20 February 2026, Friday
In over a decade of being a Web user, diving into it’s history, promises, philosophy, and the underground scenes, I have been forced to look on the state of it now.
For the last week, lainchan has been offline most of the time, which has made me think about boards in general.
I was active on Agora Road, lainchan, Heyuri’s /lounge/ (not to be confused with the rest of Heyuri), 4-ch.net, The Post Office, and the Cyberix Network, and I’d also infrequently lurk places like denpa-chan, Ashley Jones’ tubgurl, and Bus Stop.
I’m a certified board freak, or I was at least.
Every one of these websites have just become less interesting to me over time. It’s hard to tell which changed more quickly, the Web or myself; at least a little of both. Each of these sites have less draw for me, and each has a unique reason for this, but the trend itself is universal. Increasingly, I’ve been wondering “why would I read the worthless words of an online stranger over one of the books I have?” It is an excellent question, which is really another way of asking “what purpose do boards serve in my life?” They are a substitute for real social interaction, which I feel is lacking in my life. This is mostly because social media has supplanted normal social structures; though they are flawed, it is what we are naturally adapted for.
I’m stuck with a primitive desire to be social, which I’ve fed with the low-grade staple of anonymous boards, lacking the means for real socialization. Everybody is in a like situation, which makes it harder to go into the so-called “real world”. The only way forward I see is to overcome my simian social need and embrace loneliness. And this, this is the result of the Internet, the greatest connecting force in human history?
The disappointment of the Web pains me, because I really do believe in a higher ideal of the Internet. There is no technology I am so passionate about as computer networks, none even close, because no other technology has the social importance and unrealized potential that the Internet has. If there is a great march of human progress, the Internet would have always been a necessary step somewhere down the track. My great idealism and the disappointing reality have created a tension that has been bugging me for months.
At a time like this, there is one thing to be said. “Fix it or shut up.” My worthless complaining that I put out here publically, is really just so I can put to words a feeling I’ve long had, but what right does one have to complain if they would not bother to fix the problem? In fact, every day I have been pondering how we could restore the natural social order. It seems unlikely that concerted effort could do it, but it’s worth trying at least. If I get something, I will certainly share it on here.
03 February 2026, Tuesday
I’ve long been bothered by the load-time of fonts on my website, and decided to finally do something about it.
I imagined one should be able to take a font and remove glyph sets from it, and I was right.
It’s quite simple to do actually.
I also planned to change to the woff2 format as it has superior compression.
On a Debian system, install the fonttools and woff2 packages and use this code.
pyftsubset font.otf --unicodes=U+0020-00FF --output-file=font-reduced.otf
woff2_compress font-reduced.otf
This will give a font suitable for English and many Western European languages, beyond this it’s a matter of finding your necessary unicode ranges and changing the argument in the first line. The total difference was impressive. There were two fonts on my website; EB Garamond 12 Regular reduced from 412KiB to 34KiB (91.7%), and EB Garamond All-Caps reduced from from 206.9KiB to 20.3KiB (90.2%). In other words, the fonts will download at ten times the speed now, which has made a notable difference to the service of my website. I’ve taken the liberty to add a monospace font, one of the Hanazono usually used for CKJ type but I think has a neat look for English that you don’t see often, as well as switched body face to EB Garamond 08 Regular, which is thicker.
25 January 2026, Sunday
I’ve made a few changes to the website.
I renamed the blog section to the essay section as it more accurately reflects the contents, and I’ve created this ‘proper’ blog as well.
Was going to call it a ‘microblog’, but I really don’t like that term for some reason.
Anyway, this is for writing which is smaller, informal, personal, and less focused.
My night-shift work at the warehouse has really brought down my energy, I believe it’s why I haven’t been reading so much lately. Generally, I’ve been unable to do anything creative either, can’t write poetry nor make any music, I feel dry. I’m happy to say in a few weeks I’ll be leaving and will return to life under the sun, and will be going back to my previous job too. It’s a minor hit to my income, but far less hours, less draining, and less stupidity from the micro-managers sitting above me.
What I have been reading lately is The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul. I’m experimenting with taking small notes, because I want to be able to write better reviews for the books I enjoy. I’ve read bits of other books as well but not finished them for various reasons. Been trying to read Society Of The Spectacle by Debord, but it’s so incredibly dense I must agonize over every sentence. Recently I’ve been reading Misunderstood by Tanya Crossman, which is about ’third culture kids’ like myself, people who spent their childhood travelling very often. I’ve wanted to understand the general effect of this lifestyle on the psyche and see if it relates to me, but the first chapter has been quite uneventful. The same affirming platitudes about how TCKs are more “empathetic” and “open to other cultures”, and glossed over how it may impact our capacity to form relationships. If it’s no better in another chapter I will drop it, and probably won’t leave a review, because I feel too personally invested in the matter to make an objective statement on the books merits.