Well, here we are, Lina. The eternal worm is about to devour Appalachia and us with it. We stand on the precipice watching the impending destruction. I wish you were really here with me right now and I wasn't actually talking to this blasted piece of paper, but that's just how things shook out, I guess. And you might think I'm being metaphorical and deep or something, but no. I'm being completely literal. there is a giant worm descending from the sky, its girth spanning hundreds of miles, mouth agape, about to take out a chunk of North America from eastern Kentucky all the way down to the northeast of Georgia, and we are just about at the epicenter. There's not enough time for us to escape. We are staring at the end of our lives. These are our final moments.

You know, the sunset is very pretty despite the giant worm and everything. People are screaming and panicking in the valley below, fighting each other for resources and rushing around in the vain hope of escaping, crashing cars into each other... Yet here we are at the top of a cliff face, overlooking it all in complete peace and serenity. We know how to embrace what they cannot.

My heart is racing and my body shakes, but in my mind and in my true heart, I feel nothing. I am completely calm and completely numb. Whatever happens from this point doesn't really matter. I can't control it. No one can. What is one supposed to do when he hears his home is about to be eaten by a giant worm, that it is approaching so quickly that there's no time to try to find somewhere to escape to? There's no point in panicking. I just accept that it was apparently inevitable (because why would it happen if it wasn't?) and watch the show.

The worm draws ever closer. Must be about 3 miles away. The sun is disappearing. I lay back on the grassy hill. It's getting cold. I really wish you were here, Lina, because maybe we could

I'm really missing you right n

It would be really nice if you were here in person, Lina... in a strange way, this is kind of beautiful, and I wish I had someone to share it w

I try to close my eyes but find myself unable. I stare down the throat of the insatiable worm. It must be 2 miles away. The sound of people panicking is dying down. Maybe they're finally starting to realize they can't avoid this. Maybe they're even coming to embrace it.

Still staring at the worm.

It continues to draw ever closer. It must be one mile away. I hear a banjo playing softly. Plucking a quick one out before the eternal worm devours Appalachia. That has a nice ring to it.

The worm now fills the entire sky. Most of the light is gone, but looking at the horizon, it looks like we have about 30 seconds before it makes landfall. The banjo still plays. The end is coming.

The ground shakes. It's here. It's starting. People are praying and singing hymns. I should probably go down and worship with them. I am a believer, after all. But I like it here up on the cliff face. The banjo is still playing.

Slowly we sink deeper into the worm's digestive tract. The air smells like dirt. The ground still shakes, but with an intensity that remains the same as when it started, so I quickly get used to it. Some have already succumbed to the earthquake and sunk into the earth, never to be seen again. For now you and I are safe at the top of this hill. The banjo has stopped, and the only audible sound is that of the worm's continuing feast.

I find myself strangely calmed by the darkness and the low rumble of shifting earth. My eyes drift closed and I start drifting off to sleep. Maybe by some miracle I'll wake up tomorrow and everything will be okay, and if not, that's okay too.

Continued in Part 2

The old new plan was to see Social Reckoning this week on Monday or Tuesday, but something came out that caused a change of plans. This little movie called "You Can See Everything". It's another A24 flick co-directed by Lance Oppenheim, the same director behind Primetime which I liked. This one is a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, the noted fraudster who supposedly aimed to revolutionize blood tests with her company Theranos but couldn't actually deliver on any of her promises. The other co-director is Nathan Fielder, a comedian known for his absurdist humor and dry demeanor. The movie apparently follows Holmes, but much of the focus is directed on Fielder's interrogation.

The premise isn't what hooked me, though. What got me interested was the incredible response. At the time of writing, the movie officially released yesterday, some people got to see advance screenings on Thursday, and the film has a 4.8/5 on Letterboxd averaged from 70,000 ratings. Keep in mind, this is the website where many of the films considered the greatest of all time struggle to break 3.9. YouTube reviewers say it's great. Traditional news media journalists say it blew their minds. I just have to wonder, what in the world is going on with this movie? It's apparently mind-blowing, the greatest movie of the year, a must-see. I usually don't let hype influence my decisions about what to see, but I have to admit I'm extremely curious.

So now the NEW new plan is to see that film, and I probably won't watch Social Reckoning until it comes out for rent on YouTube or something. I'll let you all know how it is, obviously. The weird thing is that it's not playing at either of my local theaters yet. Maybe they just have a thing against documentaries, but I have a feeling they're rushing to get it on their screens now that the reviews are in because a listing just came up on the site for the theater closest to me, though they don't have any showtimes yet. Well, I'm excited to see if this thing is really as crazy and life-changing as they say it is.

