my digital migration.

After the double collapse of ImGoth, and the recent closure of Darklinks, I find myself re-building my datacastle at G+. While it lacks the dark focus & subcultural fostering of my previous cyberhomes, there's a large subset of Gothic community on here, plus a greater pool of the scene's past & present Gotherati, along with non-scene people whom I know & love from my life in Tucson. In migrating here I'm going to re-post a fair amount of photos, and more importantly, writing. For those of you who've followed me on either of those previous sites you'll immediately recognize the content, and for my new circles a bunch of blox in your feed ranging from the painfully confessional, reviews of literature & cinema, episodic life commentary, pensive essays, bits of fiction, old polls, and seriously over-passionate fanboy subject surveys. Honestly it's years of stuff, so I'm also writing this as a coming-your-way-heads-up in case the cross-posting from Blogger doesn't retro-date the shares to G+ back to when it was originally penned in the stream of things, and you find yourself asking, "Why is he just now reviewing this 20-year-old film?", or other equally anachronistic observations. Odds are I'm keeping it in my writer's portfolio as a showpiece, so bear with me.

Maybe it's just first impressions of G+, but there's something obtuse about how this social network's set up: indirectness of messaging, the presentation of another's feed over their own profile's about, the small and nearly unidentifiable roundel for initial identification, the aggregation of postings over the proactive visitation of profiles, and the one-sided classification system of placing others into groups they (and likewise you) will never be aware of, thus shunting the complication/simplicity of honesty aside to never truly know where you stand with people, and the near-infinite amount of sharing over folks actually bothering to take their own photos or write their own material. And even if it were one's own material you took time to work on, you lose ownership in a sense, as it becomes secondarily attributed -- they're just chunklets of infotaining data floating in an amorphous pool, a pool which dilutes authorship. And while one can restrict sharing to prevent this, unless you've accrued 1M+ followers, your tree falls in the forest for no one to hear.

Yet what's also stunning are the 4.5K+ views I've gotten in under one month. On those previous niche sites it'd've taken me years to accrue that many hits. And while that observation sounds like it's about ego, it's not -- it's about connectivity and the opportunity that arises when the doors it can knock upon multiplies exponentially.

Ultimately I'm hanging my black hat here for stability. Google's not going anywhere except into the far future. It pwns the internet aggregation game, acquired YouTube, figured out more effective online video conferencing, has bottomless pockets, and gave visionary Ray Kurzweil a carte blanche lab to engineer immortality for us (+1 that!). Such quests for innovation & permanence (hopefully) means that this is the last time I cut 'n' paste my long-accrued virtuality from one screen to another and can instead spend my time on more creative endeavours for you before eventually tagging it into an uploaded version of my wholly conscious cerebral singularity matrix.

Welcome to Guillermo the IVth, v.3.0.



While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.