The Labubu's Gaze

I have a bodyless labubu dangling from my bag, a counterfeit head that detached itself immediately on exit from its plastic wrapper womb maybe a year ago.  

On that day I had watched videos about how labubus were a harrowing consumerist icon in a way that seemed mostly undistinct from other toys and trinkets, and I became gleeful and insane at the prospect of opening up my own false labube. 

Her head accompanies me and bobs wildly as I walk, through warm parks with a thousand dogs, to the restaurant where I had fish and beer as advertised on an angler fish themed sandwich board (though my fish of choice was tuna). She is a special freak, speeding through the world. Seeing it all with those maniacal labubu eyes.

The expression of the labubu is her greatest asset. One eternal, angry gaze. Today, she watched me slap ketchup out of a glass bottle expertly. No squeeze, just sharp slaps on the flat bottom. I felt powerful in that moment. And the labubu head surely felt it. 

Blur

That beautiful late afternoon time when the sun is dipping down and everything is sort of calm and a little bit dim - that's such a perfect, peaceful time. It's still light but the sky pales against streetlights and lit signs. The night life takes a tentative step into view, and maybe you're sleepy by now. Maybe the day's work is mostly done.

There's a sense of adventure to this transition, maybe it's because it's the ideal beginning to a night out somewhere. Especially on a hot summer day, like Friday the 28th of June, 2024. The day of an impeccable soufflé.

My soufflé.

I'm always struck by the ambience of the cars and streetlights as night comes. So many details on every street, but that light change is often the thing that makes me notice them. Everything feels different in the shadows, and in the rich, golden light of a setting sun.

I used to love taking this particular sort of blurry photo. I would sit at the front on the top deck of a double decker bus and take pictures as we drove along the street, getting all these streaks of patterned light, moving away from us too quickly. There seemed something strikingly beautiful about it, like that sense of movement, impossible to stop, was a better representation of the moment in time than any static shot could be. The streaking light conveys the time through that absence of stillness.

There's something magical in that.

My Plan for Learning 10,000 Japanese Words

I've been using Anki for years to idly study Japanese in a wonderfully unthinking way, and I use this one deck of Kanji cards in particular that I am now just under 900 cards away from completing. That may sound like an awful lot of cards, but we're talking completion within a year if I learn three new cards a day, which is very doable and thus I can no longer make excuses. I must finish the kanji deck. I will.

This kanji means 'harvest'.

As for the attached vocabulary deck, no, let's not talk about it. That one hurts.

This big nasty boy has just over ten thousand new cards for me to learn, which would mean an average new card rate of almost thirty per day if I wanted to learn it within a year. This is too much. Not least because it would be additional to those new kanji cards, and all other new cards across my other decks (which I will not discuss here in order to stay focused).

The stats for my kanji & vocab decks, respectively. Let's not talk about the 'relearning' segment.

***

So I think my plan is going to be to just to stick to those three new kanji cards each day and learn those - nice and leisurely. I can't get too sucked into spending an untenable amount of time on this (I very strictly keep my language study to one hour per day maximum, because it starts to massively get in the way of more important stuff once it creeps past that limit, in my experience), but three new cards a day is wonderfully relaxed.

Me. I'm weak. 私は弱いです。

And then in one beautiful year, when I've crunched those remaining kanji into my brain, I can get started on the big vocab quest. Maybe I'll opt for ten new vocab cards a day, which would get me to the finish line in about three years. That's a long time, but we're talking about ten thousand Japanese words slotted into my mind, both aurally and visually, so I'd be very satisfied by that timeline.

I've crunched these numbers a few times along the way so far, and I've found that adding more than ten new cards a day starts to get rapidly too much for me, so going for a four-year relatively chill goal that allows me to spend a reasonably minimal time per day on language seems like a good option.

Mmm... wheat.

Realistically, I should probably increase that first number (three new cards per day) so that I can dip the ten a bit lower later on, but I'll experiment with that and see how I feel. I think I sort of enjoy learning the vocab more, because there's more information to attach the memory to (I learn the sounds of the words), so it might be easier to study a higher number of new cards per day when I've moved away from the kanji. I don't know.

Either way, here's hoping I can cram that stuff into my brain! 