Y'all need Jesus

It's a cautionary tale on what happens when a powerful person with seemingly good intentions lets his ego go unchecked; when it stops being about chasing predators and starts being about chasing success.

Check out my full review on Letterboxd.

That said I'm not as upset with the low turnout as you might think. The lack of members has given me time to get familiar with the platform and experiment a bit and make sure things are ready in case it does finally pop off. Though if you are seeing this and are interested in the concept, I would absolutely love it if you would sign up and share the site with your friends! It would be cool to have a little network of founding members that recognize each other by name when waves of new members come in. Also it would help me out in gaining experience administering rambl to know how people use the platform, things that need to be changed/simplified, and to see a little community in action.

But I digress. I recognize that part of the reason rambl isn't seeing new members is because of the way I'm going about spreading the word: I wanted a slow rollout so I haven't talked about it in public spaces yet, I've only shared with friends and family so far since that way the stakes are lower and I'll be relatively safe from ire if I handle things wrong while I'm still figuring out website administration. I don't mind who anyone else shares rambl with, I just personally am trying to keep it relatively small right now.

On the subject of administration, I recognize some things need to be changed on the site: for one, the code of conduct needs to be separated from the terms and it needs to be expanded to include acceptable/unacceptable topics, a standard disciplinary process, etc. For another, the privacy policy is sparse and unprofessional and possibly inaccurate, in truth I don't understand everything the site collects and how much I have access to so I will need to go on a deep dive on that and update the policy accordingly. I also would like to make some adjustments to the site layout which is a bit of an undertaking, I will need to get familiar with a new scripting language for the site's template engine which is always fun (that was sarcasm)

I also wanted to talk about some ideas I've had to help spread the word about rambl. One is business cards as I mentioned in my last post about the site's tagline. That way I have something physical to give to people I see IRL so they can more easily remember my site and are more likely to actually follow through and make an account. Another is a video ad, I have an idea for a short (~30s) promo video that uses the song "Good Day" by Tally Hall so I'll update you all when I make progress on that.

Thanks for reading and hope to see you post your thoughts here on rambl!

Help me choose the tagline for rambl.social!

I want to have a tagline I can put on business cards and whatnot to try to get people interested in rambl. I'd like for it to be eye-catching and let people know what rambl is about. You can choose one of the six I came up with or suggest your own if you'd like!

https://strawpoll.com/B2ZB9722QgJ

For those of you who don't know, I have a letterboxd account where I rate and write about movies I've seen. I don't watch movies all the time but I'll have weeks or months where I see a bunch of them. I recently reviewed "The Social Network" and "12 Angry Men," and I plan to see "Primetime" this week in theaters. If you want to give me a follow you can find my profile here.

You can say what you want about the film but I think it's extremely poignant, though truthfully I'm too tired at the moment to really expound on how. Well, I can say this: it certainly foreshadows a lot about why the technological landscape we live in is such a hellscape right now. There's things characters say in this movie that seem so prophetic you wouldn't believe they came up with it in 2010.

Overall the movie was great and made me feel morally conflicted, which in this case is a good thing. It moves at a breakneck pace but that's not necessarily bad either, though I kind of had a hard time keeping up but that's probably more so due to the fact it's past my bedtime.

Hmmm... Something's wrong with this picture but I can't quite put my finger on it...

Couch multiplayer seems to have peaked on the Wii and its late-2000s contemporaries. I know it can't just be my own nostalgia saying that because my sister would agree, and she wasn't born until the Wii was already in its senior year. Though, I will admit we did end up growing up with mostly the same games as we wouldn't get a new console until I got my parents to pitch in to buy her a Switch for her birthday in 2020. Either way, even with us having access to newer and arguably better games, the ones on the Wii just seem to be better at bringing us closer together and just being plain fun.

We've been working our way through Kirby's Epic Yarn, New Super Mario Bros. Wii and just messing around in other games like Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Wii Music (the game itself might not be that good but it's given us lots of laughs) and we love those games. None of this is to say I'd give away my Switch and PC and only ever play Wii games forever, and I think I can say the same for my sister, but hey, if we were on a desert island that somehow had electricity and a TV...

What kind of games do you all have memories playing with your friends and family?

Though I have had the thought that a dumbphone wouldn't be the glamorous digital messiah I'm looking for that would immediately change my life and fix my mental health for good. No, what I'm probably longing for are the memories and the experience of being in middle school and getting my first phone. I didn't care that it wasn't a smartphone because it was a phone, and having a phone was cool. Now it's not just normal but expected, and that's taken a lot of the fun out of it.

