Dying on the Dead Internet.

Months ago, I noticed a mysterious surge in traffic and immediately attributed it to bots. After all, no single post was attracting this extra traffic, but everything I’d written over the 8 years I’ve had this domain was. In the past two weeks, these bots have been flooding in from China specifically. Here’s what the stats for squaremeat.com looked like a week into October:

Remove the “Chinese visitors,” and you’ll see how sparse my readership is. Traffic peaked in 2020, when I still had Instagram and notified folks of new posts by posting to My Story. I don’t mind the low traffic volume: I value my human readers, most of whom I assume know me in real life.

But to discover that AI Scrapers are coming to my site in droves to co-opt my identity is upsetting. That’s why it’s taken this long to write my first post for October. There appears to be a way to block these Chinese bots through a plugin called Cloudflare. In the meantime, I’ll password-protect all new posts. Thanks to Ed for the idea.

(Except I couldn’t make it work. Fuck it. Feast away, AI Scalpers. UGH.)

The Dead Internet theory has come true, and faster than I’d anticipated. Rather than muck around with bots on the internet playground, I’ve redirected my human intelligence to stories written by other humans. I just finished book 38 of the year this morning: Stephen King’s The Long Walk.

Three books ago, I read Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, which takes place in the year 2030, when all of humanity has given up on the real world in favour of a virtual world of their choosing, from a tropical utopia to a video game-esque setting where they can fight demi-liches, or even travel to a different time period and go meta by playing the original PacMan at an arcade.

Naturally, even within this virtual world, capitalism prevails. Just as streaming services and social media apps started ad-free, enshittification eventually kicked in. Now, you need to slave over menial labour in the virtual reality universe to earn access to the more desirable virtual worlds. It was a quick and entertaining read, yet Cline’s dystopian world also felt uncomfortably probable.

To cleanse my palate, I picked up Julia Child’s My Life in France as per Marianne’s recommendation. The memoir begins with Julia and her husband’s arrival in France in 1948, as the country still recovers from WWII. Julia discovers she prefers the unhurried French way of living and cooking to the American mindset of maximizing productivity by choosing convenience above all. She writes about the challenge of marketing a 700+ page tome of recipes that take a full day to prepare to an American audience.

It’s no surprise that the microwave is an American invention. Rather than round up all the ingredients at a supermarket to nuke inside a microwave, Julia would buy her vegetables from open-air markets and neighbourhood shops, butter from a crèmerie offering multiple types, cheese from fromageries, and bread from boulangeries. Even cooking oils came from standalone oil shops. It reminded me of my time living within walking distance of Montréal’s Avenue Mont-Royal, which had even an olive oil shop (I see it has since closed).

I don’t think the issue is that we no longer have the time to visit multiple stores. We used to go to Blockbuster to rent a movie, to the bank to pay bills, to the mall for shoes and clothes, and to the library or bookstore to acquire books. Now all that stuff is available online, and we’re somehow still strapped for time? Nah. We waste the time we gain from these conveniences by passively gorging on algorithm-rich fodder.

After finishing Julia Child’s idyllic book, I read The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven by Nathaniel Ian Miller. Why? My hairdresser recommended it, and of course I’m going to trust the guy who has done my hair for 20+ years to influence my to-read list. Although the book’s title suggests otherwise, Stockholm Sven is a fictional character whose aversion to civilization leads him to the remote settlement of Longyear on Spitsbergen Island. When he ends up disfigured after a mining accident, he further withdraws from society, only allowing a few exceptions. This part of Sven’s life appealed to me as I sink deeper into isolation and eccentricity. The part about being surrounded by snow, ice, and “ice bears” did not.

Post-Stockholm Sven, I read Big Swiss by Jen Beagin, which was not recommended to me by anyone who assists me with my grooming needs. I was in the mood for something weird, and I found it under a Reddit post where the poster asked for recommendations featuring an older female protagonist who wasn’t married, divorced, pregnant, or a mother. Someone (or a very convincing bot) recommended this book and added the disclaimer that it was “very weird.”

