And before you say “…It went somewhere?” don’t think I don’t see you over there, Deadpan Snarker.

But here’s the deal. Gneech.com was created Back When the Internet Didn’t Suck, and happily blogged along for many years. Then one disastrous day, WordPress went all-in on a terrible editor/interface called “Gutenberg,” and in the years since has been spiraling further and further into enshittification/slopification, to the point that I recently looked in on my sites and they were all just plain broken.

But what I didn’t know is that in response to Gutenberg, a bunch of former-WordPress-enthusiasts split off a fork called ClassicPress, which (as the name implies) is “What if WordPress, but didn’t suck?” And I doubt I would have ever known, if one of my friends over on Mastodon hadn’t casually dropped that they were migrating their sites over to it, and I was like, “Um… excuse me… what is this ‘ClassicPress’ of which you speak?”

So here we are, up and running and raring to go! There’s still some work to be done—the Quotinator ran off of JavaScript and seems to have undergone a catastrophic existence failure, for example—but I’m very pleased with the results so far.

Fixing the comics pages? Now that’s going to be a challenge. >.> Wish me luck!

-The Gneech

Whenever I get deep into my writing projects, I get an itch to return to Michael Macbeth. Originally conceived thirty years ago (yikes), Michael took a lot of (undisguised) inspiration from Dirk Gently, and to this day is a character I greatly enjoy—but for whom I have a very rough time coming up with ideas. I did manage to write one short novel featuring him, as a NaNoWriMo project, but it was… thin? There was some genuinely good stuff in it, but the whole was definitely lesser than the sum of its parts.

On a related note, the topic of the Brigid and Greg Fictionlets comes up in conversation periodically; Multiclass Geek recently pondered what a story about that dynamic duo now would look like, compared to their heyday of the early 2000s, but that idea would by necessity take the story places I wouldn’t really want to go (Isadora’s age being just one example). Like Jeeves and Wooster before them, Brigid and Greg are inhabitants of a particular moment, and letting time pass for them would force them to change into something else.

The biggest obstacle with both Michael Macbeth and B&G, I think, is that they are both about “a vibe.” Michael Macbeth is “creepy and kooky on a rainy afternoon in a college town.” B&G is “what if Jeeves and Wooster were Gen-Xers?” But a vibe is not a story, a vibe is just… a vibe. When I go to write about these characters, I get hung up on trying to think of things to actually happen, because part of the requirement is that it shouldn’t significantly change their status quo. A Michael Macbeth that doesn’t live in his shabby little apartment always just a few dollars away from broke, isn’t Michael Macbeth any more. The goal for Brigid and Greg in any long narrative would be “get out of whatever is going on and go home.”

In writing The Sky Pirate’s Prisoner, I had the freedom of characters who could end up anywhere as long as the journey was interesting—if anything the whole premise of that story is that the status quo is untenable and must be destroyed. How do you send heroes on a journey where the goal is to remain mostly unchanged by the end?

Obviously it can and has been done, many times over. Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, just about any superhero you can name, all have long and serialized careers that consist of resetting back to starting point at the end of each story. And those work by focusing on the plot, the series of events, rather than on character development. As somebody whose strength is primarily in character development, I suppose it’s no surprise that I flounder there.

But I keep trying! And I will probably continue to keep trying, as long as I can put words together.

So NaNoWriMo is going the way of the dodo. Posts about it on Mastodon or Bluesky all tie that to their embrace of AI, but what I’ve seen suggests that they’ve been struggling for some time. Given how excited I was to participate in it once upon a time, I would expect to have stronger feelings about it, but honestly I just don’t. I have reached the stage where I assume unless proven otherwise that enshittification of anything good is a matter of when, not if; as such, I just don’t emotionally invest in such things the way I once did.

But I’d say that NaNoWriMo is an exemplar of a larger trend of the web and post-web era: so many of the web’s best things are just not viable economic concerns, and should never have been treated as such. Just like nobody should reasonably expect to somehow make a living building model trains or hiking mountain trails, “encouraging people to write” is a valuable activity on its own, but trying to make it financially remunerative is just not a thing that will go anywhere. In the same vein as “the Post Office is a public service, not a business,” our culture has an unhealthy fixation on trying to make everything profitable somehow, even things that just aren’t.

There’s a reason so many artists and other creative types can only make a living via some kind of patronage arrangement. Art, writing, other creative pursuits are immensely valuable to society without being profitable, in the same way that exercise or brushing your teeth are valuable to an individual person without being profitable. There are exceptions of course, creative people who can make a living or even thrive through their work—but there are also professional athletes who make a living or even thrive through doing exercise. But those exceptions are extreme outliers.

If NaNoWriMo had stayed in its lane, so to speak, and always been considered a valuable community activity and event instead of a money-making enterprise, it would still be alive and well and beloved by many. (The whole AI thing was a huge blow to their reputation, of course, making the beloved part less of a slam dunk… but who knows how much of the AI thing was a desperation bid to make a profit? I’m not versed enough in the matter to have a meaningful opinion on it.)

