in 2006 office depot created one of the most influential consumer products ever — elf yourself.

maybe i am still wrapped up in the holiday craze, but i recently used it again and while watching my head on a dancing elf, i couldn’t stop thinking about how this website is still unfailingly funny + shareable + delightful, and has sustained success year over year.

the last time i was truly surprised by something, it was when taylor swift released her eight album folklore in july of 2020, in the middle of a summer that never seemed to end. it revitalized me in this strange, alchemic way that reminded me of who i was in the past muddled with whatever i was in the present. at the end of this year, folklore said she had a sad older sister, and evermore became another surprise release. the second time i was truly surprised.

the trying times of this year has brought us not one, but two, surprise cabin-in-the-woods albums from taylor. and somehow, it was everything we needed to get through isolation in this cold winter. folklore was the fading light from a dissipating source of warmth; evermore is the frost from the chill that never left.

whatever promises of transformation (read: transformative experiences ) i once believed are now distant echoes, footprints in the sand on this journey to actualization. to know a person is to unwind the epistemological origins in the theory of their thought. these are the seminal pillars of how i see the world and filtered through my own cognitive machinations. big ideas, small ideas: we are a but a sum of all the influences we encounter and choose to impress upon ourselves.

notes on diegesis, intertextuality, skeumorphs, bildungsroman, zeitgeist, reflexivity, nostalgia, and so much more.

a generation raised by the internet. growing up in a digital headspace with bodies in a physical world. coming of age with the internet as the internet came of age itself.

it reminds you of another time in your life when online was the only thing that mattered.

essays that i will someday (start and) finish writing:

• signed by screenname: the selection of a screenname as a signature of ourselves, the multiplicity of our many names, and forks of our digital identity scattered to the winds.
• lowercase legacies: all-lowercase writing as a structural condition for internet cognition and communication.
• the making of an aesthetic: the ~ aesthetic ~ as digital ambiance, how they’re formed and take shape, and design as a visual language of the online.
• online blues: #36465D vs #001935: tumblr as a genre-defining cornerstone of the internet; how that indie internet conciousness has somehow elevated to the mainstream.
• reacts as the conversational metalayer: reactions take the complexity of human emotions and render them in bite-sized emoji form.
• by poor design: the humans in human-centered design and the inequities in user experience as a reflection of the inequities in humanity.

we all have these—the thoughts that won’t leave our brain. the things we spend a lot of time thinking about. half-baked musings that can keep us up at night or fill the blank pages of journals and blogposts. the conversations we have without ourselves about what matters to us and what we believe of the world.

and i’m still looking for the words to say the things i mean. someday, i might find them. for now, they exist as inklings of the connective synapses that map and connect these thoughts together:

• lifestyle genres: an ode to our constant coming of age
• cultural artifacts: the stories we keep coming back to
• national geography: places and what they mean to a people
• compositional interaces: fault lines between the real and unreal

these are the things i’ve spent my whole life trying to put into words