Journal:  \u2764

Itʼs a journal.  A web‐journal.  Some might even say web‐zine—personally Iʼm not sure those two words necessarily add anything to each other; independent, multimedia, unconventional press has always been the format of the webpage—if anything we need a name for those other sites, those polished, corporate storefronts which hardly even deserve the prefix web‐.  Itʼs a web‐journal in the way that web‐logs arenʼt: forward‐chronological, each page a handcrafted statement and a resource on its own, the whole more an album than a chart of singles, an artistic statement.  Itʼs what I imagine when I think of the word “webpage”…  I got tired of not seeing it, so I went ahead and built one.

Prior art:  Every GeoCities website ever made.  [NB: Not actually. But you know what I mean.]  Iʼd like to say that good web design has taken place, somewhere on the internet, since 2009, but I think we can all agree that itʼs pretty rare.  Which strikes me as funny:  HTML and CSS technologies are more sophisticated now than theyʼve ever been, computers and data connections are faster than ever before, and yet… the pinnacle of web design was reached five years and two days before HTML5 achieved W3C Recommendation status?  That canʼt be right.  Surely.

But it does seem like weʼve lost something—and it isnʼt ease‐of‐access: web pages are easier to write and easier to publish than they ever have been—but a certain kind of creativity and ingenuity, webpages viewed as art and not simply as the pale backdrop for a dry run of text and high‐resolution stock photography.  Iʼm trying my best to hold my tongue and not say, « thatʼs because boys donʼt understand design and women have been driven out of the industry »—because (I hear) there are (were), out there, in the big wide world, good designers who were men and still cared about accessibility and creativity and æsthetics—and they got driven out of the industry too.  Industry—why are we even talking about that?  Is that what the Internet has become?

Letʼs forget industry—this is a journal.  Do you remember?—if you were born in the 90s you might—the distinction they tried to push on us, regarding diaries and journals?  “Journals” are what boys write: objective records of the world; facts and information—diaries are “girlsʼ stuff”—they said—diaries are personal, sentimental—Anne Frank wrote a diary, Mary Shelley wrote a diary (nevermind that it was titled The Journal of Sorrow) but Lewis Carroll—no, wait, Lewis Carroll kept a diary as well—he was a weird one though—but John Steinbeck!

This is not that kind of journal.  (Or diary, for that matter.)

This is (just) a (simple) record of the thoughts of one individual, glitzed up with felt penHTML and stickersCSS, and published to the Internet like itʼs 1997 all over again.  But with, like, linear‐gradients and CSS variables, because itʼs not 1997 all over again.  We can do better now.  Canʼt we? 

Ah, but here are some things this Journal is not:—  Detached.  Formal.  Uniform.  Rigorous.  Polished.  Cohesive.  This is not your grandfatherʼs tech blog.  This is not Medium [Dot] Com.  Itʼs a bunch of fuckinʼ HTML pages that I wrote by hand in a text editor.  Appreciate the effort, lol.

Anything and everything.  But realistically:

 +  Personal thoughts
 +  Life stories
 +  Short fiction
 +  Media criticism
 +  Tech and design commentary
 +  Song lyrics
 +  Poetry? ⟨oh god i hope there isnʼt any poetry⟩

Regarding technology: I think (one of) the 
measure(s) of good writing is the ability of a text to 
produce something which outlasts its current moment.  Even 
in journalism responding directly to current events, there is 
a historical/cultural/human interest in well‐written pieces 
which greatly outlasts the events that they describe.

It is undeniable that technology has a huge and 
significant impact on many of our lives, and this is indeed a 
matter of historical/cultural/human interest worthy of note 
and record.  However, tech “journalism” is… mostly 
lacking in this regard.  New phones that will be obsolete in 
a year; controversies between figures that have no 
relevance outside of their extremely narrow field; social 
media companies continuing their slow march towards decay
—despite the churn there is little here of lasting 
substance.

Something I think itʼs worthwhile to consider before 
publishing any critical piece responding to technology: Is 
this something I would still consider worthy of reading, if it 
were to be printed off, stuck away somewhere, and only 
discovered years later after all the technologies it was 
responding to have come and gone?  It is not impossible to 
write pieces with this quality.  I still quite enjoy reading 
about HyperCard, even though HyperCard technologies themselves 
are long gone.

(My apologies to the HyperCard revivalists.)

So—I am not planning on publishing, to this journal 
(although I may elsewhere), technical takes or analyses 
regarding some obscure aspect of some fledgling protocol 
(*cough, cough* ActivityPub) whose relevance (the 
takesʼ) is unlikely to last the year.  But I will not shy 
away from addressing technology, as it stands, as it impacts 
our lives, as it shapes and is shaped by our experiences and 
efforts, in the present, future, or yesteryear.

My name is KIBI Gô—or Lady KIBI, Allie HART, jellyfish_link, JʼLi, Autumn Leaf, Emogee, Moggy, and just about every other variation on Margaret you can imagine.  This is my journal! 

Iʼm a genderfluid grey‐ace trans woman living in Washington State—but like, not the rainy part of Washington State, the part of Washington State with basalt and gay‐haters, and coyotes which break into the gay‐hatersʼ pantries and steal all of their delicious meats, because coyotes are queer allies yʼall, just ask them:  « Awoo! »  I studied Mathematics and then Gender Studies at one of the least economically‐diverse liberal‐arts colleges in the country, and have been trying to unlearn the racism from that place ever since.  I was born in 1994, which makes me old enough to technically be a millennial, but young enough to share nothing in common with those Bad Millennials like Mark Zuckerberg.  I still have social anxiety and know Marx though.  My first webpages were published via email to my friends, and if you wanted you could email this webpage to your friends too, and I wouldnʼt stop you.  I still donʼt understand how servers manage to function.  Iʼm very good at HTML and CSS (your mileage may vary).  

In November of 2016 I joined the social network Mastodon, and in the time since have written some of the most widely‐circulated and well‐thought‐out articles discussing the platform, which is a really low bar.  In 2018, I published this little thing called The CYBRE Manifesto, which people said “moved them”, but Iʼm still not clear on where to, since theyʼre still enacting the same old behaviours as before.  I write highly‐experimental fanfiction, which my friends all love and strangers donʼt bother to click on.  I created this webpage! and I hope you enjoy.