this is a byline, where one would put a witty comment if they could think of one

I feel like 2024 is going to have some big changes for me. “Josh you just ran a half marathon—” no but I mean, like, other changes. And I’m not a big change guy. Personal change, I mean; I love quarters and nickels and dimes. But getting my trajectory from ΔA to ΔB takes a lot of fuel.¹ It’s always been this way; ask me to get a new hairstyle and I will, maybe, two years from now. But there’s just something about my current situation which feels untenable, bristly, at odds with some innate desire.

I think what I’m trying to say is: I’m gonna buy a boat.

Just kidding. You think I can afford a boat?

Portland (Half) Marathon Report

First of all, if you wanted a race report on the Portland (Half) Marathon, click ye olde link to ye olde blogge and have a read with your eyeballs. If you want a TL;DR: it went good, I made it, huzzah. There is a more philosophical treatise on the impact running long distances can have on your brain and your body, but I ain’t the type to write all that shit down. If anything, I need to not think about it so I can do it. You know how sometimes you’ll be having sex and suddenly you’ll think of George Washington’s wooden teeth, which weren’t actually wooden but were all sorts of teeth—holy shit, imagine having walrus teeth in your mouth—and then suddenly you look down and your partner isn’t even in the room anymore, they somehow just crawled out from under your frozen body as you ponder our first president’s dentures and now they’re on the couch eating Wheat Thins and watching an episode of Maury from 1994? Yeah it’s like that. No think, just sex running.

I’m running a 10k track race on Sunday the 15th with the Oregon Road Runners Club. My first track race and I can’t wait to look completely like I don’t belong there.

I’ve told this story a million times but when I was a kid, my class went to the local roller rink to skate. I had never skated before so I was hugging the walls and falling on my ass. At some point they declared that there was going to be a race around the rink with all of the boys. Despite me never skating before, I was put in the race. When they shouted “Go!” the boys all roared down the skating rink … and then there was me, at the end, shuffling like an old man. I guess my point is, sometimes you just gotta be shit at something, even if it’s embarrassing. Usually people are like “Nobody’s paying attention to you” but I guarantee you people were looking at me. Ah well. I was a kid!

Cleaning Up & Clearing Out, Digitally

I’ve been contemplating social media again. Wait, don’t go! I brought cookies. They’re just for me but you can smell one if you keep reading

My disgusting inky ichorous tendrils have been rooted within the World Wide Web practically my entire life. I made websites back in 1996, when I was 13. That was 27 years ago. And for a while, being present on the internet was great. Having a username and forums and AIM and early Facebook, it was all cool. Instagram filters that nobody uses anymore. If the internet of mid and late 90s was the wild west, then the internet of the early 2000s felt like the industrial age, and me and my online friends were the coal miners.

Now, the internet sucks ass. And by that I mean social media, which is a festering wound that could be cleaned out if capitalism wasn’t a drug-resistant flesh eating bacteria. Twitter, obviously, was demolished by the world’s dumbest richest man. Facebook has become a nightmare miasma of absolutely everything I don’t care about. Mastodon is good, but boring. Threads, stupid pandering. The only thing that continues to barely resemble its former self is Instagram, and that’s owned by the world’s fastest richest man! It’s all self imploding in the service of the All Ighty Ollar?

All this is to say, I’m pulling the tendrils out as much as I can. I’m trying to reduce my internet footprint. I want other Josh Belville’s to show up on google search results. I’m sick of posting a thing and then having to post that thing on multiple other things to ensure that the vast majority of people—my friends and family—can find it, even if they never read it or even think about it for one second. It’s absolutely absurd.

We have a device that fits in our pocket and can tell us where the nearest hot dog is in .0000005 milliseconds and yet in order for you to watch the YouTube video I made, I have to post it to Facebook and then also to Instagram oh and you better write a tweet about it too, have you thought about posting a thought-provoking post on LinkedIn about how nice it is to lick billionaire’s boots in order to buy groceries?—etc etc etc.

I hate it! It’s stupid and bad, and in the last few years it has even fractured relationships between family and friends because social media (or the Russians, or both) took our middling opinions and polarized them so much that I can’t look at my extended family online anymore without tagging them as Trump supporters in my head. In real life, this would never be a problem. I know they’re conservative and Republican, but if they asked me to their house for dinner, I would go and have a great time, because they are, at heart, good people. But online, everyone is a Something, and that Something is usually Bad.

In order to get the engagement they need to satisfy advertisers enough to pay them money, social media sites have to make you want to come back. I hate it. It’s basically addiction on a mass scale. It’s that fucking game from that Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. It’s stupid that this TV show accurately predicted our addiction to smartphones back in 1991.

So, what does this really mean? It just means that I’m going to try to either delete, or stop using, as many social media apps as possible, and to delete accounts to things that I don’t really need. I thought for a long time about just using this newsletter to post things, but honestly the engagement here isn’t very good either. Maybe I just suck! That’s totally possible.

For 2024 I want to use social media as minimally as I can, with a few exceptions. Like, I want to post only on Instagram, and only at the end of the month with a photo dump of what I’ve been up to. And then maybe go outside more and actually meet people and shit. Who knows.

Just thought I’d bring it up in case you’re wondering why you haven’t seen me around in a while. I’m out there, in the Real World, picking up Chicks.

Stuff

Great TDC with Caroline Polachek that really showcases her voice, which is beautiful. She does have that ethereal air of a woman whose parents are rich.

Somebody reminded me of Square One the other day. Amazing show on PBS about math and they had great music videos, like this one.

Conan’s interview with Arnie is very good. I forget that he’s a Republican and loves Ronald Reagan, which I will forgive, I suppose.

The End

I’ve always been bad at wrapping things up. In that vein: bye.

1. This is an astronaut joke, and I don’t even know exactly what it means. ↩︎