Today I read “My Website is a Shifting House Next to a River of Knowledge.” The metaphor struck me deep. A website as a shelf — not just a place for display, but an assembly of objects, books, and fragments of a life. Surprising juxtapositions become meaningful simply by proximity.
I’ve never been good at growing things. Plants need balance. Patience. Maybe that’s why I struggle. Still, gardens — real or virtual — offer space. Space to sit. To think. To let ideas root, or drift.
Then there are puddles. Fleeting. Shallow. And yet, I think of the rock pools along the James River — whole worlds thriving in temporary, fragile ecosystems. Life in ephemerality. There’s something there.
A line from the essay lingers:
Maybe that’s how I navigate — through metaphor, more than logic. It’s not just poetic. It’s sensory. It's how I see the internet, and maybe even the self. I need to dig up that YouTube video — the one on “internet gardens.” Digital spaces as tended plots, not algorithmic wastelands. Without attention, they wither. Without care, the weeds (ads, noise, sameness) take over.
An individual act of collective ambition. So be it. I have my gloves. I have my shovel. Let the cultivation begin.
It’s a graveyard. A reflection of the nature of the web: things go dead—they disappear. Links break, go missing.
“Signposts on a map of a living web pointing to a web as it once was, a web in progress, a web in the making.”
This reminds me of Cait McKinney’s book Information Activism — how queer and feminist social movements use digital technologies to build alternative information infrastructures. These movements struggle to provide vital access to information using new digital tools, within conditions where that access is often precarious.
Focusing on the transition from paper to digital-based archival techniques from the 1970s to the present, McKinney shows how media technology animates the collective and unspectacular labor that sustains social movements, including antiracist and transinclusive endeavors.
Thesis: Technology must BE good. DO good. How do we find a clear path through how we use technology and what we expect from it?
Our attention is over-STIMULATED and we are TIRED... Blindly chasing... We must learn from the character of other places to change the landscape the internet currently houses
Twin lions: Patience and Fortitude.
“A library is the gift a city gives to itself”
You are a mind, a body, a thinker, a reader..a soul.
BIG FAN OF STEPPING BACK IN TIME!!! Lord do I LOVE ME SOME HISTORY. The past fuels my desire to research. Maybe it’s because I have to really read and visualize to fully understand and learn. It takes a pretty intense memory capacity to recall so many aspects of reality that just aren’t relevant anymore. It’s oddly the most grounding thing a person can do. You would think hope is fueled by looking toward the future, but I find myself fulfilled by looking behind and seeing how far we’ve come.
Body autonomy as ancestral memory... I don’t shave my body hair. As a feminine presenting person, I get shit for this, or at least HELLA silent judgment. It’s really taught me to truly, unconditionally, not give a fuck about how I am physically perceived. But I digress. The reason I stick with it might be an unconventional reason compared to my other queer folks. When I see my naked body in the shower, or feel my arm and leg air it an especially tantalizing breeze, I smile, and I remember the past. A past of women who didn’t have the technology or fuck ass propaganda shoved into their faces about conforming to the ever present male public gaze. I’m latina, and body hair comes with the package. It makes me feel inspired to think about my ancestry of past communities, far before colonization, before shaving your legs was a rite of passage into womanhood. I think of women of the ancient world, and I feel strong, and more myself and intune with my presence standing on this earth. It’s the past that fuels me, and I have found a way to feel more connected to the souls who came before us.
Reflection on the digital world:
And yes--
I suffer from insomnia… yeah. It’s my phone. It’s easier to numb the mind than to lie there racing with thoughts. Maybe the solution is deleting social media. Reading more. Sleeping more. We’ll see.
YES
NO
YES to movies
NO to TV
It’s actually crazy to think that all of my mother’s strict rules regarding entertainment consumption might have actually paid off. So here’s the thing. I grew up kind of sheltered, this is something that made me incredibly insecure when I started navigating the wide diversity of my tween peer’s interests come 7th grade. It became apparent to me at that age that my lack of internet usage had made the way I interacted with my social media…well, wrong. There was a divide of that second world of personable connections that my friends would make through vine references and their snapchat private stories. I was truly the farthest from what we deem as “chronically online”. And shocker, I was a loser. I liked to read. Not only did I struggle with the innate social media language that seemed so easily ingrained in the student body, but I also had every other outside source of entertainment media heavily censored. Shout out Mormonism, those teachings made it a core belief to avoid television at all costs. My mother disconnected herself from the news, from the popular shows, from the god damn weather channel.
Here’s the thing, as much as I have disdain for the chosen ignorance of refusing interaction with news outlets, and dare I say REALITY…my mother did fill that void with something else.
Movies. YES to movies. Wow, I can really go on forever gushing about this art form. That’ll have to happen another time. Movies and books fueled my imagination in my formative years, and are probably the driving force behind my creative inspiration as a designer and illustrator. I can remember the moment I fell in love with writing. I was in 2nd grade, and Roald Dahl’s bookset entered our household shelf. Reading the BFG as such a young age, I recall gaining consciousness for the first time regarding an author’s writing STYLE. I was very moved, although I’d have to reread the work to find the nitty gritty details that scratched my kid brain. Here’s what I know, my imaginative experience reading those books were out of this fucking world. Reading was just as entertaining as watching a movie to me, because I could visualize every description on those pages. I really only used google to search up a word or thing that I didn’t know. That and play the occasional keyboard typing games. The only thing I knew how to look up on that world wide web was Try Not to Laugh compilations…courtsey of a 5th grade slumber party of course.
I used to hate my lack of media literacy, but now it’s helping me find hope again in what I once found inspiring about entertainment. Stimulation used to make me daydream, not fry my synapsis with short-form content. It really is that damn phone. And all those damn streaming service subscriptions.
I am shamefully still very much navigating a netflix addiction. Thats why its YES to movies and NO to tv.
I want storytelling to make me think , to make me really appreciate the writing room and the board artists. I see their vision, and it helps clear the fog of my own.