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<title>sensory overload - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios</title>
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<p align="center"><b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b></p>
<p><b>sensory overload</b></p>
<p><b>published: 1-20-2019</b></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Instead of mindlessly browsing social media, shooting out shitposts at the speed of light that won’t matter next time the sun kisses us with its rays, I’m staring at a blank file in Nano during a babysitting job for my brothers. They’re blasting two different video games at the same time in the same room, and their eyes are practically glued to the TVs, so there really isn’t much “babysitting” for me to do.</p>
<p>But because of the discordant sounds, I can’t concentrate well, so I already know I’m not going to be writing the next Shakespeare in these three hours I have to sit here. I type three words, and then I get distracted by the Smash 4 theme, and then I come to my senses fifteen minutes later, no closer to another post than I was.</p>
<blockquote>
my brother’s friend, playing <i>Super Mario Odyssey</i>: “bassist” sounds like “racist”
</blockquote>
<p>I remember the first time I played Smash. It was a complete sensory overload: the only characters I recognized were the Mario ones, and <em>maybe</em> Link and Zelda; the music blared at top volume since the TV remote was missing, probably under someone’s butt in the crowded side room all my cousins and other kids were forced into while the adults drank themselves silly with Christmas Eve alcohol; and there weren’t enough controllers, so the loser had to give up their controller every time.</p>
<p>It was flashy, and it was chaos, and I fell in love at first sight. Much like the modern Web, or the <a href="gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-18__Small_Internet_Manifesto.txt">“large internet”</a>. Both with a user/fanbase festering with entitlement and unwarranted self-importance, both with a carefully curated experience meant for wide-scale consumption, both actively resistant to any attempts to modify it and make it one’s own. (Seriously, it really shouldn’t be <em>this</em> hard to make Smash mods more complicated than “original recolor, donut steel”.)</p>
<p>Here, the similarities end. Because Smash is, at the end of the day, just a fighting game for little kids. You can’t dox people with it, or send mobs to harass people on it. But you also can’t really make friends with it. It’s an experience set in stone. It’s a single-purpose item.</p>
<p>But the <a href="gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-16__The_Small_Internet.txt">Large Internet</a>… There, or <em>here</em> if you’re reading this on an HTTP mirror, you can do <em>anything</em>. You can say <em>anything</em>. Anyone can start a server and start publishing their own material without the gatekeeping of the older forms of mass media.</p>
<p>However, despite this, the current societal trend seems to be to confine oneself to a handful of massive silos. Millions, if not billions, of people screaming all at the same time, but not all the <em>same</em> message at the same time, discordant voices along with the advertisements and flashy colors and dark patterns.</p>
<p>Sensory overload, as it were.</p>
<p><a href="gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7evisiblink/phlog/20190109">The terminal, however, feels different.</a> I have yet to see an ad on someone’s homemade phlog. If anyone had an ANSI-fueled eyesore of a color scheme, I wouldn’t know it, since my custom colorscheme overrides everything. Browsing through someone’s gopherhole doesn’t use megabytes upon megabytes of tracker scripts and cryptomining and seventeen imported JavaScript frameworks.</p>
<p>The Zaibatsu, and the Small Internet as a whole, feels like the old library at my old high school, before they tore everything down and built a brand-spaking-new building in its place. The walls were close to falling down, and the tables and chairs were scattered everywhere, and half of the bookcases had plastic veils on them to protect the books from the dust and residue that would occasionally snow from the ceiling. It was a tiny space, where I spent the free time I got whenever class got cancelled by playing with my new laptop (back when it had Windows 10 and I hadn’t discovered Linux yet) and emulating <em>Fire Emblem Fates</em> at five frames per second on a bleeding-edge build of Citra and editing <em><a href="https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/books.html">Me Before You</a></em>. The whole building had a sickly-sweet smell, which made my stomach lurch at first, but I eventually learned to love it, to associate it with <em>safety</em>.</p>
<p>With <em>home</em>.</p>
<p>The Large Internet, on the other hand, feels like the library that took its place. Set on an outlook peering over the cafeteria, it’s constantly loud. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. There’s only a few places to sit, and the computers there run an extremely locked-down version of Windows 10 with the school’s filtered and censored internet. Technically speaking, it’s capable of more, but in practice, it actually does less.</p>
<p>I’ve revived my grandma’s old Acer Aspire One notebook. It only holds 51% of its original battery capacity, and the single gigabyte of memory severely limits what I can do with it. I have to run it in a TTY most of the time, since graphical environments hog memory, and for the few GUI programs I can’t live without, I have a broken i3 config I can <code>startx</code> into.</p>
<p>In the Large Internet, the netbook immediately wimps out. Only ten minutes of battery life, CPU slowing down to a crawl, 100% RAM usage, if I’m lucky. Without luck, the whole thing just freezes.</p>
<p>In the Small Internet, even with whatever bug keeps making dmesg puke all over my screen, I can still browse and write and check in on my friends and acquaintances with little lag, the only barriers being how fast I can type on the <em>incredibly cramped</em> keyboard and how long I can make the shitty battery last.</p>
<p>It’s slow. It’s contemplative. It satisfies my soul. It was where computers began, and when the Large Internet comes crashing down in flames like a gas blimp gone wrong and “normies” struggle to come to terms with the reality that they willingly gave up control of their inner selves, it is where they will end.</p>
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