ceɑꞃᵹæꞅꞇ

yes, as in the interactive fiction/games tool

when I was job hunting¹ I needed to put up a personal site fast, but the idea of using one of those Here's My Hero Image and Infinite Scroll Portfolio and a Bunch of Random Icons templates made me aesthetically sick. I also have a lifelong love of using tools for things they are not really designed for².

This isn't zero effort exactly; in addition to purchasing/configuring a web host, contorting a twine into a site-site requires some hacking-out of game state and fiddliness with CSS and image hosting, for certain things you may need to edit the generated HTML file manually, and I need to figure out whether RSS is possible. But adding and editing stuff is just a matter of adding/editing passages, and the perversity of it amuses me.

A similar tool is Decker for Hypercard stack-like sites; I haven't messed around with it but I know of at least a few personal sites using it.

1. that was rough but happily I am no longer job hunting

2. but not disallowed or discouraged: "Anything you create with [Twine] is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes."

yep, everything in twine allows javascript! some story formats make it easier than others but even in the less javascript-friendly formats (e.g., harlowe) it is very possible if you know it.

chapbook fwiw is my current recommendation, seems most actively maintained, and is best imo in terms of default presentation/responsive design

Adding this as yet another thing to check out when I have spoons. (I'm commenting on them because that'll make it easier to find when I'm filtering my old posts)

gonku

A drawing of Eggbug, after touching the basketball that had sucked all the magic out of the NBA players in Space Jam, and now they're a hulking monster that's prepared to chost up in the chaint and dunk some balls

Big thanks to @ICELEVEL for continuing to indulge my shitchosts

you can commission him here

Anyway, this is all just furthering my feeling that the era of social media as we knew it is over.

With Twitter still dying (active users down 30% in the last year!), I've seen more and more discussion of where everyone's going - but what I'm seeing is that most users aren't. The numbers don't line up; more people are quitting twitter than are joining Bluesky or Mastodon or anything else. Which is what makes me think the era of participatory social media is ending.

This isn't just because of twitter dying. I remember reading in Garbage Day a year or two back that Twitter was seeing active posting go down in the early days of the pandemic. People kept using group DMs, but stopped posting. And as much as Adam Mosseri's "people aren't posting, they're just sharing links in group chats" comment has to do with the site culture he built, it's the same phenomenon - many normal people pulled back from posting like they would have before. Meanwhile, the fastest growing things were TikTok and Youtube, which have a highly stratified audience/creator relationship that's more like traditional media, and Discord and Telegram, which are non-public facing social media.

There are people like us who post, who need to post to survive. But it seems like for a lot of people they're simply losing interest, or are happy to settle into a more passive relationship where they "consume content" but don't post.

It's hard to say why exactly, but it feels a bit like...

Most social media now is algorithmic, and algorithmic timelines are more designed to deliver streams of "content" to "consumers". They don't encourage the everyone-is-posting-and-interacting way that social media traditionally worked.

A lot of social media is enclosed behind loginwalls now, and I think we both have a younger cohort that doesn't remember the older public web at all, and an older cohort that's starting to forget what it was like. The enclosed social web lends itself more to the creator-consumer dynamic than it does to posting.