Hi.

This is a proper post.

Not that the goose one isn’t, but I would consider that a demo, a try-out, and, a way to break the ice.

This is new to me. Sharing a text like this so publicly, yet still so privately. After all, there is no audience. It’s just my lonely island of a domain, and currently, barely anyone is even aware of this “blogs” existence. For better or worse, unless explicitly told to come here or by some very obscure set of decisions end up entering “vytzia.com” into the search bar, you can’t really know any of this is happening.

This is public, out there, but not pushed down anyone’s throats in some attention economy-era algorithm.

If you are here, you probably wanted to be here. I think that’s special. :]

A reason why I wanted to try this format out is because I feel like I’m a very online-shy person. Beyond this website, I don’t post anything publicly, not anymore at least. I never really comment anymore on any online forums. My digital fingerprint on the “surface web” is quite nonexistent. It’s not a bad thing, I love my privacy. However, I feel like maybe the desire to not exist on the surface of the web has been influenced by not the greatest of factors. Factors which are now outweighed by all the fun things that it could bring.

A short while ago I was talking to a friend who was struggling to focus on his studies. I mentioned to him something that a “study with me” YouTube live streamer (yes, studying STEM can get lonely) once said, which was that he thought everyone should become a “study with me” live streamer. The reasoning is that even if no one is watching, the thought that someone might be is enough to push you to be extra disciplined with what you do. Now imagine my surprise when my friend tells me a few days later that he had spent a couple of hours working on his live streaming setup, and the day after that he had his first “study with me” stream. A tip which I shared with him, which I myself did not take too seriously, because of how terrifying live streaming seemed to me, he picked up just like that. And it made me wonder: what was I so afraid of?

Like many kids nowadays, I used to daydream of becoming a YouTuber. These dreams, or visions, would alter depending on which era YouTube found itself at that time. I was at different points in my (imaginary) career a let’s player, an animator, a vlogger. I did it all (in my head). One thought that occurred to me quite often is that at some point I will get cancelled. It had to happen. The way I thought about it is what you would call nowadays a “cannon event”. It’s not that I had any out-of-the-ordinary beliefs or that I had a history of problematic tweets. I was just convinced it was the natural order of things that having such a big audience and being so chronically online, that one day, human error will play its part and apologies will have to be issued. I even thought about prerecording apology videos for before I “fucked up”. Obviously at that time I was not well-versed in apologizing — as, obviously, was no one else on the platform. Apology videos were still a developing art form. Either way, it did, I feel, shun me away from ever really committing to a public appearance.

Am I scared of being canceled now? No. Not necessarily. Somehow cancel culture, it feels to me, has reached a point where it is doing the opposite of what it set out to do, which is remove “problematic” figures from the public eye. However, attention economy has turned any sort of discourse into an opportunity. It does not matter what the subject matter is as long as you are the center of it.

As for me, it’s not cancel culture I’m weary of, it’s cringe culture. If canceling was about addressing bad actions, cringe goes against action itself. Within the frameworks that cringe culture builds for us, there is no room for trying, no room for passion, no room for genuine, authentic self expression. The apex of this is a society of people who stopped trying, who pretend to be nonchalant, and who bring each other down when someone stands out.

So screw that! I don’t want to live in such a world. And I want to push against the voice telling me to live comfortably in the obscurity of inaction. So Hello World, here I am, all 70 kg of cringe, pounding away at a keyboard for an audience of maybe two friends to see. Where will this go from here? Who knows. But I had fun with this, and I hope you (whoever you are) did too.

If you made it this far, that’s adorable. What’s the last meal you remember really enjoying? I could honestly eat something right now.

I don’t think I’ll have any socials attached here, but you probably know where to find me. :]

Take care