Desk World

I am a habitual bed-typer. I work fully in bed often, and I regret nothing. Being in bed with my laptop is natural and right. However, there is something to be said for a desk.

The thing about a desk is: you can put all kinds of stuff on there. It immediately enters a satisfying place when you add two things to the desk and it becomes a decoration challenge. As soon as that happens, I'm locked in. I am creating another ideal representation of myself. I am the desk woman.

Some dog pages in my onion skin journal.

Now, as we all know, a desk requires a drink. A special drink for the desk. This might be a delectable coffee option, or some kind of enticing nectar. Usually, you will find yourself graduating to two drinks. This is a sign of excess and pleasure. Follow that impulse. Go drinks crazy.

Me, basking in the glow of my wonderful desk.

There is also an unstoppable power that grows with each subsequent notebook or other paper object that gets added to the desk. Currently, I have two such items: a sketchbook, and my diary. I like to think of them as the dear friends and dark accomplices of my laptop. The computer is enhanced by the pen and paper. The system is complete. There are pencils and bobby pins nervously awaiting my attention.

I call her "Mangles".

I've been drawing feverishly in my onion skin journal here. At my beautiful desk. Creating a horrible bird. As I must. 

Darren Aronofsky's AI Madness

It came to my attention recently that noted freak director Darren Aronofsky has made some short films from crunched up AI-generated scenes for TIME Magazine's YouTube channel. They concern snippets of early American history, and look a little something like this:

Okay, eww. What's going on here?

In the first one, January 1: The Flag, we see sexy old legend George Washington raise the Continental Union Flag (or the Grand Union Flag, if you like) at Prospect Hill in what was then Charlestown, Boston, to the shock and awe of onlookers.

The first (unofficial) flag of the United States. In all its AI glory.

This seems to spook and hurt the British, possibly because the British Forces in the area were at this time surrounded, but interestingly, the reaction of stilled dismay that the film attempts to show (all emotions are sort of blunted and still in these AI renderings, it's like watching the facial skin of a corpse shift slightly underwater and calling that an expression) is less interesting than the one documented by George Washington in a letter to Joseph Reed on the 4th of January:

"We are at length favored with the sight of his majesty's most gracious speech breathing sentiments of tenderness and compassion for his deluded American subjects; the speech I send you (a volume of them was sent out by the Boston gentry), and farcical enough we gave great joy to them without knowing or intending it, for on that day (the 2d) which gave being to our new army; but before the proclamation came to hand we hoisted the union flag in compliment to the United Colonies. But behold it was received at Boston as a token of the deep impression the speech had made upon us, and as a signal of submission.
By this time I presume they begin to think it strange that we have not made a formal surrender of our lines."

                - via Our Flag: Origin and Progress of the Flag of the United States of America,                                    by George Henry Preble.

Those British buffoons interpreted this sign of reverence for the thirteen colonies as a compliment to the king. Incredible.

Of course, they figured out quickly enough what this flag-raising was really all about - America slay, Britain nay - but isn't this reaction so much funnier, and even a better patriotic story, than its straightforward alternative? I'm struck by the flattening of a genuinely interesting historical moment, with its odd little false assumption, and George Washington's sneering, delighted mockery of that, washed away so we can instead watch AI's limp version of the beginnings of a frown on an old man.

My favourite moment, in any case, is the delivery of the line, "stripes... thirteen of them" at about 2:42. There is a slight Disney villain quality to it that I enjoy, provided to us by, not AI, but a real voice actor. Thank you to that man.

Birds: My Latest Passion

It's kind of crazy and insane just how many animals are out there. There are so many of them. Who even are they? What are they thinking? Would they even know what to do if I walked into the room?

Roseate Spoonbill, from John Latham's A General History of Birds (1824). 

I've been learning about bird species recently. My grandma liked birds, and once I bought this birdspotting guide in her presence, and she was beyond delighted. I don't think I have ever in my life gained someone's approval more strongly than in that moment. So I sort of thought I should study flashcards and really learn all the British bird types.

My beautiful bird book.

Some of my favourites include:

Redstart 

Now this is a bold character. This is the sports car of birds. High contrast. Love it.

Tufted Duck

Look man, you gotta be tufted. I would be tufted if I could be, but legally it's not possible.