So, alas, poor NaNoWriMo. I am proud that I managed to succeed at the challenge once or twice, and I’m grateful for the impetus it gave me. But the truth is it had long stopped being relevant.

-The Gneech

Richard Grant = The actual “evil Loki”
Sophia Di Martino = The Enchantress, working for Richard Grant
TVA = Actual Baddies, or at least taking them down will be the endgame
Kang the Conquerer = middle time keeper, will be the next phase’s Thanos trying to restore “sacred timeline”

Confidence in these predictions? 65-70%.

-TG

Last night in his Beat Saber stream, Ink Blitz was asking his viewers about their music preferences, and described mine as “’70s, ’80s, and ’90s stuff,” to which I replied “It’s way more than that!”

Of course, his exposure to “my music” comes mostly from the things I request in his streams, plus music I’ve played on my own art streams etc. in the past, so it’s skewed by things like what’s actually available to request, and what suits the mood of the venue. And in those contexts, it’s true that I gravitate mostly towards bubblegum pop or new wave and ’80s alternative. But that just scratches the surface: I have a deep love for ’30s/’40s swing, Japanese city pop (“that anime sound”), baroque and classical (Mrs. Gneech and I have very different opinions on Vivaldi), bossa nova and calypso, and lots more.

The truth of it is that I approach music the same way I approach just about everything else: I look for depth, I explore the weird corners of genre, and I apply that “bringing the awesome” philosophy of searching for things that are better than they need to be. I like glam and putting on a good show, I give preferential treatment to songs that are about more than just “Baby I Loooove You,” and melody is way better than rhythm. I’m not super-into vamping (once I’ve heard a riff three times, I consider that riff done), I think patter must be used sparingly and with a sense of whimsy or not at all (which destroys 90% of rap for me), and I cannot tolerate anything designed to excuse or comfort small-mindedness or deliberate mediocrity (looking at you, most of country-western).

So you might find me listening to Clannad one minute and Cab Calloway the next, then rolling into a Jazz Butcher song that gets followed up by Lady Gaga. So it’s hard to just point at a genre and say “This is my jam.” My jam is the creative process that went into making the music, at least as much as the time period in which it was composed and the medium it was presented in. There are some genres that I’m more drawn to because they embrace those processes more than others (jazz, new wave, etc. all have that counterculture “done because it’s good first and if it makes a buck that’s fine, too” creed), but I can find music to like just about anywhere.

-TG

Putting some thought this morning into the much-mourned LiveJournal. I mean yes, technically LiveJournal still exists, but even if it hadn’t been yucked up by its sale, it was already a ghost of its former self at that point. At its height, LiveJournal combined the experience of a blogging community, an active Twitter feed, and an RSS reader all in one. With powerful community-searching and keywords, and a PAGINATED, CHRONOLOGICAL FEED (*bows and presses hands together at such a wonder*), LiveJournal was a way to connect with your current friends, find new ones, and have as deep or as frivolous a conversation as you wanted without being sabotaged by the algorithm. You could get bot-swarmed by trolls, that’s a danger everywhere on the internet, but there were also tools for dealing with that.

Of course, the problem was that it was expensive to run, and as the airline industry (and just the *#$^ing existence of MS Word) proves, some individuals may be willing to pay for something that doesn’t suck, but people in the aggregate will not pay a single cent for an objectively much better experience if they can get something terrible that does the same job for cheaper or free. And so Facebook, Twitter, and other “you’re the product not the customer” scramble-your-feed-for-pay services flourished, while LiveJournal, where you had to put in your own HTML code and pay for the privilege, did not.

Unfortunately, the 21st century has shown that the nature of modern technology is to start out pretty cool and over time get progressively worse, and social media is no exception. There are still some blogs around, writers banging away stubbornly on their keyboards because that’s who writers are, in the same way that newspaper comic strips technically still exist. But I can’t remember the last time I got involved in a meaningful discussion with a community through them. I gather that Discord (and to a lesser extent Telegram) is the place for that kind of connection, but I’ve never been able to operate in that kind of environment. I like my discussions to be high signal-to-noise and siloed by topic–in a way that I can find and reference later, mind you–but forums are just as moribund as blogs are.

So what to do? Twitter’s own users regularly refer to it as “this hellsite” and lament their own seeming addiction to it. (See also, Hank Green’s recent video, “Is Twitter Redeemable?”)

Facebook is and always has been a dumpster fire, partially due to the technology, but mostly due to the “hate speech is peachy as long as it pays” avarice of its owners. Tumblr is a niche platform that keeps trying to evict its only users. Pillowfort and Dreamwidth are the Good Guys, but they also don’t have the enough of a user base to create and sustain community (and Pillowfort has been plagued by bugs and long term shutdowns). I don’t have an answer; it may be that the journaling format was just a 15-year blip that has gone the way of BBS’s and editorial pages, and I should just let it go.

But I really like it, and I want it to come back.