RAG

Mar 11, 2022

It’s snowing outside. It looks really pretty. I just finished reading ‘My Life In Art’. I feel like it had so much to teach. It was very dense in knowledge. I’m sure it will have a good effect on me.

I smoked weed yesterday, so I’m a little tired today. I’m hoping to try some sort of system where I stay sober for like a week, then smoke at the end of it. The problem always is that I end up smoking for more than just one day. I have a hard time not becoming a total pothead. It’s impossible to grow when I’m high. 

I just find it really useful to smoke once in a while because of the new perspective I always get. It doesn’t help to actually be high when living my life. It makes everything much more boring and difficult. I see weed as being like goggles you can put on once in a while, just to get a perspective shift.

For example, when I’m building the website and I feel stuck on something, I find that after smoking weed I suddenly see a new approach that is totally obvious. The weed does nothing to help with actually implementing the new idea. It actually makes that part way, way harder. Weed just sends me straight into my head. In some cases that sucks and is anxiety inducing, while in other cases it turns out to be helpful. 

The problem is when I get stuck with it. Once I start doing it every day it becomes pretty pointless. Sure, I may have tons and tons of ideas, but because I’m tired and lazy I never actually implement any of them. That’s where being sober is so important.

I’m also wary of designing a system whereby I rely on marijuana for inspiration and direction. It sorta seems like a bad road, long term. But maybe not, I don’t know yet. If I can control it then I think it's fine. It’s just this problem of abusing it.

I talked to mom last night and she told me how excited Yoga and Pablo are about the idea of me going to Australia and staying with them. That’s really great news. It is exactly what I’ve wanted for the last couple years, and I don’t think the full weight of it has set in yet. 

I have an opportunity similar to the one Liam had, in that there’s a new location with a job and home already waiting for me. It’s awesome news. I can move to Australia if I want to. I can do it. There’s a very clear destination, I just have to travel along the path over the next months to get it all set up. 

There’s this funny feeling about the idea of leaving Toronto. The main one is Nana. She’ll be very alone once I leave. Of course I don’t want to make decisions based solely on her. That would be robbing myself of something important. 

The other factor is this apartment. I hope that we can figure out a way in which we can keep this place. Maybe dad could stay here? Maybe Jason could kinda become in charge, and I could find a great person to rent out my room. I could charge a little extra, like $700 a month, that way I’d make a little extra money.

I also think about friends. There’s a few friendships that might not survive the move. 

I think I had a pretty simple idea of girls. I was not used to the idea of personality being a whole separate factor from looks. I guess I always assumed that being attracted to someone meant that you’d also be attracted to their personality.

I’ve gotta walk Harry today at 3, but that’s about it. I don’t want to smoke weed. I’ve got work tomorrow morning at 9 am. I’d like to start reading the next book. It’s called ‘Mila 18'. Nana got it for my birthday.

I really need to write about my website. I need to get all the principles, goals, ideas down on paper. There’s so much I’ve learned. When I talk to people, those things start to bubble up and I could talk for hours about it. I need to actually write it down.

The original purpose was to just have all the things I’ve made in one public place. It’s basically a hard drive, only the hard drive is made public.

I’d thought about this kinda thing forever. A cool website is one of the things I thought about since I was like 15. I used to write about how I wanted to make ‘the world’s first digital art gallery’. 

At the time I imagined a website that would feel similar to Mario 64. I remember how he could walk around this art gallery and jump into the paintings. I imagined that my website would be organized and displayed like that. You’d control an avatar or character and walk through the halls of a building, where all the things I’d made were up on the walls.

I made my first website when I was about 21, but that was intended to be a professional portfolio. All of my personal projects were being uploaded to whichever sites best housed them, such as Vimo and YouTube for my videos, SoundCloud, Bandcamp and Spotify for my music, Instagram and Flickr for my photos, and Commaful for my stories. 

I always sorta hated how spread apart everything felt. I knew that eventually I wanted a single website with everything on it. Honestly though, I felt pretty certain that it would be years and years away. It just seemed like such a massive undertaking and so unrealistic at the time. I’m very surprised that it manifested itself so early on. I really saw this as being a thing I’d work on later.

The biggest reason for starting work on it has to do with leaving Instagram. If I hadn’t left Instagram I would never have started. I remember smoking some weed, going for a walk, and just realizing that no matter how I looked at it, Instagram made me feel like shit. I always sorta knew that, but this time it was different, because I had actually tried my best to grow on Instagram. I had tried every type of content imaginable and was posting on a daily basis, over the course of like a year and a half. I’d posted songs, music videos, street photography, photoshop art. Nothing worked, and my followers actually went down and down. 

So not only did I recognize how shitty it made me feel, I also realized that it just didn’t work for me! It’s not like I was successful but felt disillusioned. I was unsuccessful AND disillusioned.It just sucked all around. So I felt that I had literally nothing to lose by leaving.

So I left, and felt better pretty much right away. The thing was, I still had the urge to share things with people. So for a while I was posting on TikTok. I started writing and recording a new original song AND music video EVERY SINGLE DAY. Nothing happened. I watched all the videos about what you’re supposed to do to grow. I was even posting 6 videos a day at one point. It was all that I was doing. Nothing happened at all. 

So I deleted TikTok eventually. It was around this point that I remember lying in bed, having smoked some weed, and imagined this home page for a website where it said my name and then had all the years I’d been alive right underneath it. It looked really cool in my head.

The website and the system I’m working on can ultimately become a really cool ecosystem. I’ve already envisioned a couple different uses.

So the website will be everything I make sorted chronologically. There will also be a similar back-end system. What I’d like to develop is a way that I can drop images into a little folder and it automatically adds the date that it was created and just prompts me to name it. It also gives me the option to automatically update the website with the new piece. There will also be an option to automatically put the things I’ve made through the RAG. I can choose the template and it’ll group them together into a new art piece, and I can easily put all the exports through over and over creating an infinite amount of new pieces. 

These can automatically upload to the website. So basically, when I place them into a folder on my computer, it automatically updates the website, very similar what to Apple has done with iCloud. I’d like the same software on my phone, so that photos or notes I create can be immediately catalogued and uploaded to the website.

One decision I gotta make has to do with the back-end. I want to make it easy to locate things. That’s more important than it is on the website. On the website it’s not super important to be able to locate specific things, at least for the time being. However, on the backend, it should absolutely be simple to locate things. I want this all to serve as a really good file management system as well. 

There’s a few different ways to sort things, and so what might make sense is to start with four folders: ‘Sounds’ ‘Pictures’ ‘Words’ ‘Videos’. As far as I can tell most things I make fit into one of those categories. Once you’re in those folders, everything is sorted by date. That should make things quite a bit easier to locate. I don’t like it for the website, because part of the point of the website is that you’re looking at an analogy of a person. You’re seeing the digital version of a person. A reflection of a person. 

A real person is chronological, I think. There is the fact, though, that humans can go to different places in their mind instantly. They can locate certain memories. So I think that eventually the website needs a similar function. I don’t like the idea of a search bar. I only want to do it if it can be done the way humans do it, where it’s instant.

Is it instant? And I realize that when humans do it, it’s not all that reliable. I’m basically asking if I should give the website the ability to think, I think.