Pied Wagtail

I just think this little snowball is so cute. I love that long tail and that tiny body, the beautiful white and black pattern. An adorable creature.

***

There are endless variations of little (and big!) birds, and just knowing more of their names is really helping me to develop an appreciation for all of the many varieties and patterns and colours. Starlings are so spiky and have an understated green iridescence. Black-headed gulls look like they're wearing a deku mask. Little Auks look like very cute little aliens.

They are all so great. I love them. 

My Trinkets

It's a soothing thought, perhaps, that everyone has trinkets and other ephemera floating around in their lives. That's part of what makes "what's in my bag?" posts so fascinating — the fact that we all have miscellaneous stuff. That's right boys, I used an em dash. Don't be scared.

I love to see the contents of people's bags, wallets, or drawers. Do you have cash? Do you have a library card? Do you have a photo of someone? Maybe I'll show you what's usually in my bag later, but right now, here's a selection of things that I store in a little plastic folder. These are my mementos.

But what the hell are they? Let me explain them to you. From left to right:

1.  My school photo. Looking good!
2.  A handwritten thank you note from my favourite Tokyo restaurant, Umezono Sushi.
3.  My Ghibli Museum ticket.
4.  A picture of a child that I found on the ground in Paris (Amélie moment). 
5.  Origami cranes, a small gift from another restaurant in Japan.
6.  Musée d'Orsay and Arc de Triomphe tickets (€16? Is she rich?).
7.  Bunny. I just like him. 

You are Going to Start a Blog Now

It's the third of January. You're thinking, "I can't start a blog now? Two days after the beginning of the year? Why, everyone would point and laugh at me. No one would be impressed." 

That's me blogging.

WRONG. I would be impressed. I would clap. Like this:

That's me clapping.

I have been ceaselessly obsessed with This Kind of blog for a pretty long time. My beautiful blogspot which you are looking at right now never took off, never became some kind of indie sensation. No, it languished alone and neglected after everyone stopped doing blogs, started doing YouTube, pivoted to video in a more crazed way than ever before, and birthed the dawn of the current wave of short-form video which has most internet users in a chokehold in one way or another.

My 86 year old grandfather is looking at and playing short videos on his phone. I don't know how this happened, and it frightens me - not least because the volume on that phone is turned up HIGH.

But what I need you to do right now, if you have even a sliver of diaristic noodling within your mushy little brain, is start a blog. Or log back into your old one, if you were already one of us, one of our fallen brethren. I think, one day, sooner than I'm ready for, Blogger will get shut down. Unless everyone starts getting really into it. I mean, what if we all had one, huh? Wouldn't that be a beautiful big world of blogalicious joy and fun?

A beautiful image of this very post.

Yes, it would be. Which is why you need to make a blog. Do it today. Write something overly personal. Write a horrible poem. Show me your outfit (we can act like lookbook.nu never died). Are you listening to me? Are you hearing me?

I am calling out to you. I need you. Start a blog.

Delicious 2026

Good January to you, dear reader.

I'm not really, traditionally, a New Year's resolution type person. I prefer to just drift along as usual, but I also just regularly try new things and get into a new goal, so I think overall it can feel a bit redundant. I don't have any amazing ideas springing to mind for this new and delicious year, but it is true that in 2025 I finally came to understand that mysterious beast we call "the gym". And as it turns out, I like her. Except for her cancellation policies, which are always bad, and which always incur a string of emails that feel like you're being pursued by the most inept police force in the world. They can only communicate via email, but their pursuit of you is certainly relentless.

So that's one glorious habit formed, crystallised, made permanent within me. And I do have the gentle suggestion of bicep muscles at this time. They are real. I hope they won't sink back into me and smooth out. I'd like to have a trace of evidence.

Anyway, I do have some vague interests, let's put it that way. I read thirteen books in 2025. I'd like to read a higher number this year, and in particular some non-fiction, focusing on early American history. Thomas Jefferson and all that. John Adams, who so far I have learned liked his wife. Good for him.

I also received a diary for Christmas, and a beautiful fountain pen, so it goes without saying that a physical diary entry is going to be happening to me every day - in that luscious school-blue ink. Very good. I've missed keeping a diary.

