i hate having to abuse plaintext formatting to simulate custom typesetting on websites that dont allow styling text. like the way i have to add spaces between letters to simulate big letter spacing or use obscure unicode characters meant for math notation to simulate custom fonts. these all break accessibility in exchange for style, but if websites would just let us use more html (like cohost does) we could have both!

like its genuinely so disheartening that so many websites only allow plaintext input, or some extremely limited form of markdown. its called the HyperText Transfer Protocol for a reason! why limit ourselves to just plaintext? i want to have colored text, zany fonts, even animation if i want to! writing a post should feel like writing a letter, i should be able to style it however i please if i want to. we have the technology, just let us use it.

A bit of irony re: that (not good) New York Times piece about how "We’re Watching the End of a Digital Media Age. It All Started With Jezebel": The "defining" post being discussed here -- a Jezebel post containing unretouched and retouched images of Faith Hill from Redbook magazine -- no longer contains those pictures, since a change to the Kinja platform permanently disappeared the images. (Though it still of course has pictures for ads and chum.) You can still find them on various bottom-feeder aggregator blogs, at least for now until they disappear. But the "defining stunt" no longer contains what made it defining; as a piece of digital media, it has effectively ended.

This kind of linkrot and link decay is everywhere. Digital news companies and platforms break, go bankrupt, or just yolo their money away until they get bored. The publications and websites that shaped the Internet disappear into stray links that managed to survive, stray ProQuest articles no one will read, the dwindling memories of people who were there, and the theories and vibes of people looking for something to blame.

idk; it seems to me like news companies viewing their news product as ephemeral throwaway content might also be relevant to "the end of a digital media age," but what do I know, I just read and write it