First entry here. Instead of greeting the world, I'd like to complain that it's February 22nd; one more week and it will be March once again. I'm typing this as I make a work-in-progress site, slowly piecing together lines of code like unfamiliar legos. To be honest, I'm not even that sure how I'd be able to get myself to update this. If "to be is to be updated," as Wendy Chun writes in Updating to remain the same habitual new media, I only sometimes am. Existing in real life requires nothing more than being. Existing on the Internet requires steady work. It's like how you'd hope to exist in someone else's memory: by continuously reminding them that you are alive. Or perhaps it's like a committed relationship. Healthy or not, I have no objective frame of reference.

I simply hope that by transferring my digital presence to this little-known site where the objective is just to be me will help me, in fact, become myself. A while back, one of my friends (Max, if you're reading this) asked, "why do you have so many [Instagram] accounts? Can't you just be yourself on one account?" I was slightly embarassed, I must admit, but I had to remind myself that I was certainly not the only person who used Instagram like that. There are certain sides to me I'd feel weird exposing to certain people on my followers list, which, of course, maybe is a sign that I should simply unfollow them. Too late now -- I deactivated my account. It's gotten too much. The prevalence of social media accounts amongst, essentially, all my peers have created a collective digital language. Brainrot, memes, spam, mirror selfies, hard launches on Valentines Day, etc. etc. In middle school, I used to believe that I was somehow immune to social media and its concomitant pressures and expectations (boy was I wrong).

Currently, I'm inspired by the vernacular web (thanks to Olia Lialina and Chia Amisola's works). This website is my new digital enterprise in joining a movement of handmade, handcoded sites that exists counterculture to mainstream social media. Perhaps I should map the progression of my habits as I transition from "doing things for the sake on an Instagram post" to "doing things for the plot so that I can log it on my indie site." But I take issue with the phrase "doing it for the plot," the same way I take issue with "character development" -- is it a plot for myself or for an invisible audience interpolated into my mind by all of my external influences?