~/garfish

Cracking under pressure

Anxiety has been a constant companion, a dear friend, life coach, motivator, magic spell, curse, slaver, liar. It has been a constant in these posts as well. Imaginary summoner of monsters, the constant strife to escape it, to be happy in spite, to relax its grasp, to harness its power to make me creative, productive, skinny and alive. In recent weeks, I started therapy and combined with various work-related stressors, almost collapsed under the weight of the noise in my head. I have been on sick leave for some days now and have spent a lot of time walking, running, gaming, building, doodling, thinking, talking to friends on the phone. I made some important and, in hindsight, very obvious discoveries about myself and my anxiety.

Origin

My daughter has a different mother tongue than I do. She is unique and separate from me in many ways. But I also recognize myself in her often. The anxious summoner of imaginary monsters I was as a child and sometimes still am; the analytic, structured and pragmatic adult I morphed into; the restless collector and experimenter I have always been. There is genetics at play, projection on my part as well, I must assume, probably mirroring habits and behaviours to each other. I observe, guide and protect, she grows, delineates and becomes.

When my father died, me and my siblings went on a sort of biographical pilgrimage through the country he was born and grew up in. It filled blanks in my head that I didn’t know were there. I picture taking my daughter on a trip through my old homes, so she would not fill those blanks by herself. To understand where I came from in time to ask me questions about it.

Legacy

I started writing the next paragraph a month ago but while writing it, I realized that I was writing just to write. I felt like I didn’t really have anything to say. Reading it back didn’t feel juicy, even though writing it felt natural. I wanted to reflect about identity. Who I am and who I wanted to be, ideally. Since then, I started listening to the audio book of Karl Ove Knausgård’s (wilfully poorly titled) My Struggle and watched an insightful interrogation of the Mormon tradwife trend on social media by Alyssa Grenfell. In this video, she is discussing some posts from the personal blog of one of the foremost influencers in this space, Hannah Neeleman (@ballerinafarm). Both are instances of peoples deeply personal writings becoming part of their very public legacy. Both worked actively, intensely and successfully on creating a legacy for themselves. Knausgård explicitly identifies this as ‘his struggle’ early in the book, which really is the literary equivalent of the personal blog of a proto-influencer. Knausgård, I’m sure, would not enjoy this review and I might regret this analysis once I made it further than the first half of the first of six books. Either way, it made me think of this post I started writing differently, I think I was dancing around legacy, not identity. What I will be remembered for, if at all, is inextricably linked to how I perceive myself.

As a clam

I am happy today. I think I was happy yesterday too, maybe I’ll be happy tomorrow. I certainly was not happy a month ago. I vividly remember being depressed. Or what I call ‘depressed’, the PHQ-9 might call it ‘moderately depressed’. My wife asked if I had taken vitamin D recently. Seasonal symptoms of Scandinavian January tend to get me around this time, so this was well-intentioned and probably astute. But when I’m moderately depressed, I feel like this is a crucial part of my personality and condition. A core ingredient to my identity, an inevitable swing of the pendulum. When the pendulum stops swinging, I will stop existing. Nothing vitamin D could cure, and the mere suggestion shows that she really doesn’t get me.

Of course, it’s probably me that doesn’t get me and I anxiously bristle at the idea that anyone knows things better than me. At least things that I should know. So I’ve taken my vitamin D, I’ve continued working out, I’ve upped my daily calories from an extreme deficit to a slightly less extreme deficit, I’ve been social and tried to practice good sleep routines. And now I’m happy! Is there a causal relationship? Maybe, but probably I’m happy because I’ve spent irresponsible amounts of money on new hobbies. I was moderately depressed because I had nothing new and shiny to give me joy. Or the other way around? And why is it so much easier to write about being unhappy?

“habitual diversion of the mind to purely imaginative activity or entertainment as an escape from reality or routine” -Merriam Webster

This is another continuation of my series of posts reflecting on hobbies, work, joy and relaxation. I realized that one important aspect was missing as a major theme: escapism. The obsession and mental occupation that (for me) comes with a difficult task at work, a new hobby, a good (audio) book, series or video game. The drive to get through the mundane parts of the day to get back to the thing that feels like I could do it forever. The taste of dopamine in the back of my mouth while I find ways to engage in the thing while I should be doing something else. Listening to podcasts about it in the car, searching information while I’m on the toilet, making spreadsheets. Planning ways in which I can manage to spend a whole day overindulging in just that one thing. Until I suddenly snap out of it, somewhere between two weeks or a month in.

It runs in the family

My father used to have two small cabinets on wheels in his office, each with twenty or so small drawers. Some drawers were meticulously labelled ‘pencils’ or ‘scalpel blades’ or more generally ‘drawing’ and ‘office’. The largest section by far was labelled ‘Krimskrams’ (the German version of ‘knickknacks’). From a very young age, way too young to be around scalpel blades unsupervised, these drawers fascinated me. I opened them, one by one, investigating their contents so many times that I remember them better than my own drawers and cupboards from that time. I remember their smell, a mix of the leather that softened some of the drawer bottoms, the graphite of the pencil lead refills, the metallic tinge of the various hobby knives and office supplies and the chemical overtone of the inks and glues and markers. The feel of the hard plastic cupboards and the slight rattle when opening the drawers. They always opened super smoothly, but the knickknacks rattled. Everything in those drawers was magical to me.