“As a small child, I had a weird habit of collecting hardened pancake drippings from the griddle. I stole them from the kitchen on Sundays and arranged them on my bookcase. I always had about a dozen, and I’d talk to them at night. One day my mother found them. She asked me what they were and I said, ‘They’re cornies, Mom. They’re my friends.'”

Big Swiss satisfied my itch for eccentricity. The Long Walk followed immediately, and, well, that was only three days ago. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book with such a self-explanatory title. It starts as a walk, then becomes a long walk 1/4 of the way in, before the remaining stragglers descend into madness. I’ve yet to read a Stephen King book I didn’t enjoy.

Now that I’ve completed The Long Walk, I can write about the long run I’m not going to do.

Last Saturday, I received an email from the Royal Victoria Marathon organizers with details on where to pick up our race packages and how to change distances. I had a fleeting idea to register for the 8k instead of dropping out entirely, but what would be the point? 8k used to be my regular distance; I ran it 3 or 4 times a week, and I’m too injured to benefit from the incentive of chasing other runners to get a personal best. Waking up at 6am to force myself through a crowd of people for the sake of completing an “easy” 8k would be meaningless.

I get an extra day off tomorrow, and with Monday being a holiday, that makes a five-day weekend. There will be no Halloween costume project this year. I saved last year’s costume so I could donate it to Value Village instead of sending it straight to the landfill. After I placed the costume in a donation bin, I watched the next donor heave what was obviously a heavy box on top of it, potentially breaking Oogie Boogie’s face.

I dipped into Value Village yesterday afternoon to see if it made it onto the rack and how much it was priced at.

It was not there. Either someone became smitten with my DIY job, or the shell of Oogie Boogie now lies under a heap of garbage at the Hartland Landfill.

I tried.

Someone (or some AI) commented that you can guess anything’s texture by imagining licking it, and I’ve been imagining licking random things ever since.

I hate it.

The last thing I put my tongue on was a square of honey butter bars. Alexa mentioned many months back that her all-time favourite treat was the honey butter bars from Mosi Bakery & Cafe. When she asked me to bring dessert to yesterday’s birthday potluck, I decided to try my hand at making honey butter bars, even though I’d never tasted Mosi’s version.

The potluck ended up being cancelled because people, including me, suck. Potluck or no potluck, I’d set out on a quest to source cane syrup on Thursday. Five shops later, I resigned to buying a substitute called Lyle’s Golden Syrup. (Side note: I really like the name Lyle.) Apparently cane syrup is available at Staples (an office supply chain). I wasn’t going to fuckin’ Staples for a 26er of Torani syrup.

Project Honey Butter Bar commenced at 10am yesterday. I’d incorrectly assumed the roomie would be at work, so he had to put up with hours of me clanging around the kitchen, making a mess of every surface. (When I was in kindergarten, the teacher had the class bring home pot lids to bang together for a school assembly performance. I relived that memory as I percussed the metal measuring cups with a knife.)

LET’S MAKE SOME NOISE FOR ALEXA!

8 eggs and a pound and a half of butter later, I had a large, custardy rectangle that needed three hours to cool before I could cut it into smaller rectangles, pack it into a square container, and feed it into Alexa’s oval maw. (And Daniel’s, and Felicia’s, Amanda’s, Cody’s, and a bunch of grubby-fingered mechanics at two bike shops, because it was way too much dessert for just Alexa.)

“IT’S THE BEST THING I’VE EVER TASTED,” she said.

Good, because that was Quite the Quest! Julia Child would have been proud!

Yann, who is more salt-toothed than sweet-toothed, sent his assessment via WhatsApp: “Actually, it’s really, really good.”

Daniel said they were, “🔥…as the teens would say,” and Cody gave them a 10/10. Basically, everyone seemed to enjoy them way more than I did. Because of these overwhelmingly positive responses, the recipe has earned a spot in my tattered cookbook.

And maybe yours too?