Mostly, though, the major thing I want to do is make more videos. It's tough to get the pace right considering things like variable video length (I'm working on an hour-long one, and while that's great for a big chunky video that viewers can sink into, it's extremely bad for getting videos made in reasonable time-frames). I've been making a video for Patreon every month since June, and so in six months I'll be able to start posting those publicly (my whole thing there is that they're exclusive for a year, and then go fully public). I'm pretty excited to be able to do that, but it means that until then, my public output looks low - because I'm spending time making sure those bonus videos are done every month, instead of just making more public videos that can be seen by all.

I also had the trouble of a repetitive strain injury, which meant I had to massively reduce my editing time so that I could rest, and so a video I wanted to get done in October will now, in the best case scenario, be posted in January. I'm hoping to improve my workflow to mitigate this sort of thing, and it might just require the videos I make to be shorter for the foreseeable future. I'm not totally sure what exactly I'm going to do, I just know that this is the major thing I'd like to improve in the next year. Become better at making the videos.

But that's boring, so whatever. I'll read 43 books. I'll watch Pluribus. I'll draw every picture on my phone. I'll rotoscope some animations of Saul Goodman. Yeah.

Happy New Year! 

I TAKE TOO MANY PHOTOS (and yet not enough)

I swear, every time I look through my phone’s IMAGE FILES I am greeted by the unstoppable and dire realisation that no, I will never be a true neat minimalist legend. I will simply be a woman with things. And the things I have the most of, clearly, will be all those alluring files I keep on my precious phone. 

Blossom in New York, 8th April 2024.

The best thing, without a doubt, is that they’re backed up. Because they’re not stored in one easily destructible phone, but on Google’s big, meaty servers too, everything was basically okay when I abandoned my poor phone at Heathrow last October. Am I still hurt by how lacklustre the lost & found department at the airport was? Yes. Am I still haunted by the knowledge that at any time it can all go south, and I can be on a 12 hour flight without my phone, saying, “wow I wish I had my phone”, and then be in Tokyo for maybe a week and a half completely phone-less, gazing at commuters eyes fixed on their phones like an orphan at an out-of-reach bowl of gruel? Yes. But basically, it was fine. Still got all my pics. Still got most of my apps (although tragically I lost the now-unavailable free version of Kanji Tree, but the person who made it deserves cash money, and I have other kanji apps).

I went to a safari park with my family, and I saw ponies there (yesssss).

The point is, my pics and snaps are eternal. They will never die. They will exist as long as I have storage left. And I do. I do have storage left.

They accumulate though. Like a big mould. Sometimes I look back upon them, and find seven near-identical photos of me standing in front of a landmark. None of them are “show to another human being” level images. And yet they are here, in the bowels of the phone. Lurking.

I love them. 

Eclipse in New York, 8th April 2024.

Here are some pictures from my recent outings. Try to guess what events may have lead me to take them. Try to imagine the rich life I may be leading. And then smile as you look. These are my images. This is me.

Abandoned Squirtle, 9th May.

Tasty treat, 21st June.

Hand reaching out, 30th May.

Lost Mickey, Tokyo, 3rd Jan.

Gratitude, or Whatever

The idea of a gratitude journal is so straightforwardly nice. List the things that make you happy. List your deepest thanks for all the coffees you had today. A transcendent and gracious act, and if you do it, you are better than everyone. You are like an angel.

I am grateful for: this guy.

It sounds a bit too direct, I think. A "gratitude journal" sounds like something a weird older relative would make you do, aged seven on a Sunday when you really, really would rather be evolving your Eevee into an Espeon. I guess maybe I'd prefer a general scrapbook or journal. One that was just like any other, except that you knew, in your own gorgeous, big mind, that it was for recording all that good stuff around you. It's a secret, and that makes anything better.

Another point is that I am a hater, and I value hating. Being thankful and enjoying stuff can certainly be fun, but babes, I need my rage. I need my fresh, searing irritation and bitter resentment. And you know, all the things between that and pure, idyllic, heavenly love and admiration and joy. Because sometimes all the great things make the bad things seem that much more unfair. We need the whole bundle. A dog caused very hot coffee to be spilled on me yesterday. And I do not forgive that dog. 

Ok fine, I forgive the dog.

Blossoms are allowed to flower in the USA.

