So, I bashed this out on my lunch break today: Digital Relationships; or, How I Met My Wife and Why I Might Not Try That Again

I'm right behind you fam, but dam is the last third of my fugging blog post taking me a bit.

Well, it took me all fugging month to get around to writing mine.

It's the sort of procrastination that occasionally served me well in school.

Well, the time limit didn't do me much good. I got the last third to a better state than it was, but don't feel I quite nailed the landing... Oh well! I can always come back and update the last couple of sentences if the muse strikes. I wouldn't say I procrastinated as much as went back and forth on what approach I wanted to take with it. Yours definitely helped push me over the finish line.

The Neon God

I have some things to say about this in a post called "Storming Heaven". I tried to go easy on the Romantic Satanism, but the older I get the more I realize that that's my fundamental vibe.

Lessssgooo, I got my very own Starbreaker response post! Thank you so much for taking the time to read and then write that all out, yo. I loved reading it!

You should consider (maybe) submitting it into the Lainchan Web Festival. I'm pretty sure you do not have to be a Lainring member to participate. You can email: [email protected]

As for what you wrote, I agree with a good chunk of it..

• There's a lot of nuance I steamrolled over (some for artistic? purposes), that I'm glad you addressed.

• I'm personally not dogmatic, I think: "every rule has its exception(s), including this one". Heck, I'm not even very biblical myself, just sort-of adopted that style for this piece.

• You're correct in that I was not referring to your journey / relationship. I think its awesome how you met your wife. But I also suspect, and I mean you touched on it in your original post, how it was different back when you did.

But our core feelings are definitely at odds. I really do believe there is salvation in surrender. That darkness, death, conclusions are not inherently worth fighting, particularly to their bitter end. That there's a sort-of idea of "overstaying your welcome", and that grace and wholeness flow more easily when that vibe? is respected. Meaning timing matters a lot, too early and I think a lot of what you argue occurs. But too late, and I think a sort-of beauty is lost.

Thank you again for your time and attention, I know you churn out writing like a got dam machine, and maybe it's not much to you, but still! <3

As someone in an infinite-small yet somehow also infinite-long distance relationship with my muse, Martina, the irony doesn't escape me. I think digital relationships are just another addition to the many many avenues in which love can manifest. Physical, digital, spiritual or fictional, romantic or sadistic, slow-burning or explosive, love comes to you in many ways; one should not renounce it just for its form alone. Rather, I think one should embrace it and work with its quirks to build something special. MemeAnalysis put it best: Love simply is.

Something I read once was on the relationship between freedom (or moksha) and love. How the speaker considered freedom a higher value than love. How, if love were to be hindering freedom, they believed it should be dropped. I agree with that idea, and with you. That love should be free-flowing, including in whatever ways it manifests. [Osho, The Tantra Vision Vol. 2, Chapter 2]

But how often do we try to force love / hinder freedom? How often do we try to force a lot of things? I think digital relationships lend themselves to convenience, to comfort, to superficiality. We find them safe, risk-averse, and we have a tendency to want to keep it (and a lot of things) that way. I'd have different feelings on @starbreaker's marriage if it'd had never left the digital, and even stronger feelings on people having relationships with ai's.

Would those 2 cases be 'simply love'? I don't think so.

I'm glad you liked it. I just kinda started ranting on my lunch break. It got a bit spicy, but so was my lunch.

Done. I CC'ed you on the email. Hope you don't mind.

I'm not part of the Lainchan webring, and TBH I've been avoiding Agora Road and adjacent-spaces; they remind me more of 4chan than I find comfortable since I never particularly liked chan culture.

I'd love to see what you think of these nuances either in this post or a follow-up. No obligation, though.

I try not to be dogmatic, and try not to impose my preferences on others as prescriptions. But this popular attitude that tech is somehow separating us from human nature and from Nature has been bugging me for a long time.

It was definitely different. For one thing, no such thing as Tinder, etc. I think OKCupid was around back then, but I never used it. And it certainly wasn't respectable. I'm not sure it's really respectable today, either; it's just more common. It seems more superficial, though. When I did it, my wife and I actually got to know each other a bit before exchanging pictures.

Yes, we're definitely opposed on these points. For one thing, I don't believe in salvation at least as defined by Christians. To me, that means being forgiven for being human, since no human is inherently good enough for God. Well, fuck God. We're the potter's clay, and if the potter isn't pleased for his work that's his problem.