Either way, after thinking about it for a bit that Alcatel probably wouldn't work on modern networks even if I was able to get it unlocked. I thought it was 4G but thinking about it more, it was already a bit of an older model by the time I got it and it was probably 3G at best. I would need to buy a new dumbphone, which itself isn't as easy of a prospect as you'd think. Smartphones are getting cheaper and cheaper, meaning there's less of a reason for manufacturers to even make dumbphones at all since one of the main reasons people even buy them is because they're not as much of an investment. Now the investments that really matter, your data privacy, screen time and exposure to algorithms, are all but forsaken, and the desire to get away from it all actually comes with a premium. Small companies overcharge for dumbphones that market themselves as such, and big companies' offerings are becoming harder to find and are often locked to expensive phone plans, many of whose features don't even work on the dumb devices.

dumb.co's Dumbphone 2 is probably the best I've seen at only $20 but even their practices seem a little shady, especially that they don't recommend using your own phone plan since most of the features it comes with are locked to their plan. Right now I'm just going to hold off and keep using my Pixel 8a with GrapheneOS and continue trying to make decisions that help me be more conscious about my phone use and overall screen time.

Do you ever find yourself missing "the way things were" as far as social media goes, even if you didn't get to experience much of it?

As a child of the early 2000s with parents that actually cared about my wellbeing, I didn't get to see much of what the internet of the time had to offer socially, though I was able to catch little glimpses of it. I could at least tell, even back then, that there was something special about the social sites of that era from looking over my mom's shoulder as she browsed Facebook during its golden years, or by seeing the lively discussions held on purpose-specific forums before much of that discussion was centralized to aggregators like Reddit. Something about it just seemed more fun than the comparably much gloomier modern social internet.

With the rise of algorithms and the internet acting more as a free market for the buying and selling (and stealing) of personal data, it should be no shock why there is much talk these days about the "dead internet theory". It's not even just that there is more activity from bots than real people on the web (a fact that has been proven beyond reasonable doubt by recent analysis, though I don't have a source handy), there's something else going on. The internet used to feel like a living and breathing place, now it feels more like a wasteland that we just so happen to inhabit. There was something living here, now it's just ruins in a desert.

Yet there are pockets of life amongst the endless death which surrounds us. There are people out there who remember what the old internet was like and want to preserve that feeling. There's a guy out there who uses the handle "Reject Convenience" and his website and forum are delightful. You'll see me hanging out on there and posting every so often under the name agentkilo. Coming across his forum is what finally pushed me to get this site back up and running, because hanging out there gave me that old internet feeling. I wanted to share that with my own circles, so I made rambl.

Basically what I'm trying to get at here is that there is hope left for a truly social internet minus all the bullcrap of algorithms designed to purposefully make apps hard to put down, data harvesting, and companies which have done and continue to do unspeakable atrocities for the sake of profit. Small websites are still out there and offer an alternate, friendlier web. Thanks for using this one!

-kilo

The inception of this new version of rambl has come along with a personal journey of mine. I've slowly been going through a "digital detox" by trying to be more conscious of my time online and cut out unnecessary distractions. Years ago I deleted most of my social media accounts because I felt they were unnecessary, and on top of that, they were monopolizing a lot of my time. Like a lot of people I felt ashamed by how much of my time was spent consuming mindless content served to me by algorithms rather than engaging with the world around me in a meaningful way. And I don't blame anyone who uses and likes these platforms, I can admit there's good stuff on them. I just kinda snapped out of it one day and realized I had an addiction. And ever since then I've tried to do more to be intentional about how I use technology. I'm still far from perfect in this regsrd but I think I've made some good steps.

Some more recent changes I've made to my technology habits include:

• Switching to fokus launcher on my phone, so I'm not as tempted to fall into distraction from the home screen
  
• Putting a bluetooth handset on my bedside table and leaving my phone in the living room when I go to bed (and basically never taking my phone into the bedroom anyway)
  
• Switching to RedReader for browsing Reddit on my phone, since it removes the algorithm and only shows me posts from my subscribed communities. (This has cut down on my time on reddit significantly because I can't just scroll/refresh endlessly, it only updates once every few hours.)

It might be worth it for you to consider how much time you spend on your devices and whether it's stopping you from living the life you want to live, and maybe make some changes to your habits accordingly. It could start with something as simple as deleting an app. I can tell you that it has helped me significantly with the feeling that my time and life are dominated by technology. Take back your brain and make technology work for you!

-kilo

on this new version of rambl, you can reply to posts, add tags, and set up a much more rich user profile with as much or as little detail as you'd like to provide about yourself. hopefully the interface is easy enough that you can figure out all you can do just by playing around with it.

thank you for your interest in rambl and enjoy your time here!