summer 2025 weekly web writing + stuff
Week 1: My Website is a Shifting House... - Laurel Schwulst
"Gardens have their own ways each season. In the winter, not much might happen, and that’s perfectly fine. You might spend the less active months journaling in your notebook: less output, more stirring around on input. You need both. Plants remind us that life is about balance."
I find myself relating personally to the garden way of doing things for many activities or goals I have. I have periods of time where I'm super active or "progressing", and other times where I want to take a break and have my focus on something else completely for a while. I don't think there's anything wrong with circling back, I feel like as humans we naturally want to be able to do it all (and I have a running list of both creative and non-creative things I want to do/try out...) and sometimes pushing hard on one thing gets you burnt out. Focusing on inputs and experiences > perfect high quantity outputs
Week 2: J.R. Carpenter - A Handmade Web
"In the early days of the social web, there was a broad expectation that regular people might own their own identities by having their own websites, instead of being dependent on a few big sites to host their online identity." - Anil Dash
I pulled this quote because it reminds me how I feel a certain discomfort posting artwork or pieces of myself that "represent me" online. I always feels like my prescence on whichever popular host site it may be feels inauthenic to what I would truly want to create for myself. I don't want to seem like I'm selling anything to anyone and many social platforms have sales as a large part of their existence ironically. And to me a website compared to a popular social platform can be more intimate or secretive, as the creator you set the tone of your own site, expand your expressiveness and feel better about no one or nothing watching you (hey secret insta/tiktok/facebook data agent are you in there?)
"Whereas archives held in museums or libraries generally contain artifacts created elsewhere — manuscripts illuminated in a monastery, for example, or photographs developed in a darkroom — the handmade web pages contained in this online archive continue to exist in the medium within which they were created. That said, the frames through which we view them continue to change"
Week 3: Hello, World! - Taeyoon Choi
"Every day we look at computer screens for a very long time. We touch them, carry them, sleep next to them. Our lives are stored in bits, messages turned to network packets. Living spaces arranged in human-sized pixels. But behind the familiar interface, the inner workings still seem so distant. For most of us the window into our digital lives is opaque."
Tech for humanist uses VS consumerist uses, how many things does a computer or phone need for convenience? What can we change about our consumption and usage of tech? How much tech should be implemented in public spaces or businesses? Does your car need a TV in the center console with digital buttons? Especially when a tank of gas is $50? I don't think so
Week 4: The Good Room - Frank Chimero
"I once heard that a library is one of the few remaining places that cares more about you than your wallet. It means that a person can be a person there: not a customer, not a user, not an economic agent, not a pair of eyes to monetize, but a citizen and community-member, a reader and a thinker, a mind and—God, I am going to say it—a soul."
My favorite places / situations where I like to take in my humanness and ignore demands from the rooms of tech - spending time at parks, sitting on porches reading a book someone recommended (and not what the internet thinks of the book), sitting or laying outside on the ground and staring at the sky, maintaining the spaces I exist in (cleaning, organizing, laundry, rearranging decor), trying an old baking recipe from one of my Mom's recipe books, taking nature walks / going on a hike or trail and observing, and the greatest activity of all time that blocks all chances of being surveyed or monetized in some way,SLEEPING!
"if technology is a place where we live, a place that we carry around with us, shouldn’t we choose to be in lively and nourishing digital environments?"