Goals & Expectations

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Welcome to the inaugural episode of Butcher's Block!

For those who know me personally, thank you for indulging my silly whims. For those who somehow found me despite my lack of literally any SEO, I'm glad you found me. Here in this space I go by James Butcher, or James, or Butcher, depending on my mood. Those who know me know what that name means to me, but perhaps you don't know why I chose it. In fact, you may be looking at this page and asking yourself all sorts of "why" questions. Why is this blog here? Why are you doing it? Why am I here? Let me answer those questions for you in as many words as I feel like.

The first time I laid hands on a personal computer was sometime between 1993 and 1995 - at the very start of my life. I spent the first five or six years of my life in a sort of cul-de-sac community of sort-of row homes. We did not live a rich life, but it was comfortable enough - my older brother and I sharing a room with a bunk bed (top bunk baybee!) and a narrow but roomy back yard. The nicest thing about this area was the sense of community - everyone knew each other and *mostly* got along. We rambunctious kids were given the kind of freedom that the previous turn-key generation enjoyed, but with a few more restrictions - don't stay out after dark, and don't go past the STOP sign at the end of the street. One of these homes belonged to a lovely couple and their children who were a little more well-to-do than our family was. They had an ENTIRE WALL of VHS tapes of all genres, and this couple was kind enough to let us borrow tapes to watch at home. Baby Me gravitated towards the Disney films and the occasional Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. But there was something else they had in their home that mesmerized me: a little beige TV sitting on a desk, and underneath that desk, a beige obelisk with mysterious lights, buttons, and ports. One day I came over to return a lent copy of "Angels in the Outfield" when I saw the man of the house at this box playing some kind of space shooting game I had never seen before. I watched as the man maneuvered a tiny claw-like ship around a wireframe tunnel, enemies flying towards the screen and the little ship blasting them away. My brother and I were no stranger to video games, having owned a Super Nintendo at this point, and while I thought the graphics and sound were not as good as those of Mega Man X (because few games are as good as Mega Man X,) I could still see the appeal. The game he was playing, of course, was the Windows port of Tempest. I asked the man if he had any other games on the computer, and he was happy to let me sit and peruse through the Games folder in the Windows Start menu. I didn't understand these games at all - Solitaire was confusing and too hard, Minesweeper seemed to be completely random whether you won or lost, and FreeCell was Solitare but "more stupid." So I played Tempest, and I liked it, but not nearly as much as Mega Man X.

And then I played Doom.

On a shopping trip to the local K-Mart, I looked at the red letters of a sign next door that read "CompUSA" and asked my mother what kind of store it was. "A computer store" was her response, and I begged her to go inside. My little baby brain couldn't fully comprehend all the different gray, white, and beige boxes, but some of these boxes had video games that you could play IN THE STORE! I walked by a display and watched as a gun - just a gun - moved through a maze of dark tunnels, picking up little trinkets and making strange grunting noises against stone walls looking for secrets. I listened and heard a flurry of electronic guitars and synthesizers wail away as this gun turned a corner and suddenly a zombified soldier stood with its own gun, shooting at us. The gun fired - the iconic Doom shotgun - and that sound dug a hole and burrowed into my cerebral cortex, where it still lives to this day. It was the most violent, most exciting thing I had ever seen in my life. I pleaded with my mother to bring home one of these amazing devices, told her I would do ALL of the housework for a month. Needless to say, the family that borrowed VHS tapes from the neighbors could not afford a PC in 1995, but I was at least allowed to return to this magical computer store a few more times before my mother and I fucked off to Colorado for a few years.

Jump forward to the year 1999. My brother and I anxiously sit and watch as our step-grandfather is unboxing a brand-new Gateway PC. At this point, my knowledge of how a PC works was already entering the "junior tech support" stage, so I was happy to be able to help hook up the keyboard and mouse, plug the RJ11 connectors for the phone line into the modem ports, and hook up the printer to the serial port. After much waiting, there was a new PC set up and waiting for us, and not only that - it was connected to America Online. My brother and I took turns going to the websites that our favorite media pushed us to visit - WWF.com, pokemon.com, playstation.com, nintendo.com, disney.com, etc. We then had fun just typing in whatever domain names we could think of - poop.com, fart.com, butt.com, etc. We probably shouldn't have done that! (though if we found anything emotionally scarring, I can't recall......hm.....) We explored the online games, we sat in chatrooms, we downloaded music. We fucked it completely with viruses almost immediately, despite McAfee's assurance that we were protected.

