An Introduction
Today’s word is aphotic.
Hi, I’m Alice! I am a transgender woman in the terminal stage of her 20s (sorry, it's inoperable) and my pronouns are she/they. Welcome to my blog!
There are a few different, scattered lines of thought that I’d like to chase down, with the overall goal of getting to feel comfortable in this space and the blogging medium. This is bound to be a meandering start; please bear with me. Let’s go!
Previous Projects
Until very recently, I have been a long-time semi-regular contributor to the SCP Foundation creative writing project. The SCP Wiki and its sister site, The Wanderers’ Library, have been host to 6 years of my writing across 75 distinct short works and two dozen collaborations under the username “Lt Flops”. You can find all of my past contributions here.
That chapter of my creative adventure has come to a close, and as of October, I’ve been on an indefinite hiatus. I want to be completely candid here: this is both the first and last time I am likely to bring this up. Which means… Welcome to the next chapter!
Let’s see what else is on my mind.
Why I'm Here
Right, I should probably explain that. I’ve been fascinated with the idea of having my own blog slash web journal for longer than I can even say. On a basic level, I’d just like to have one centralized space where I can stow all of my ramblings and ideas, instead of consigning myself to stew on things in perpetuity, or pestering my Discord chats and coworkers with them instead (not in perpetuity, but long enough to drive them out). Put another way, there are a good couple of decades of angst inside me that I need to let loose. There is also no better avenue than dumping it here, so I can let LLM webcrawlers loose to scrape the contents of my brain and trigger a digital panic attack.
For 2 months now I’ve been procrastinating on even getting this intro written. But my decision to choose BearBlog was fairly straightforward: the social media aspect of blogging and its associated algorithmic junk food ruins my appetite. I have a fundamental aversion towards creating “content” to placate the image of an audience. And as I’ve become more confident in my style over the years, my tendency towards perfectionism has risen proportionally, to the point at which whatever I'm working on grinds to a halt. It’s the conflict between filling the human sensorium with the expectation of drawing engagement and racking up psychic debt vs. feeling comfortable speaking in your own voice.
The pipe dream of my writing becoming popular has never really been my goal. If I knew that even five people had read what I had to say, that’d genuinely be good enough for me.
Themes and Topics
So, this is where I want to be careful. The reason may not seem immediately obvious, but I’ll explain at the end. Let's also crank up the “serious” dial by a few notches.
The sociopolitical moment we’re in right now is thoroughly frightening. I draw attention to two specific matters that I consider to be of greatest personal concern:
I. Nobody with a shred of synaptic activity buzzing through their skull could dispute the stark reality of the industrial-scale genocidal onslaught being carried out against Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza, and the more general explosion of naked settler-colonial bloodlust made manifest in Lebanon, the West Bank, and beyond. It’s being pumped into all of our screens every single day, and has been for the past 13 months. It has become impossible to look away, and yet, our media class has effectively told us not to believe what we’re seeing with our own eyes.
We also know that imperial and colonial subjugation affect not only a people, but the land on which they live. Thus the genocide being inflicted in Palestine is also bound up in a wider complex of ecocide, where the occupying force is deliberately despoiling the territory so that it can become “a place where no human being can exist”; where 70% of all agricultural land has been rendered unusable; and where kilotons worth of explosives have been dropped and megatons of toxic CO2 have been released into the atmosphere.
II. The rapidly accelerating scale of ecological devastation wrought by Capitalogenic climate change has been mind-boggling. An outsized share of this destruction has impacted the Global South. Whereas countries in the imperial periphery make only marginal contributions to global CO2 emissions, they have at the same time been made subject to centuries of resource extraction, pollution, and waste attributable to countries in the imperial core.
Of course, this damage is not just confined to the Global South: hundreds of major cities and outlying areas on every continent have been hit by tropical storms, deluges, wildfires, and droughts over the last year: many of them more severe, persistent, and their effects longer-lasting than anything we have experienced in our lifetimes. Food, housing, fuel, medicine, electronics, and everyday consumables have all become concomitantly more expensive, and the average person has been made to foot the bill.
⁂
Spurred on by all I have been seeing and hearing, my original vision was to use the blogging medium to hone in on this constellation of topics in my own impromptu research project. If I cannot act, I can at least write; and before I write, I should at least learn. The object of my studies focused not only on the extents of the impending collapse but on how it would affect all of us. Once my headspace had become set in this task, however, I realized that was not enough. It would also be necessary to seek insight into combatting the collapsitarianist excesses that are threatening to become the dominant ideology: to understand what it would take to slow or prevent the worst of it on a societal level.
It might seem obvious, then, that these plans fell through pretty quickly. I have never considered myself a doomer, but with a topic as depressing as this, it takes its toll. Hence, in the context of being careful, my only real fear is of eventually becoming burnt out.
While I still want to talk about the sociopolitical issues of the day — that is the overriding urge that pushed me to create this blog in the first place — I’d like to pace myself, and avoid going whole-hog if I can, thanks!
What is this blog going to be about, then?
I want to pre-empt this entire discussion by steering clear of any labels that might constrain what I might want to write about. For now, I’d like to do some light journalling, maybe dabble in some fiction fun along the way. As stated earlier, I want a pressure-relief valve for the long-haul!
I’m entirely cognizant of what might happen if I start declaring, “this is an X/Y/Z blog!” It goes beyond that; I’m even hesitant to declare what kind of person I am. Something about constraining flows of desire and setting me in my ways. But, we’ll see how it goes. And if I keep this blog thing going after this intro piece, you might even find out.
If you came this far, thanks for checking out my intro!
Last edited 1 Dec 2024