As for overstaying one's welcome, I think I never had a welcome to overstay. I never felt wanted or welcomed, or like I belonged anywhere. If anything, I am the price of my parents' selfishness. They just had to have intercourse instead of making do with sodomy.

I didn't ask to be here, but now that I am here I'm going to make the most of it. While I might have done most of what I thought I wanted to do as a young man, I am not ready to reach my conclusion yet, or go gently into the night. If we can't go together, I'd rather outlive my wife than leave her to grieve over me. There's always another book to read, another band to discover, another movie to watch, another lover to kiss, and another mountain to climb. If that means fighting to the bitter end, or for as long as I can still muster the strength and orneriness to do so, then that's what I'll do. And if I could gain limited physical immortality and not be subject to further aging or degenerative disease, I'd do it without a moment's hesitation and be damned to anybody who objects.

I'm good at ranting, evidently, and I can bullshit with the best of any Ivy League liberal arts major. It's been a while since I've been able to belt out fiction this quickly or easily, though. But maybe I should write blog posts, emails, etc from my characters' viewpoints and go hypertextual and epistolary. It's not like I don't write in a setting where almost everybody is computer-literate, by which I mean they can cope with a UNIX login prompt and know how to access and read man pages.

My understanding is that it is not necessarily love but attachment (to people, to material possessions, to one's place in the world) that hinders one's journey toward moksha/nirvana/enlightenment. Maybe I'm thinking of Buddhism rather than Hinduism, but one of the central characteristics of both the Buddha and the bodhisattvas is love, or at least compassion.

All the time. Patience is not a virtue that comes naturally to any of us. Some of us just have an easier time cultivating it.

Even I would not suggest that one can have a digital marriage. I got married because that was the easiest way for me to be with her, for us to live together on a permanent basis instead of having to make do with a week or two together whenever we can save up some money and get time off of work.

If my wife had left me and stayed away long enough, trying to maintain a marriage over the internet, I would demand that she either return home or let me go. I agreed to monogamy. I didn't sign up for celibacy or solitude. I could have stayed single if either appealed. Likewise, if I had to live apart from my wife for work, and never came home, I'd have no right to expect her to stick around. She didn't sign up for celibacy or solitude, either.

//quote#10//

You might recall that in my own post on digital relationships I expressed scant sympathy for people engaging in 'romantic' relationships with Replika chatbots or RealDolls equipped with ChatGPT.

I completely understand. I do appreciate having the space / flexibility to discuss more crudely or about darker subjects more readily, but those spaces are absolutely double-edged swords.

Well, for example, this idea / quote from your post in particular is one I was thinking about as I was writing my piece:

"Did Nature make viruses, bacteria, and other parasites to sap our strength and cut us down before our time? We developed sanitation, germ theory, and vaccines to armor ourselves against infection and root out those that take root despite our precautions."

Modern medicine is a marvel. How many times have I'd have died by now without it? And with my general sweep of Unabomber-like disdain, I inherently include it in my attack on technology. But there are potentially interesting discussions surrounding some of these innovations. Antimicrobial resistance could be seen as a "divine push back" on the "tampering of" with these forces, but there's tons whose consequences are seemingly non-existent. And I even read once somewhere that, allegedly, antimicrobial resistance correction is potentially something that could occur over the course of months as it seems their defenses require significant amounts of energy, and that once their need for it is unnecessary, evolution drops that shid, pretty quickly too, given at their generational lifespans. So a few grueling months seems like a small price to pay for the countless lives that have been saved. Still, we can see the inherent balance of things, and how tilting the scales too much, "straying from grace" can cause problems.

Have you seen this thread on Agora Road? Is it even ethical to have children? I think you might enjoy it as what you speak of is echoed quite a bit throughout the discussion. Additionally, this post by xandra (you may know her from MelonLand) may also be of relevance: Childfree.txt

This is what I'm kind of alluding to. I don't think you can gain 'immortality' without incredible cost. Because you'd be "overstaying your welcome", the universe would enact a toll so powerful that you'd be left with a diluted imitation of life. And at that point? What are we doing? Lower the curtain, yo. That's a wrap.

EDIT: In reference to your preferred online spaces: I do find it a bit funny though how direct and "rough" your writing can be, but your favorite online spot seems to be MelonLand, with its "rainbows and unicorns" kinda vibe. Not hating in the slightest, just that I find it a bit ironic, you know?

I just spent the last two hours writing a response to your last post, only to have this site eat it. Because even in the future nothing works.

