sam's internet house

mid-december evening chatter

It's bizarro times over in SamLand so I figured for once I'd just set a timer at my desk and put into the world whatever came out of this little distraction-less writing-to-blog session. With my open hands turned to you, here you go.

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I had to make a burner account and re-download Instagram last week for the first time in over a year because there's this indie theatre that's re-opening soon and they were posting information only on IG (boooo… no website) about an event happening where tickets were likely going to sell out quickly (they did). I snagged what I needed after five days of having that little pink and orange icon on my home screen. I was amazed at how quickly that app took away my attention. I found myself opening and closing the app multiple times a day in every minute of my spare time, because despite not following a single person I knew on real life on the app, my brain was still addicted to the stimulation of the mindless scroll. I felt vindicated in the successful proof of my long-standing social media hypothesis, which is that what fuels the Instagram addiction is not the connectivity with familiar friends, rather it is the constant swipe of the fingers and of the infinite pretty colours and information to make you stimulated. On that same sort of topic I also read one of ava's blog posts a few weeks back, and it's so great I've been sharing it with more than a handful of people I've chatted with since I read it. It's called the overstated importance of connectivity and you can read it too at this link.

Personally, I'm thrilled that my 'connectivity' online is limited to more meaningful interactions with people through this blog and my other online spheres and not on IG or FB. This indie theatre has promised to get their website up and running soon and hopefully that can be the last time I log onto that terribly cursed app.

To further support my current era of the digital diet I am trying to maintain, I finally purchased an e-reader. I have resisted this temptation for a very long time because there is nothing I love more than going to the bookstores on weekends, and I truly feel that it is important to have access to 200-300 physical books in my home at any point in time. However - I've been spending a lot of time on are.na lately and there's just too many PDFs/EPUBs I'd like to read that would be otherwise completely inaccessible to me as they're limited print/digital exclusive/not distributed in Canada/my library doesn't have them. I find myself on the bus most mornings trying to scroll on a tiny phone screen to read these things and I think in order to save my eyes (and encourage myself to read without bluelight screens before bed), this will be a good investment. I am eager to get cracking on the things I have listed here on my shelf. Please send me any book recs… I'm about to be reading a lot more.

Save me e-reader.. e-reader save me…

Having the bad app back on my phone for a bit also made me take a look at my screen-time stats to figure out what I'm actually picking up to scroll on in those little in-between moments of time (waiting for the bus, waking up in bed in the morning, on my lunch). It's mostly the basic functions of what I need my phone for - maps, texts, calls, music, podcasts, email. I've been happy to have pivoted pretty seriously in 2025 to using an rss reader and subscribing to newsletters as ways to find good things to read that I enjoy and to keep up with some of my favourite bigger creators off of traditional media platforms. No more scrolling, just seeing exactly what I want to see. I'll likely post this elsewhere on the site soon, but here's a mini-list of the newsletters I look forward to seeing in my inbox (and highly recommend):

These are all newsletters with large-ish readership so it's also nice to stick to the RSS feed instead sometimes and read from all my favourite people in the blogosphere. I've been finding I have to untrain my brain a bit though from the constant stream of content I used to see on social media - I've been finding myself a bit disappointed at how many blogs I started following in the first quarter of this year that are no longer posting. But this is the authenticity of the small web, right? People are not content mills and they don't owe me updates on their lives! I can only sit and twiddle my thumbs and hope that they one day return to share their writing again. Actually, bloggers write all the time about wanting to people to engage with our writing and affirm our online presence, maybe instead of twiddling my thumbs I should actually reach out to the blogs I love and let them know they mean something to me. I think one of my 2026 resolutions will be to cultivate friendships with my digital neighbours a lot more!

I leave you tonight with a song I've been listening to a lot lately.

love n hugs,

sam