Huge mistake.

I made a Substack account the other week, and I regret it. You just can't go somewhere without being sucked into a whirlpool of what's essentially digital gang violence.

People wear their stupidity like a badge of honor. And it's such a fad. It's not even real. Do you think people act the same way they do on social media in public and when camera phones aren't in their faces? No. We've become a society who prefers spectacle to objective reality because there's money in it. That's it. I can't even blame classism because I firmly believe that if everyone in America had their basic needs met, we'd still find something to complain about and someone to point at and say, "Hey! They have more then me. That's (insert personal brand of victimization here)!"

If you think that the tremendously wealthy rulers of the world and the destitute can't both be eye-wateringly stupid, then you should probably read more.

Here's a suggestion.

I have more energy to bitch about things, but I don't want to. My misanthropy is peaking alongside my existentialism, and shit's getting weird.

Fans of people like Chris Brown, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Pablo Picasso will tell you to separate art from artist. I get it. Sometimes bad people can make beautiful things; and good people can commit war crimes. There's nothing universally objective about morality. It's a series of ever-changing value judgments. And we want those beautiful things to exist to spite the artist, not necessarily elevate them.

Believe it or not, you can enjoy things without subscribing to the mindset of their creators.

Say that aloud in a room filled with people and see how it goes. The reactionaries will be on you faster than a Christian excusing child abuse.

Everything's a choice. Control what you can control.

I'm choosing to separate art from audience. I'm also choosing to separate myself from the e-culture of the chronically online. No more Substack. Bye, Goodreads. I'm not even so sure I'm going to publish anything for sale for much longer, but that's a different conversation. At this point in my life, it's become more important to me to not participate in the broader areas of the Western zeitgeist.

The blog might stick around, though it'll probably just be me bitching at the void in the style of 1998 blogs. Hockey, video games, writing stuff. No schedule, no consistency. No content warnings.

Happy April, nerds.