There are many more stories I could tell, but the main point I want to get across is this: I grew up with a PC within arm's reach my entire life, and I've spent more of my life online than not. This has fucked me up in incomprehensible ways (we truly, honestly don't have the time to get into it) but in many other ways it has enriched me. More than anything, I loved the ability to explore this digital space, to engage with people beyond my physical space, to learn literally anything I wanted to learn with a few clicks of a mouse. Yeah, there were pop-up ads and shady download sites and creeps in chat rooms and it took twelve minutes to download a picture of a naked woman, but overall it was a good time.

Then Mark Zuckerberg fucked everything up.

Fast-forward to today and the Internet that I know is now long-gone. Social media apps feed a constant stream of ragebait directly into your eyeballs. Every website tracks your browsing history and data to advertise semi-related crap you can buy off Temu. AI generated content floods every inch of the Web and poisons your search engine results. Fewer people are visitng websites, instead existing in insular, app-based spaces. The niche corners of the Web - your hobbyists, your tradesmen, even your local community - have been compressed into a Reddit-flavored sludge. Creativity on the Web only exists to serve the algorithm and desperately chase the dopamine hits of "impressions" or, God forbid, launch some kid's career attempt as an "influencer."

Not to say that everything is doom and gloom (I highly reccomend you check out the Well Made Web for a currated selection of "old" websites) ((and in fact you should go type in "poop.com" into your web browser and see what happens!) but it's undeniable that the Dead Internet Theory holds some weight.

So what do we do about it? As a collective, it would be no easy feat to "reboot" the Web, and at this point it might be too late. So perhaps, in my own small way, I can fight the system and maybe even start a trend. But beyond any lofty goals of digital revolution, the simple fact is that I cannot stand to be on social media sites anymore, and I refuse to allow tech bros to feed their AI LLM's off of my content (not that being here stops scrapers, but at least I'm not *handing* my data over freely.) So here I am, with a digital platform that I own on my own equipment, that I am in full control of, that cannot be moderated or censored by a crusty technocrat.

On top of that, it's a great excuse to get back into coding! I've always dabbled a bit in computer coding - BASIC, Visual BASIC, HTML, JavaScript, Java, Python - but I've never put in the effort to make anything with it. Right now we're starting off with some very basic HTML and CSS (look at these URL's, buddy! We're serving static content!) but would eventually love to get into SQL and PHP as well. I would love to figure out how to get an actual blog platform going, with the ability for me to more easily push content to my main page, and for readers to add comments to posts. Until we get that kind of stuff implemented, you can always anonymously sign the guestbook or shoot me an email.

While I have some lofty goals, I also need to temper expectations a little bit (both yours and mine.) The most obvious thing to state is that I am just a hobbiest who has absolutley no idea what he's doing. Hit the "Inspect Element" button of your web browser and take a look at the code on this page - you'll be horrified. While it's my honest goal to improve my skills, it will take time for me to get things put into place and learn best practices. Speaking of which, time is a resource that I sadly don't have that much of. Being a dad, working full time, and being a student means that this project of mine gets fourth billing. At some point in the future, I may have a better system in place that lets me write wherever and push content to my page, but as of now I'm literally typing this in the HTML document you're reading right now on the actual device which runs my web server and if that's not the most amature way of doing this, then I'm already streets ahead.

It's also important to me that you know that this page is going to be 100% me, and the words, language, and feelings expressed on this page are not going to be to everyone's taste. You're going to see sentences like Shoot every ICE member on sight and Donald Trump and his cabinet need to hang for their crimes and you're either going to be on board with that, or you're going to have to figure it out yourself.

I would be remiss to mention that the future of this project may not actually come. I don't mean that in a apocalyptic way, but in a way that honestly portrays my flaws: in my life, I've been many things: a writer, a musician, a chef, a baker, a computer programmer, a car mechanic, a game developer, an electrician, and so on. But I've only ever truly dedicated myself to being really, really good at one and a half of those things. I unfortunately have a really bad habit of picking up hobbies for a little while and then dropping them once it feels like I've either gotten bored or hit a skill celine that I don't have the enthusiasm to surpass.

Regardless of what happens in the future, I'm truly glad that you're here with me now, and I will do my best to stay consistent in this new hobby. Look forward to more ramblings, some film/music/video game reviews/, some pictures of my day-to-day, and more fun stuff to come.

Take care of yourselves, and each other.

~JB