a year of aloe.gay
table of contents
if you scroll alll the way back on the list of all pages, the oldest one is "my bass guitar," dated 5/4/24; followed by the first post on this blog, dated 5/10/24. so im gonna go out on a limb and say it's the website's birthday. happy birthday, website!
(there was an earlier version that was live for a bit before this one, but whatever!) i'm really stretching the definition of "last edit" dates at this point anyway - a lot of the more "post" type pages have had little edits made in secret, and their "last edit dates" set manually to retain their chronology. i've been meaning to kind of address the whole situation by adding "created on" dates, and going back through and adjusting everything .. i was kind of attracted to doing it "for" the birthday - its kind of a review, kind of an epoch - but life just didn't go down that way this time. that's ok, i'll get around to it.
rhodo stuff
in fact, i've already added functionality for created-on dates to #rhodochrosite ! i had originally decided this was too fiddly for some reason, but especially if i'm setting a lot of them manually anyway i think at this point it would be a nice distinction. plus, fran wanted them ..
sybil'site
oh yeah, i totally buried the lede here. i have mentioned my friend fran before and how she's been helping so much with this project, testing stuff out and just talking about how it works .. welll she's done gone and launched a rhodo-made site, site.sybls.net !! thats right baby, we got two (count 'em, two) whole users. a better birthday gift, a website couldn't ask for. and her site is so cool ! theres this whole like clever personal-lending-library system that uses a tag to designate available books .. and lots of great writing that i love to read :)
but so like. making and launching a site with this tool in the state it's in right now is a silly thing to do, right. or like .. it basically just makes us collaborators. its bugged all over the place, documentation is thin or nonexistant (you gotta just text me sometimes), new cases and behaviors are constantly being discovered .. things are still being defined. which it turns out is actually great fun, if youre down for it ! it's so cool the way the outline of something comprehensible is taking shape over all the sketching. im rly enjoying the dialogue. so yea ! thanks fran !! check out sybil'site !
othernews
in other rhodo news, i finally implemented the page-by-page rss feed thing. so like, you could follow just blog posts, or just rhodo posts, or whatever. some of the things you could do are actually inadvisable ! like, if you followed the works feed, that would include the drawings page, which is huge. that might not play nice in a feed reader. at some point i'll put some guard rails on there ... but for now, like, it's part of the fun.
i'm trying to keep that in mind with this project .. that a certain kind of jank is part of the fun. it's #diy ! this is not critical infrastructure ! part of it is just playing around and seeing what happens when you strictly, literally implement a certain idea expressed a certain way. sometimes it's unexpected, sometimes it's not what you would have wanted if you had thought of it ... but sometimes a surprise can be delightful, sometimes it makes you look at it a different way. related reading, i enjoyed how this mastodon thread (fair warning, its a thread about LLMs) described coding as like, a dialogue between a human intellect and a "possibility space," and how they each act to shape each other.
(i also enjoyed it for including such raw lines as "LLMs promise something enticing, but ultimately hollow: the ability to skip the dialectic and impose one's will on the machine by force" and "[LLM code] is written to appease a master that does not understand the conflict between their ideas, nor the compromises necessary to resolve them." thats some Wizard Shit. thats a Grim Warning)
year in review
long post ! i think it makes sense for what it is tho. anyway so here i just wanna go over like, the broad strokes of aloe dot gay year one. what were the big projects in my creative life that i was logging and stuff ? well,
the site itself
a lot of the early posts are about this project itself, here in the main blog and in the aloe dot gay project log. i think it's natural and makes sense, because obviously this is taking up a lot of my creative bandwidth as it's getting off the ground. it's also pretty funny in a way i think is summed up hilariously in this friendly blog post's intro:
has anyone else noticed that indieweb types are always sucking themselves off about websites? they make their own site and all they talk about is websites, websites, making websites, and how much they hate social media. they don't do anything with that shit! they give you pages that are like "what have i been doing lately? why, making websites of course!". fucking obnoxious
:) anyway ... i've reflected a lot on this project here already but i'll just add that it feels really nice to be writing a lot more, it's great having a central zone for all my creative work where i can organize it how i want and it doesn't depend on some big indifferent Platform, and my favorite part of the project is when someone emails me. seriously every time someone's emailed me it's been so heartwarming !
tapes
i think the next real project i took on this year was the tape demos, and honestly just highlighting these was a big part of why i wanted to do the review at all. i'm proud of this ! i think it's like .. i'm excited about it as a direction for my music. earlier this year i was telling everyone i was "on hiatus" as a musician, as a way of sorta confronting my burnout. and then when i was first putting the site together and figuring out how to host and present all my old albums and singles and videos, i was framing it to myself as a way of "clearing space" for the new .. and then, and this is just data, but then shortly after that i got pretty into working on some tapes. so .. !
drawings
then it was fall and cohost was shutting down. cohost had become my spot for posting drawings, which before that had been twitter, but on cohost it had exceeded what it ever was on twitter. so i set up a drawings page over here, grabbed all the cohost ones out of my site export plus a few older ones, and i've been posting new ones here ever since ! like i was saying before, having a central spot to be like, the canonical location of stuff, in a way that almost approaches the archival (especially considering my local site copies,) and not having to worry about porting it all somewhere else or starting all over if this or that Platform goes down or becomes intolerable .. it kinda fucks. plus check out those thumbnails ! so cute ! i get to just do whatever i think is cute on here !
rhodochrosite
at this point the website maker peels off from the website, and i've gone on plenty enough about rhodo dev here already, but just for the sake of chronology i mention it. it becomes a separate project ! it hums along at "becoming a neat gardening tool" while this site hums along at "becoming a garden of aloes heart"
offerings
im including the offerings page here because another thing i did this year was get fucking fired, and i had a few months of contract work since then but i have not gotten another "job." instead i'm trying to make job .. by which i mean establish some kind of sustainable mesh of interwoven art-hustles. i've taken on a couple music students! it's great, i love teaching. (i still want more!) and i've been thinking and feeling my way through defining more of those threads .. you can read all about it at that page.
etc
i have to make a nod to my house here; i don't bring it up much because it's kind of out of scope, so to speak. a common refrain in my older writing here was "this is not my diary"; from the start i intended to keep this pretty tightly focused on my creative work. but the house is a creative project in many ways. in june of last year a friend and i moved into a coöp house that was in deep dysfunction, and in the ensuing transformation all the existing members left as new ones came in. so now it's basically like a brand-new group of friends collectively owning a house .. and all year we've been working hard to make it a place we can live and work and thrive together, and now at the year mark this is really starting to bear some fruit. to be honest, i also don't write about it much because a lot of what we've been fielding is actually pretty grisly, or sad, or intimate, or all three. i won't go into great detail here either, but i just mention it because it's been such a big part of my year, where my energy's going, and it's a project i have a lot of hope and excitement about for the future. (which is, whew, vulerable and scary!)
soo yeah. long long birthday post. what if a website was a taurus. its more likely than you think ! just blabbing to wind down, but truly thank you for being here, reading, DMing me. it's obviously your contribution of time, and attention, and care through engaging, that makes this all meaningful as a publishing project. so thank you so much, this goes out to you! cheers to one year, and i'll see you on the world wide web ;)