a sense of peace to try and get through it. One day God will make sense of all this for us. We just have to be patient and faithful. Stay faithful. Don't let it get to you. It'll all be over soon.