a small, monumental step
after over a decade of wandering around the internet, hiding from judgment under anonymity, I am finally ready to share my writing in a public, confessional space.
I've been writing on and off since 2013, a sophomore in high school, when I first started posting album reviews on RateYourMusic.com. most of this has been about art - music, games, books, movies - but the format of media review sites is a little clinical. they're attached to huge databases, and gamify creation. the communities can be great, and in theory it's a wonderful, centralized exchange of ideas about these artworks. but in practice, I felt like my participation was compulsory. every time I walked out of a movie theater or a record hit its run-out groove, I felt like I owed those website my thoughts. it nagged at me, and still does.
if, like me, you start to invest your sense of self into these posts, as a curator or tastemaker-for-one, it's hard to avoid falling into the templated shapes of criticism, especially when the work leaves you with little to say. there is this instilled idea of elaborative equality between works, a minimum output expected of you as a consumer, and that leads to dull paragraphs on character development, or cinematography, or controls, or audio mixing. my writing consistently failed to reflect the response provoked.
my digression from this style was actually in homage to games writer Tevis Thompson, who has over a hundred 200-word-maximum blurbs, designed to distill the absolute essence of their experience with the work. it was a great exercise; I learned a lot about editing (occasionally, lumberjacking) raw ideas into something purer. your vocabulary is tested in ways that are rarely encountered in daily life. but for all of its success, I felt a similar issue of templating thought, this time through sleight of hand. the small form factor shrinks the expression-space, so efficient sentence structures are often reused. flowery prose helps hand-wave past gists because they cannot be further interrogated. the result errs toward a vaporeal abstraction that can't describe the work or your view of it.
what followed from this experiment was a long silence. I had lost my voice and sense of purpose in writing. I started journaling on paper, mostly about my day and things to remember, but occasionally about art. I even scaffolded a whole website around the idea of publicizing the edited art notes into articles, but ever the contrarian, I felt bound by standard notions of the "article form". ultimately, that wasn't for me, either.
around 2023, I started to retreat from internet life. I deleted my social media accounts after building an obsessive habit of debasing others and picking pointless fights. I felt blazing intensity of opinion about things I knew nothing about, and couldn't resist engagement with what we now refer to as "ragebait". when the algorithms started to encourage that behavior, I had to remove myself. even smaller fora, like The Athletic's comment box, would enthrall me in pointless combat. I replaced those outlets with my friends, family, and peers: people who knew who I was, people with whom combat had real consequences.
peace ensued, but the lack of exposure to dialogue about some of my interests left a hole that, until today, was occupied by conversations with LLMs. as you can probably imagine, that brought about its own unique brand of pathologies, namely the impulse to outsource the consolidation of messy thoughts. I hoped that the clankers would be able to draw on their firehoses of data to direct me toward some facsimile of human wisdom, but they just served as a black hole for my intrigue about the world. surprisingly, I didn't feel much joy in being delivered answers - perhaps because I wanted to find them myself. and then it dawned on me how this used to occur: writing.
my life is much more complicated than in 2013. I work full time as a data engineer - a line of work that demands constant upskilling to stay employed - and am now four semesters into an master's program in computer science. even with these commitments, I am flooded with thoughts in need of an outlet. many have drifted from commentaries on specific artworks toward the layer of interpretation and logistics between myself and the things I experience, be it art or life events or changes in worldview. this means more inquiry into who I am, where my biases and prejudices lie, and my limitations of comprehension. and more to the point: who I want to become.
a new stage of writing deserves a new home, so that brings us here to hayden.cool. it's more casual, it's got an accessible feed, and I have hopefully freed myself from the confines of topical structure or gladitorial socials. but best of all, it's mine. :)
I've been writing on and off since 2013, a sophomore in high school, when I first started posting album reviews on RateYourMusic.com. most of this has been about art - music, games, books, movies - but the format of media review sites is a little clinical. they're attached to huge databases, and gamify creation. the communities can be great, and in theory it's a wonderful, centralized exchange of ideas about these artworks. but in practice, I felt like my participation was compulsory. every time I walked out of a movie theater or a record hit its run-out groove, I felt like I owed those website my thoughts. it nagged at me, and still does.
if, like me, you start to invest your sense of self into these posts, as a curator or tastemaker-for-one, it's hard to avoid falling into the templated shapes of criticism, especially when the work leaves you with little to say. there is this instilled idea of elaborative equality between works, a minimum output expected of you as a consumer, and that leads to dull paragraphs on character development, or cinematography, or controls, or audio mixing. my writing consistently failed to reflect the response provoked.
my digression from this style was actually in homage to games writer Tevis Thompson, who has over a hundred 200-word-maximum blurbs, designed to distill the absolute essence of their experience with the work. it was a great exercise; I learned a lot about editing (occasionally, lumberjacking) raw ideas into something purer. your vocabulary is tested in ways that are rarely encountered in daily life. but for all of its success, I felt a similar issue of templating thought, this time through sleight of hand. the small form factor shrinks the expression-space, so efficient sentence structures are often reused. flowery prose helps hand-wave past gists because they cannot be further interrogated. the result errs toward a vaporeal abstraction that can't describe the work or your view of it.
what followed from this experiment was a long silence. I had lost my voice and sense of purpose in writing. I started journaling on paper, mostly about my day and things to remember, but occasionally about art. I even scaffolded a whole website around the idea of publicizing the edited art notes into articles, but ever the contrarian, I felt bound by standard notions of the "article form". ultimately, that wasn't for me, either.
around 2023, I started to retreat from internet life. I deleted my social media accounts after building an obsessive habit of debasing others and picking pointless fights. I felt blazing intensity of opinion about things I knew nothing about, and couldn't resist engagement with what we now refer to as "ragebait". when the algorithms started to encourage that behavior, I had to remove myself. even smaller fora, like The Athletic's comment box, would enthrall me in pointless combat. I replaced those outlets with my friends, family, and peers: people who knew who I was, people with whom combat had real consequences.
peace ensued, but the lack of exposure to dialogue about some of my interests left a hole that, until today, was occupied by conversations with LLMs. as you can probably imagine, that brought about its own unique brand of pathologies, namely the impulse to outsource the consolidation of messy thoughts. I hoped that the clankers would be able to draw on their firehoses of data to direct me toward some facsimile of human wisdom, but they just served as a black hole for my intrigue about the world. surprisingly, I didn't feel much joy in being delivered answers - perhaps because I wanted to find them myself. and then it dawned on me how this used to occur: writing.
my life is much more complicated than in 2013. I work full time as a data engineer - a line of work that demands constant upskilling to stay employed - and am now four semesters into an master's program in computer science. even with these commitments, I am flooded with thoughts in need of an outlet. many have drifted from commentaries on specific artworks toward the layer of interpretation and logistics between myself and the things I experience, be it art or life events or changes in worldview. this means more inquiry into who I am, where my biases and prejudices lie, and my limitations of comprehension. and more to the point: who I want to become.
a new stage of writing deserves a new home, so that brings us here to hayden.cool. it's more casual, it's got an accessible feed, and I have hopefully freed myself from the confines of topical structure or gladitorial socials. but best of all, it's mine. :)