I decided to redo my entire digital footprint for A Soft Death. I updated the website, created a domain email (amber@asoftdeath.com is live!), created a YouTube channel associated with that email, updated my TikTok, Instagram, and created a Threads account. It was a long and painful process but fortunately I think I’m at the end of it. I basically would go to work, stare at a screen, come home, stare at my laptop or phone, and do an excessive amount of grunt work for myself. Hours of unpaid labor that left me nauseous and gaunt.
Everyone says “you should be passionate about what you’re doing.” I don’t know if this was passion to be honest. I spend 40 hours of my week at a desk staring at a computer. Coming home and replicating that same activity was not a show of passion or excitement, it was just an extension of a pre-existing skillset. When I was sitting on my couch at 10:30pm on a Tuesday, anxious about the way my email addresses were collapsing into each other on Google servers, I can’t say that there was an ounce of passion running through me. My blood has hardened enough to survive crises that play out on digital screens.
This is kind of a nice feeling. I’ve been dragging this project around in my head since the pandemic and it’s weird to watch it start growing a spine, a pair of legs. It’s mutating in front of me and there’s something deeply weird and interesting about watching it evolve. Mostly because I couldn’t imagine the work that I do taking on a life of its own. The project first started flickering a few years ago and I stuck it out. Life happens in waves.
It’s wild working this much. Thursday night I came home, opened my laptop, started exploring templates for the blog, and 5 hours disappeared from my night. I didn’t even brush my teeth, I just stayed glued to my screen until I was exhausted, and then dragged myself to bed. When I woke up the next morning the first thing I did was pull my laptop back out and start working on the site again. Later I got coffee and went back to tweak it. There’s some minor work left, but that can’t happen until Monday (I guess the engineers are off for the weekend?).
I feel good having restructured a significant portion of my digital footprint. It was painstaking labor but I like how everything feels more settled. I’m so exhausted though. It’s been 5 days in a row of round the clock work. I still have some more loose ends to tie up and they’re grating on me, but I’m almost there.
a soft death 