Doppleganger(s)

So it’s now May of 2021 as i add this content. Still less than a full month since my purchase of these three domains. But weirdly, i’ve decided that this is the page i want to ‘flesh out’ first.

A bit of background on this whole Emergence Guild endeavor is probably appropriate first though.

My decision to lay claim to my own hunk of cyberspace preceded the purchase of these Emergence Guild domains. Almost a decade ago, i’d abandoned my previous effort, organicmeat.net, due to a number of factors, none of them really planned nor premeditated. Anyhow, a few months ago, when i became aware that the outpost i’d planted at medium might not always be available for free, i began plans to move in this direction. One of my first decisions of course was to try to figure out what domain name to choose. i ended up writing down many dozens of words, in the belief that i’d be able to combine several of them successfully into a “winner”.

My medium-term plan was to eventually purchase a full blown VPS (virtual private server) platform on which to host content, but when i noticed how inexpensive the namecheap wordpress options were, i realized that i could take advantage of this option sooner.

i had several reasons not to immediately proceed with trying to purchase/rent a VPS:

  • i wanted to think about exactly which software platforms to deploy
  • i didn’t want to rush in — the demise of my previous domain organicmeat.net was in large part due to me not diligently maintaining, updating and patching the software i’d deployed there — as a result, i’m hoping to do better this time, by not over-extending myself, and so this time around i’m interested in thinking fairly deeply about just how much i decide to do with regard to deploying various software packages in a manner that will allow me to stay on top of maintaining them, and not demand more of a time-commitment from me than is realistic, and also won’t feel like too much of a burden
  • while i know i want to have a website, my plan with regard to what specific content i want to post on it is still rather amorphous, and so it certainly won’t hurt to take my time
  • my preferred operating system (and the only one i really would ever consider): debian GNU/linux, is (at the time that i’m writing this in May of 2021) about to release another major version (bullseye, their 11th) — it seemed to me that it made sense for me to use this new release from the beginning on my (as yet non-existent) VPS platform, and so i decided that i will be waiting for bullseye to be released before i proceed with attempting to spin up services on a VPS (and my cheapskate nature will also be satisfied, as i can avoid paying the (admittedly quite inexpensive) monthly fee(s) for the VPS until both debian and me are ready)

In the end though, my eagerness got the best of me, and one morning several weeks ago, several days after hearing my shrink refer to her community of psychiatric practitioners as a guild, i realized that i really like this word. And so i went back to the many dozens of other words i’d written in my journal notebook. Eventually i read emergence there and i realized that this was definitely the name i wanted. Much to my delight, namecheap’s website informed me that all of the top three domains (.com, .net, and .org) were not only available, but also very affordable. So i greedily signed up for all three. My initial plan had been to have them all point to the same resource (though i haven’t followed through on that quite yet, and so .org and .net are ‘hanging’ unattached at the moment). Originally i’d thought of wordpress as a temporary solution that i would eventually replace with the VPS hosted content. But upon further consideration, i realized that now that i have more options, i can actually use them to create a more diverse set of resources. So at this point in time, i envision keeping the wordpress content here indefinitely @ the .com URL.

But of course this means that i now need to choose how these different (but intimately related) three domains will each interact with each other, in terms of the content they will each contain.

Interesting. While it was not my intention (at all!) when i started composing this content for this particular page an hour or so ago, it occurs to me now that the page title absolutely does apply to this set of three domains, each being sort of a mirror of the other (once they’re finally all deployed and disambiguated (it may take quite a while for me to get to spinning up explicitly unique content on the .net option)). Hah!

But i still haven’t yet gotten to the original point i wanted to make here (this tends to happen a lot when i write: blame Ed Misch for teaching me to free-write just before fall began in 1982).

The psychotherapy i’m currently engaged in is surfacing an awful lot of stuff…

Without going into gory detail (nor providing even a sufficient backstory), one of the things that i’m considering has to do with the possibility that i may have been “constructing” false selves (in order to protect a tender, inner core from the prying eyes of others, and most especially to try to keep this vulnerable center hidden from me) my entire life.

The plan i think i’m going to go with regarding these three domains is to have this .com instance primarily be about my personal emergence. Both psychotherapy and collective presencing are playing a significant role in how/what i am becoming…

Eventually (after (i hope!) i’ve emerged fairly significantly myself), the goal of course will be to gather like-minded folks who will be willing to join me in trying to midwife humanity’s emergence. Certainly there’s a need for us (as a species) to radically change direction away from the completely unsustainable (and in many ways, also truly awful) path we’re currently on. Someday, perhaps we’ll be a true guild. For now, i’m just a single person with high hopes and three domain names.