The title is the slightly adapted opening line from 2Chainz’s ‘Birthday Song’. Not a bad song, not a great one, certainly an unforgettable music video. What we do and why we do it is often inextricable from who we do it for. I’m not that kind of scientist, but it seems uncontroversial that as social animals, we do many things that appear intimate and self-facing for social reasons. At least in part. When we look at ourselves in the mirror, we are only superficially looking at ourselves. To an extent, we want to see what others see when they look at us. As opposed to a diary, a blog does not have the appearance of being self-facing. It’s an emphatically public medium. So why am I writing? Who am I writing for?

Live Laugh Work

I have thought a lot about that post I wrote about doing work and work-like activities in my free time and how I find them very fulfilling. I reflected that this is in part a protestant remnant valuing work over leisure and my bad self-image that is temporarily improved by productivity. This is an accurate assessment, but I think it downplays a simpler truth: I find large parts of my work fun. I enjoy making code work like I want it to. I love diving into new data. I get a deep sense of pleasure from working on tight deadlines with my favorite colleagues and delivering something worthwhile just in time. And, ah, there we are again. That last one is definitely fueled by my sense of worth being derived from work achievements. The absence of innate, healthy self-love. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a real contributor to my enjoyment of work. I conceptualize it as a dopamine button, like a gambling addiction, but instead of losing me money, it makes it easier to earn it. That’s a super power, as long as it works. The problem is that it turns into a werewolf curse on occasion.

Short history of the page

The page started out with a fairly generic look that is documented in this post. That post also contained an honest analysis of what worked and didn’t work for me in that first draft. I liked the Tokyo Night styling but found that it clashed with the fish tank themes and hated the font. I struggled a lot with the page not being Neocities enough, because I loved other peoples creative retro stuff with GIFs and tiled backgrounds everywhere and really nice pink/peach themes. I failed to provide examples back then, but I was talking about sites from the ‘recommended’ page, like PetraPixel, Lazer-Bunny, Sakura Dreams or doqmeat.

I also started to realize that I don’t really have any use for pages other than the blog. But my instinct at the time was to try and push the styIing more into a generic Neocities aesthetic and go harder on the fish. Both aspects I found theoretically fun and wanted to explore, but my concluding sentences were prescient.

The deeper I dive into Neocities, the more I see other, more sober designs and other blog-first pages without shrines. […] Last week, I changed the colors into what I find a more Neocities-aligned Hanami-colored and pixel-fonted version. It might just be a different kind of generic, but I am more at ease with it.

I started writing this before the summer holiday and am finishing it now that the holidays are over (summer is not), so it might read a bit disjointed, because it is.

Summer blues

Summer is here and ever since I was little I have felt the anticipatory sadness of summer ending as soon as it starts. Free time and sunny days, so many plans and half-formed ideas of activities, endless hours of just gaming or hanging around at the communal pool, going to the forest. But the idea of the holidays ending and school resuming always hung over everything, autumn was always just around the corner. I don’t know whether this is a common feeling or a product of my anxiety (which also is a common condition). I am working on just enjoying the moment and not thinking too much about the fleeting nature of everything. But this feeling of the summer ending when in reality it just started has many forms in my daily life as an adult.

I have already written about my thoughts on how ethical I think coding with AI is and how I currently feel about bot sitting as a coding tool, as well as the current state of this page as a product of bot sitting. To round off this collection of initial meta posts, wanted to give a comprehensive recipe of my current workflow to create the page and its content.

Webmaster? Hardly.

The idea of what this personal website is or should be has changed over the two-ish weeks since its creation. Originally, I just wanted to make some kind of website to learn more about how HTML and CSS work and where their limits are. I had a few stabs at this before joining Neocities. The obligatory demo page in my school’s CS class. Back then, Geocities was still around and some kids had personal pages, but most of us were hanging out on a regional network called Kwick. A proto-MySpace where predominantly German teens were tinkering with flashy profile pages that were fully customizable with HTML and were making friends for life in open chatrooms. I still sometimes talk to A, who lived half a country away from me then, multiple countries now.

Vibe coding

Vibe coding has become the expression du jour for letting large language models (LLMs) write code for you. It lives on a spectrum between the agentic, fully integrated IDE that runs commands, reads files and writes new ones at the merest suggestion you want it to do something and glorified autocomplete.

Please, I had a long day, stop calling it that

I know, as a self-identified grump and hater, the term ‘vibe coding’ makes me die a little inside every time I read it or hear it used unironically. But saying it is fun. It’s one of those terms that the youths, the rappers (same thing) or the nerds would allegedly use as slang, but really, it’s mostly your streamer’s favourite streamer and other millennials using it compulsively (‘ironically’).

I am making this website for myself to learn about web design and development. I use various AI tools to write HTML and CSS, because I love seeing quick results and learn well by looking at and modifying code. I do not use AI to write content on this page unless specified otherwise. I do not use AI to generate images or other media for this page. I will experiment with generated ASCII-art, because I feel that is ethical-ish.

When I first wrote this disclaimer, it got me to reflect more deeply on where I draw the line and why. I am not sure I have a definitive conclusion.

I would describe myself as a skeptic of AI and a hater of its evangelists and most implementations/‘products’. I do not like the way that a lot of it tastes of the same get-rich-quick, break-things-move-fast, quasi-religious scam soup that comprises most of the modern technological scene.