Home For Fiction – Blog

Yes, Home for Fiction is back with new blog posts. The phrase of the title (… new beginning) refers to the last post published some eight months ago. Other than new blog posts, things haven’t changed. The site has been online, and I’ve been publishing Punning Walrus cartoons daily.

There are two components involved in this new beginning:

• an ideological one; what made me stop last year and why I have decided to resume.
• a methodological one; how I decided to resume, under what conditions.

Most readers discovering this post by accident will probably not care enough about the details. However, that’s part of the ideological foundation too, as you will discover…

A New Beginning for Home for Fiction: The Ideological Cesspool our (Digital) World Has Become

Though the surrounding concepts have all the ingredients of a grumpy old man tilting at windmills, at the same time it’s hard to deny there’s a fundamental truth to the following statement: Our societies are becoming shittier. People become more self-absorbed and stupid, and less accepting and respecting. There are specific reasons, and I’ll refer you to Castoriadis for all the details.

I’m fucking tired of seeing pointless “art” made by AI (whether in the form of pictures or even text), bots talking to other bots on social media (which I don’t visit, but I learn about indirectly), and overall precious little humanity. And so, about a year ago, I thought “fuck it, I don’t care. Let everything go belly up”.

Funnily enough, that was sort of the same reason why this new beginning takes place.

Selfishness FTW…

In a sense, the reason I decided to make a new beginning for Home for Fiction – that is, write new posts – is because everything feels so fucked up that the only pleasure I get from being online is making stuff on my own.

So just as I’ve been drawing Punning Walrus or playing with code because I wanted to distract myself and avoid reading news or seeing pointless discussions, I now felt like I wanted to write blog posts again.

Ultimately, I want to focus on making something good for purely selfish reasons; I just want the reward of making it and seeing it.

However, there is more to it…

A New Beginning: From Ideology to Methodology

It’s not only in digital terms our world is becoming shittier. I almost never refer to “news” or “current affairs” on the blog because they come and go. I prefer to focus on more fundamental aspects of society, culture, and philosophy.

Nonetheless, we can’t deny the world has entered a new phase, with a massive, monumental paradigm shift. To put it bluntly, I would’ve never guessed I’d witness one of the world’s most important societies shoot itself in the foot.

Parenthesis:

Now, let’s make one thing clear: I don’t have any sort of strong national (or other) identity. I don’t think of myself as Greek, Finnish, or European – in the same way I don’t think of myself as straight, cis, or man, although I am all of the above. My only sense of identity (sort of) is that I am me.

And still, the paradigm shift I referred to made me feel very strongly about two things:

• I wanted to decouple myself from relying on large corporations, particularly American ones.
• I wanted to favor European products, both digital and otherwise.

How this is relevant to this new beginning for Home for Fiction, you might ask.

Digitally, We Can’t Be Free; but We Can Be Freer

Whether you’re a US citizen or not, take a step back and realize how much of your day-to-day activities (say, shopping online, checking emails, communicating in general) require you to rely on oligopolies based in the US. I’m not saying anything new, this is self-evident. Even if you don’t use social media (I don’t), it’s really hard to avoid Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and their like.

What you perhaps don’t know (unless you’re a programmer) is how much of the infrastructure of the internet at large relies on these American oligopolies.

Dystopias Begin with Oligopolies

Until this new beginning, Home for Fiction was hosted on a well-known US hosting service, on US servers.

I wanted to change that. I wanted to rely less on oligopolies, and I wanted to rely less on American business. So, among other changes, I moved the site to a European hosting service.

The road is long, the process is continuous. I mean, from a programmer’s perspective, how can you avoid using fonts, scripts, stylesheets, and other resources fetched remotely from, say, Cloudflare? Even if I technically use European servers due to proximity, it still is a US company; and a behemoth, at that. At some point I might bypass it altogether and only use local fonts, scripts, and stylesheets, we’ll see.

But at least Home for Fiction is now hosted on a local server, run by a small Finnish company, located near where I live.

Moreover, because I want to rely less on (American) oligopolies, I’ve made several changes on my personal day-to-day digital habits:

• I stopped using Google or Cloudflare DNS; I now use Quad9.
• I stopped using Google as a search engine, opting for Qwant.
• Similarly, I replaced Google Drive with Cryptpad and Filen, and Gmail with Tuta.
• I closed my Amazon and Ebay accounts. Fuck their capitalism-on-steroids practices that cause harm to people and the environment alike.

The services linked above are European and privacy-first – you can find plenty more on European Alternatives.

I’ve already been using Linux as my daily driver for quite some time, and the next step will be to install an alternative OS on my phone – you know, because I want to actually own it. I can’t be completely free (that’s how the internet works) but I can be freer.

So, what Happens with Home for Fiction?

As I said in the introduction, the rest of the site has been up and running all the time. I just stopped writing blog posts. Now I decided to write and publish more of them. There isn’t any set schedule, there are no guarantees of any sort whatsoever.

I do things for my sake only.

Ironically, that’s the only way for you to get something remotely useful or inspiring. Because money (and here we must include “likes”, promotion, fame, or whatnot) poisons everything.

Note: If you want, also take a look at my creative manifesto.