Anyway, I suppose this is my gratitude journal, for right now. I am grateful for the ability to feel the whole steaming circus of emotions. I am especially grateful to have learned that I can be really mad for a second (e.g. aforementioned dog hot coffee incident) and then just get over it (after my aunt puts my jumper, now moist with coffee, in the wash). I am grateful for the pretty white blossoms that show up everywhere in spring, a unifying feature of all sorts of places - and one that I have used to decorate this post. Wherever you go (or at least... in many places) you will be comforted by the blossom. It belongs with you, and you belong with it. The world is with you, y'know? Familiar things remain.

I am grateful for the glimpses of what I would call my "true" look - glumpy type woman, slouchy jumper, hair up. I like the times I see myself in the mirror and think, "yeah......... that's so me". That's the platonic ideal of me. Very satisfying.

Glump woman.

Lastly, I am grateful for sleep, which I will do now.

                                                                                                 (Goodnight)

One Bag

I've been thinking a lot about hoarding lately. Both the actual serious medical condition, and more broadly the way we collect and keep so many objects in our lives. I've always been extremely interested in stuff like the (briefly very popular, but seemingly a bit less so these days) online minimalism movement. I love looking at a photo of someone's single 40L bag that they take travelling with them. I love thinking, "what if everything I own could fit into a bag like that?" and then never actually remotely reaching such a goal.

What if I only had this tote bag? Wow.

I always think there'd be such an immense freedom in that. Just me and my Big Bag. A few years ago I bought a desktop computer. And I got a yellow desk to put my monitor on. And then I got a beautiful Rode Procaster microphone and arm from a very generous friend (thank you Hayley!). And so now there's this extra corner of my room that belongs to me. An immobile beast. I love it, and I love playing games on it, and I often use it to stream - which has earned me at least $20, if not more ;-)

But still, often I think, ok, what if I got rid of that stuff? That thing will not, unfortunately, fit in my backpack.

Digital hoarding, too, is something I'm interested by. Not least because I am always running the risk of filling up my free Google Photos storage. And nothing in this world could ever make me pay for more of it. But what am I to do with all my beautiful photos and videos? Well, lately I've been making short videos with my collected footage and posting them on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, but this practice does in fact make it so that I record a lot more videos than I otherwise would. It's very satisfying though, and I get to enjoy deleting all the footage when I'm done. Perfect.

It's easy, of course, to keep a million digital files, because they essentially take up no space. But I try to stay in the habit of constantly pruning them. I love to delete. I love to kill. Pictures are so amazing, because they help you to save memories, but in some cases I really only need what's in my head.

Still, better to keep endless digital clutter than physical. I look at my chunky black backpack wistfully. I think it's a 40L bag. It's great for travelling, and I can usually easily fit everything I need in there. But everything I own? Not even close. Maybe one day.

The painting I'm looking at here is 'Hof zwischen Großstadthäusern'
(Courtyard between City Housing), by Erich Miller-Hauenfels. In Vienna's Leopold Museum.

The Great Social Media Wars of 2023

Here we are, in a landscape of digital turmoil, scrambling around like bees looking for a new hive. I’m feeling nostalgic about lots of things, like Myspace (which there is now a dupe for) and something I can’t remember the name of which was present on websites in the 90s: a lighthouse you could click on that would take you to a random website. This was the way the online world first opened up to me as a young child. Click on the lighthouse. You’ll see something new. I’m not sure if it was a webring or something slightly different, but I found the lighthouse theming quite captivating. The imagery of the guiding light at the edge of a vast, moving sea. It was perfect for what the web was, and how wide open and personal it felt.

Perhaps something a bit like this.

You can do the same sort of thing on Wikipedia, and it’s so fun! Just click on a random page, learn about Frontiers of Science (a comic strip about - you guessed it - the frontiers of science). Great! Remnants of exploration are around, but more hidden than they were. Stumbleupon was another way to discover things online, popular around 2010, but it bit the dust finally in 2018. The web had become more insular.

The internet has come to be a much more ordered, corporate space as it has evolved across the past few decades. It’s often portrayed in movies that explore it as a physical space as an uninspiring, futuristic, clinical mall (e.g. Wreck it Ralph 2, Ready Player One, The Emoji Movie). This alone speaks volumes. Oh to wander the Pinterest and Spotify and Snapchat skyscrapers. Oh to suck up the empty space.

