journal entries

laurel shwulst: my website is a shifting house

this reading was one of the most inspiring i've read in the course.
it helped reframe my motivations for hobbyist web design and why i try to recommend it to others
treating a website as its own art piece rather than a grand center piece of your work that must look and behave a certain way

ursula k le guin: a rant on technology

one of the things i remember writing down in response was that the reading puts into perspective the amount of things that are human constructed and therefore "technology". dazzling stuff.

parimal satyal: rediscovering the small web

i liked the beginning section about going back to basics, raw html and css. complex systems can fail, so there is something sort of comforting and humble about building a website with only its barest essentials.
places like neocities and other static web hosts that foster an independent web community are great ways to discover extremely niche homepages and creative outlets.
starting out, i got a bit jealous of this browsing experience since it confirmed that artistic expression are fully limitless and that i would never be able to live up to that community, but part of the return to a smaller web lifestyle is removing that type of exterior pressure that comes from a place like social media.

callum copely: a friend is writing

this experience was most notable because i viewed this on my phone, and the layout changed to accomodate my smaller screen.
one of these effects included the notifications, a new message in each section, being truncated into a collective number rather than each section having its own number.
this makes the amount of outstanding new information more vague and mysterious, adding to the tension the design of phone notifications (or the expectation of them) that the design is definitely emulating. was just neat to share a slightly different perspective.

becca abbe: the internet's back to land movement

as common of a joke of the cloud just being someone's computer is, it is a good reminder for me (as someone who relies on cloud storage to keep my physical storage flexible) to always have backups in case one day my access to the cloud or the cloud itself just vanishes one day.
vanishingly unlikely, but when it comes to digital media a healthy amount of doomsday prepping doesn't hurt i'd say.
i remember during the discussion the breakdown of how the concept of the cloud linguistically came about and why it was so accepted (it's up there/out of the way + stores a bunch of things).