That's what I get for not pasting posts into Emacs and then hitting "reply" once I'm done editing my response offline. I'm not sure much of genuine value was lost, since I was still pushing what is basically the Gurren Lagann "Row! Row! FIGHT DA POWAH!" worldview but with marginally greater eloquence and significantly greater verbosity, so I'll settle for addressing this last point.

Is it really that ironic that I prefer to lurk on MelonLand instead of Agora Road? I say lurk because I don't post there that often. As I implied in my digital relationships post, the persona I project on my website is not my totality. I might manscape with this edge, but I've got room in my life for rainbows and unicorns and fluffy kittens named Wyld Butt Stallyon, too. After all, a unicorn can still gore you if you get too close, and kittens have sharp claws and haven't yet learned restraint in their use. =^.^=

I know that pain. I'm slowly picking up the habit of writing on Obsidian and then copy-pasting, but I still require more discipline.

I'm still cultivating discipline myself.

If I cannot be my own master and captain my own soul, there is no shortage of people who are no more than my equals who would happily stand as admiral over mine.

Here's a new post: Hacker News, Again.

Kek: Noted.

I didn't think it was you, and I don't mind having links shared elsewhere. But HN leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

It wasn't me. I'm open about my Hacker News account on HackerNews itself AND my site.

I don't like it much either, but I've found it useful enough on occasion to not totally renounce it. And I will occasionally post small-web links, but I do try to be considerate about whose*.

This made me think... maybe being slashdotted (even though I'm hosting on Neocities) is part of the paranoia about why I mostly keep writing about personal experiences on my sites instead of personal opinions.

I've recently participated on Agora for the first time. Apart from having to wade through the not infrequent antisemitic rants and getting more of an insight into people's odd relationship with anime than I'd like, the main thing that puts me off is the youthfulness of the user base. I was surprised to learn that a not insubstantial portion of Agorans are high-schoolers, with the largest demographic being people in their early twenties.

Now, young 'uns are cool and all, but, personally, I prefer places that tend to track older, or at least where oldies are well represented. This is particularly true when it comes to dealing with internet history, the small web, nostalgia, retro gaming, etc. and most definitely true with 4chan-esque platforms like Agora.

1. It's good having people around who've experienced a decent chunk of web and tech history.

2. I'm uncomfortable participating in 'edgy' content, or even being around it, with children present.

3. Related to the last point, I do not want to inadvertently call a 14 girl a c***t.

4. If I ever stumble on a Windows 8 nostalgia thread, I might literately keel over and die.

That's not to say Agora doesn't have many interesting and nice users of all ages. It does, for sure, loads.

I completely agree that any user claiming to be underage on Agora should be banned. I believe its even in the terms of service / forum rules somewhere, it's just not enforced. But, personally, I take the stance: "not my circus, not my monkeys". Anyone that I've noticed say they're underage, I disregard entirely. It's not hard.

As for them being young in general (but over 18). I appreciate the youth. Yes, youth is dumb, but they also bring in new / interesting perspectives or if not, at the very least serve as interesting windows into culture / life, I think. But I'm also a teacher, I work with kids, I'm used to youth's eccentricities.

I have nothing for the antisemitism unfortunately. Though I will say, I personally find it a little (sad) funny that I enjoy the (unrelated) thoughts or ideas someone is sharing, while grappling with the fact that they'd probably throw me in a gas chamber if given the chance. ¯\(ツ)/¯

Isn't there also a rule against racism? You'd think that would cover antisemitism. Anyway, I like your take and might hang around a little longer, but with a few changes. Namely blocking the self professed children, and open antisemites. By blocking the latter, I know I might lose out on some higher-grade tips on increasing virility, and being schooled on the true meaning of the Bhagavad Gita, but I'll live. :)

And hey, I've got nothing against young people, no ways, but I sure do feel old reading some of those Agora threads.....

Thanks for the reply.

I'm not convinced that anybody hanging out on web forums knows fuck-all about increasing virility. I sure as hell don't.

Totally. I'm referencing some of the ancillary interests held by master race bros on Agora.

i would make fun of these kids but i was just as angsty when I was in my teens

I was angsty too as a teen, but I had grown up doing duck 'n cover drills in the friggin' 1980s. And I never let my angst lead me to become a reactionary. Though there was a time when I found Ayn Rand appealing. For about a week between having finished Anthem and The Fountainhead. Reading Atlas Shrugged cured me. (I read the whole book. Even that long-ass chapter where John Galt shows Fidel Castro how to monologue.)