thombo

thombo

@thombo

high-intensity soulful whiteboy

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thombo
@thombo

here's to the chosts we made along the way

since cohost is shutting down, i figured i'd share some stuff i was working on in my drafts and talk about how this site impacted me.

as i stated in my very first post on here, i used cohost primarily as a destination to stretch my hands writing. to really test my chops and sharpen my skills by posting a few blogs here and there. i may have only posted a handful in the past year+ since joining but i was always workshopping more in the background.

i exhibit obsessive compulsive traits and am woefully beholden to perfectionism in my creative endeavors. so more often than not writing a post has taken the form of a big project that gets refined as i scale it down over time. recently i've fired off a few "written in one go with minor editing" posts just to let some ideas live and not have to form them over time and that has been a wonderful exercise too. sometimes you need to just let thoughts leave your brain even if they're potent ones.

of everything i posted on cohost, my two favorite pieces are the ones i worked the hardest on. trying for 30 years to take off the mask and the inherent romanticism of looking at jpegs. both are full blown article length pieces with an emotional attachment to them that i feel is indicative of my writing style. my voice as a writer lives and breathes in these posts. i would enjoy very much if you read them. i also think my write up on the most interesting movies i watched in 2023 was pretty good, if a little lengthy. probably gonna make that a yearly tradition.

moving forward, i want to continue to grow as a writer. it's a creative outlet that feels the most freeing to me right now. i keep talking about it on here, but there are two paths in which this passion is going to take me. first of all, i want to make my own website. a real honest to god domain with a blog component. there i hope to let more of my writing live on its own and forever remain as an immovable capsule. but to let my writing grow, blossom, and hopefully reach more people than the handful who see it currently, i'm gonna start making youtube videos. it's a scary world out there in that space and i will have to deal with the blows of the platform as they come, but i think creatively it is an outlet i am destined to be drawn to. maybe i can finally put this film degree to use that way.

so, what's in the drafts folder?

a couple things. these first two are rough scripts for what will eventually become youtube videos. they are being written with that medium in mind, so they're flowing a bit different from how i have written on this website in the past. the first post is called:

(You Gotta Respect) Long Movies Where Nothing Happens

as you might expect, it's a discussion on slow cinema and film with meditative elements, goals, and presentations. wherein i explore a handful of movies in depth (though not exhaustively) and talk about their cinematic conventions that, to me, are peaceful and/or contemplative. it's a work in progress, but currently the films i'm drafting discussions about include in no particular order:

there's other movies i'm considering talking about, but i'm just sort of writing it as i go and figuring out how every film works in conversation with the last. the idea is mostly to share some movies that i think people might not have heard of that fit this style of filmmaking i find so compelling. and yes, i know most of these are not long. and yes, things do happen in all of them. the point is not that they are boring. i find them fascinating. but you gotta admit that's a good title, like come on.

next post is called:

Exploring The Raver Movie Canon

similar idea structurally to the last post. talking about a selection of films that fit an overarching style and attempting to understand what their similarities and differences can tell us.

i'm a life long raver, lover of dance music, DJ of over 10 years and huge nerd about the culture. there's a surprising amount of feature films that are primarily about or centrally feature raves and raving culture, and i think they don't have a lot of academic or even just critical writing attached to them. i'm looking to expand that knowledge by watching lots of movies about the topic (mostly fiction, not involving documentaries here which there are also a wealth of about raves) and trying to define what a movie "about raving" or "about ravers" has looked like over the years. and this too will be an exercise in also spreading some awareness about under-seen or lesser discussed films.

some films i'm looking to discuss in this video/writing/essay are:

and the only other draft worth talking about is one that i think will remain as a written work, but one that i'm nonetheless already very proud of how it's shaping up. an indulgent ode to turning 30 this november called:

Top 10 Old Man Musings that i am legally allowed to be right about because i just turned 30 years old

i could talk about what this post is going to look like. but instead of sharing insight, i'll just share a block quote section and leave you to wonder about what the rest will entail.

there's much to be said about how diluted online interactions have become now that you have to move through them at accelerationist speeds to keep up. like i think it's telling of how quickly the culture moves that databases like knowyourmeme have become load-bearing to understanding half of the interactions you're going to have online. i don't really believe in dead internet theory, but i do believe that there is more bot activity online than there is human these days. and that's just fed into how fast and instinctive all human interactions have been evolving online. the path of least resistance is now the only path forward. everything is as cheap and disposable as plastic, even our conversations. and people have less patience or scruples as a result of navigating through the endless slop this way. the great irony that's been spoken of the internet since its inception has come true. being more connected has made us--on the whole--more isolationist than ever.

i dunno, i'm not an anthropologist. but i do know that nobody can make "good bait" anymore because we don't live in a world where The Greatest Thread Of All Time Locked After 19,000 Posts Of Heated Debate exists anymore. it's much easier to pander to the lowest common denominator for the maximum possible gain, and let the algorithms do the legwork for you. just sit back and let the clicks farm themselves. completely useless information for nobody gets pushed to the front of your "feed" so frequently that it just makes sense to capitalize on it. if you have no moral compass, that is. you need not even engage anymore and somebody has already collected their social or monetary paycheck from the bait just existing in the first place. the bots will pick it up if no humans do, and they spread it to other bots while they're at it. it will probably reach humans somewhere along the chain but that's not even a necessary component of the operation. there is no "winning the internet" for people unwilling to be grifters. you just decide how much you want to lose before logging out of the casino.

man, i really liked cohost. the staff founded this website on respectable morals and worked hard to keep a healthy community running when they and all of us knew in our minds that this kind of website can't last in the toxic environment the web currently is. i never expected it to be profitable. i never expected it to grow far beyond the community of Old Posters and burnt out leftist freelancers of all stripes that attracted its ground floor. but i had hoped it would live a little longer. continue to be a destination online that i found comfort in going to. there are very few of those left right now. and now we're losing another one.

i think, as many users have put it in their mourning upon the announcement of the news, that just the fact that this website existed at all is proof that a better, more friendly, more intertwined and loving kind of internet can exist. that we can build spaces on the net that are wholly divorced from corporations, copyright holders, advertisers, and the kinds of evil that those types attract. there is a future for posters like us. old souls of the internet who know how to foster what we've taken from our short time on this space and let it marinate with the other 20 or so odd years of being online that we live with. i know everyone who follows me is already a close friend, but thank you for taking the time to read what i wrote here. if you're someone reading this at any point in the future, thank you for stopping by. thank you all for witnessing this little drop in the bucket i contributed. i'll miss this place.

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