Wreck-It Ralph 2's Amazon zone.

So the internet is in large part, a shopping zone. It’s Times Square. It’s nasty. And now we have our dedicated posting apps. Clean and white and empty (the influence of the iPhone is insurmountable), and filled with ads that feel increasingly random and esoteric, despite the grand accumulation of data to “personalize” them. Wow, I didn’t know I needed… a kind of odd graphic tee. Thank you Twitter. Thank you for serving me five thousand bra ads a day. I am ready to buy now.

Ok ok, that’s the landscape. We all know about it. The built-in creative fun of Myspace and Livejournal has been drifting away from us on a makeshift raft for a long time (although Tumblr, maintaining some relic status as the prime social media type thing for weird art girls of the past 10 to 15 years, still has some of this). Part of my personal response to this lately has been to jump into Neocities and to revive this gorgeous blog (you’re welcome). And I’d like to encourage other people to get over here and get into this kind of “personal site/blog/hub” way of posting, but it’s certainly not a one-for-one replacement for social media, and this is an essential part of the weird problem we’re facing here.

The Jonathan Richman page of my website (important).

There are some unique pros to enjoy about modern social media. Obviously one huge reason it came about was because the phone became our primary way of getting online, and our websites and blogs weren’t and still aren’t really suited for that format. There’s also so much breezy simplicity in browsing a ton of short-form content and having a feed for that. It is a shame, I think, that feeds for long form content have been starved out (I used to use Bloglovin’ a lot and now that thing is a hollowed out corpse sitting there, impossible to log into, repulsive to see), but it’s simply not a replacement for the short-form feed we’ve come to know and adore. Short form content is different, fun, wild. It is not your noodling blog post, nor your meticulously crafted HTML nightmare website with a thousand blinkies. It’s its own thing, and it needs its own home.

So here we are at the crossroads between all the new Twitter-likes, and it’s clear now, looking at them all, that Twitter was (is) monumental. It was instrumental in making the short text post a content king. It made it so we can harangue celebrities at will. It took us to new oversharing heights, and it made communicating with your online pals easier than ever. I have met, at this point, most of the people in my life via Twitter. I’ve found countless artists and Final Fantasy podcasters and Jar Jar Binks freaks on there who have inspired me a huge amount. And while I would absolutely follow their weird blogs where they post regular 1000 word posts about medieval cross sections of frogs or whatever, there is no replacing the Twitter format. We need the little posts.

So what’s it to be? Let me run through all the platform options I am currently aware of and give you my Big Thoughts on all of them. It’s hard to say which will come out on top. Maybe none of them. Maybe we’ll just use all of them forever.

Tumblr

Tumblr lives under the looming shadow of its past, and this is both a deterrent and a selling point. It’s somewhat nostalgic, and honestly I love it for a lot of complex reasons. To me, Tumblr was always sort of an art place. The people I follow there are very funny and creative. But there certainly is a culture there (and this is an issue with every Twitter alternative here - there is a certain vibe to the userbase which may or may not be to your liking).

There is a sense on Tumblr of being in some sort of secret den. It’s also always felt like more of a female-heavy place to me and I do enjoy that. The feeling of just being surrounded by feral, creative girls. It’s good. I think there are some small UI issues that linger and could go a long way, if changed, towards making Tumblr feel smoother. For example, I notice the images there being slow to load much more often than on other apps. I don’t wanna see those placeholder gradients anymore. I banish them.

Mastodon

I have a soft spot for Mastodon. There is something relaxed about it. I never personally had any onboarding problems, but I think even a small amount of unsmoothness ends up amounting to a big issue just because people will go to whatever platform offers them the easiest signup experience and integration into the app/site culture. Immediately this place gained a reputation for having USER RULES (uh oh!) and I think this will probably linger. I also have experienced some annoying technical issues, usually images not posting (which I tend to only notice when I come back hours later and see an error message). This may be more to do with Tusky (the app I use to do Mastodon posting on my phone), but it highlights another issue of complication, which is the fact that there are multiple proprietary apps to choose from - so you’re faced with another decision to make. Not necessarily a big problem for the individual user, but an issue for swathes of people who just want to download an app and join a platform swiftly.

