Looks around, sees things

I’ve been doing lots of navel gazing when I haven’t been writing Vengeance, My Heart, which is why my activity has diminished somewhat on the site.

Some of it is getting around to coming up with a useful term and framework that I can hand people who ask me about my spiritual practice. I know, most folks are not clamoring for information here, so that isn’t the issue. But it does come up in conversations at times. And I’ve discovered that people prefer a tidy couple of words when it comes to answers of that sort rather than my rambling, ambling version of it (which is almost as much about what I am not as it is about what I am). Plus, it is time to settle down with it without sounding so darned intellectual about it.

For the record, “experiential animist” seems to be the more grounded two-word response I’m currently settled on; should anyone want to know what that means, they can ask for more.

More technoblather making intermittent appearances after this point in the post. Here be dragons.

Some of it has also been my online persona and appearance, which I’ve had some conflict over. Not my chosen pen name, that seems sensible still. But how I interact with the internet and sites (like WordPress-adjacent sites). For a few dollars more (intentional pun), I can test out a few things to see if I can break those things that I suspect are not as valuable as they come off as being (and are occasionally sources of frustration).

One of the things I stumbled upon is geminispace sites. These sites basically bomb the internet back to the 90s and are so resistant to the ideas of the modern internet, they require a separate browser. Your usual suspects will just not render the site because the code is written in a close-cousin to Markdown. And it is VERY text-based, and therefore extremely fast. It is a nice idea, and it is something that I’ve wondered about as things get increasingly complex on the internet. And they are a collective of site very adverse to the social media characteristics we’ve become normalized to.

But it would be quite a reach to expect folks to download a browser just to read special webpages. That said, it is its own community.

So, I’m not ready to go all prehistoric on folks.

Visiting the HTML renders of such sites did bring a smile to my face. Simplicity without all of the visual noise we succumb to each day. You really don’t realize just how much visual noise we experience on a daily basis until it is removed.

While I am still in the “thinking about it mode” on the matter and unsure if I want to pull the trigger, I am seriously considering forking off my serial fiction to another domain and making this my “blog/poetry” content, while shifting Ash and Thorn’s stories off to another location. I can experiment with a highly minimalized WordPress install that gives readers functionality that makes reading a better experience for them and is more reflective of reading in the fiction in the way that a book might be read. It also gives me the opportunity to test a pet hypothesis that some of the social elements of the internet are more distractions, less enhancements.

If it makes sense to do so and confirms some of my suspicions, it might reflect how things look over here as well.

I’ll let you know if that is pursued.