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Manifesto

This is titled "Manifesto" somewhat facetiously. These might be read similarly to the Fifty-Seven Precepts of Zote the Mighty, and taken with the same weight, which is fine by me. I do not know how many would hold up under more intense scrutiny than I have given them or particularly care whether they lead to a net positive in "worth;" I like and live them out regardless. That is not to say that I would not change them (feel free to reach out and give me new ideas or debate ones here), I just believe these are worth possibly wasting my time or opportunity cost on.
Also, insert "I think" and "I believe" everywhere. I throw out statements here willy nilly.

Life

Reject Everything

This could be "Live a Curious Life," but I mean it in a more demanding and, well, rejective way. Reject everything that would reduce curiosity.
The moment you have an idea, tools, or constraints introduced to you, the number of paths your mind could follow diminishes drastically. To avoid this, Reject Everything. Reject the ready-made tool someone has; do it yourself. Reject the clearly better and simpler path; make things harder for yourself even with no reason in sight. Reject your culture; build something new and unique to you from parts you find on your way through life that pique your interest.

This smells of "not invented here" syndrome, but I mean it in an open-minded, not closed-minded, way. This is how we create diversity in spaces where everything has been "figured out," or at least had time to establish before you came along. How much more diverse was the web (and the internet, before those became synonyms) in the 90s and early 2000s? Even a rather plain (some may say tastless, flat, uninspiring) page like this can have texture; I would list its features I am proud of but I would like to think it can stand alone.

I also do mean it in a separate obstinate way - little on this site has a date, and I will not implement an RSS feed. Those are in part protest against norms ("releasing" a page vs living documents), social media, people's tendency to devalue old things, and producer culture.

Reinvent the Wheel

This is essentially the above (and along with the next few these are really all together one concept), but has different motivations. Re-solving solved problems is satisfying and gives one lower-level insights and experience for either the current situation or the future. Countless times I have suddenly realised that I had made something or used some method in a previous hobby project that was perfectly applicable to a pressing problem.

Fail, and Feel Free to Not Bother Trying Again

Who cares if you are the single worst person at an activity, ever? You did it! And you had fun! Or, if you didn't have fun. . . You did it! And, if you didn't do it, you were living, and gained a new experience that could also have been outside of your normal. That alone is worth your while.

Do Things for the Sake of Doing Them

Why would one need an opponent, a peak of a mountain to reach, a story to experience? Most things without these incentives still have value, if one looks closely. Find the mental fortitude to struggle and do them alone, for their lone purpose.

But also, Action is Not Required

One can be a part of a movement without being a participant in the movement or furthering it. Thinking about something or allowing it to influence who you are, how you think, or your actions is enough "doing" for me to count it for equal membership in a group; affecting something outside yourself should not be required. I would extend this to life and everything and wholly reject "do not go gentle into that good night." Go past nihilism into absurdism, and then further still into a mix of both. The pressure to "rage against the dying of the light" is as absurd a constraint as nihilism. A meaningless life wasted is as worthy as a meaningless life savored - you would still be here, doing as much living as anyone else. "Nirvana is right where you are, provided that you don't object to it."

The Web

Stop Enforcing a Reading Width

I could rephrase this into something faffy and virtuous in the vein of "avoid enforcing your answer to a subjective question" but I am really mostly just pissed about this one thing. marginalia.nu is one of the worse examples of this. A too-wide text box can always be shrunk by popping open a devtools panel or resizing the window, but a too-small one requires a quick dig into CSS.
One study has found that [characters per line] had only small effects on readability, including factors of speed and comprehension; but when asked for preferences, 60% of respondents indicated a preference for either the shortest (35 CPL) or longest (95 CPL) lines used in the study. At the same time, 100% of respondents selected either one of these quantities as being the least desirable.
– Wikipedia, referencing Shaikh, A. Dawn (July 2005).

I enjoy somewhere around 90-120, but if you have JS enabled, this page is resizable by dragging the edge of its "page." Unfortunately the CSS resize property only allows creating a hook in the lower right of an element.