I like the culture on Mastodon - it’s a lot of people who are interested in minute tech details, literature, old web stuff, their favourite 1993 video game, etc - but it clearly has not gripped the masses and has instead ended up as a hub for different varieties of nerd. It’s quite a relaxing place, but it feels slightly clunky and empty. It feels at once exactly like Twitter, and yet somehow also too different. For whatever reason, I rarely browse there.

Bluesky

Bluesky to me is the technical best of the bunch. It doesn’t have gif or video posting yet, nor direct messaging, but it feels solid. It has alt text. It has some good moderation options. It feels more populated than Mastodon despite being invite-only. This is essentially my favourite one at the moment, but the major downside for me is that much of the prominent userbase on there currently are not the sort of people I’m interested in following. There’s quite a lot of sexual content on there, and while a lot of people have referenced the lack of that sort of thing as a major negative for them on other apps, I personally prefer an app where you simply can’t post nudes. Not just because I don’t want to see those things (which Bluesky is currently ok at moderating via user controls), but I find it fosters a wider user culture that I don’t really like. A pervert culture. lmao

Nevertheless, I’m very interested in Bluesky, and curious to see what things will be like when the place opens up fully (it’s still invite-only at the moment). It feels like a really direct Twitter alternative (thanks in no small part, I’m sure, to a Twitter founder building it), it feels responsive, and it feels relatively alive.

Cohost

Cohost is web-only, which is a huge detriment to its use as a true social media replacement. After trying it out for a while I stopped, partly for this reason, but also because it feels the most barebones. It feels clunky and underpopulated, it doesn’t give you notifications, and it’s essentially a worse version of Tumblr. It’s cute but it doesn’t really work for me.

Threads

Ok. Threads is the new big fella in town. Meta swooped in with a pretty decently structured app. It feels a lot like Hive (which I will touch on next), and it feels a lot like Bluesky (albeit without some of the neat features there). The huge advantage of this one for me was that I could slam all my Instagram followers (and following) over onto Threads, which gives me a nice built-on audience and immediate connection to a bunch of people I already know and follow. That’s huge for the ease of onboarding. If you have an Instagram account you are almost already there.

The downside here is that it feels corporate. There’s a strange algorithmic feed which will inevitably show you some BRAND and INFLUENCER posts that feel aimless and intrusive, but it’s also filled up immediately with tons of users comparitive to other platforms. As an art poster, it was immediate for me to see my feed populated with tons of artists who already used Instagram, and this is the natural platform for them. There is a somewhat sanitised feel here, but at the same time people are not shy about bringing in their shitposting, and it’s nice to see people I have followed on Instagram and seen mainly image posts from in the past from letting loose and going textpost crazy.

Another tragedy, for me, is that because your username is linked to Instagram, I have to have an underscore in my name here. This is true violence.

I’m writing this very soon after the launch of Threads, so the excitement of something new is still pretty palpable, but so far I like the intensely populated, party feel of this one. Also, Limmy is there and his posts are golden.

Hive

Hive is most certainly done for, especially now with Threads coming in, but it was interesting how quickly art and game dev types scrambled to get onto this one. I don’t really know how it happened, I just woke up one day and everyone was on Hive. Then a little while later the whole thing shut down in response to security concerns and that was that. It was unusable for a good while, but it’s still up now and a very small amount of people are still using it. A very curious relic, and for a moment, it could’ve been something. Threads is a technically superior version of this one in any case.

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For now, Threads and Bluesky are the options I’m most interested in, and I’m curious to see how they evolve as time goes on. I hope that at some point we’ll settle into some stability, but whatever happens, long live posting, I suppose.

EDIT: Since writing this a few days ago, interesting things have happened on both Bluesky and Threads. Bluesky has gotten into hot water with the userbase for failing to implement preventative measures against usernames including racial slurs. Meanwhile, Threads has forced users within the EU out, blocking them from using the app even with a VPN. It seems that the Twitter-alternative world is still staunchly in its infancy, with every alternative possessing some glaring issues, whether lack of features, annoying glitches, or more complex and unwieldy user culture problems. 

It seems to me, ultimately, that we're facing a huge shift, and that perhaps none of these alternatives will be enough to replace Twitter wholesale. None of them appear to be able to reach its heights.