post-first-post ruminations and a proper intro

after re-reading my first post, i realized it probably doesn't perfectly serve its role as an intro post in that it doesn't really introduce WHO I AM. so in this post i've decided to briefly do a bit of that as well as offer what potentially may be a GAME CHANGING idea for this blog.

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chapter 1: the introduction that never was.

welcome to offline vibes!! my name is sean and im currently working as a software developer type person in the wonderful city of san francisco, ca. i'm just over one year out of college, having graduated from college [1] last yr. as u can gather from the first post, i have been reminiscing about an era now lost consisting of relatively anonymous online social presence + posting and interacting with your social circles through longer form pieces (e.g. blog posts) rather than short, more personalized status updates. a partial tl;dr of the first post: twitter fb etc. give me "running into someone u kinda know but not that well on the quad and chatting for like 2 mins" vibes whereas blogs give me more "late night convo in ur common room" vibes. the latter are much more precious, imo!

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chapter 2: future plans

i know that conventional wisdom probably wouldn't support subjecting a new idea to radical change soon after its inception, but i'm not a conventional person!! i work at a hypergrowth startup. so i decided fukk it. i realized that i want this blog to be a bigger deal than it might otherwise be and to that end, i'm considering tying it to my irl identity! maybe this is a bad idea. i haven't fully decided on that yet. but a component of that process that could also just be done by itself would be for me to build my own lightweight site to support this blog rather than using blogger.

pros:
* more control and "ownership" of hosting my own posts etc. (not that this is a big concern)
* fun side project
* potentially more clout

cons:
* more effort (this is fine, i'm hella bored)
* feature parity with blogger will be a long time coming (or probably never)
  * e.g. comments, comments w/ user account, internal tools for me

i think the pros outweigh heavily + also this maybe even would be **more** loyal to the vibes i'm trying to recreate anyway. so whether or not i end up hosting the blog strongly tied to my IRL identity, I think i'll definitely try to write up the site myself. i'll probably make some more posts on here outlining my progress but i'm hoping to get an MVP out pretty soon!

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chapter 3: bonus vibes

as i was taking a walk last night i had a few thoughts that i figured would be worthy of being mentioned on offline vibes [2]:

1. wearing a joy division shirt after college age [3] is like ... really risky. as in like 99% risk. as in no one except probably peter hook himself could pull it off.

2. i think i might start including a brief playlist of what im listening to with a blog post every so often. maybe if i enjoy it enough i'll like include notes abt each song. but basically it would just be "things im listening to rn." i'll start with this post and we'll see how it goes!

3. maybe this is because i grew up most of my life in "cold" states with "harsher" winters, but ive realized that im heavily opposed to hot and a much bigger fan of cold. all the more reason that global warming sucks!!!

 anyway, happy labor day weekend also! unfortunately i have ended up working for my company this weekend. damn. hopefully that will just serve to further radicalize me!

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playlist of the post (PotP)

i think this playlist is pretty indicative of what i usually am listening to in late summer. i return a lot to my summer 2017 playlist for inspo tbh, esp for hotter days for whatever reason. i'll probably make a separate post abt it sometime in the future bc i consider it a great collection of music.

1. "Ruby, My Dear" - Thelonious Monk Septet (Monk's Music, 1957) 

2. "Weather Bird" - Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines (The Complete Hot Five and Hot Seven Recordings, 1988)

3. "Ocean Drive" - 21 Savage, Metro Boomin (Savage Mode, 2016)

4. "Endomorph" - Allan Holdsworth (Secrets [Remastered], 1989)

5. "Location" - Playboi Carti (Playboi Carti, 2017)

I put the playlist up on apple music if you're lazy (link)

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[1] although i live on the west coast currently, i went to school on the east coast. i am perhaps the pinnacle of coastal elite: bicoastal elite.

[2] henceforth maybe OV? although that does overlap with popular d2c overpriced apparel company outdoor voices...

[3] to clarify: wearing it during college is also like at least 60% risky freshman year and moves up like 10% per year i'd say. realistically no one should be wearing one after freshman/soph year hs. i admit that i wore my JD shirt from late middle school throughout college.

first blog post. yipee!

 wat's up people. welcome to offline vibes! u may be thinking to urself: how can there be a BLOG which is ONLINE that is called (and thus presumably based around) OFFLINE vibes?

good question. to be honest, i'm not entirely sure! it just seemed like a good name. more than anything, it's like the sort of art where u just create something that looks nice and there is probably meaning in the story or reasons behind why u think it looks nice, but on a realistic level u just think it looks nice.

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anyway i just wanted to write about what's going on in my life and what im thinking about. i quit social media pretty much cold turkey a couple of months ago, and since then i've overall felt much better but i do think i miss the sort of broad online interaction that social networks give you. at the same time, i've always found myself nostalgic for the era of the internet when blogs and forums were a thing instead. i think the increased anonymity and "avatar"-ness of it all was way more compelling; maybe this is a view that is partially influenced by "old school" internet/techy types [1] but at the same time i think it's also just based on my experiences on something more like that form of internet.

the nice thing about blogging and forums imo was that it put basically everybody in a position where it was expected for u to just make random friends. because most everyone was represented by an avatar which was much more detached from oneself than the social media ones we use today, i think it made more sense to just talk to strangers and things like that. games like WoW, for instance, got big because people at the time didn't necessarily game with IRL friends. u would just sort of meet people online by coincidence and make friends, much like ppl do today in real life.

fwiw, that thing sort of does still happen in some circles i'm sure. to return to the WoW example, i've noticed that the "classic WoW" community (being a group that's obviously going to share the same sort of positive thoughts on "older school" internet vibes) seem to be much more friendly overall than players in the main game. at the same time, the community has a lot of toxicity too (which tbh, is also a big part of old internet; i don't miss it per se, but it was definitely part of the internet and i can't rly imagine things without the toxicity as well). but i think people are much more social overall.

if u think about it though, this really mirrors what's happening IRL too i think. the broader trend that i would say has been happening more and more often with people w phones, social media, n stuff, is that we're creating rly rly small circles (like cheerios) of "actual friends" and much much larger circles of "ppl ur friendly with." This is like exactly the facebook vibe!~! [2]

i think i'm starting to get more conscious specifically of the latter part after having lived in bay area and worked in tech/entrepreneurship for about 1.25 yrs now. u can very much sense the culture war between older and younger devs, and even if it's really unpronounced now (bc the older ones are basically donezo [3]), i do think echoes of that battle played out irl. linking back to my first bit, that declaration of internet independence or w/e guy totally was pwned by zuck in the end. and in some sense, that really sums up a lot of internet history.

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well there u go. the first post of "OFFLINE VIBES." thank u for reading and i hope u enjoyed! stay tune for future posts about whatever i am thinking about at the moment.

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[1] (like the guy who wrote this shit [link] or jared lanier, e.g.)

[2] "How much was the direction of the internet influenced by the perspective of nineteen-, twenty-, twenty-one-year-old well-off white boys?" Ezra Callahan, in this (link) N. yorker profile of zuck, orig. in Valley of Genius (Adam Fisher)

[3] might be wholly the subject of another post